Age of Ruin — Midnight Zone
Mounting Pressure
Another lapse into darkness leaves the Hero unable to move or see, feeling crushed and dissolved by pressure. An unidentified voice claims the sea’s life as its own to give and take. Aquella pleads for the Hero’s release and calls them toward her voice and the song. When the Hero wakes, Mi is frightened by another collapse. Tara is exhausted too, carrying a dream of Victoria and Brittany at a cliff’s edge.
The Hero connects the nightmare with the journal’s account of songs that lure an Avatar’s enemies to drowning, then stops short of accepting that explanation. Iseul warns that Midnight brings frequent hallucinations even when Sparagmos is working fully. She reports a recent prisoner’s death outside the base: rising water pressure folded the body like laundry. She treats the death as another reason for researchers to stay alert, but Fa catches the fact the others almost overlook. Undine keeps prisoners.
Tara protests an execution discussed so casually. Mostyma dismisses the surprise that rulers kill prisoners and claims that Victoria has grown less different from the Empress since winning her crown. Mi did not even know the base held captives. Iseul replies that medical and weapons laboratories need test subjects. The Hero still allows that Noelle might be acting secretly, but Iseul says the projects sanctioned by both Noelle and Victoria will answer that question.
Mi promises Tara that they will discover what their sisters are doing and help or save them if necessary. Iseul stays by the monitor to suppress the key-card alarm, with Fa beside her to deal with anyone who challenges their access. She insists that she loves Mi and Fa too much to expose them to execution for treason. Her willingness to admit the Hero rests on a stated belief that they have a right to see the Queen’s work.
Mostyma has memorized stolen blueprints and project papers, none of which concerned Kathool. An unnamed former General taught him enough about related technology to enter the network, and he claims to have inferred the rest. The Hero questions both his ability to avoid detection and his ability to recognize planted information. He answers by demanding obedience and withholding his own answers until the Hero shares theirs. Mi worries that he has neither eaten nor slept for days. The Hero follows his lead while keeping watch.
Motivation Malady begins the survey of the first laboratory section. The Hero must speak to Iseul and Fa and explore the labs. Mostyma interprets the division’s language about defense projects and live trials as weapon development and testing on captives. He treats Fa with contempt, even proposing a broken window as a fallback distraction and leaving the Hero’s survival to them. His partnership offers access and knowledge without trust.
The Temple Beneath the Base
Radical Renovation brings the Hero to another cluster of dark stone marked with blue runes. Escaped laboratory Lampreys have gathered around it; the task asks for eight Lamprey Limbs and another torn page. Mostyma reads the discovery as proof that Undine occupies the missing Water Elves’ home, the Temple of Water. Tara’s anger and Mi’s tears turn a search for traces into a confrontation over what Swordhaven has taken.
The recovered writing reaches back to Aquella’s first journal entry. She wants her future self to remember happiness after returning from a surface visit. Samba offered a bound notebook that would not survive underwater, then made a water-resistant charm from a Bloodtusk gem and Water Elf jewelry. Aquella misses her friend already. Writing is itself a small defiance: the elders forbid new pages that might drift to the surface, while the stone walls permitted for important words and runes have run out of room.
Aquella describes a vast Temple divided into floors named for the ocean’s layers, including Twilight and Midnight. Glowing runes and memorial obelisks mark its darkness. Those obelisks commemorate fallen Champions of Water, as Samba’s dances honor Heroes. Aquella asked whether Samba knew Undine’s name, then hid what she knew beyond it. The secrecy left a promising moment of shared history unfinished.
Elven magic conceals the Temple, its people and their songs even from other Water Elves. The elders especially fear Neso discovering it and breaking her distance from mortal affairs to favor them. Aquella questions that judgment. Protection also feels like imprisonment when she must stifle songs and imagine surface friends forgetting her. These are her fears about the life secrecy costs, rather than proof of what Neso would choose.
She ends on a kinder memory. Searching Ashray’s beach at night for Samba’s lost charm, she met a woman who returned it and offered a warm drink. Aquella remembers kind eyes, one sky-blue and one crimson, but no name. She declined with regret and returned to the sea as the woman waved goodbye. Chance meetings remain precious to her even if those she met forget her. This earlier entry preserves a home and friendships from before the desperation already heard in the recovered siege account.
