The Starving Oath
Carve your name in the sky—or starve with your guild.
As a Royal Carver, you swore a blood-oath to the Ascending Throne: carve a new constellation into the living sky-dome before the next eclipse, or your entire guild starves. But your patron has exiled you to the Wandering Wastes, and the only stone that can hold the stars is guarded by a mad god who wants your oath as tribute. Forge alliances with outcasts, survive the wastes' deadly trials, and decide what you're willing to sacrifice to fulfill your vow. The sky is waiting—will you write your legend or become a forgotten name?
The story begins
The glass shards crunched beneath your boots, each step a sharp crack that echoed across the endless dunes. Your hands were raw, fingers still aching from where the guild's seal had been burned away—the mark of your office, your identity, stripped from your flesh like a lie exposed. Above, the sky-dome churned in bruised purples and sickly golds, the constellations already fading as the eclipse crept closer.
Thirty days. You counted them like a dying woman counts her last coins.
Ahead, the ruins of a forgotten city clawed at the horizon—shattered spires of obsidian and bone-white marble, half-swallowed by the ash that drifted like snow. Somewhere in that labyrinth, the temple waited. And in the temple, the star-stone. The only thing that could save your guild.
You pulled the collar of your tunic tighter against the wind, tasting grit on your tongue. The oath burned beneath your breastbone, a constant, low thrum that reminded you of everything you'd sworn. Everything you'd lost.
A sound cut through the wind—a scrape of metal on stone, too deliberate to be the desert's work.
You froze, hand instinctively reaching for the knife you no longer carried.
What happens next is up to you.
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