(Mist: The Island of Fiery Mountains — Dawn)
The fire had burned down to embers overnight.
Jericho was already awake when the others stirred — sitting at the edge of the clearing with his eyes on the mist, the same position he had been in when most of them fell asleep.
Whether he had slept at all was unclear. With Jericho it usually was.
William was the second up.
He looked at the embers.
Then at the landscape around them — the calcified trees, the cracked earth, the faint heat still bleeding from the ground in the cold morning air.
"Still awful," he said. To nobody specifically. Just establishing the facts of the morning.
Erica sat up from her bedroll and pushed her hair back.
"Good morning William."
"Is it," he said.
"Relatively."
"We're on a cursed island searching for a piece of a dead star while a calamity dragon exists somewhere nearby," William said. "Relatively is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
Alice was already folding her bedroll with the quiet efficiency of someone who had decided the morning didn't require commentary.
She glanced at Jericho briefly — he hadn't turned from the mist — then looked back at what she was doing.
The tips of her ears were slightly pink from the cold.
Or the cold.
Erica noticed.
Said nothing.
Drako rose without sound — one moment horizontal, the next standing, the transition so smooth it barely registered as movement.
He looked at the landscape with the same sharpened attention he had worn when they landed and hadn't fully set aside since.
"You didn't sleep," he said to Jericho.
Not a question.
"I slept," Jericho said.
"How long."
A pause.
"Some," Jericho said.
Drako looked at him for a moment.
Then let it go — the way Drako let things go when he had noted them and filed them and decided pursuing them wasn't his place.
⸻
They ate quickly.
Travelling rations — nothing elaborate, nothing that required effort the morning didn't have to spare.
William ate with the focused joylessness of someone fueling a machine rather than enjoying a meal.
Erica ate with considerably more enthusiasm than the food warranted, which was simply how Erica approached most things.
Alice ate carefully and quietly and passed Jericho the water before he asked for it.
He thanked her without looking up from the map he had drawn from memory the night before — a rough rendering of the island's peak formations based on what they had seen from the water during the approach. Markings where the volcanic rock faces were most exposed.
Estimated distances from their current camp position.
"The impact site would be deep," he said, mostly to himself. "Something that size hitting the earth at that velocity — it wouldn't sit at the surface. It would have driven itself down." He traced a line on the map. "But over enough time the geological shifts around it would have pushed portions back up. If any of the star fragment is accessible it'll be where the rock faces have cracked open along their natural lines."
"How do we identify those lines from a distance?" Alice asked.
"The rock around a Luxton Star fragment will be different from the surrounding material," Jericho said. "Older. Denser. The impact compressed everything around it — the geological signature will be distinct if you know what you're looking for."
"And what are we looking for specifically?" Erica asked.
"Dark blue veining in the rock face," Jericho said. "Almost black in low light. The compression creates a mineral reaction in the surrounding stone — it's the only place on earth you'd see that specific coloration."
William looked up from his rations.
"Dark blue veining," he repeated. "In black rock. On a dark island covered in mist."
Jericho considered this.
"It'll be visible," he said. "The veining catches light differently from the surrounding rock. Even in low light conditions it has a faint luminescence."
"Glowing blue lines in black rock," William said. "Right. Much easier."
"I didn't say glowing," Jericho said.
"You said luminescent."
"That's different from glowing."
"Enlighten me," William said.
Alice looked between them.
"It reflects available light rather than producing its own," she said carefully. "So in the mist conditions here — where light is diffused rather than direct — it would appear to have a soft inner quality rather than an active glow."
William looked at her.
"Thank you Alice," he said. "That was — genuinely helpful."
She nodded seriously.
Erica pressed her lips together.
⸻
They broke camp and moved out as the mist began its almost imperceptible morning thinning — not enough to call it visibility, just enough to say the world was making a minimal effort.
Jericho led. Drako fell naturally to the rear — the position of someone covering the group's back without being asked to.
The landscape shifted as they moved inland and upward.
The calcified forest thinned further, giving way to open rock faces that rose in uneven formations toward the peaks above.
The ground underfoot became less soil and more stone — the cracked earth of the lower island replaced by solid volcanic rock that had been compressed and reformed so many times over so many centuries that it had lost any resemblance to its original shape.
The heat increased with the elevation.
Not dramatically. Just consistently — the ground a degree warmer every hundred meters, the air carrying a faint mineral edge that hadn't been present at camp.
William noticed it first.
"The ground is warmer up here," he said.
"We're closer to where the Athanatos Flame went deepest," Alice said. Her hand moved to her sword instinctively — not drawing it, just finding it. "The black fire burned downward as much as outward. The deeper geological layers absorbed the most heat."
"Still burning down there?" William asked.
"A fire that doesn't extinguish," Drako said from behind them. "Yes."
William looked at the ground beneath his boots with renewed consideration.
"Fantastic," he said quietly.
Erica glanced back at him.
"You're walking on it fine," she said.
"I'm aware," William said. "I'm allowed to find it unpleasant while doing so."
⸻
An hour into the climb the first rock face opened up before them.
Massive. Sheer. The stone dark and layered in the compressed formations of something that had been subjected to extraordinary force at some point in its geological history and had organized itself around that force ever since.
Jericho stopped.
The others stopped with him.
He studied the face carefully — eyes moving across it in sections, reading it the way he had read the map that morning. Methodical. Unhurried.
