Black dust settles in Dawn Town’s secluded streets. A six-year-old child begs near the river with visible crystallisation on her skin. Anti-dwarf sentiment—muted in Malachite where dwarves hold institutional power—runs openly in Chrysalis, where other races blame dwarven industrial techniques for the disease’s spread. The Grand Pantheon’s clergy call for compassion and community support. New Church’s conservative craftspeople call for the Labs to be expelled from the city entirely. Snowford’s academics argue about mechanisms and transmission vectors. Mistheart’s mages quietly research whether the condition can be magically arrested.
Chrysalis Labs insists it is close to a breakthrough. Rhine Lab, unsolicited, publicly announces that its research has identified promising treatment vectors that Chrysalis Labs’ institutional caution prevents it from pursuing. The Oligarchy watches the two institutions circle each other and calculates which will produce results first.
Four hundred feet below the city, in rooms that predate the current civilisation by centuries, researchers study technology they do not fully understand, built by people who are now dust inside failed preservation machines, in preparation for a catastrophe whose nature they can only guess at.
And on the Highland Plateau, where the geometric portal stands guarded by its ancient silver sentinel—now a weekly flexing challenge for the goliath tribes—something modern is being constructed nearby that Chrysalis Labs has not been invited to see.