Age of Ruin — Abyssal Zone
A Scavenger’s Hunt
The Hero meets Aquella in another darkened dream, but rejects the figure as an imitation. It becomes Kathool’s voice, speaking of its awakening and the screams that rose from the depths without its intervention. Its speech cycles through waking, slumber, regression, Chaos and cataclysm, then places itself in the depths of the Hero’s mind and unnamed others in the depths of the world. The creature calls Aquella a protector without a title and promises to find what the Hero is seeking. The encounter gives the search no comfort: Kathool is now deliberately taking part.
Waking does not cleanly separate the nightmare from the room. The Hero sees Fa without a face; Fa sees ten heads on the Hero, three resembling Re. Tara recalls a dead mother reading a story about Victoria’s execution during sleep paralysis. Kathool inserts a false claim about adoption, which Song denies saying and rejects as untrue. Fa’s readings show Sparagmos recovering from seventy-five to ninety-five percent, but the Hero distrusts that reassurance.
Song credits the base’s protection to Dage and suspects that learning the truth about the Mana Core and Astravia eased his agitation. Recounting those events hurt the others, however, leaving them more vulnerable to Kathool. The Hero finds the new illusions weaker but harder to distinguish from reality. Tara admits that Dage’s takeover has at least freed her from watching the artificial Brittany suffer.
Song confesses another reason she chose the A.I. solution. Astravia’s surviving technology was unfinished, and she wanted a reason to improve it until memories might bring the dead back. She believes she made Victoria suffer despite the Queen’s welcome. Tara tries to answer that guilt with the love Mi, Fa and Noelle offer, but Song’s thoughts turn toward finding Noelle before accepting any comfort.
Dage reports that Noelle cut communication with the Trench Deck when he took control, then obstructed Sparagmos’ fuel. Song begins to question why Noelle would endanger the researchers she treated as servants. Even the offer to adopt her never included Mi or Fa. She wants to know whether affection was only a way to secure her loyalty. Dage orders the Hero to reconnect the fuel, find Kathool and the elves, and capture Noelle.
Kathool answers Dage’s contempt with voices of sacrifice and betrayal. The Hero recognizes one of them as their own. Fa reports a sudden fall to half capacity, followed by clanging from Dage and an apparent return to ninety-five percent. Indradeep then explains the work Dage has imposed on the researchers: they remain prisoners until secret projects are finished, although he says the teams are eager to help and the designs are not harmful.
Tara stays above to protect the researchers while Mi searches for Iseul and Abel. The Hero descends with Song and Fa into the least reconstructed part of the base, a partly flooded remnant of the Temple. Fa knows its maintenance routes and insists that her strength is needed. She warns that anyone slipping outside the walls would be crushed; this is no safe detour through familiar laboratories.
Kathool offers to find all the elves and shifts its tentacles through Abyssal’s walls. Song sees an obvious trap and wants a new route. Dage instead demands that the Hero prove the power they have disclosed, threatening to turn off Sparagmos if they refuse. Fa presses the party onward. They must repair the system while following a path shaped by one adversary and enforced by another.
Under Broken Floors
Shark Kiting begins with a debrief from Fa and eight Shark Fins. Song watches creatures that normally remain on the seafloor or flee toward Ashray panic into the base. She concludes that Kathool’s awakening has driven them upward and that its movements have opened holes in Abyssal’s walls. Fa’s experience matters because these halls collapse, flood and change so often that she navigates by feel rather than a fixed map.
Suckered Blockade examines six fuel lines and one intrusive tentacle. The nearby lines are undamaged, but Kathool has blocked Fa’s usual route. A hole it broke through the floor offers the way down, with one of its tentacles serving as a ladder. Song’s sarcasm about this apparent consideration does not disguise that the party is proceeding on Kathool’s terms.
Digestive Fluids sends them into unlit chambers filled with Blighted Water Elementals. Eight samples of Saturated Blight Water are gathered as the rooms are drained. Song realizes the elementals are excited by Kathool’s moving tendrils and are trying to absorb them. Their behavior challenges her assumption that Kathool’s influence had simply corrupted them.
Sodden Secrets explores chambers with no man-made entrances, reached only through Kathool’s new breaches. The Hero collects seven Shadow Samples and examines three mural plaques. The pictures connect the Temple’s weapon with a colossal Darkness Elemental, a Champion named Undine and fuel drawn from the creature’s remains. Kathool is leading them toward a history the base’s ordinary routes left concealed.
