This world was a suffocating, eternal darkness, where the sun had been swallowed whole by roiling clouds—thick, malignant things that choked the sky and left the earth below to rot in shadow.
The air reeked of still water, of old blood crusted beneath fingernails, of something sweet and putrid festering just beneath the surface.
It clung to the back of the throat, a taste like rust and spoiled meat, promising only hunger, only despair, as he had experienced.
In this waste, this endless rain, this cold, this darkness, they gathered, men who were more than men, but they were not outside.
What could be found outside was three bestial mouths, slack and wet, yoked to a wooden carriage.
Inside, the figures crouched in a circle, their prize laid bare before them, the same one they had plundered from the limestone cave.
The largest of them loomed like a butchered god, eight feet of sinew and malice wrapped in the pelt of some wolf-like horror, its fur matted with old gore.
