Beneath Hearthglass, the party stood in the heart of the buried crystal chamber, facing the terrible truth that had been waiting below the city. The trapped beholder, Zalzarak, was not simply the monster they had feared. Around him, frozen in leyline crystal, were the transformed remains of the lost gnomish people, the origin of the Hushlings, and the evidence of a tragedy that had twisted across centuries.

As Agelaius Phoeniceus scouted the chamber, he saw the progression clearly. The deeper the crystal ran, the more the Hushlings looked like the people they had once been. This was not a nest of monsters. It was a city's grave, preserved in the moment of its slow corruption. When Orchestra spoke through Broj and called the trapped presence its brother, the party was forced into a bitter choice: leave the beholder sealed away, or risk freeing something ancient and dangerous to uncover the truth.

Aedric Vale reached into the crystal and was pulled into a white dream-space where Zalzarak's mind still lingered. There, he learned that the beholder was not awake, but dreaming, and that his connection to the strange dream-being had become the center of the corruption. Broj followed that truth into sleep and saw the fuller story: Zalzarak had once protected Hearthglass from something far worse beneath it. In trying to defend the city, he had made contact with the dream-being, become trapped within the leyline crystal, and slept through centuries while the people he meant to save became the very horrors haunting the depths.

With their leyline connection restored, the party chose to act. Together, Broj, Aedric Vale, Warwick Willows, and Sorina focused their Realmstrider power into the crystal. The prison peeled back like water, freeing Zalzarak enough for Orchestra to reunite with the piece of itself trapped inside him. The beholder woke not in rage, but in grief. His first concern was whether his people were safe, and when he saw what had become of the city below, the ancient guardian wept.

The reunion freed Orchestra and its brother from Broj, but not cleanly. A seed of the joined being remained inside him, childlike and curious, leaving Broj with a new burden he did not ask for and could not easily give away. With Hearthglass behind them for now, the party left the Engine and followed Broj to his home plane of Amonkhet, stepping from crystal nightmare into oppressive desert heat.

There, the story softened but did not slow. Broj returned to his family home, where his sister Zamira, his mother Samira, his father, and his brother Tanazak brought humor, warmth, and embarrassment in equal measure. His family quickly learned that he had not returned alone, but with dragons, strange friends, and something new living in his mind. Samira accepted the truth with unsettling calm, telling Broj he would make a wonderful father, while the childlike presence within him began surfacing at the worst possible moments.

Meanwhile, Agelaius Phoeniceus had chosen a different path. Angry at gods, dragons, and every greater power that had tried to command the party, he left the others and returned to Tarkir, walking alone through dangerous lands claimed by dragon rule. Warwick Willows reached out through sending, but Agelaius Phoeniceus refused to say where he was, only that he was handling his own business and would return on his own time.

As the party rested on Amonkhet, they began to reckon with what came next. They debated Eldraine, the Fey, Miriam, old obligations on Theros, and the danger of interfering with their own timeline after realizing the Engine had not released them cleanly back into ordinary time. For the moment, they trained, recovered, and waited. Broj trained under his father's brutal precision. Aedric Vale practiced mounted combat with Nithera. Warwick Willows finally gained confidence with his shield, only to trap himself in a force cage from his own magic. Sorina helped where she could, finding a rare moment where her power healed instead of harmed.

By the end, Zalzarak had awakened beneath Hearthglass, Broj carried a strange new life within him, Agelaius Phoeniceus walked a lonely road toward vengeance, and the party found themselves caught between unfinished promises and unstable time. The crystal nightmare had ended, but its consequences were only beginning.

The party stood upon the stone viewing platform beneath Hearthglass, suspended in the silence of a massive crystalline chamber where the truth of the buried city waited in terrible stillness. Before them, across a gulf of open air, a beholder-like horror hung trapped within the leyline crystal, its immense central eye glazed beneath layers of ancient growth. Around it, frozen in the same glittering prison, were countless small bodies curled and tangled together like a nightmare nursery. These were not merely monsters. These were the people of the lost gnomish city, caught in different stages of transformation, some still almost peaceful in shape, others stretched into the gaunt, screaming faces the party had come to know as Hushlings.

Agelaius Phoeniceus took to the air and circled the chamber, torchlight flickering against crystal as he descended low enough to see the horror below. What he found turned the place from battlefield to tomb. The deeper he looked, the clearer the progression became. The creatures near the surface were twisted and familiar, but deeper in the crystal were forms more whole, more gnomish, as if the people had been taken by the corruption slowly, century by century, dream by dream. Some were frozen mid-scream. Some pushed helplessly against the crystal that had sealed them. Beneath the city, the dead had not been buried. They had been preserved, imprisoned, and changed.

