The air in the Deep-Border mines didn't just smell like dust; it smelled like desperate poverty and the slow decay of the earth. It was a thick, cloying atmosphere that coated the back of the throat with a metallic tang, a constant reminder that they were breathing in the very mountain that sought to bury them. Kaelen wiped a mixture of soot and stinging sweat from his brow, his lungs burning with every shallow, labored breath. His pickaxe, a rusted implement that had seen better decades, felt like a leaden weight in his calloused hands.
Beside him, Elara was chanting under her breath. Her voice was a fragile thread of sound in the oppressive darkness, a rhythmic murmuring that served as her only anchor to sanity. A faint, flickering light emanated from her fingertips—a pale, sickly blue glow that barely managed to keep the devouring shadows of the cavern at bay. It wasn't true magic, not like the high-mages of the Capital wielded; it was a mere trick of the "Echo," a straining of her own life force to mimic the luminescence of cave-moss.
Ria, always the most restless of the three, was testing the stability of the rock wall with the butt of her spear. Her eyes, sharp and predatory even in the dim light, scanned the jagged ceiling for any sign of a tremor. "We shouldn't be this deep," she whispered, her voice tight with a tension that mirrored the groaning of the overhead beams. "The Guild maps say these tunnels were condemned a decade ago. They called it 'The Throat of the World' for a reason, Kaelen. People go down, but they don't come back up."
"The Guild maps are for people who can afford to pay the entrance fees to the safe zones," Kaelen countered, his voice rasping like sandpaper on stone. He adjusted his grip on the pickaxe, feeling the splinters bite into his skin. "We're three days behind on the tenement rent. If we don't find something, the Overseers will toss us into the street, or worse, into the debt-gangs. One high-grade mana-shard, Ria. Just one, and we can pay the rent for a month. Maybe we can finally buy Elara a real focus stone so she doesn't have to bleed her own energy just to see in the dark."
Elara offered a weak, trembling smile, though her face was the color of curdled milk. "I'm fine, Kaelen. Really. But he's right, Ria. The surface is a dead end. The Echo is faint up there—too many people, too much noise. Down here... can you feel that? It's different."
Kaelen felt it too. It wasn't the "Echo" of nature that the scholars at the Academy prattled on about—the singing of birds or the rhythmic rush of rivers. This was something ancient, something heavy. It was a low, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through the soles of his boots and settled in his very marrow. It felt like a heartbeat, slow and tectonic, pulsing from somewhere beneath the obsidian floor.
Driven by a mixture of greed and an inexplicable, magnetic pull, they pushed further into the gloom. They squeezed through a narrow fissure where the air suddenly turned unnaturally warm, shimmering with a haze that distorted their vision. The smell of damp earth and rot was abruptly replaced by the sharp, stinging scent of sulfur and ozone.
"Look," Kaelen breathed, his voice dropping to a reverent hush.
At the end of the crawlspace, the tunnel opened into a natural cathedral of obsidian. The walls were smooth as glass, reflecting the dying blue light of Elara's spell in a thousand fractured directions. In the center of this dark hall lay a creature that belonged in the tapestries of legend, not the mud of the Borderlands. It was small for its kind—no larger than a hunting hound—but its scales were the color of cooling magma, deep crimsons and blacks that seemed to pulse with an internal, dying light.
It was pinned to the floor by a spear of translucent, jagged ice. The weapon was a cruel paradox, refusing to melt despite the sweltering heat radiating from the dragon's hide. Frost crept across the obsidian floor, fighting for dominance against the beast's fading warmth.
"A dragon?" Ria hissed, her hand flying to the hilt of her weapon. Her knuckles were white. "Kaelen, get back. That's a Calamity-class entity! Even a hatchling could burn this entire sector to cinders."
"It's dying," Kaelen said, stepping forward as if entranced. He wasn't thinking about the danger; he was looking at the way the creature's sides heaved in ragged, desperate gasps. He saw the way the ice-spear was pulsing with a sickly, violet energy—a "Void" curse, designed to drain the essence of a living thing until nothing remained but ash.
The dragon's eye—a massive, vertical slit of molten gold—snapped open. It didn't growl. It didn't roar. When it spoke, the sound didn't travel through the air; it erupted directly into the center of Kaelen's mind, a roar of pure, unadulterated sensation.
HUNGER. COLD. ENDLESS NIGHT.
"It's asking for help," Kaelen whispered, reaching out a hand.
"Kaelen, no!" Elara cried out, but it was too late.
The ice spear, sensing a new source of energy, cracked with the sound of a winter forest snapping in a gale. A surge of freezing Void energy erupted from the wound, lashing out like a whip of absolute zero. It was a final, lingering spite from whoever had hunted the beast—a trap meant to extinguish the last spark of the dragon's life. The blast caught Kaelen square in the chest, the sheer force of it throwing him back against the obsidian wall with a sickening thud.
Cold. It was a cold so absolute it felt like his blood was turning to glass. Kaelen tried to scream, but the air froze in his throat. His vision began to grey at the edges as the Void-chill began to dismantle his heart, bit by bit.
"Kaelen!" Elara screamed, rushing toward his crumpled form, but the dragon moved with a speed that defied its injuries.
With its final, agonizing strength, the creature shattered its own bindings. It didn't flee into the shadows. It lunged at the dying boy, its physical form dissolving into a stream of pure, liquid fire. The gold and crimson light flooded the room, blinding Ria and Elara. The heat collided with the Void-ice inside Kaelen's chest, a cataclysmic meeting of two opposing forces.
Kaelen didn't feel the impact. For a moment, there was only a void of sensation, a vacuum where his soul used to be. Then, he felt a Graft. It was as if a hot iron had been pressed into his ribs, soldering his spirit to something infinitely larger and more ravenous than himself.
His heart stopped for a terrifying beat. The world went black. Then, it restarted with a thud so powerful it echoed through the entire cavern, shaking dust from the ceiling.
Kaelen gasped, his eyes flying open. His irises were no longer the dull brown of a miner; they were swirling pits of embers, glowing with an internal furnace. On his chest, directly over his heart, a glowing brand in the shape of a coiled dragon burned through his salt-stained tunic, the skin around it red and raw.
The dragon, Ignis, was gone from the floor. The obsidian cathedral was empty of the beast, but Kaelen could feel it. It was the new rhythm in his blood. It was the heat behind his eyes.
"Kaelen?" Ria asked, her spear trembling in her hand as she stared at her friend. "Your... your arm..."
Kaelen looked down at his right hand. It was smoking, the skin blackened and textured like volcanic rock, yet it didn't hurt. It felt powerful. A rhythmic orange light pulsed beneath the surface of his skin, matching the beat of his heart. The cold of the Void was gone, replaced by a gnawing, insatiable heat. It was a hunger that felt like it would never be satisfied.
Inside the quietest part of his mind, a voice hissed—ancient, proud, and terrifyingly small.
"Feed me, Little Echo... or we both burn to ash. You have seven suns to find a spark, or the hunger will turn inward."
Kaelen looked at his friends, his breath coming in puffs of steam. He realized then that he wasn't a miner anymore. He wasn't even entirely human. The one-week clock had begun, and the price of his life was a hunger he didn't yet understand.