Above him, the twin moons hung low, twin pale coins in a vast indigo sky, their light silvering the desert and giving the landscape an otherworldly, unclean sheen. Every rock and twisted remnant of ancient stone was cast in sharp relief. The world out here felt vast and old and deeply, profoundly empty.
And yet — alive in its own way.
The Hollow Quarry lay ahead, somewhere beyond a field of jagged stone outcroppings that rose like broken teeth from the desert floor. The obsidian resin he sought could only be harvested from the glassy black vents that pocked the quarry’s lowest edge. It would be dangerous. Everything out here was.
But danger didn’t weigh half as heavy as the thoughts gnawing at the back of his mind.
Prejudice. Always the same shape, no matter the face.
His ears flicked back, catching the dry whisper of the wind. He remembered the way those villagers in Dustreach had sneered at Marx — at a man with more skill in one weathered, scar-calloused hand than any of them had in their whole lives. Dismissing him, mocking him, because he moved through the world differently than they did.
It was a poison he knew well.
Fox-folk. Thief-folk. Liars. Cowards. Stupid beasts with clever fingers. Desert Rats.
That’s what they’d called fennicians and goblins in Pella. Fennicians weren’t uncommon in the borderlands, but they were rarely welcomed. He’d heard it all — how they were cunning and untrustworthy, how they were tricksters who couldn’t hold loyalty, too clever by half, or not clever enough. People made you small with words long before they ever raised a hand.
It had been no different in his old life. Diagnosed late, labeled defective, or difficult, or defiant. Too loud, too restless, too strange. Not like the others. ProlixalParagon knew the language of dismissal in every tongue.
The words hadn’t changed. Only the world.
And Marx — a man who had left war behind to build, whose work had more worth than half the village’s bluster combined — cast out, overlooked, called worthless because of a missing limb.
His claws flexed against the hilt of his dagger as he walked.
The old ache in his chest wasn’t unfamiliar. It came with being made to feel like you didn’t belong, whether because of the shape of your body, the patterns of your mind, or the name your kind carried. It would have been easy to leave it. To look away. To let Dustreach rot in its own small-mindedness.
But he wouldn’t.
He was done letting it pass.
Because every time someone sneered, every time someone spat on a man like Marx or a kid born with fur and tail, it cut deeper into the world. Left a mark. Made it harder for the next one to breathe.
And if there was one thing ProlixalParagon swore, if there was one thing he would be known for, it was this:
Not on my watch.
A dry wind blew through the outcroppings ahead, carrying with it the faint, sharp tang of molten stone. The Hollow Quarry wasn’t far now.
He took a long breath of desert air — hot, dry, harsh — and felt something loosen in his chest. Resolve. Not clean or easy. Not righteous. Just necessary.
He would stand in the way. He would call it out when others turned their eyes aside. Because sometimes it only took one fool with a sharp tongue and a sharper blade to make the bastards flinch.
ProlixalParagon smirked to himself, the expression sharp as a knife in the moonlight.
The ground shifted ahead, the sand giving way to sharp-edged glassy stone. Fragments of obsidian glittered like spilled ink, scattered across the earth. The Hollow Quarry yawned before him, a jagged pit where ancient earth fissures still belched thin tendrils of heat and mineral-rich vapors. Pale-blue foxfire clung to some of the rocks, flickering in the shifting air.
He crouched behind a rock outcropping, sharp eyes scanning the quarry floor. A thin film of dust drifted over the obsidian vents below, but something else moved in the shadows. A low shape — heavy, broad-shouldered, hunched — its pale hide almost indistinguishable from the bleached stone.
A Quarry Mauler.
Massive, near-blind creatures, driven by scent and heat. Lured by the same mineral vapors that birthed the resin. ProlixalParagon’s lips curled back. He’d hoped for quiet, but Ludere Onlines gods loved irony.
Of course it wouldn’t be easy.
He touched the faded charm Lyra had given him at his neck and drew a long, steady breath.
The Wastes were cruel.
But so was he.
And from now on, one fox-folk bastard would to carve his name into the dust.
The Hollow Quarry was a dead, sunken wound in the earth. Its jagged walls bled glassy shards of obsidian and chalky white dust, the air thick with the sulfurous reek of mineral vents and the faint shimmer of ambient mana seeping from fractures in the stone. Pale-blue foxfire clung to the rocks, its light warping the shadows into long, twitching shapes.
ProlixalParagon crouched behind a cluster of salt-scarred stone, peering down at the wide basin below. The Quarry Mauler lumbered near one of the resin vents, a hulking, muscle-bound creature built like a hairless bear crossed with a stone-crab — thick, gray-white hide marred with old scars, its forelimbs ending in heavy, jagged talons stained dark with earth and blood. Its eyes were milky and dull, long-since blind, but its heavy, wet nose twitched constantly, and every so often it let out a low, bubbling rumble that reverberated through the stone.
