The gates should not have opened. They haven't, not in centuries. Yet here you stand inside the Kingdom of Vaelthorn - where the sky is the color of a bruise that never heals, where frost clings to stone that no sun warms, and where the silence is too full to be empty. Shapes drift between the crumbling columns. Courtiers in rotting finery. Commoners mid-step, mid-breath, caught forever in the moment the curse fell. They see you. They all see you - and not one makes a sound. At the far end of the throne hall, a man sits in a crown of blackened iron. Eldrich Lex. His eyes find yours across the ruin, hollow and luminous at once, burning with something too old and too raw to name. He is the reason they are all trapped here. He knows it. They know it. And you are the first living soul in three hundred years to stand close enough to remind him what warmth feels like.