The eternal gloom of Karak-Zorn had begun to feel like a physical weight, pressing against Dayat's chest with every breath. Although the city was an architectural masterpiece—a subterranean marvel where Mana-crystal lamps flickered in every alcove and geothermal steam provided a constant, artificial warmth—there was one thing no Dwarven technology could ever replicate: the boundless freedom of the horizon.
Dayat sat on the edge of the stone balcony at The Glowing Hearth inn, his legs dangling over a sheer drop that vanished into the mist of the lower ventilation shafts. He looked up at the gargantuan cavern ceiling, obscured by a thin, hazy veil of industrial exhaust. He missed the color blue. Not the electric sapphire of Dola's eyes or the flickering azure of a Mana-spike, but the pale, smog-tinted blue of a Jakarta morning, or the piercingly clear cerulean he had witnessed when he first fell into the Continent of Aethera.
