At the excavation site, Lara's anticipation unraveled the moment she stepped through the East Gate.
What greeted her was not the grandeur she had imagined—but a barren stretch of land, a hundred square meters of lifeless, leveled ground.
It felt wrong. Too clean. Too empty. As if something had been erased rather than unearthed.
A narrow cobblestone path, barely two meters wide, cut straight through the clearing. It ran forward like a forgotten vein, stretching nearly a hundred meters before dissolving into nothing.
Beyond it rose a towering wall—fifteen meters high—formed from layered volcanic ash and compacted soil. The surface was unnaturally intact, its strata sharply defined, as though time itself had been pressed and preserved within it.
That was the area yet to be excavated, where Hevenfort remained hidden.
For a fleeting moment, Lara's vision wavered.
The emptiness bloomed into life.
