At the center of the slick cobblestones lay a fragment of a monument—a broken slab of dark stone, carved with a single, unmistakable symbol: a downward spike piercing three concentric rings. The mark of the Earth Piercer .
And then the vision swallowed him. He was standing on a cliff that no longer existed, in a time when the Song of the world was still untarnished. Before the depths rose. Before the greys. He wore not his own body, but that of a giant—a Deepwoken of impossible attunement, his flesh woven with stone and root. His name was Harran the Sunderer . deepwoken earth piercer
The ground didn’t shake. It focused . A single spike of obsidian and compacted time erupted from the fault line, clean as a spear, and traveled seven miles underground. It emerged directly beneath the Church’s hidden basilica. Not a soul died. But the basilica—every vault, every relic, every contract written in sinner’s ink—sank into the crust, folded like paper, and was never found again. At the center of the slick cobblestones lay
So Harran did what Earth Piercers were made to do. He placed his palm on the living rock. He sang the mantra not as a shout, but as a whisper: “Break not the earth. Pierce the lie.” He was standing on a cliff that no
“Don’t touch it,” grunted an old Diver named Soryn, her left arm replaced by a shifting mass of crystallized pyre keeper shards. “That thing’s older than the Lighthouses. It fell from the sky during the Second Tide, when the Drowned God turned over in his sleep. They say it was driven into the world’s collarbone.”
“The truth about the Mantra of Piercing,” he whispered. “It’s not for killing. It’s for exposing .”
But Kaelen had already stepped off the dock’s edge, sinking into the black water, the glow of the Earth Piercer pulling him like a star falling backward through mud.