The Hidden Corpse requires six Shadow Organs and six Decayed Elemental Gems while Song studies the murals. She recognizes the Shadow Viscera as the fuel Sparagmos already uses and reaches the central connection: the security system and the Drowning Machine are the same artifact. She believes Victoria and Noelle knew more than they ever told her. The fuel Fa describes as oily, skin-like and twitching has a source in that buried catastrophe.
Octo-Flake Fish Feed clears ten portions of Foamy Residue and scouts the route ahead. Fa recognizes the way back toward the lines. Song also reinterprets the Foam Scavengers: they resemble the Seafoam Elemental encountered in the submarine and seek Kathool’s tentacles as food. The party has disturbed creatures feeding on the intruder, rather than simply fought monsters obeying it.
Completely Surrounded examines six more fuel lines and a final mural. Song finds no notable damage and concludes that Noelle must be blocking the supply from the Trench Deck through an existing mechanism. The mural links the dead and living dissolved into seafoam with Neso’s strength. Song fears that the water surrounding them is part of a much larger opponent, while the elementals pursue Kathool for their own purpose.
Sea Salt Soap confronts four Waxy Adipocere. Orange antlers on the new monsters resemble the Water Elves’ horns. Song identifies them as physical creations of elemental water magic made from elven remains, not hallucinations, and understands Kathool’s cruelty in displaying them. She places the deaths shortly before her family and Victoria’s researchers arrived, rather than in the ancient past Noelle invoked. Her precise estimates vary, but the distinction from a forgotten Planar War tragedy is decisive.
In the Grip of Justice opens the return route. Song repairs the way to Midnight while the Hero gathers three Necro Wax, seven Scavenger Tentacles and the journal at the obelisk between two doors. She apologizes for how the search for Aquella has ended. The book turns the remaining repair mission into a warning: the party must get back to Sparagmos because Dage himself is the intended sacrifice.
The Drowning Machine
Aquella planned her fourth entry as her last before leaving to find the Alliance. She wanted to explain the danger clearly to its leaders. That morning, the Oracle and elders had admitted her to sealed chambers so she could understand the reasons for isolation. There she learned of the Drowning Machine, built from ancient machinery and arcane magic beneath her home.
Her account returns to the Planar War. The Darkness Elementals could resist drowning and crushing pressure; one enormous creature consumed a continent and threatened the sea. Neso urged the elves to sing harder and poured power into them. They died under it, while the strengthened songs began drawing the Colossus’s attention and also lured innocent people to drown. Aquella reads the Avatar’s response as blame shifted away from her own part in the disaster.
Fear drove the ancestors to make a second weapon. Its input was the Pedestal, first fed with their own mana; its output spread through the entire Temple. Aquella reports that its power used Neso’s authority over water, seas and currents, but that mortal magic could reach currents in the air as well. The account distinguishes what the elves could attempt from the elemental bounds governing their Avatar.
The first strike tore part of the Colossus away without killing it and drew the creature toward the Temple. Undine, then Champion of Water, gave her mind, body and soul to the Pedestal. Currents ripped the enemy in two. One half sank and continued bleeding at the seabed; the other crawled ashore and hid. Aquella’s history leaves remnants of the creature rather than a clean disappearance.
Neso’s laughter followed the enemy’s defeat, while the Water Elementals discovered that Undine’s soul had not returned to her Plane. It was erased as the weapon’s price. Fearing both Neso’s reaction and the temptation to use the machine again, the elves hid themselves from the world and their Avatar with a new song. Other Water Elves and Neso came to believe them lost in the war.
Aquella asks why the hidden weapon was never dismantled. An elder’s unfinished answer about keeping it just in case makes her suspect ambition, perhaps even an expectation that she would become a convenient new Champion to power it. The Oracle denies that they would sacrifice a loved one. Aquella remains unconvinced and decides the Alliance must know of an instrument capable of erasing souls and wounding gods.
She imagines the weapon aimed at a city of innocents or even Lore’s core. Her urgency to leave comes from what it could enable, not from an observed attack on either target. The record also complicates the elders’ protective explanation: Aquella fears their caution has preserved a means of domination they might someday use.
The Doors Open
Before Aquella can leave, human ships pierce the Temple’s concealment. Armed intruders know where the children and elders sleep and appear able to see through its walls. Aquella wonders whether the woman with red and blue eyes followed her home. The Oracle leads the people deeper into the Abyss. Aquella blames herself, but her suspicion does not by itself establish the invaders’ identities or methods.
Annotations now interrupt her writing. A cheerful note places the next account a few hours after she planned her departure. Another says the siege entry was copied onto Ashray’s beach obelisk as bait for the Hero. The distress that began the search was real testimony used by someone else to direct it, rather than a message the Hero happened upon untouched.