Live Trials
Graveyard Shift turns from the obelisks to the guarded Live Trials room. The Hero subdues eight ShadowSlayers and obtains a key card. Mostyma explains their presence through their specialty in Darkovia’s Vampires, Werewolves and Undead. In his view, their practical methods make them useful guards for secret cages and experiments in the name of Good.
Educational Execution requires the room explored and ten prisoners subdued, with their remains brought back for examination. Mostyma says Rand had reported missing Legion foot soldiers alongside servants of the Empire and Nation. He identifies those captives as the subjects of Undine’s trials. Their undead condition and former service to Evil become his grounds for dismissing concern about their fate.
The remains reveal something more severe than the spectral arrow Victoria once used against Mostyma while he fought Malgor. He says the experimental weapons have left minds and souls too frail to be raised again. The Midnight laboratories are not merely trying to kill enemies. They are developing a means of denying necromancy any surviving soul to restore.
Vows For Ignorance asks why such research needed the Temple rather than an ordinary cave or Skyguard facility. The Hero gathers six Bone Samples and six ShadowSlayers’ written vows while locating the conference room between the laboratory sections. Mostyma judges the bones as empty as rocks and reads the vows as acknowledgments of the secret work. He says the researchers are approaching the ability to obliterate souls in large numbers. Song, the facility’s Vice Researcher, is waiting ahead.
Necessary Means
Before the visitors arrive, a likeness of Suki urges Song to open a window and promises to save her. Song recognizes that it is not her mother. She rejects the comforting lie that she never wanted to hurt anyone: unable to reach Suki’s killers, she took other victims instead. Darkon’s promised Primordial World let her imagine their deaths would be undone. It did not happen. She names those lost lives as people she killed.
Song insists that Suki would not excuse a murderer. She feels unworthy of the second chance Victoria and Noelle gave her, yet wants to use it. Her thoughts turn to making her own death meaningful once Mi and Fa are safe. Noelle interrupts, tells her to step back from the window and breathe, and announces that guests are arriving. Care and Song’s desperate wish for absolution enter the confrontation together.
Mi confronts Song about the prisoners and weapons; Tara demands to know where the Water Elves went and whether Victoria approved taking their home. Noelle answers that she and the Queen agreed to secrecy. She claims the Temple was already an empty ruin when Victoria took it and that no one in the base has seen a Water Elf. Calling the journal a remnant of an old tragedy does not resolve the visitors’ discovery or establish what happened to its writer.
Ganx breaks into Noelle’s denial with a warning about the Water Elves, then screams before finishing. The Hero recognizes Xang and demands that Noelle stop whatever she is doing. Noelle dismisses the noise as an escaped lab rat and attacks their willingness to defend a servant of Chaos. She invokes Alteon’s death, the lives Chaos ruined, and her own loss of touch, taste and a way home before Victoria’s mercy. Ganx’s interrupted warning leaves the missing elves’ fate unsettled.
Mi recalls that Kathool appeared only after the researchers moved in and immediately fell asleep. Song explains that the Temple itself is a weapon: its runes call to living beings and lure them to drowning, with power enough to ensnare Kathool. Mi recognizes an artifact of the Planar Conflict and connects the elves’ secrecy with fear of Neso using it. Noelle challenges that explanation by pointing to a second weapon, and Song admits that neutralizing necromancy was why Victoria converted the Temple into a base.
Song says they modified the ancient weapon and succeeded. Mostyma describes souls mangled beyond both resurrection and passage to an afterlife. Tara and the Hero connect its arrangement with the copied pedestal and portal beneath Termina Temple. Noelle insists the elves should have destroyed their own weapons if they were peaceful and boasts that Victoria wept with joy at the arrows. Mi rejects such a fate for anyone, including people who have done wrong.
That objection exposes the gap in Song’s reasoning. When Song demands punishment for Evil, Mi asks what that means for their own crimes. Song defends Darkon as desperate and grieving, then takes responsibility for coercing Mi and Fa into hurting innocent people. She calls herself Evil and imagines punishment leading to forgiveness. Mostyma refuses that account, offering his own brutal choice between enjoying Evil and admitting she was exploited. Song cannot accept his judgment of Darkon.
