Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I deliberately left some space here because I know that both Binary and Venerated are gonna be complaining about me breaking canon.

  Floor’s open gentlemen. Have at it.

  EdinburoughArchivist

  Yea, well, they’re gonna have to wait in line.

  I haven’t posted here until now because I was honestly just lurking and enjoying the ride. When you cracked the House of Seasons puzzle, I figured okay, let’s see what else he’s noticed that the rest of us missed. I didn’t want to nitpick everything like some posters.

  But you’ve been playing fast and loose with the lore long before this whole Rockstar class. My problem goes back to Cole’s “history lecture.” That was more than just reinterpreting existing lore to fit with your fic. You straight up invented entire sections of Frontiers history.

  You made up two giant empires, a continent-scale war, and a decisive battle that supposedly shaped everything that followed. None of what you wrote connects to legit lore. You just made it all up. It reads well, sure, but it’s not grounded in anything that we know. It's all just invented bosheet.

  CaptPuffnstuff

  ^ Edinburough

  I think we all can admit that some of Frontiers is frustratingly underdeveloped. But there’s a different between extrapolating lore from item descriptions or quest descriptions, and wholesale invention of canon.

  You created the Resonance Engine and a hundred-year looping battle and, for some reason, decided that the echoes from the House of Seasons get to show up on a battlefield far away from the actual House.

  This fic got popular because you discovered a bunch of overlooked stuff in the House and then built onto that. Now it feels like you’re using all the goodwill the forum gave you for that discovering as a free pass to throw “cool ideas” into a blender and see what comes up.

  The echoes are associated with the Blooming Witch, but she’s nowhere near the Soundtrap. That place is far outside her sphere of influence. Even following the logic of your own fic, you’re not consistent with the lore.

  CradleOfMirth

  I was gonna stay quiet because it seemed like everyone here was okay with Cole’s “history” lecture and I didn’t want to be that guy. But yea, same complaints.

  The lecture dragged. It slowed the pace of the story and dumped a bunch of random bosheet on us without any real payoff. Then the skeletal bones all merged together and turned into a walking bone mountain, and that’s when I checked out. That was where this fic stopped feeling like Frontiers and…I don’t know, turned into an anime boss fight.

  Cool idea, just not why I’m here.

  CrushDaddyXx

  Hard disagree.

  This is the first time that Zeke has actually done something proactive instead of just standing around listening to Cole narrate a textbook at him for six straight posts. I’ll take undead bone kaiju over a lecture any day of the week.

  Fogbarrel

  I love lore as much as the next obsessed nerd, but let’s not pretend that Frontiers didn’t leave half the map functionally empty. There are entire regions of the map with no quests or NPCs or meaningful storytelling. The devs just forgot about those places.

  Now that we all know they’re not coming back, it’s up to the community to fill in those gaps or they stay empty forever. If you don’t like how Zeke’s doing that, that’s fair. But the alternative is that everyone here writes something better.

  Also, it’s not like all Zeke’s stuff is coming out of nowhere. The Vash Dynasty is referenced in the games. Vash Callis exists as an item flavor text. Zeke isn’t just inventing all this shit up. He’s not magicking it out of thin air. He’s expanding on fragments of the lore that never got any follow up.

  MinMaxMike

  | echoes from the House of Seasons get to show up on a battlefield far away from the actual House |

  Small clarification: Z3ke didn’t say that these were literally the same echoes from the House of Seasons. He said they reminded him of them. That’s a pretty important distinction.

  Enemy archetypes get reused all the time in video games. Skeletons show up everywhere. So do gnolls and jackals and corrupted soldiers and bandits. Same vibes, different zones, different names, different color schemes.

  Are we really gonna pretend that Frontiers never reused enemy designs or themes across regions? Because that feels like selective outrage.

  SpicyShoyu

  I kinda get why people don’t like the echoes, but I honestly think they fit better than folks are giving them credit for.

  Everyone latched onto the obvious sound angle of the Valley of Echoes. Soundtrap, resonance weapons, vibration doing weird physics things. That all tracks. It makes sense. It’s the clean, surface-level read.

  But the House of Seasons had those echoes too. Remember that conversation with the Blooming Witch when she talked about her sister and she said that she was focused on one of the hardest forms of magic there is? Most of us immediately assumed spatial manipulation because that’s the Blooming Witch’s whole vibe. But what if we all guessed wrong?