Aquella’s next account describes the failure of rescue. A cheerful man outside the doors promised not to harm her people and offered only a handshake and a conversation. She stepped out, locked the doors behind her and accepted. Control of her body vanished. Her own hands knocked for the Oracle to let her back inside.
The Oracle embraced Aquella as her magic gathered. Unable to stop or cry out, Aquella killed her and then the people who tried to save her or flee. Their warriors could not turn their weapons against her, and the elders demanded her release before dying. When control and her voice returned, the man invoked his promise. His companion instead turned a blade on Aquella: she recognized the woman from Ashray’s beach.
Aquella escaped toward the Temple’s base, afraid that she had been allowed to lead the intruders farther. She could not forgive herself, but still wanted to keep them from finding the Drowning Machine. An annotator mocks the danger of her telling the Alliance, including the Empire, and says the woman called the Eyes went too far. The name is explicitly an alias. Aquella’s last plea for happiness is answered by the intruders’ casual judgment of her naivety.
The Hands Set the Trap
A later voice in the book claims that the Jus Divinum handed Victoria both Temple and weapon after killing the Water Elves and dumping their remains outside. The researchers then converted soul-erasing power into weapons that could be produced in quantity. Once no elves remained to control the songs, the Temple lured other creatures, including Kathool. Sparagmos was the Drowning Machine under Noelle’s new name, and the elders had secretly been feeding it the Colossus’s remains.
The writers describe two problems they wanted the Hero to solve: Kathool and a dwindling fuel supply. They leaked enough information to attract an Evil power interested in Swordhaven’s secrets, hoping for Nulgath, Dage or even Gravelyn. The Hero’s ability to draw companions was part of the plan. They did not need to know exactly who would follow, only that the visitor would be powerful enough to use.
The placed journal entries were arranged in a particular order to lead the Hero down to Sparagmos while hiding its full function from the companion. Noelle’s desire for forgiveness made her useful. The plan required her to let the visitor gain possession, cut the fuel and separate the Hero from them with the apparent necessity of repairs. Deprived of its normal source, the machine would consume whoever stood on the Pedestal and turn that power against Kathool.
The message imagines that power securing Good’s triumph for centuries and rejects waiting for Avatars who act only when threatened. It thanks the Sovereign Eternal and signs itself the Hands of the Jus Divinum, promising to make its own Gods and name its own Heroes. The confession reveals why the investigators were encouraged to uncover genuine crimes: outrage, curiosity and friendship were tools for delivering another person to the same sacrificial machine.
Sleep Paralysis
Song and the Hero put the recovered history beside the murals. The Temple was given to Swordhaven by the people who massacred its inhabitants; the party had assumed the Crown found it. Song realizes that she, the researchers, the Hero, Dage and Kathool have all been used by the Jus Divinum. The pedestal in the mural matches the place Dage occupies above. The broken supply is meant to turn him into the weapon’s fuel.
Kathool finds the proposed outcome entertaining and asks whether Fa’s reassuring reading is trustworthy. She looks again: Sparagmos is at three percent, and she says it has been falling for five hours. The earlier appearance of stability has concealed an emergency. They rush back to Midnight before the threatened sacrifice can be completed.
Dage hears the Hero ask why he truly came to Ashray, but the confrontation changes into an encounter with Wilhelm’s face and voice. The figure taunts him about remembering a confidant’s betrayal across fallen kingdoms. Dage insists that Wilhelm’s soul belongs in the darkest Underworld. This is Kathool’s attack on his mind, not evidence that the actual soul has returned to the base.
A Laken likeness then attacks a different wound: Dage’s failure to become pure, triumphant Evil rather than preserve balance. Kathool argues that splitting his soul has not removed the weakness of his human birth. It claims the Hero’s revealed immortality and greater power brought Dage relief rather than hatred. That is the pressure Kathool applies, not an independently settled account of everything Dage feels.
The system announces a fatal threat, failure to connect to the lines, and acceptance of a sacrifice while its output aims at a seaborne target. Kathool’s influence then flickers. A monstrous composite of elven remains appears as its speaking vessel; Kathool says it assembled fifty pieces from several elves, including parts of Aquella. The search has reached the people it sought in the cruelest possible form.
Kathool attacks the Hero as well, promising that everyone will tear the base into a waterlogged coffin unless Dage is allowed to be erased and the weapon fired at it. The monster presents the Jus Divinum’s desired sacrifice as the only escape. Song breaks that trap for the moment by sharing Dage’s burden. The system withdraws its threat assessment and Fa reports a recovery to sixty percent, but Song is already hearing a false Darkon.
