The goblin's tip had been useful.
Fossils in the crater, he had said. Big ones. Old ones. The kind collectors pay gold to touch.
Radomir had decided before the words left the goblin's mouth. I saw it in the way his posture shifted, the way his hands moved toward his pack. He was already planning the extraction.
Un'Goro was everything the Barrens was not. Green. Alive. Steam rose from vents in the earth, and strange plants grew in colours I had no names for. The air was thick and warm, and the ground buzzed with the life of insects and small things I could not identify.
The fossil was a pterrordax, half-excavated from the crater wall. Its bones were massive — the ribs arching like the frame of a ship, the skull longer than my arm. It had been dead for longer than any mortal civilisation had stood.
Radomir approached it the way I had seen him approach the old text in Gadgetzan. Carefully. Reverently. He ran his fingers along the bone, searching for something only he could see.
"There," he said, pointing to a dark shape embedded in the fossilised ribcage. "Do you see it?"
I saw it. A black diamond, pristine, catching the steam-light like a drop of deep water.
He worked for hours, chipping away the fossilised bone with tools so fine they looked like they belonged in a jeweller's shop. I sat nearby and watched. The crater hummed around us. The steam rose. The light shifted.
When he finally held the diamond up, his hands were trembling.
"Two," he said. "One more."
I looked at the diamond. Then at the fossil. Then at the horizon beyond the crater — south, toward Silithus, where the wound in the earth had swarmed with things that should not exist.
The diamond was precious. But it was not the most important thing we had found here.
The most important thing was the understanding that this threat was older than us, older than the forest, older than the desert. And it was still growing.