The map Ka'lenna gave me was little more than a smudge of coal and memory—tribal recollection etched onto dried hide. But it was enough.
The vault lay westward, past the obsidian chasms known as the Wounded Teeth, and through a ravine the tribe called Deadspire Pass.
They said nothing grew there.
They were wrong.
Things grew.
They just shouldn't have.
We moved fast. Four warriors. Ka'lenna at my side. Supplies split across two beasts. The air grew colder with every rise in elevation, the sky heavy with gray clouds like waiting stone.
The deeper we went, the more I felt the pull in my blood.
The ash-mark on my chest had started to pulse again—warm and rhythmic, like it sensed proximity to something buried. Or watching.
We reached the canyon mouth by the third day.
The wind had changed. Carried with it a smell that made one of the warriors gag behind his mask.
Rot.
But not death.
Mutation.
I scanned the terrain. The BABEL system in my visor flagged the soil density and found anomalous biomass traces ahead.
WARNING: Biochemical decay detectedThreat Class: BABEL Aberrant – Generation 2. Status: Unstable. Active.Known designation: "Skirrow."
Ka'lenna tensed. "That word's not ours," she whispered.
"It's BABEL's."
We didn't have to wait long.
It came just before dusk, while the warriors set up camp. Crawled out of a cleft in the canyon wall like it had been sleeping in the stone.
Seven limbs. No eyes. Its body a bundle of armored bone wrapped in pulsing sinew, like someone had grown a war machine from a wound.
It screamed.
Not a sound—an infection. A psychic screech that hit behind my eyes and made one of the warriors drop their spear.
Ka'lenna was already moving.
So was I.
The battle was a blur of motion and blood.
I tried to control the BABEL tech in my gauntlet—willed it to send a disruption pulse. The vault connection flickered and then surged, answering my call.
Initiating Resonance: Ash Pulse – Minor
My hand glowed hot, and I slammed it into the earth.
The sand lit up in a fiery ring, and the Skirrow staggered—screeching as cracks formed along its shell.
Ka'lenna moved in then, blade like flame, carving a deep gash along its torso. It shrieked again—then split, bursting into a cloud of spores that hissed across the camp.
I grabbed her and pulled her back before we inhaled it.
We watched the thing collapse into twitching pieces, its flesh boiling off into mist.
"What the hell is this place?" I muttered.
Ka'lenna's face was pale.
"This is not your vault's doing."
She turned toward the canyon's far side.
"This… this is punishment."
We buried the bodies of the infected birds we found further ahead. Some had extra wings. Some, faces.
A warrior asked to turn back.
Ka'lenna refused.
I stayed silent.
But it wasn't over.
As we reached the high plateau overlooking the vault site—half-sunken beneath ancient ruins carved into the mountain's base—we found something worse than the mutant.
People.
A scout party. Three warriors from a nearby clan, their armor draped in moss and chainglass. Spears of jagged obsidian. Tattoos along their chins. Eyes cold.
They didn't attack.
Not yet.
But they made it clear we were trespassing.
"This place is closed," one of them said in the old tongue.
Ka'lenna stepped forward, speaking it back.
"He is marked," she said, nodding to me. "The vault calls him."
The scout spat.
"The vault calls death."
They left.
No blood.
But not peace, either.
That night, we camped just outside the vault's blast gate—half-buried in rubble, vines, and time.
I stood watch while the others slept.
Ka'lenna joined me at dawn, wrapped in her stormcloak, eyes sharp.
"They will come back."
"I know."
"They'll bring more."
"I hope they do."
She smirked.
"You're not afraid anymore."
"I've been afraid my whole life," I said. "Now I'm just ready."
The vault was waiting.
So was the war.
But I was no longer walking into the unknown.
I was walking into something meant for me.
And if they wanted to stop me?
They'd have to burn trying.