Together as One
Together as One asks the Hero to defeat The Ashray, the body Kathool built from the dead. Song has practiced to take a place at Sparagmos and now endures the psychic assault beside Dage. Fa pleads for the creature to be stopped but fears that revealing her own true form might leave her unable to change back. Once again, the absence of Re, Ti and La makes her feel that Song must bear everything.
The vision of Darkon tells Song she is innocent and that he exploited their family. She refuses that comfort just as she refused the likeness of Suki. Her father must remain a hero in her mind, so she takes the wish for blood and the guilt onto herself. Kathool has found a way to hurt her with the excuse she cannot allow herself to accept.
Dage rejects the scene’s idea of Evil as an insult and asks the Hero for ten minutes until his creations come online. The Hero starts the countdown. The immediate task is to hold off Kathool’s vessel long enough for that alternative to exist, rather than accept the machine’s demand to consume Dage.
After the fight, Fa calls for Song to open her eyes. Song realizes she is alive and credits the practice that prepared her for Sparagmos; the Hero adds that she has long been practiced at hurting herself. The three new systems announce themselves, and Fa reports full capacity. Song’s intervention has bought time, but it has not resolved the convictions that made self-destruction seem like payment.
The Sea Hungers
Chrysoar, Circe and Lycegenes bring Sparagmos back to strength. Dage has built new artificial personalities, and Song asks whether they are based on people he knew. A fourth, Orpheus, is placed on standby as a gift; its intended model is not explained here. Kathool observes that Dage chose memories of these people at their best. Their identities are more than interchangeable replacements for the lost Brittany.
The Hero does not press Dage over what happened inside his mind, describing only Kathool wearing the Hero’s face on a hideous puppet. Kathool concedes this bout, then admits that it is missing limbs and cannot move properly. Fa reports worsening water pressure and creaking foundations. The party begins to connect those physical conditions with the elementals’ behavior below.
Song recalls the last mural’s claim that allies and enemies dissolved into seafoam become Neso’s power. The Hero combines that clue with the predatory Water Elementals, the Water Titan and the idea that dissolved matter is easier to absorb. They propose that Neso wants her Temple back and is dissolving Kathool to take its strength. Kathool answers with talk of the Avatars’ fear turning to envy and its new experience as prey. The account supports the danger without making the absorption complete.
Kathool is interested enough to watch what happens next. It stops moving its vessel and invites them below. Fa initially welcomes the pause, but Song fears the consequences of a direct conflict between the Avatar and the Primordial no matter which wins. The Hero sees the possibility of fighting both, while Kathool seems entertained by the prospect of an Avatar gaining its powers.
Dage asks why the Hero does not stop time. The Hero cannot reliably activate such powers and fears punishment from the entities in the Mana Core even if they could. Hurting or killing Neso could destroy Lore, while challenging her pride may make negotiation harder. Dage recommends bargaining with the being willing to hear an interesting offer. Even that may fail if Kathool is too immobilized by the sea to cooperate.
Dage asks how much of his power the machine has taken and whether it could be used offensively. Song says only Noelle knew of that capability. Reaching the Trench Observation Deck is now necessary both to confront Kathool and to learn what the system can do. The next descent follows from unresolved choices, rather than a plan to overpower both adversaries without consequence.
What Must Be Carried Below
The new personalities refuse to remain silent. Lycegenes overrides a mute order, studies the Trench blueprints and scans the surface. Storms, rising waves and people approaching the shore continue, but allies are handling that front. The Hero recognizes Laken’s voice beneath the alias. Song finds that the A.I.s have worked around Dage’s instructions, giving him companions who can answer back.
Circe warns that Dage overworks and lets it affect his judgment. Chrysoar urges the party to keep him from the Trench because the machine has drained too much of his power. Lycegenes fears Neso might consume their abilities as well, gaining a path into the Underworld alongside Kathool’s strength. Dage answers their concern by saying they are lucky to be already dead. The A.I.s know he will be hard to restrain and ask the others to look after him.
Fa also intends to join the descent. She says she will reveal her true form for Song, Mi, the Hero and the researchers, despite fearing how others will see it. Her promise follows the paralysis she felt in the previous crises. Mi remains responsible for the search for Iseul and Abel; the need to mend the base has not made their disappearance less troubling.
Burial at Sea offers a task while the A.I. studies the route. Song asks for one Ashray Artifact, three Adipocere Antlers and six Scavenger Foam so the scattered remains can be kept safely, perhaps in the morgue, until a proper burial becomes possible. Flight from Drago once kept her from burying Astravian friends and teachers. She does not want to abandon these dead as well, and intends to ask Victoria why Aquella and her people met this fate.