Shadows danced before the molten glow of the lava river, scurrying away from the magma’s angry glow. Suffocatingly hot, the air pressed in on all sides, thick with heat and the acrid odour of sulphur. The ground beneath Castalla’s hooves trembled with the Furnace’ might, a precarious lattice of stone that climbed above the red river below. This was a place of constant danger, where one wrong move would send you careening to the most unpleasant of deaths. Yet here, in this fiery inferno where death crooned sweetly, calling, waiting, Castalla felt oddly at ease. There was purpose here, focus, something to curtail her thoughts and caution the working wheels of her mind, lest her thoughts stray to more heart-shattering places.

Beside her, Fetch danced along the narrow ledge, her steps light and unburdened by worry or the weight of the dungeons almighty heat. Their voice, when it skirted upon the heated air, was a singsong call, echoing off the cavern walls with an eerie, childlike cadence.

“Home, home, where do you roam?” she sang, intuitive gaze turned to Castalla with an innocent sort of curiosity. “Where does your heart find rest?”

Castalla held their stare for a moment, head tilted slightly at the question. Then she tore her gaze away, fixing it upon the horizon that wavered with the oppressive heat. <i>Home</i>

The word tasted of ash and loss, of anger and hatred and guilt, of something that once was but could never be again.

“Somewhere on the surface,” she answered mildly, not betraying the memories that sunk claws into her mind and tugged, tugged, tugged until the pain came free. Home was little more than a skeleton’s husk, gutted from the inside out, empty but for the ghosts of a better past. She rarely returned, unable or unwilling to face the monument to her failures, the pain-stained evidence of her guilt.

The dungeons were far from home too, but she found herself in them more often than not. Like all, she was drawn as a puppet is on a string to the mausoleum of a long lost history, to level upon level. For riches and for adventure. For resources and for acumen. But also for any sign of those she had lost. Of those who had once been led into an unstable section of the dungeon and left to perish when the walls came down and all hope of escape guttered out like a candle in the wind.

“Somewhere on the surface,” Fetch echoed, perhaps unsatisfied with the answer but already turning their gaze back to the path. But Castalla was far from the Earthen Furnace, locked in the ghosts of her past.