Level 9 — Quarry Mauler
Aggressive. Heat and scent-based tracking. Territorial predator.
ProlixalParagon’s throat tightened. This wasn’t some straggling scavenger like the Salt-Hollow Stalkers. This was a monster. The kind of creature level 10 warriors or hunters might hunt in teams. And here he was, a Level 3 fennician with nothing but a dagger, some jury-rigged caltrops, and a head full of stubborn.
Backing down would be smart.
Which meant it wasn’t an option.
“Right then,” he whispered, ears swiveling as he studied the basin. The terrain was treacherous — loose scree, unstable ridges, old mining debris half-buried in salt crust. But that meant opportunity.
He slid the dagger from his belt. Not much to look at — a simple, narrow-bladed thing with a leather-wrapped hilt — but the edge was sharp. It would have to be enough.
I don’t need to beat you. Just need to outthink you.
ProlixalParagon’s sharp gaze swept the basin and noted a cluster of cracked support beams by a narrow overhang. Above them, a precarious ledge of stone hung, dust occasionally sifting from its edge. Weak, unstable. The kind of thing a careless, charging brute might bring down.
A plan began to form — desperate, reckless, but the kind of gamble his kind were made for.
He drew a caltrop sphere from his pouch, thumbed the catch, and lobbed it toward the resin vent.
Clink.
The tiny burst of blinding dust sent up a sharp puff, rattling the nearby stones.
The Quarry Mauler’s head snapped toward the sound, nostrils flaring. A guttural, grinding snarl rolled from its throat. It lunged, heavy limbs crushing loose stone beneath its weight.
Good.
ProlixalParagon darted from cover, keeping low, the salt-crusted dust scraping beneath his paws. He moved fast, skirting along the quarry wall toward the overhang, every muscle tense.
The beast reached the caltrop’s burst site and pawed at the ground, confused but furious. It snorted, scenting the air — catching his trail.
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Its head swung his way.
Shit.
The Mauler charged.
The ground trembled under its bulk. Each step a thunderous impact against the brittle quarry floor.
ProlixalParagon bolted, tail streaming behind him, leading it directly toward the weakened support beams. The air was thick with dust, the sulfur stinging his eyes.
He reached the overhang, saw the old wooden supports — dry, cracked, splintered with age.
The Mauler barreled after him, too fast, too close.
He spun at the last moment, using his momentum to hurl another caltrop sphere at the beast’s face. The burst wasn’t enough to blind it, but it staggered — one massive claw catching on the uneven ground.
It lunged again.
ProlixalParagon dove aside, rolling in the dust. The beast’s shoulder slammed into the old support beams.
Crack.
The ledge above groaned.
Crack-CRASH.
The rockfall came down in a deafening rush, a cascade of stone and debris that buried the Quarry Mauler in an avalanche of salt-glazed rubble. The ground shuddered, dust billowing in choking clouds.
ProlixalParagon scrambled to his feet, coughing, ears flattened against the roar.
Silence.
Then — the twitch of a claw. A low, wheezing growl from beneath the rubble.
Still alive.
His dagger flashed.
He was on it in two bounding strides, plunging the blade between a seam in its exposed throat. The beast let out one last, rattling breath.
Then nothing.
He stayed there a moment, chest heaving, the world narrowing to the sound of his pulse in his ears. His hands trembled around the dagger hilt.
Then — a soft ding in his vision.
>XP Gained: 410<
>Level Up! You are now level 4<
A weak laugh slipped from his throat, half relief, half disbelief.
“That’s right, you bastard,” he rasped. “A fox outfoxed you.”
He forced himself upright, staggered toward the resin vent. Obsidian resin clung in glossy, dark droplets to the glassy stone. He retrieved a vial from his belt and carefully scraped the resin free, the viscous fluid glimmering faintly with captured light.
[Quest Progress: Obsidian Resin Acquired]
He corked the vial and tucked it safely away.
For a moment, standing alone in that broken, silent quarry, with blood on his hands and dust in his throat, ProlixalParagon felt something unfamiliar swell in his chest.
Not pride.
Defiance.
The world would call him lesser. Would sneer at fennicians, goblins, and crippled carpenters and all the other souls too stubborn to die quiet.
But out here — in the dirt and blood and dust — a fox could still make a legend of himself.
And he would.
The quarry fell silent. The kind of silence only found after violence—the thick, suffocating stillness that presses in when even the wind holds its breath.
ProlixalParagon stood over the Quarry Mauler’s cooling corpse, his breathing ragged, his pulse pounding behind his eyes. The sharp tang of blood and churned dust lingered in the air, a grim cocktail of death and earth. His dagger dripped with the creature’s thick, dark blood, the viscous liquid clinging stubbornly to the narrow blade.
