They felt him before they saw him.
It began as something Jin almost didn't notice, a faint thrum under his feet as they crossed the far end of the bridge, so soft he thought it was his own pulse. Then it came again, and again after that, slow and steady, a deep shudder that rose through the soles of his shoes and into his knees, as if something very heavy were being set down somewhere far away, over and over.
By the time they had left the bridge behind and started down the dark river road on the other side, nobody was talking anymore.
The shaking was in everything now. It was in the road, and in the low stone wall along the riverbank, and in the water itself, which rippled outward from the bank in small, even rings every time it came. Jin watched a loose pebble on the road ahead of him hop, settle, and hop again.
