---
🌑
The sun had long stopped being warm.
It hung above the horizon like a dying ember, bleeding color into a sky of dust. Auren Marrow walked alone across the Shattervale Flats — a place where nothing grew, where the wind howled through skeletal trees and the ground was littered with rusted metal teeth, remnants of a war no one remembered.
He was starving, again.
But more than that — he was hunted.
He could feel it: eyes behind broken stones, footsteps that stopped when he turned. The Seed beneath his skin throbbed, not from hunger this time, but from warning.
He wasn't alone.
And then he saw them.
A flicker of firelight. Movement. Voices.
Auren crouched, crawling up a crumbled slope to peer into a shallow ravine. A group of five people sat around a fire built from burned books and shattered furniture. He could smell real broth — something boiling with roots, maybe even dried meat.
He was too hungry to think twice.
He stepped forward.
A bowstring snapped. A bolt hit the dirt inches from his foot.
"Try another step," a woman growled, "and I'll turn you into soil."
Auren raised his hands slowly.
"I'm not here to fight," he said, voice dry and cracked. "I just want warmth. Maybe a word."
A pause. Then the group stood.
Each one unique. Each one dangerous.
---
🌑 The Team
The one who had spoken was a tall woman in a patchwork coat, one eye covered with an iron plate. Her name was Veyra. A former soldier of the Hollow Legion — before the Legion cannibalized itself during the Siege of Thornecliff. She didn't miss.
Next to her stood a boy with silver hair and soot-black hands — Caz, a machineborn, raised by pre-collapse AIs in an underground vault. His fingers twitched with nervous energy as he scanned Auren with an old bioscanner that blinked red.
"He's carrying... something," Caz muttered. "Bio-energy levels aren't natural. He's... alive, but not like us."
The third was Sethra, a former priest of the Soilbound Faith — a broken man wrapped in torn ceremonial cloth, his back marked with carved symbols. He watched Auren with sad, empty eyes.
Beside him stood Arlen, a girl with burning eyes and a cracked jaw. She said nothing — just held a broken spear tight in her grip. Her breath steamed from her lips unnaturally. She was rumored to be a fireborn — one of the rare children who had absorbed the last warmth of the world itself. Most called them cursed.
The last sat in silence, barely visible. A hooded figure sharpening two knives. Their name was Wren. No one knew their past — only that they spoke to the dead.
---
🌌 The Offer
"You're Seeded," Veyra said finally, lowering her weapon. "We've been looking for one."
"Why?" Auren asked.
"Because if you're what we think you are, you're the key to getting out of this wasteland."
"Out?"
"To the Verdant Below," Sethra said softly. "A place buried under the dead soil. Some say the gods left it. Others say it was sealed to protect the last living ground."
Auren shook his head. "It's just a story."
"So was death, once," Arlen said, finally speaking.
They made room for him.
Auren sat, bones aching. He tasted real broth for the first time in weeks. Roots, dried meat, salt. He nearly cried.
"Why me?" he asked between gulps.
Caz leaned forward. "Because the Seed in you — it's not just alive. It's awake. I scanned it. It's old. Possibly sentient. Possibly divine."
"I didn't ask for it."
"Neither did we," Wren whispered from the shadows.
---
🏚️ The Mission
That night, around the fire, the plan unfolded.
Caz had uncovered an old Vault Map — a half-burned datasheet that showed the location of a hidden chamber beneath the city of Dovenshade, a place swallowed by earthquakes years ago. Legend said it was a pre-collapse seed vault, protected by old-world tech and buried far beneath the ash.
"But it's not just food we're after," Veyra said. "We believe the vault holds a key to purifying soil again. Not just surviving — rebuilding."
"And it reacts to me?" Auren asked.
"Yes," Caz said. "Your Seed may unlock the gate."
"Or awaken whatever's guarding it," Wren murmured.
Silence.
Then Veyra stood.
"We move at dawn. Across the Blightpath. Ten days' walk. Dangerous terrain. Factions might intercept us. The Vaultborn. The Bone Kings. Maybe worse."
"And you trust me?" Auren asked.
"No," Veyra said. "But we don't have time to wait for another Seed-bearer."
---
⚔️ Trouble Comes Early
The next morning, they moved as a unit. Swift. Silent.
They crossed rustfields and bone piles. Once, they found a collapsed bunker still glowing with radiation. Another time, they saw a skyship overhead — black, ancient, drifting like a ghost.
On the third night, the wind shifted.
Wren froze.
"They're coming."
"Who?" Veyra snapped.
"The Pale Choir."
Auren felt the Seed burn in his chest.
He didn't know who the Pale Choir were, but in his soul, he knew what they brought: death, silence, and something worse.
Caz handed him a blade.
"You're one of us now," he said. "If we fall, you run. Don't let the Seed fall into their hands."
"I'm not ready," Auren whispered.
"No one ever is," Arlen said, stepping beside him, fire flickering in her palms.
---
> In the age of rot and ruin, five strangers and one Seeded boy would march across the bones of the world…
Not to survive it — but to awaken it.
---
End of Chapter 3
to be continued...