It began, as most tragedies do, with a whisper. A rumour carried on the wind, a chill that settled not just on the skin, but on the very soul of Aethelgard. Aethelgard, once a bastion of shimmering steel and pragmatic innovation, was consumed by a slow, insidious rot – the Vespacide. It wasn’t a war fought with swords, but with rust. Not rust in the conventional sense, born of water and air, but a *sentient* rust, a parasitic bloom that corrupted metal with unsettling grace. The initial victims were the constructs – the tireless automatons that powered Aethelgard’s industry. They began to falter, their movements jerky, their gears grinding with a metallic lament. Then, the corrosion spread to the city’s defenses, the shimmering shields becoming brittle, the towering walls weeping with a sickly orange sheen. The source, they discovered, was a shard of a fallen star, pulsing with an energy that twisted and corrupted anything it touched. It had been unearthed during the excavation of the Obsidian Depths, a region famed for its unstable geological formations and, unsettlingly, its echoes.

The echoes weren't merely auditory. They manifested as fragmented memories, phantom sensations, and glimpses of a reality that never was. Aethelgard’s architects, brilliant minds consumed by the rust, began to hallucinate designs for buildings that defied logic, structures that pulsed with the same unsettling orange hue as the corrosion. The city’s scholars, obsessed with deciphering the star shard’s influence, found themselves translating equations into mournful ballads, their words dripping with a despair that seemed to vibrate through the very stone. The most unsettling phenomenon was the ‘Rustlings’ – small, animate constructs of corrosion, born from the shard's energy, that hunted in packs, driven by an instinct to expand the blight. They moved with unnatural speed and precision, their forms shifting and reforming as they absorbed metal into their being.

The final resistance, led by Commander Marius Thorne, a veteran soldier hardened by the unending conflict, devised a desperate plan: to flood the Obsidian Depths with a potent solvent designed to neutralize the shard. However, the solvent proved unstable, reacting violently with the shard’s energy, creating a localized implosion that ripped through the city’s lower levels, adding to the chaos and accelerating the rust’s spread. Thorne, consumed by the fragment of memory of the shard, attempted to merge with the implosion, becoming a vessel of pure, sentient rust.