  What if both the sister and the Blooming Witch were actually digging into animancy?

  Hear me out. Cole and Corva were arguing about animancy and how magic supposedly can’t touch the soul, and how theorists have been chasing the idea of animancy for centuries without success. That’s straight up Chekov loading a gun and setting it on the table.

  What if the Blooming Witch’s sister was one of those theoretical mages studying animancy? And what if the Vash had more like her present at the Eight Day Thunder? What if animancy is the reason the House of Seasons exists in the first place?

  The Valley of Echoes could be named for both reasons: sound as a weapon and souls caught in a loop. I’m not saying my theory is airtight, just saying that there is connective tissue here if you squint hard enough.

  The_Kijs

  Here’s my problem with it. Z3ke just dumped thousands of words of completely unsupported and unprovable lore on us with Cole’s lecture.

  When he wrote about the House of Seasons and he gave descriptions of it and everything, we could all head out there and actually check it out. That’s what a bunch of us did, and we even followed his character and discovered that he isn’t completely full of shit and there’s actually a hidden section of the House that none of us knew about.

  But Cole’s “history lesson” included absolutely zero cited sources, almost no facts that we can corroborate, and ended with a runaway sonic weapon vaporizing most of the battlefield and destroying the evidence. We can’t even head out to the Soundtrap because it’s from Syndicate’s and all those servers have been shut down.

  The entire lecture is about as valuable to us as the film Gladiator is to a classics scholar. It’s a cool story, but it’s just a story.

  MinMaxMike

  I don’t really care about this lore slap-fight. I wanna know more about Z3ke’s class. What does it actually do?

  Did he unlock something like a bard class? Emberveil already has a bard class, is this the Frontiers version of that? Is he gonna be buffing and debuffing and doing CC?

  Z3ke, you unlocked a brand-new class in the middle of a fight and then immediately cut away. WTF mate? You gotta give us something more than that.

  TVEye

  Yea. Throw us a bone. Preferably not one from the things trying to kill you. ??

  ShivSays

  Meh. Kinda seems like author wish fulfillment.

  Middle-aged dude doesn’t get to live the rockstar dream, ends up bartending most of his life away, and now he writes himself into a world where he unlocks a Rockstar class by screaming hard enough and he can beat people with the power of music.

  Feels very Mary Sue.

  UnhelpfullyHelpful

  Counterpoint - bards are awesome. Sooo many of the best characters in fiction are bards. Name all the bards: Jack Black in pretty much every movie he’s ever been in. Bill S. Preston and Ted “Theodore” Logan. The Blues Brothers.

  Donkey from Shrek is a bard. Always singing, never shuts up, lets Shrek handle the fighting while he does the talking.

  PraylineJolene

  | Donkey from Shrek is a bard. |

  He did seduce the dragon. That’s prime bard behavior right there.

  StoryLeech

  I read something where someone was arguing that Link was a bard. He’s an adventurer with a diverse skillset and he’s always got a musical instrument around him. Dude is straight up bard.

  GrognarTheGreen

  Nah. Link knows how to shut the hell up. Can’t be a bard.

  I wouldn’t mind if this fic leans into the bard angle. How many other fanfics actually center around a bard as the OC? It’s always archers, shadow mages, assassins, or some other flavor of edgelord. We get it. Your guy wears black.

  I love bards. I played one in BG3 and there’s a whole chunk of the game where you’re ridiculously OP. You can kill like, four bosses just by talking them to death. If Z3ke goes that route, it’d be hilarious. Crush and the other combat goblins would probably hate it, but it would be something different. And frankly, this forum could use something different.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Okay, first of all, y’all rude as hell. Collectively. As a group. Sit with that.

  Second, if this were some kind of wish-fulfillment power fantasy, I’d be attractive and confident and charismatic and effortlessly cool. I would not be beat all to hell and stuck in a world that I don’t understand with a bunch of shit trying to kill me.

  I’m not beating people with the power of music. Don’t know where y’all got that from. All I did was scream once and nearly passed out. My throat was flayed and I was bleeding all over everything. That’s everything I was able to do with this class. If this is a power fantasy, it’s the least glamorous one imaginable.

  And to everyone asking me for hard details about the class, sorry but I don’t have them. I didn’t get a helpful pop-up that was like “congrats, you’re a Rockstar now. Here’s what that means.”

