The trees thinned into broken rock and dead air.
Noel stepped over a tangle of twisted roots and followed the slope downward, boots silent on dry earth. The forest behind him had already gone quiet, like it wanted nothing to do with what waited ahead.
Varn's Hollow.
It wasn't a valley. It was a wound in the land—jagged cliffs, sharp outcrops, fractured boulders rising like broken teeth. Steam hissed from small fissures, and mana in the air pulsed raw and uneven, as if something had torn through it and never sealed the cut.
He crouched behind a ridge of slate-black stone, eyes scanning the field below.
Rotten trees. Claw marks on the rocks. A carcass—something that used to be a deer, now split down the middle, limbs bent the wrong way. No signs of feeding. Just destruction.
He opened his palm, summoned a thin thread of mana, and sent it forward—searching.
The feedback came fast: a blur of corrupted presence circling the area. More than one.
Then one moved closer.
