Chapter 348 - 347: What Grows in Darkness
Location:Seven Peaks — Command Center / Thornwall — Eastern Border
Date/Time:TC1854.01.26-27
The relay crystal from Thornwall arrived at dawn, and it carried Constable Corwin Harlan’s voice with the particular tightness of a man who’d seen something come back that was supposed to be dead.
"They’re at the nexus point. Twenty or more. Not hunting — circling. Feeding something into it. The ground’s warm again. It wasn’t warm yesterday."
Raven played the message twice for the war room. Taron, Thorne, Shen Wuyan, Naida. Four people who understood what "feeding something into it" meant without needing it explained.
The nexus point at Thornwall had been destroyed. Raven had poured dragon fire and planetary lightning into it until it cracked apart. Kairos’s residual cosmic energy had scoured the corruption clean. The breach had sealed. The ley lines were healing.
And now twenty Skulkers were circling the site and pumping Necrotic Essence back into it, trying to reactivate a node that should have been permanently dead.
"They’re attempting to birth a Warden," Shen Wuyan said. Her voice was calm — the particular calm of someone who’d spent eight hundred years learning to keep fear out of her tone. "Concentrated Necrotic Essence fed into a ley line nexus. Given enough time and enough Skulkers, the swarm intelligence can coalesce into a controller without one being manufactured."
"How long?" Taron asked.
"Days. A week at most, if they have enough mass."
"They have forty in the northeast valley," Naida said. "If they’re pulling from that cluster too — "
"Then it’s happening faster than days."