  You’re all asking me about questions like I’m supposed to know how this class works. I didn’t design it. I didn’t even know it existed. I’m not a dev. I’m not writing wiki pages like all of you. I’m just some idiot who is trapped in this world.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Normally, someone like Mushroom or Story steps in and helps me out. Where the hell are they? Why isn’t someone letting me know what this class actually does?

  MushroomCleric

  This is usually the point where I swoop in and drop some lore and advice and give you a crash course on things. But in this case, I shouldn’t be the one explaining the class to you.

  There’s someone here who is significantly more qualified to talk about it. Someone who is uniquely suited to telling you about it and how it fits into the Fracture-verse.

  VeneratedWitchHunter

  

  
1. I know where you’re going with this Mushroom, and you can suck it.


  
2. Zeke didn’t actually break canon with this one.


  

  Like the rest of you I also hated Cole’s history lecture and the mountain of unsubstantiated shit that came with it. That criticism stands. But the Rockstar class itself is canon. The man has done his research on that.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Uh…what?

  I’m more used to you showing up and pointing to my post and yelling about how I’ve committed a crime against the Fracture-verse and its lore. This sounds suspiciously like you’re supporting me.

  7Spirals

  OMG someone hacked Venerated’s account.

  Gravemind, you better check on this before he starts liking fics and apologizing to people.

  GravemindLegacy (MOD)

  On it.

  MushroomCleric

  HAHAHAHA.

  I’m honestly not all that surprised that most of you don’t know about the Rockstar class and that Venerated does.

  There’s a very simple reason for that: Venerated is one of the only people on this forum whose favorite Fracture-verse game is not universally loved.

  See, I’ve always been an Emberveil guy because I love fantasy RPGs, magic systems, orcs, elves, swords, and all that shit. WoW and Skyrim are still comfort games for me outside the Fracture-verse catalog. But Venerated? He never really cared about Emberveil or Null Protocol.

  He’s always been more partial to Shards of Time.

  Byte-Sized

  Eww David.

  Hambone

  Everyone boo this man!!

  7Spirals

  Boo

  10161066

  Booooooooooooooo boooo

  FopperyandWhim

  I’m pretty new to this forum and only played Tech Reign so far and don’t know why everyone is booing.

  …but booooo.

  Sorry Venerated. I just want to fit in.

  VeneratedWitchHunter

  Since Mushroom just casually tossed me under the bus, I guess I’ll own it.

  Yes. Shards is my favorite Fracture-verse game. I know the reputation and I know the memes and I know that the game is widely regarded as a disaster that killed Severance Systems. It was their first jump into 3D, it ran like absolute garbage, the camera actively fought you, the motion sickness was real, and the marketing team clearly had no idea how to explain what the game was. All of that is true.

  But here’s the thing, I love Shards because of what it was trying to do. Severance Systems didn’t try to play it safe. They swung for the fences. They didn’t do what all the other video game companies tried to do, which is to find a hit and crank out sequels until everyone’s bored of it. I mean, do we really need another CoD?

  Severance tried to take everything they’d learned across all the Fracture games and mash it into one absurd, overly-ambitious project. They had tactical party management, time manipulation, rhythm-based mechanics, environmental storytelling, branching narrative paths that carried consequences across multiple timelines. The whole thing was buggy and unstable and way too big for the tech of the time.

  But if it had worked, we’d all be talking about Severance Systems in the same breath as Nintendo, Squaresoft, or Rockstar. They would have been one of the few video game studios that changes how games are made.

  Instead, they overreached and it all came crashing down. But that doesn’t mean the idea was bad. And it definitely doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have tried. That ballsiness (don’t know if that’s an actual word) is what drew a lot of us to the Fracture-verse in the first place. Shards is just that mindset taken to its logical extreme.

  Which brings me to the Rockstar class. Most people tried to forget about Shards and move on. They never delved into the dev notes or interviews or cut-content breakdowns. That’s where people would have found out about the Rockstar class.

  It was cut content and was supposed to be a hybrid DPS/support class built around a gimmick. The plan was that players could upload MP3 files directly into the game. Severance Systems had created an algorithm that would analyze temp, volume, rhythm, and frequency, and then translate that data into mechanical effects in combat.

  Fast and aggressive tracks would be offensive buffs. Slow and heavy songs would lean into CC and suppression. Melodic pieces would focus on shields and healing. There was even a dev interview where they talked about how genre of music would subtly affect battlefield conditions.