Then Broj's eyes turned gold again.

The presence inside him, the dream-being known as Orchestra, looked through him toward the crystal prison and spoke with a longing that carried more sorrow than command. It called the trapped presence its brother. It did not want the party to kill him. It wanted him freed. That simple request ignited the party's fear, anger, and doubt. To Agelaius Phoeniceus, freeing a crystal-bound beholder beneath a ruined city sounded like madness dressed in divine purpose. To Warwick Willows, it was one more impossible bargain made by powers who had already dragged them too far. To Sorina, it was a problem with no safe edges, for any attempt to touch the crystal risked becoming part of it. And to Broj, it was another moment of waking up in the middle of someone else's plan, with his own body used as a door.

The crystalline drone, acting as Axioma's proxy, revealed that the thing trapped in the beholder should not be there. Axioma had drawn them to this place because he believed a solution could be found through them, through their void-touched Realmstrider connections, and through the strange bond Broj carried. Agelaius Phoeniceus railed against the idea, furious at gods and greater powers who kept treating mortals like tools. His anger was not cowardice. It was exhaustion sharpened into rebellion. He had watched the party be pulled from one cosmic obligation to the next, and this time the command to kneel before another mystery was too much.

Aedric Vale, however, saw the shape of the task with cold clarity. The crystal could be manipulated if the party's leyline abilities were restored. The trapped mind could be reached through dreams. And if Orchestra truly needed to reconnect with what lay within the beholder, then someone had to stop arguing long enough to learn what the creature actually was. So Aedric Vale flew to the crystal with Nithera, placed his hand against the cool, hungry surface, and let the prison take hold.

In an instant, he was elsewhere.

The chamber vanished, replaced by a white expanse where a golden outline of Aedric Vale approached him like a mirror wearing another soul. Behind it hovered a golden orb surrounded by ten tiny eye-stalks, a dream-shaped echo of the beholder. Music, clicks, and resonant vibrations filled the empty space. The being asked if he had come to take its thanks. Aedric Vale answered that he had come to set it free, perhaps to reunite it with the other half it had lost. When he tried to show it what had become of Hearthglass, his own mind faltered, but Nithera surged through the connection and helped cast the image across the dream. The beholder-being saw the changed city above, the people still living on the surface, and the ruined truth buried beneath them.

It did not call itself caged. It said it slept. It said it was learning from a superior source. It warned that its people would not be harmed. In that strange white place, Aedric Vale understood the first piece of the answer: this creature spoke through dreams, and whatever had happened here was not simple malice. It was a sleeping mind tangled with something older, stranger, and far less mortal.

When Aedric Vale returned, only a heartbeat had passed for the others, though he had lived minutes inside the vision. The answer shifted the plan. If the creature spoke through dreams, then Broj had to sleep.

So Broj, with typical bluntness, knocked himself unconscious.

In the dream, he found himself in a lavish chamber of cushions, tapestries, food, and distant laughter. Around him were small gnomish figures whose faces blurred in memory, while a dark-skinned, golden-eyed gnome sat before a great beholder shape as though the two were companions at court rather than monster and victim. The gnome opened its stretched mouth and released the same musical, clacking resonance Orchestra had once used before learning how to speak with the party. Then Orchestra appeared beside Broj wearing the face of his sister, a familiar shape made wrong by golden eyes and divine distance. With a hand on his shoulder, it helped him understand.

The visions came hard.

Broj saw tentacles descending from the sky and entire cities brushed into white dust. He saw those same horrors overtaken by crystal. He saw Zalzarak, the beholder, not as a tyrant reveling in ruin, but as a protector working with the gnomes of the city, raising defenses, placing nodes, and using crystal to keep something worse below. The city above had remembered him as a guardian because, in some terrible way, that had been true. Zalzarak had been trying to protect the people of Hearthglass from what lay underneath.

But then a dream entity had been contacted. Zalzarak, fascinated and powerful, took the connection too deeply. He poured too much of himself into that dreaming mind, and Orchestra's other half was drawn into him in return. The bond became physical, not merely spiritual. Zalzarak fell asleep inside his own protection and never woke. Centuries passed. The crystals held him. The dream bled outward. And the people he meant to protect became the Hushlings, shaped by the impossible mingling of beholder mind, leyline crystal, and dream-being influence.

It was not innocence. It was tragedy. And tragedy, as the party had learned too many times, could still make monsters.

Broj offered the only solution he could think of. He would carry Orchestra and its brother, whole again, long enough to take them to his home plane. There, he believed, his mother or sister might have the patience, strength, and care to help the strange being learn without letting it destroy anything in the process. It was a bargain made not with pride, but with weary responsibility. He did not want this burden. He simply refused to abandon it once it had fallen into his hands.