"Not here," he said finally.
"How can you tell?" Alice asked.
"The compression pattern is from the Athanatos Flame," he said. "Not impact. Different formation structure." He turned slightly. "We're looking for something older than the Black Day. The impact site predates everything on this island including Mera's presence here."
He looked at the map briefly.
"East face," he said. "The peak formations on the eastern side are the oldest geological structures on the island. If the fragment surfaced anywhere it would be there."
He moved.
They followed.
⸻
The eastern face stretched before them — massive, ancient, the compressed rock formations telling a story that predated everything on this island including the Black Day itself.
And there — running along the natural fault lines where the face had cracked open over uncountable years —
Dark blue veining.
Almost black in the mist's diffused light.
But present.
Unmistakable.
Alice drew a quiet breath.
"There," she said softly.
Nobody argued.
Jericho stepped closer.
The fragment wasn't a sliver or a deposit or a manageable piece of cosmic material sitting conveniently at extraction depth.
It was enormous.
The blue veining they had spotted from a distance was the surface expression of something that ran far deeper into the rock face — the visible portion alone spanning the full height of the eastern formation, wider at its base than any of them could have anticipated from the approach.
William stared at it.
"That's—" He stopped.
"Large," Alice said quietly.
"That is the size of two buildings," William said. "Stacked."
"Yes," Jericho said.
"And you want to pull it out of the rock face," William said.
"Yes."
William looked at him.
Then at the fragment.
Then back at him.
"Alright," he said finally.
The word carrying the particular resignation of someone who had stopped being surprised by Jericho and was simply documenting events as they occurred.
Erica crossed her arms and looked at the formation with the focused assessment of someone already calculating angles and variables.
"The fault lines run deep on the left side. If it comes out wrong it could take half the face with it."
"It won't come out wrong," Jericho said.
She looked at him.
"You sound very certain."
"I am," he said simply.
She held his gaze for a moment.
Then stepped back.
"Everyone give him room," she said. "Commander's orders."
William and Alice moved back without question.
Drako didn't move immediately.
He was looking at Jericho with the particular attention he reserved for moments he intended to remember.
"Drako," Erica said.
He stepped back.
⸻
Jericho approached the rock face alone.
He placed both hands against it — not against the blue veining specifically, but against the surrounding rock. Reading it.
The mercury flowed outward first, tracing the fault lines with the surgical precision of something mapping before it acted, finding the edges of the fragment and charting the full scope of what was embedded in the earth.
The fragment was larger than even the surface suggested.
He adjusted.
Then he set his feet.
The ground beneath him compressed slightly — the rock actually compressing under the weight redistribution of someone channeling the full application of what he was. Not soul energy. Not an ability.
Just strength.
The kind that didn't announce itself.
He gripped the fragment.
And pulled.
The sound the rock made wasn't an explosion. It wasn't a crack or a collapse. It was something between a groan and a sigh — deep and resonant, the sound of the earth releasing something it had been holding for longer than anything alive could calculate.
The fault lines split cleanly along their natural seams.
The surrounding rock face held.
And the Luxton Star fragment came free.
Slowly at first.
Then with the particular momentum of something that had decided to move and had committed to it completely — the massive dark blue formation pulling away from the earth face in one continuous piece, ancient compressed rock releasing its grip on something older than itself with what felt almost like reluctance.
Jericho held it.
Both hands. Arms extended. The fragment suspended between him and the rock face at the moment of full separation — its size dwarfing him completely, the two building comparison suddenly viscerally real now that it was no longer part of the landscape and was simply a thing being held by a person.
Being held.
Without strain.
Not effortlessly — there was effort in the set of his shoulders and the planted position of his feet. But controlled. Managed.
The effort of someone operating well within their actual capacity while the thing they were managing was categorically beyond what the category of person they appeared to be should be able to manage.
Silence from the group.
William's mouth was open.
Alice had both hands pressed together in front of her, eyes wide, the expression of someone watching something they understood intellectually and still couldn't fully process visually.
Erica watched with her arms still crossed.
Her expression was composed.
But her eyes were doing something different from her expression.
Drako—
Drako was looking at Jericho the way he always looked at Jericho when Jericho did something that confirmed what Drako already knew and could never adequately express.
Like watching something the world deserved to see more of.
Like pride that had nowhere adequate to go.
Jericho set the fragment down.
The ground accepted the weight with a deep resonant thud that moved through the rock underfoot and up through everyone's boots simultaneously.
He straightened.
Looked at the fragment for a moment.
Then turned to the group.
"We need a piece approximately—"
"Jericho," William said.
He stopped.
"Give us a moment," William said.
Jericho looked at him.
"To process," William clarified. "Just — a moment."
A beat.
"You just pulled a two building sized rock out of the earth," Erica said. Her tone was the composed one. Her eyes were still doing the other thing. "With your hands."
"It came out cleanly," Jericho said. "The fault lines helped."
"The fault lines," William repeated.
"Yes."
"The fault lines helped you pull a two building sized rock out of the earth."
"Essentially."
William looked at Alice.
Alice looked at William.
They looked back at Jericho.
"Alright," William said. For the second time.
With the same resignation as the first time, carrying slightly more weight now.
Drako said nothing.
He was still looking at the fragment.
Then at Jericho.
Then at the fragment again.
The expression on his face was the one that didn't need words and didn't use them.