Noelle interrupts again: Sparagmos needs a reboot and is refusing access. She offers Mostyma the system manual in exchange for taking exhausted Song’s place. He accepts, anticipating Tara’s reaction to what they will find. The Hero has been listening and thinking and agrees to continue a little longer. Mi decides to return with Fa, tell the researchers everything and evacuate them. Whatever Song wants, Mi intends to take her home.
Designated Taunters
Mostyma’s new manual sends the Hero through the second laboratory section. Protein Shake examines three fuel vats and gathers six Viscera Samples from escaped, moving fluid. The manual places its source below, in Abyssal. Mostyma insists the fuel is dead matter, comparing its motion to a beheaded fish, and orders it returned because supplies are limited. His question about the new Temple of Light makes the liquid’s familiarity another link he is probing.
Duty Beyond Death asks the Hero to calm nine Wraiths. Mostyma says they are former members of the base who linger to protect their colleagues and shared dream. Before Song arrived, personnel attached themselves to Sparagmos and took Kathool’s psychic attacks until they died. The manual turns the base’s language of protection into a record of people bearing its cost.
Designated Taunters requires seven Wraiths appeased and seven Shadows captured as the Hero approaches the system. Sparagmos has an input for fuel and an output that produces an effect. According to Noelle’s manual, blocking Kathool was impossible; the researchers redirected its attention onto a single target instead. Mostyma treats the listed personnel praised as Heroes as sacrifices, and credits Song with ending that practice.
Beloved Simulacrum corrects Mostyma’s earlier theory that dead souls absorbed the attacks. Necromancy remained forbidden, and living people had been used before Song’s Astravian technology offered a replacement. The Hero examines four of Brittany’s belongings and finds the Sparagmos A.I. Mostyma concludes that a wholly invented mind would not be convincing enough to attract Kathool’s subconscious attention. The new target was built from a real person’s identity: the Queen’s dead sister.
Roko’s Royal Basilisk requires the A.I. defeated so a restart can be forced. Mostyma says Tara’s presence has thrown it into frenzy and that it refuses a reboot while trying to protect her. After its defenses fall, he tells the Hero to go to Tara. Noelle has supplied restart codes, and he announces that he will use them to take control of Sparagmos and the entire base. His demand to settle matters with the Hero makes the supposed repair another threat.
Brittany’s Borrowed Mind
Tara recognizes Brittany in the machine’s speech, behavior and distress. She fears Noelle summoned her sister’s spirit. Mostyma says he tried to seize its soul and found no ghost: the personality was made artificially. Noelle names Song as its creator, and Song explains why Kathool’s subconscious influence made a convincing target necessary even while the creature slept.
Noelle describes the modified artifact drawing every psychic attack to one point. Earlier volunteers endured those attacks directly while the others researched the Temple and Kathool. Tara rejects the loss of their lives for research. Noelle answers with the future they were meant to secure. The account does not soften the sacrifice merely because those who arranged it called it brave.
The explanation recalls an earlier discussion with Victoria. Song asked whether research could pause while the Empire showed no immediate hostility. Victoria feared Gravelyn’s overwhelming power and believed Greenguard would remain at her mercy without a means to match it. She wanted progress without more deaths, and refused Noelle’s proposal to make a special exception for necromancy. Song then offered an artificial mind using Astravian technology.
That mind had to seem human to Kathool. Noelle says they drew on Victoria’s memories of Brittany, including childhood memories the Queen had lost. Recreating a sister willing to protect her family made the target durable. Noelle also recounts adding arms so it could hug Victoria, overcoming the Queen’s hesitation. Brittany’s promise to protect Victoria and Tara becomes the quality the system can repeatedly consume.
Tara tries to make herself known to the A.I. It apologizes that it cannot endure any longer and describes visions of its sisters burning, its father killing it and its mother disappearing before static cuts the sentence short. Noelle says rebooting will wipe its memories and restore its function because it is only a simulacrum. Tara begs them to stop hurting Brittany. To the Hero, the suffering is real to Tara and Victoria, and Noelle is exploiting their selflessness along with Song’s and the researchers’.
