Edge of blackthorn city
The forest thinned as though it had reached its own border, ending like the unraveling of a dream.
The giant trees that had stood like sentinels of a lost era, their limbs screaming with wind and brutes, fell before crooked stumps and knotted scrub. Slivers of late sunlight filtered through the thinning leafage, casting feeble shadows to the earth. Out of deeper places the low rumble of hidden horrors still lingered, but at the perimeters the sound was waning—like a threat that clung to the breath yet dared not pursue.
This was not a place for men. Hunters shunned it. Merchants never braved it. Even thieves and wayfarers retreated long before they reached its shadow. The edge of the forest bore a quiet too weighty to shatter, as though the earth itself had made a vow: none shall tread lightly here.
And beyond that quiet, seven kilometers distant, the world ascended in counterpoint—stone and metal set against raw savagery. A city.
Blackthrone.