When he woke, he told the others what he had seen. The beholder had been protecting the city. Zalzarak had been trapped by his own attempt to guard Hearthglass. The thing inside him was not meant to remain there. They needed to wake him.

That was the moment Agelaius Phoeniceus stepped away from the path. With the leyline connection restored by Axioma's proxy, he tested whether the party could leave the Engine at all. He reached for the planes and vanished, proving the prison door was open. But instead of returning, he appeared on Tarkir, in lands now claimed by dragon rule. Beneath gloomy skies and drifting mist, warned by Erragu of the danger and the foolishness of coming there, Agelaius Phoeniceus chose to keep moving. His anger had found direction. He was tired of gods. He was tired of dragons. He was tired of bowing. If the world demanded god-killers, then he would begin walking the road to become one.

Back beneath Hearthglass, the remaining party gathered on the crystal with their dragons. Broj, Aedric Vale, Warwick Willows, and Sorina reached through their Realmstrider power, no longer cut off from the leylines. The crystals beneath their dragons began to glow. Their combined will pressed into the prison. Broj pulled with raw determination, Aedric Vale empowered and focused the effort, Warwick Willows shaped his force into a concussive arcane blow, and Sorina became a living catalyst for the break.

The crystal answered.

It did not shatter at first. It flowed. It peeled back like water, twisting away from the beholder's body and the bodies fused around him. The golden glow within the central eye dimmed as the prison opened. At last, enough of Zalzarak was freed for Orchestra to act. Broj allowed the presence to take over again, this time willingly. His golden-eyed body reached forward and touched the enormous face of the beholder, hand pressed near the slack mouth of a creature many would have slain without question.

The mouth moved.

The crystal cracked away.

Broj slumped against the massive form, and Zalzarak woke.

The beholder rose from the crystal, vast and gaunt, his central eye blinking open as his eye-stalks swept frantically across the chamber. The party braced, ready for betrayal, disaster, or the final proof that mercy had been foolish. Instead, the ancient guardian looked upon them and asked who they were. They answered as travelers from another world. Then he asked if his people were safe.

There was no clean answer.

The people on the surface were alive. The ones below were not. As Zalzarak looked over the frozen dead of his hidden city, droplets fell from his eye-stalks like tears. He asked if it was still below. The party could not say for certain. The thing he had once protected Hearthglass from remained a shadow in the story, unnamed and unresolved. But Zalzarak understood enough. He had much work to do.

Then he spoke in the musical, resonant tongue of the dream-gnomes to the golden presence within Broj, and through Broj came the answer: as long as they were friends to Hearthglass, they were welcome. The crystalline drone opened a thin slit in space and vanished, its task complete. Moments later, two small orbs of light rose from Broj's chest, connected by a golden thread. A whisper of thanks and a ripple of music followed them upward through the ceiling of the cavern.

Yet something remained.

In the last breath of that departure, Broj saw the familiar face of his sister in the dream. The united being told him it had left its seed. When he woke, the full burden of that phrase had not yet settled, but it would not take long. Orchestra and its brother were gone from him, but a childlike remnant of that union still lingered inside, curious, intrusive, and already far too comfortable calling his body home.

With the work beneath Hearthglass done, Broj led the party away from the Engine and back to his home plane. They followed his wake through the Blind Eternities and emerged not in ice or crystal, but in crushing desert heat. Broj's family home rose before them on Amonkhet, built for loxodon scale, massive to outsiders and modest to those born there. Dronoth settled outside the gate like a red-scaled furnace of his own, while Nithera delighted in every new sight and Sorina's dragon immediately despised the heat, carving out little patches of ice in the sand just to survive the indignity.

Inside, the party met Broj's family. Zamira, his towering sister, greeted him with mockery sharp enough to prove she had missed him. His father, scarred and broad and quiet, carried the weight of old strength in every movement. His mother, Samira, welcomed him with warmth, concern, and the unmistakable authority of someone who could command a household full of giants and dragons by asking everyone to wash their hands before dinner. His brother, Tanazak, learned the hard way that punching Dronoth was a poor greeting, and by the time the party saw him properly, both his arms were in casts.

The place was not a palace, though it seemed enormous to most of the party. From the air, Aedric Vale saw the truth of it. Far off on the horizon, a golden pyramid pierced the sky, while other family plots nearer to it held pyramid structures of their own. Broj's home had none. By the standards of this harsh, recovering Amonkhet, his family were humble folk living far from the center of power. Yet their home was rich in space, memory, and the kind of strength that does not need gold to announce itself.