He let out a slow, shaking breath, willing his hands to steady. The surge of adrenaline that had carried him through those frantic, desperate moments now bled away, leaving behind a bone-deep ache in his limbs and a tremor in his chest.
“Still breathing,” he muttered under his breath, a bitter half-laugh. “Good enough.”
He knelt beside the fallen beast, wiped his dagger clean on a patch of coarse hide, and sheathed it. The glimmer of his quest log flickered in the corner of his vision, a cold, clinical reminder that this was not the end.
>Quest Progress: Obsidian Resin Acquired<
Two down. One to go.
ProlixalParagon checked himself over, running skilled fingers through the thick marbled fur along his arms and ribs, searching for wounds. A shallow gash along his right thigh, seeping sluggishly. Scrapes along his forearms. Nothing broken. He splashed a mouthful of bitter, lukewarm water from his skin over the worst of the blood, cleaning it as best he could.
His body ached from exertion, muscles trembling from the burst of reckless speed, but he was alive. Alive in the old, stubborn way of foxfolk—scarred, panting, defiant.
He let his gaze sweep the Hollow Quarry one last time. The scattered shards of obsidian glittered like dark glass under the moonlight, the pale-blue glow of the foxfire making the place feel half-cursed and ancient.
No reason to linger.
He turned toward the east.
The Crystallized Echo Shard lay deeper into the Wastes, near the edges of the salt flats where the land dipped into shallow sinkholes and the remnants of dead rivers curled like dry, cracked veins across the ground. There, beneath crumbling stone arches older than the Draggor Kingdom itself, fragments of ancient, mana-saturated crystal sometimes surfaced, pulled to the earth’s skin by some unseen force.
Most folk wouldn’t go near those places. Called them cursed. Said they hummed with the voices of things long dead.
ProlixalParagon pulled his cloak tighter, the air growing colder now, leeching the last warmth from his fur. The moons hung higher, and the wind shifted — carrying with it a new scent: mineral, sharp and clean in a way only mana-heavy places carried. Faint traces of something electric, something old.
The Wastes opened before him like a graveyard.
The cracked salt and sand gave way to strange, looping rock formations, narrow gullies and dry channels. Thin bleached bones poked up from the dust in places — long-forgotten desert scavengers and unlucky travelers. The silence here was oppressive. Even the usual whisper of insects, the skitter of night-borne hunters, had fallen away.
As he crested a low rise, he saw it.
A shallow basin, ringed with jagged white stone, like the broken teeth of some long-dead leviathan. In its center, a scatter of crystalline fragments lay half-buried in the dust — milky, glass-pale stones that shimmered faintly under the twin moons. The Crystallized Echo Shard would be among them.
But the real prize lay deeper.
A faint hum tickled at the edges of his hearing. Not a sound, exactly, but a pressure. A warble beneath the surface of the world. The closer he moved, the stronger it grew — the strange, heady ache of concentrated mana.
He descended carefully, paws crunching on brittle stones. The air here felt… thick. As if each breath came weighed with something unseen, some ancient sorrow or fury left to steep in the stone.
ProlixalParagon’s fur bristled.
He moved between the scattered crystals, eyes sharp, every instinct on high alert.
It wasn’t safe. It was never safe in places like this.
The ground here was unstable — thin crusts of salt covering sinkholes, loose stone shifting underfoot. He had to pick his way carefully, relying on his sharp senses and balance to avoid the worst patches.
And then he saw it.
The shard.
A single, jagged sliver of pure crystalline blue, half-buried in a shallow depression. It pulsed faintly, casting delicate ripples of light across the stone around it.
>Objective Found: Crystallized Echo Shard<
He knelt beside it, reaching out—
And the ground beneath his feet trembled.
A crack split the earth behind him. A low, keening moan rose from the ground itself, as if the stone were remembering the voice of something long buried. Dust plumed upward, and a shape, half-formed and flickering like smoke made solid, rose from one of the nearby sinkholes.
A Dustwraith.
Emaciated, translucent, its long, tattered limbs stretching unnaturally, its face a hollow suggestion of features carved by wind and sorrow. It clung to the mana-rich soil, drawn to the shard’s presence.
ProlixalParagon’s pulse hammered.
No time.
He snatched up the shard, its cold, slick surface burning against his palm with concentrated power. The Dustwraith shrieked — a soundless, soul-deep pulse of anguish.
ProlixalParagon spun, dagger already in hand, but no… this wasn’t a fight he could win. The creature was half-air, half-memory, invulnerable to steel alone.
Not a fight. A distraction.
His sharp gaze caught a loose overhang of brittle stone above the basin. A fissure where old earth trembled. A weak point.
One chance.
He darted toward it, the Dustwraith gliding after him, limbs ghosting through stone and air alike.
