After a few more minutes of running through winding paths in the forest, we descended a mountainous slope and dropped into a valley of scattered villas. We threaded between them in silence, then crossed a makeshift gate.
I wouldn't call it a gate, really. More like a wall built the way a child stacks blocks, with uneven slabs of material pressed together in something that resembled a dam. The structures were crude, barely functional, and yet someone had clearly spent time on them. Effort, even.
'Did these guys really build a settlement out here? In the wilderness?'
The wilderness was no joke. When an Undefined Zone went unattended, it didn't just sit there. The miasma crept outward, poisoning the surrounding land before the zone itself swallowed it whole. And even when a zone got cleansed, the land it had already touched stayed rotten. The miasma changed things at a fundamental level. A stone stopped behaving like a stone, the soil rejected roots, the air tasted wrong.