The childlike remnant within Broj soon made itself known. His eyes turned gold at inconvenient times. His body was taken over mid-conversation. Zamira wrote down pieces of his adventures as the entity chattered through him. Samira, after hearing what had happened, did not recoil from the impossible thing her son had brought home. Instead, with the calm cruelty only a mother can manage, she told him he would make a wonderful father. His attempts to pass the responsibility to someone wiser, gentler, or more prepared failed before they began. Whatever the seed was, it saw Broj as guardian.

The party spent the next stretch of time resting, planning, and trying to understand where they stood in time itself. Warwick Willows reached out to Agelaius Phoeniceus by sending, but he refused to say where he was. He said he was handling business and would return on his own time. Warwick Willows also reached out to Old Brin, hoping for help, only to receive the usual storm of unhelpful strangeness. Later, a longer magical contact with Old Brin proved even less dignified and only confirmed that timing and context matter when speaking to strange old men across planes.

The party debated their next path. Warwick Willows still needed answers tied to the Fey. Sorina remembered that Miriam might help them reach Eldraine, though her relationship with Miriam remained strained. There were still unresolved paths on Theros, lingering concerns around the Oni, the matter of Shandalar, and the need to reconnect with Agelaius Phoeniceus when he was ready. For the moment, Warwick Willows visited Miriam and found her in the middle of some bloody, unpleasant work. She confirmed that she could help them reach Eldraine, but not immediately.

Then Aedric Vale realized something worse than inconvenience. Counting the long rests and the sequence of events, the party had not simply escaped the Engine. They had returned before parts of their own recent timeline had fully caught up. When he tried to go back to the place on Theros where the party had confronted the great sea creature, he appeared above the area with Nithera, only to find Loid ahead and one of Axioma's drones waiting. The drone touched Nithera, and Aedric Vale was sent back before he could interfere. The message was clear: they could not cross paths with themselves. The timeline needed time to settle.

So the party remained with Broj's family.

In that strange pocket of respite, small victories took root. Sorina, warned not to use magic because of the river-demons drawn to casting in this land, helped mend Tanazak's broken arms through careful, nonmagical use of her own strange gifts. It worked, and for once her power did not twist the moment into horror. Aedric Vale inspected the work and, with a touch of healing, accidentally sent enough vitality surging through Tanazak that the massive loxodon bolted from the room in alarm. Still, the healing held.

Broj trained with his father and was reminded that strength was not the same as mastery. His father struck with precision, not force, dropping him with blows to the solar plexus, deadening limbs with tiny touches, and proving again and again that even Broj's density and toughness could be answered by technique. Sorina watched closely and saw the secret of it: not overwhelming power, but control, accuracy, and restraint. Broj wanted to learn that defensive art, to protect without relying on weapons or brute force, but the lesson was slow and humbling.

Aedric Vale trained from Nithera's back, working toward mounted combat with sweeping passes, aerial turns, and strikes against moving targets. Warwick Willows, eager to help and continue his own shield practice, became that target. The lesson ended with Nithera turning sharply, Aedric Vale slamming face-first into Warwick Willows' shield, and a broken nose serving as proof that progress is rarely graceful.

For Warwick Willows, the practice finally paid off. After long effort, he found his balance with the Shield of the Steel Current and reached the point where he could truly wield a shield in battle. Almost immediately afterward, his growing collection of magical items reminded everyone that arcane curiosity has consequences. The Cube of Force flared in his pack and snapped a force cage around him, leaving him trapped but technically very safe. Sorina kept him company while the others decided there was little to be done but wait for the magic to end.

Later, beneath the desert sky, Warwick Willows stepped into the sand with the desire to make something kind from a place so harsh. He called lightning down into the ground, fusing heat and sand into glass. From it, he shaped a rough glass rod and gave it to Samira as thanks for her hospitality. She did not entirely understand what she had been given at first, but when she realized it was a gift made by his own hand, she accepted it with tenderness and hung it on the wall.

And so, after the nightmare beneath Hearthglass, after the truth of Zalzarak, after the freeing of a guardian who had slept through centuries of ruin, the party found themselves not celebrating victory, but sitting in the heavy heat of Amonkhet, surrounded by family, dragons, unresolved plans, and the uneasy knowledge that time itself was still catching its breath. Agelaius Phoeniceus walked alone beneath dangerous skies. Broj carried a strange new life inside his mind. Warwick Willows looked toward the Fey and the friends he still needed to save. Sorina held onto a rare moment where her power had helped instead of harmed. And Aedric Vale, ever watchful, had seen the shape of the timeline bend and knew better than most that consequences were already waiting.

For now, they rested. But the planes were still moving, the old threats were still awake, and somewhere beneath Hearthglass, an ancient beholder opened his eyes upon the city he had failed, and began his work again.