Evening came without ceremony.
The light in this cursed land did not fade the way it did in the North, where the sun bled gold across ice fields and mountains sang with wind. Here, dusk arrived like a lid being lowered over the world. The air cooled, but not with comfort—only with the deep, wet chill of shadow settling into stone.
We made camp anyway. It should not have been possible. Not here. Not in a valley soaked in dark mana, where the ground remembered screams and the air itself watched.
But Oblong had spoken. "This place is safe," he had said, voice low, distorted, echoing in places my ears could not track. "They will not come."
When he said it, his body shifted. Dark muscles coiled beneath his skin, shadows flexing as if alive, as though the land itself recoiled from him. I believed him instantly. Whatever lesser horrors prowled this valley feared him the way prey fears a god that hunts for sport.
