The journey to the ruins took three weeks, not because the distance was great, but because Selena insisted they travel slowly, deliberately, giving themselves time to contemplate what they were about to do. The ruins of marrow—what scholars had come to call the place where the cosmic corruption had first entered their reality—lay in the Wastes of Karthus, a desolate region at the edge of the known world where the land itself still bore scars from ancient catastrophes.
Few mortals ventured into the Wastes. The terrain was inhospitable, resources scarce, and though the marrow was gone from reality, this place still carried the memory of its presence like a brand burned into the world's flesh. The ground was blackened and cracked, vegetation sparse and twisted, the sky perpetually overcast with clouds that never quite released their rain. It was a dead place, or dying, and even after ten years without marrow's active corruption, it had not healed.
