The victory in the warped village felt hollow, a silence purchased with ashes and dust. For two days, they traveled in a silence of their own, each companion wrestling with the implications of what they had done. They had not purified; they had executed. The line between healer and executioner had blurred, and its shadow walked with them.
The terrain shifted from tangled woods to a misty, bog-filled lowland. Leafless trees stood like skeletal hands grasping at a grey sky, and the ground squelched unpleasantly underfoot. The air smelled of decay and stagnant water, but the pervasive wrongness of the twisted grove was absent. Here, the corruption was subtler, a slow rot rather than a violent wound.
It was Lysander who found the path. Not a animal trail or a hunter's track, but a road. Ancient, cracked flagstones, slick with moss, emerged from the bog, leading toward a looming, dark shape in the distance.
