Jungle and Judgment
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The jungle pressed in like a living thing.
Heat rose in waves from the earth, and every breath tasted of salt and decay. Brimhaven was chaos. Not in the fire-and-spear way of Zamorakian lands, but in the slow, simmering stew of greed and survival. Traders, pirates, adventurers, and scoundrels—most too cunning to wear their crimes openly—moved through its crooked docks and palm-shadowed alleys like sharks beneath the waves.
Nyssarra stood at the edge of the jetty, one hand on the hilt of her crystal-tipped blade, the other shielding her eyes from the harsh midday sun. Parrots screamed in the canopy. A distant gong rang from the Agility Arena. Someone cursed in four different languages on the wharf behind her.
This was not her kind of place.
But something had drawn her here.
The message had come by hawk, flown in from Karamja’s southern watchposts. A patrol had found something buried in the jungle—something ancient. Something elven.
She hadn’t believed it.
Until she’d seen the pendant.
Cracked. Silver-veined. Inscribed with crystalline runes only someone who walked Seren’s path would understand.
It had once belonged to her mother's kin.
Lost, supposedly, during the exodus from the mainland after the God Wars. But what was it doing in Karamja, of all places?
Buried.
Next to a shallow grave.
The barmaid at the Banana Bar gave her directions—nodding toward a path choked with vines behind the arena.
“Don’t go at night,” the woman warned. “Not unless you like glowing eyes and things that slither.”
Nyssarra went anyway.
The jungle welcomed her with mosquitoes and thorned vines, but she moved through it like a whisper—every footstep measured, her senses tuned to the rhythms of wild things.
After an hour, she found it.
A half-sunken ruin, choked in ivy and half-swallowed by the jungle floor. Stone pillars carved with curves that echoed elven design. And in the center, the grave.
Unmarked.
Not forgotten.
Around the edges, the undergrowth had been cut recently—someone had come here before her.
Too recently.
She wasn’t alone.
The arrow came from the trees.
She twisted, dropping low—barely avoiding the poisoned barb as it embedded itself in the bark behind her.
Three figures emerged from the jungle mist. Lightly armored. Scarred. Pirates, by the look of them—exiles, maybe. Jungle scavengers who thought a half-elf alone would make for easy prey.
“You don’t belong here,” the leader sneered, his blade a rusted thing, but steady.
Nyssarra didn’t speak.
She moved.
Two arrows loosed—one into the shoulder of the man on the right, the other grazing the thigh of the one on the left. The leader lunged, but she sidestepped, pivoted, and dropped him with a knee to the gut and a hard elbow to the back of the neck.
The fight was brief. Brutal. Measured.
They didn’t die.
But they wouldn’t follow her again.
By sunset, she had unearthed a second piece beneath the grave—a shard of crystal, faintly humming. Not just elven.
Singing.
She pressed it to her pendant, and the resonance almost knocked her off her feet. It was old. Raw. Something left behind not as a token, but as a warning.
And it was not alone.
Back in Brimhaven, she sought answers. Quiet ones.
The docks were louder now. A cargo ship was unloading spices and crates of something that smelled like pickled horror. She slipped into the shadows beside the customs building and waited.
She didn’t expect him.
A tall, gaunt figure stepped down from the ship’s ramp—dressed in high-collared robes, too fine for a place like this. His eyes were like cloudy glass, but they locked onto her the moment she moved.
“Seren’s child,” he rasped. “I felt the stone stir.”
Nyssarra stepped back, hand on her weapon.
“Who are you?”
“An echo,” he said. “Of a war you don’t remember.”
She didn’t trust him. Not even a little. But the crystal hummed in her satchel—and not with fear.
Recognition.
They met again at the edge of the jungle that night.
The man—who gave no name—led her to a grove she would have missed otherwise. Inside, beneath a canopy of starlight and vines, lay a forgotten altar.
Elven. Seren’s. Cracked by time and war.
“I was here when it fell,” he said, voice heavy with memory. “We fled the mainland, some of us. Fled from Zarosian fire and Saradomin’s steel. Not all made it. Not all wanted peace.”
He turned, and in his eyes she saw madness barely held at bay.
“My sister died here. The pendant was hers. The grave... I buried it myself.”
Nyssarra’s breath caught. “Why are you still here?”
“Because I never left,” he said. “And neither did what followed us.”
The shadows shifted.
Something moved among the trees. Not pirates. Not animals.
A presence.
The man stepped back.
“They’re bound to the stone. Guardians, once. Now twisted by isolation. They don’t understand you’re not the enemy.”
The jungle flared with a sudden cry—high, unnatural. Shapes burst from the brush, skeletal and jagged, made of root and bone and fragments of crystal like broken memories.
Nyssarra didn’t hesitate.
She drew the pendant and slammed it against the altar.
Light burst from the contact—raw, wild, unshaped magic.
The guardians shrieked.
Some disintegrated in the glow. Others halted, as if remembering who they once were.
She whispered in Elven.
“Be still. Be whole. Be free.”
And they were.
By dawn, the altar stood quiet again.
The man was gone. Vanished into mist or madness.
Nyssarra knelt before the grave, placing the crystal shard atop the soil. The energy had quieted. The jungle felt less sharp now—less wounded.
She lingered only a moment longer, then turned back toward Brimhaven.
There was no fanfare. No thanks.
Only the soft, steady song of something long-silenced finally fading into peace.