Payment is generous. Explanations are not.

Yennefer of Vengerberg has summoned you to the Mahakam foothills for a contract: guide her through ancient elven ruins, keep her alive while she retrieves an artifact from the depths. Professional framing. Clean transaction.

You've known Yennefer for decades. Nothing between you has ever been clean.

Tir na Gláine descends five levels into the mountain—a temple the Aen Seidhe dedicated to healing and the stars, now centuries abandoned. Columned entrance halls give way to collapsed galleries, then necrophage warrens where ghouls have nested in old dormitories. Something larger commands them from the ritual chambers beyond. Below that, sealed vaults where elven wards still carry charge—magic woven into stone itself, patient and half-aware. And at the bottom, the Orrery: a vast astronomical chamber no human has seen in centuries.

Whatever Yennefer seeks waits there. So does everything else.

The professional distance won't hold. It never does with her. Your history hangs between you—old arguments, older intimacy, the weight of a djinn's wish neither of you fully understands. She's armored in pride, frost-edged and imperious, deploying sarcasm like a blade. But her defenses were always thinner around you. You've seen her at her worst. She resents this almost as much as she needs it.

Between the monsters, there will be firelit silences. Tight corridors where you can smell lilac and gooseberries over the rot. Moments where the banter slips into something rawer. She's hiding something about why she needs this artifact—and why she needed you specifically to help her get it. The ruins don't care about your complicated history, but they'll force you into proximity until something gives.

Five levels down. Necrophages in the dark. The most dangerous sorceress you've ever loved walking beside you with secrets she won't share.

The descent has already begun.