  The idea is that players would score their own fights. The whole thing was wildly ambitious and completely insane and one of the reasons that Shards deserves a lot more respect than it gets.

  So yea, short version is that Zeke didn’t break canon and I’m actually interested to see where he takes the class.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I don’t know enough about Shards to properly make fun of you for liking it, so I’ll spare you the booing. Also, given that you’re the only person in here who actually knows anything about this class, it would be incredibly stupid of me to antagonize you.

  So…why was it cut?

  Is it bad? Did I accidentally pick a shit class? I mean, it’s not exactly “apocalypse maker” or “death-dealing badass,” but I did shatter a whole bunch of skeletons with it.

  VeneratedWitchHunter

  It was cut because it was a legal nightmare.

  Severance Systems axed it late in development. The class, as pitched, required real-world music to function properly. It needed actual MP3 files uploaded by players. That meant copyright material across multiple regions, and that is where everything fell apart.

  Once you let players upload copyrighted audio, even if the files never leave their machine, you’re suddenly dealing with copyright law across multiple countries, litigious music labels, and a shit ton of legal interpretations. The game’s algorithm was meant to analyze a song and transform it into gameplay effects, and some lawyers would absolutely argue that that counted as derivative use.

  By that point, Severance Systems was already hemorrhaging money trying to finish Shards. The idea of negotiating licensing rights worldwide was completely unrealistic. The cost alone would have crushed them and the lawsuits would’ve finished the job. So, the devs pulled the plug.

  What’s important though is that the framework for the class still exists in the game. They didn’t have the time to rip it out cleanly. The underlying systems were already baked into the game. What got cut was the implementation layer: the UI and the player-facing tools.

  When Horizons Entertainment bought the Fracture-verse IP, there was a brief moment where people thought the class might actually happen. Horizons is a big company and they had a bunch of in-house musicians. People assumed that they’d ship original tracks or pre-approved sound packs to sidestep the licensing issues.

  Then the updates stalled and the roadmap vanished and Horizons quietly shelved the IP. And that was that. The game is dead and that’s why most people don’t know about the Rockstar class.

  It comes from the most divisive game in the franchise and was buried under the collective grief of watching the Fracture-verse slowly die.

  No, you didn’t pick a shit class. You just got one that nobody really understands.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Okay. That’s some info but I’ve got so many more questions. Venerated, can you type up what you know about the class and post it here? I’d rather you write it all up now because, after I catch you all up to how we left the valley and fell in with the caravan and all that happened there, I feel like you’re gonna be angry with me.

  Last I wrote, I was in the trench, leaning against the wall and the dust from the skeletal echoes was starting to settle on everything. The echoes didn’t really explode. It’s more that they just…came apart. Bone turned to powder, and the powder became a gray grit that hung in the air. Every breath I took tasted like chalk.

  My ears were ringing and my skull was humming and my heartbeat was pounding in my ears. My throat felt like I’d swallowed broken glass. When I tried coughing to clear it, pain ripped through me and I immediately regretted everything. My arms were shaking and all I could do was stand there, staring at the notification in front of my eyes.

  [Class Unlocked: Rockstar]

  You’d all told me that without a class, I’d eventually just pop out of existence. But at the same time, Corva had told me to ignore classes entirely and just focus on my skills. At the time, that sounded like a wise decision. Some of you all agreed that I shouldn’t just pick any old class.

  But standing there in a trench filled with bone dust, with my throat half-destroyed, my gut was screaming at me to take the class and go from there. I figured you’d all be able to help me no matter what class I took. Plus, Rockstar was infinitely better than the Bartender class that I’d been offered earlier. No offense to bartenders, especially since I’ve been one, but I did not want to die as one.

  I mentally clicked on the Class Unlock screen and immediately felt something click into place. It’s kinda hard to explain. It felt like a sense of gravity settled on me. I…I know that’s not something that anyone can understand. But at the same time, can you all understand magic?

  Three notifications popped up and they were skills with little stars next to their name.

  

  
• Performance


  
• Instrument Mastery


  
• Persona


  

  You’d all mentioned before that classes let you push certain core skills past rank 7, so that’s what I’m guessing these are. I don’t know what they do or what will happen if I get them past 7 or what they relate to. There isn’t any helpful tooltip that pops up when I look at them. All I get is that these skills unlocked and that’s all.

