The doors groaned open, and the team stepped into a world where beauty had been strangled into horror.
This area had once been one of Thornspine Estate's prized gardens—a sheltered paradise of rare blooms, flowing fountains, and carved stone paths.
Now it was nothing but a rotting, suffocating nightmare.
Thorned vines choked the shattered remains of marble benches and archways.
Pools of stagnant, blackened water glistened where ornamental fountains had collapsed.
The floor was a jagged patchwork of cracked stones, half-consumed by crawling roots that pulsed faintly with a sick, reddish glow.
Above, the skeletal framework of a shattered glass dome allowed only faint, mist-choked light to filter down, painting the room in eerie greens and grays.
At the far end, embedded in what once might have been a grand floral centerpiece, the Wildfang Node pulsed—a massive crimson orb, wrapped in black thorns and dripping viscous, sap-like ichor onto the dead earth below.