At the base of the overhang, he jammed a caltrop sphere into a deep, narrow crack. The last of them — a risky throwaway. He wrenched a piece of broken crystal from the ground, hurled it at the sphere.
Clink.
Flash.
The caltrop burst with a sharp crack and a blinding flare of light and dust. The overhang groaned and buckled — a curtain of stone and salt collapsing down in a thunderous slide, sealing the basin and entombing the Dustwraith in its grave once more.
The mana pressure eased.
Silence, broken only by his labored breathing.
ProlixalParagon sank to his knees, the Crystallized Echo Shard still clutched in his hand.
>Quest Progress: Crystallized Echo Shard Acquired<
>Quest Complete: Timber, Blood, and Salt<
The world felt huge around him, the night vast and endless. But in this moment, he felt something else too — a kind of battered, stubborn victory.
Not clean. Not easy.
But his.
He closed his eyes a moment, felt the pulse of the shard in his palm, and then, with aching legs, rose.
The way back to Dustreach would be long.
And that was just fine.
Because there were worse things than a foxfolk with a sharp tongue and a sharper will.
Like a world that thought it could keep him small.
And tonight, the Wastes had learned better.
The moons hung high now, cold and watchful, their light painting the Wastes in hues of silver-blue and ghostly white. The wind had shifted again, moving in long, sighing gusts that stirred the brittle salt grass and sent pale dust trailing in thin streamers across the ground. The Hollow Quarry lay far behind, and the basin of shattered crystals had fallen into stillness — no sign of the Dustwraith, no lingering tremors beneath the earth.
ProlixalParagon pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders, his tail curling against the chill. His legs ached with the long miles he’d covered, the adrenaline long gone, leaving only a dull, persistent ache in his muscles and a soreness in his ribs from where loose stone had struck him during the quarry’s collapse.
But his fingers stayed tight around the pouch at his belt, the weight of the Crystallized Echo Shard, the vial of obsidian resin, and the mana-threaded salt cedar within a quiet, stubborn reassurance.
He’d done it.
And now he had to bring it home.
The road back to Dustreach was no road at all — just a shifting memory of landmarks: the leaning stone spire where scavengers perched at dusk, the withered, hollow tree where old travelers left scraps of offering to whatever nameless thing might spare them a safe passage. He followed those markers, his keen eyes picking out the shapes against the landscape even in the low light.
The Wastes were a different place at night.
They breathed.
The land felt alive in a way it didn’t under the sun’s brutal weight. Strange sounds carried on the wind — the distant, liquid chirrups of glass crickets, the low howls of something far off, half-glimpsed in the corners of his vision. Even the salt flats shimmered in the moonlight, ghostly and vast, like a frozen sea.
ProlixalParagon moved steadily, always aware of the ground beneath his feet. The danger in the Wastes was as much in what you didn’t see as what you did.
His thoughts drifted as he walked.
He kept remembering the look on Marx’s face when he spoke about proving his worth. That brittle mixture of defiance and shame — as though daring to want something better, to be something more, was a crime. And ProlixalParagon recognized it, not because Marx was different, but because the world made men like him feel like they had to explain themselves.
Just like it had done to Bennett his whole life.
The labels. The stares. The condescension masquerading as concern.
He thought of the villagers who’d jeered, who’d spat words like cripple and thief-folk, like it was a kind of ritual, a rite to remind the rest of them where they belonged.
But it didn’t have to stay that way.
He might not have been a hero. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor or some chosen champion. He was just a fennician with a sharp tongue, a dagger, and a head full of stubborn, half-broken ideas.
And that was enough.
Because change didn’t start in castles or with kings.
It started in the dirt. In the salt. In the places where no one else was watching.
With one man choosing to stand between another and the world’s scorn.
A flicker of light appeared ahead — faint orange sparks in the dark. Lanterns.
Dustreach.
A rough knot formed in his throat at the sight of it. The squat outline of the village walls, the scattered shapes of watch posts and wind-battered homes, looked small in the vastness of the Wastes, but there was a kind of strength in it too. A stubbornness to survive in a land that did not love them.
He crested the last low rise and started down toward the outskirts, the ground giving way to firmer, more familiar soil. A guard dog’s bark rose somewhere ahead, answered by another.
Good. It meant people were awake.
The Vermillion Troupe’s campfire glow came into view off to the north of the village proper — a cluster of flickering lights and canvas shadows. His ears twitched at the sound of soft laughter, the clink of cookware, the low strumming of a stringed instrument.
The weight in his chest lightened. A little.
ProlixalParagon allowed himself a weary grin and picked up his pace.
By dawn, he would place the quest’s spoils into Marx’s scarred hands, see the old man’s face when he realized someone had given enough of a damn to follow through. And then — maybe — the first stone of a better road would be laid. Nothing grand. Nothing dramatic.
Just one fennician’s refusal to look away.
And for tonight, that would be enough.