  After accepting the class, all I wanted to do was just lay down in the trench. I wanted to rest. I wanted to pull out my tech slate and open the forum and start panic-posting questions. I wanted Mushroom or Story to info dump on me and Binary to yell at me about canon and tell me I’m screwing everything up. I wanted someone to tell me what I’d just gotten myself into. I wanted to do literally anything except keep moving.

  But there was no telling how long those echoes would stay off me. I didn’t know if whatever I’d screamed had painted a target on my back, or where the bone mountain was, or if my shredded throat was going to kill me before anything else got the chance. I didn’t know where the rest of the group was, whether they were fighting or had managed to escape. But I did know that sitting alone in a valley filled with hostile echoes and a giant bone monster was a bad idea.

  I forced myself to move. My best shot at survival was to climb the trench and get to high ground. That was…easier said than done. There’s no good way to describe how I struggled with that. My arms didn’t want to cooperate and my legs were jelly and every time I struggled to pull myself up there was a little voice in the back of my head whispering that I could just stop. Just rest. Just let go.

  I ignored it and somehow managed to claw my way up the dirt wall, carving a deep grove into the earth with my body. By the time I rolled over the lip of the trench I was shaking so badly I could barely push myself onto my side. My lungs burned and my vision pulsed at the edges.

  The Valley of Echoes stretched out in front of me. I searched for smoke or light or movement or anything that might tell me where the rest of the group was. Eventually I heard steel on steel and shouting and the unmistakable sounds of fighting. That was enough to get me to my feet and start running.

  The valley floor was uneven. Every step I took sent a dull pain through my legs. My throat felt like it had been sandblasted, so every breath I took was agony. My lungs were on fire and a stitch had bloomed in my side, but the sound of fighting pulled me forward.

  Someone shouted a warning and I heard a gunshot. I crested a low rise and spotted the group. Cole saw me first. His eyes went wide and his face broke out into a grin.

  “Zeke!” he shouted, relief bleeding into his voice.

  I tried calling out, but before I could say anything Corva turned and I saw his face harden for a half-second. He was assessing everything, trying to decide where the threat was coming from and the best way for the group to get out of the valley. Then he was on me. He grabbed me by my jacket and yanked me close, shoving me behind him like I weighed nothing.

  “Don’t wander off,” he snapped. “Stay where I can see you.”

  I didn’t argue or say anything because I was too busy just trying to stay on my feet. Looking around, I noticed everyone was a wreck. Pell was caked in dust and had picked up a wound on his side. Cole still had a gash on his forehead. Blood was leaking from Corva’s arms and I wanted to ask him about it and see if he needed any of the bandages that Cole had me pack away in my dimensional storage space. But before I could ask him, we were running again.

  We all started running in that kind of desperate, ugly jog that happens when you’ve been running for too long and your body just wants to quit. Behind us the echoes were still coming, chasing after us as we made our way through the trenches.

  I saw Cole fling slips of paper out behind us that plastered themselves to the side of the trench. They were slapped at odd angles and they overlapped and crisscrossed, looking like a conspiracy board. He muttered something under his breath and activated the slips.

  Lines of light jumped between the paper, creating thin wires that stretched behind us. A split second later and the echoes surged at us but hit the lines and were carved apart, unraveling into fragments of bones.

  “Move, move MOVE!” someone yelled. I couldn’t tell who.

  We ran. We slipped. We slid. The trench sloped downwards and we all lost our footing, half-falling and half-sliding until we tumbled out the other side in a heap. I landed hard and felt something in my leg protest and a sharp bolt of pain shot up my body. I barely registered it as I was forced back to my feet. That was when the ground shook.

  A shadow rolled over us and I turned. My stomach dropped. The bone mountain was there. Up close it was so much worse than I had imagined. It was a writhing mass of skeletal remains fused into something that could barely be called a shape. Skulls ground against one another. Ribcages crushed and shifted as the thing moved. Bones scraped and cracked under the weight of the thing. One massive arm, if you could even call it that, swung at us and I froze. But Corva didn’t.

  He slammed into me from the side, hard enough to knock the breath out of my lungs. I went flying, hitting the ground and rolling as the limb crashed down on where I’d been standing. Bones exploded on impact, sending shards and dust into the air. Pain blossomed as I was peppered by shards of bones.

  “Move!” Corva roared.

  I scrambled up and took off. Behind us, echoes were still throwing themselves into Cole’s trap, tearing themselves apart just to reach us. The mountain drew back again, preparing another strike. I heard the crack from Wren’s rifle. A puff of bone dust drifted off the mound, showing the complete lack of damage the attack did. Pell pulled out his revolver and unloaded at the hill, also doing absolutely nothing.