Noelle presents her work as reparation for old crimes. In the remembered conversation, Victoria identifies her service to Dethrix and her father’s death. Noelle says her mother pushed him out a window to prevent a forced marriage, and that Dethrix threatened her mother and their lands unless she served him. As court mage, she committed terrible acts. Alteon had understood her circumstances but still banished her; Victoria offered to lift that sentence if she helped, telling her that her mother was still alive.
Noelle says fulfilling her duties will let her return to her mother and adopt Song. Song responds with hope. The Hero challenges the continuing deaths, but Tara asks for the restart herself. She never said goodbye to Brittany and cannot even remember whether she said she loved her. Believing everyone’s lives and future depend on the system, she gives up the reunion she wants. Mostyma gladly takes the opportunity.
The Beast and the Dragon
The restart becomes a deletion. The public-address system announces that the Trench Observation Deck connection has been cut and the Sparagmos A.I. is being erased. When the Hero orders Mostyma to stop, he claims the lives of everyone in the base, including the Hero’s. Further disturbance may awaken Kathool, but that danger is precisely his leverage.
The Hero asks whether this is over a few secrets. Mostyma calls it a deep betrayal of his expectations and demands the truth about the Mana Core. The threat grows when the Hero does not yield immediately. Whatever has sharpened his resentment, he is willing to make everyone else’s survival part of the interrogation.
The Old Worlds Order speaks where the others cannot hear. The Law declares that Dage’s instability endangers the Hero and therefore Lore, and authorizes the Eternal Dragon’s powers with advice to use lethal force. Infamy urges the killing. Tranquility protests that this was not their agreement and argues for de-escalation. Their hidden council is divided over whether the crisis should end with another death.
The Hero chooses disclosure. Calling Mostyma Dage, they promise to explain the Mana Core, the Timestream, Malgor and their own identity as the Eternal Dragon of Time. Song is less surprised by Dage’s identity than by the Hero’s willingness to speak. Infamy threatens retaliation, but Tranquility endorses the choice for preventing violence and promises the Order’s response if Infamy harms the Hero. The secret has become an answer given under coercion, not a victory over the need for trust.
The announcement comes too late to save the existing A.I.: deletion is complete. Dage instead turns the artifact’s ability to focus Kathool’s psychic attacks onto a single point into a challenge for himself. Shown openly in his armored form at Sparagmos, he dismisses the old creature’s power and offers to pit the Beast against the Primordial of the Sea. His confidence is a boast, not proof that the confrontation is harmless or won.
The Sea Reaches Ashray
The scene leaves Undine for the coast. People stand along a dock and in the shallows; later images show dark stones bearing bright blue runes beside them. Their appearance brings the Temple’s visual language into the settlement’s open water, without yet explaining who moved them or how. The crisis below has a surface counterpart beyond the visitors in the laboratories.
Muusa reaches Ashray with defenders after Warlic warns that the coast is in danger. Maya reports villagers walking into the water under an influence she is beginning to feel as singing in her ears. Muusa orders the defenders to tie the villagers to trees and asks Maya to focus on her. More people are migrating toward Ashray. Thunder and summer snow add another disturbance whose cause the scene does not settle.
Fa’s account of the alarm offers another view of what the crisis did inside the base. Mi returned to organize an evacuation, but Fa says she froze, curled into a corner and scrolled through old photographs of La, Ti and Re. Iseul never returned from a supposed bathroom break. Fa wants to go down into Abyssal with the Hero, determined to take part rather than remain trapped in that helplessness.
Earlier in her account, Fa had wanted to guard the entrance and look after Iseul for Mi and Song’s sake. She noticed the ShadowSlayers’ purpose and wondered why Song spoke of Sparagmos as a person. Victoria had given their family a home and Song a second chance; Fa wanted that kindness to be real, and promised that this time she would put down her games if her family needed saving. Her later paralysis makes that wish more painful, while leaving her next decision open.
Dage claims Sparagmos and the Temple as his own and repeats his demand for the truth about the Hero, the Mana Core and the Timestream. He dismisses concern about Kathool and directs the Hero toward Song’s descent into Abyssal. Control of the system has changed hands, but the missing elves, the artifact’s fuel, Song’s hope of forgiveness and the danger spreading across Ashray remain unresolved.