The world was dark.
There was no green anymore, or blue. No flowers, no grass, just gray-browns and shadowy earth that rose in long, jagged ridges.
A tall mountain rose in the distance, casting a red glow at its peak over the land.
It was a harsh and uneven broken tooth jutting from the landscape.
It was cold, not the coldness of a sharp winter, but a still, heavy chill.
She had no cloak, but she would have pulled it tighter, mostly out of habit; the temperature wasn't dangerous, but the place felt so dreary.
Dark clouds rolled above her in immense plumes.
They were so thick they swallowed the sky, shutting out the sun and its light. Yet despite their darkness, there seemed to be no hint of rain, no thunder, no droplets gathering.
When Sonder stopped for a moment and her hand pressed against a boulder, it was cold, as though the warmth of the sun had never touched it.
She kept moving.
The mountains weren't silent. She heard distant cracks of stone and a far-off hum, something like wind trapped in deep caverns, but no breeze touched her face. Her hair never stirred.
She went to a narrow pass and looked down into a valley that stretched further west, winding between ridges like a gash.
There were no plants, no trees. She couldn't hear the cries or howls of any animals.
She went down into the valley, her steps echoing faintly as she descended.
A strange heaviness lay over her. Not the shards' influence, but the weight of traveling into a place that felt so empty.
When she paused to drink, she noticed something else.
Her breath, however faintly she breathed, didn't fog in the cold.
More strangeness from the land she was in. She narrowed her eyes and looked forward.
She hoped that somewhere west was another shard.
Her walking became more of a shamble. She didn't truly want to find the shards, but she would try anyway. Her feet carried her forward nonetheless.
Beyond the valley were foothills.
Her boots crunched over loose rock as she climbed the shallow slopes.
She stopped when she saw a curved wall of stone.
Taking a closer look, these were ruins, if they could even be called that.
They were small, humble, barely the size of a house.
A few overturned pillars stood nearby, with wood that had turned to stone long ago.
Notable ruins were usually grand wrecked fortresses or ancient cities long abandoned.
These were wrecked and abandoned, but humble.
It had been a village, she guessed. Homes with nothing significant to their history.
Just remnants of people who once lived quietly in a place no one remembered now.
She walked through two more such ruins, but they too were nothing but more low stone.
There was nothing left of the life that had once been here.
No signs they had ever mattered.
This was where a shard would end up, she thought, in a place that had no good left.
Or maybe that was negative thinking. The land looked evil and felt wrong, empty in a way that tugged at a common person's instincts, and that made her assume it was the perfect place for a shard.
But it was nothing but prejudice.
A place couldn't be evil. The land, its dirt and stone, even the wind and everything between, weren't anything on their own.
One might twist them for other purposes, but it wasn't inherent.
But as Sonder was, she couldn't ignore all the sensations she had learned to associate with evil.
And for the day, she decided to settle down in one of the small ruins, resting where others had once rested too, and called home.