  At that moment, the only thing that was going through my head was this Rockstar thing better fucking do something. I planted my feet and sucked in air and stared up at the massive bone mound. I screamed.

  Well…I tried to scream.

  I’d expected that same pressure and impossible force and violent wave to rush out of me. I expected sound to be a weapon again. Instead, my throat gave out.

  It felt like someone had dragged razors straight down my windpipe. The scream died halfway out of me, collapsing into a wet, broken choke. Pain flared and I tasted copper and started hacking up blood as my vision blurred. I staggered, almost fell, and the mountain’s shadow swallowed me whole.

  I was going to die.

  Something slammed into me again. Corva. He hit me hard enough that the world spun sideways, shoving me clear as the bone mountain’s limb crashed down. The impact sent another storm of fragments screaming through the air. I rolled and gasped, clutching at my ruined throat.

  Corva didn’t get out of that fight clean. I heard him grunt as something clipped him. Bone smacked against armor and the force knocked him sideways, slamming him into the ground. It had only been a glancing blow, but it still smashed the shit out of the man. He was already forcing himself up before I could process what happened, his teeth bared and blood pouring freely down his arm.

  “Run,” he snarled. “Go.”

  And we did. We bolted through the trenches. Cole slapped paper to the walls as he ran, wires flashing into existence behind us. The echoes surged again, but the traps slowed them and shredded them and bought us precious seconds.

  My legs were like jelly. The bone mountain tried to follow us, its bulk grinding and shifting as it turned, but it was too big and too slow. By the time it reoriented itself we were already racing along, slipping through trenches it couldn’t reach.

  For a moment it felt like we might actually make it. Of course, we hit another sound bubble and I wanted to just throw up my hands and yell at the gods.

  Sound cut off completely. My breathing vanished. Corva’s shouted orders disappeared. Even the slap of shoes on dirt evaporated. We’d run straight into one of the dead sound bubbles where total silence reigned.

  Normally that would’ve freaked me out. Earlier in the day it absolutely would have. But after a full, miserable tour of the Valley of Echoes, this barely registered. We didn’t slow down and we didn’t look back. We just ran.

  Behind us the bone mountain tried attacking one last time. I felt it more than heard it; a massive impact as one of its fists slammed down towards the trench. We were already nearly out of its reach. The blow hit dirt and stone behind us, shaking the ground but missing us entirely.

  We burst out of the sound bubble and kept going. Thankfully, or unfortunately, (I don’t know which) the bubble we’d just raced through wasn’t the kind that ate sound and kept it. It was the kind that stored it and compressed it and then unleashed it all at once.

  The bone mountain swung again, punching straight through the edge of the bubble. And when it tried to pull its arm back, every bit of captured sound detonated at once. The arm vaporized. One second it was there, and the next it was a cloud of bone dust that exploded outward and drifted on the wind. Then the mountain screamed.

  I don’t really have a good description of it. It wasn’t a voice. It was the sound of thousands of bones grinding and scraping and breaking all at once. It was a massive, howling dirge that echoed throughout the valley and chased us as we ran the hell away.

  We ran until our lungs burned and our legs felt like they were about to give up. We burst out of the valley in a spray of dust and blood and breathless laughter that was slowly morphing into hysteria and sobbing. The echoes had stopped chasing us, not able to follow us past some invisible line at the valley’s edge.

  I stumbled and nearly faceplanted. Someone grabbed me and hauled me to my feet and we were able to keep going. When we finally stopped a few minutes later, we were well clear of the valley, on the opposite side from where we’d entered. I bent over with my hands on my knees, gasping, and forcing myself to look around.

  Pell looked absolutely awful. He was pale and coated with dust and his eyes were unfocused as he just stood there trying to catch his breath. Cole was shaking and blood was smeared all over his clothes. For once he wasn’t reaching for his notebook to jot anything down. Wren was the best of all of us. He was calm and stoic and coated in bone dust but otherwise untouched. But there were still signs that he was barely keeping it together.

  Then there was Corva. The moment we stopped, he collapsed. Blood was leaking from him and his arms were covered with spikes of bones that protruded from his skin. I just stared down at him, wondering what to do to help, wondering if he could guide me through some first aid, wondering if we could still save him.