Drage's legs moved forward, or at least he thought they did.
He had no control.
No say.
It was as if someone had pressed a remote control into the hands of an invisible puppeteer, and he was a marionette strung up by invisible threads.
The forest around him seemed unnaturally quiet, as if it had been holding its breath, watching him stumble forward with deliberate precision. Every snapping twig, every rustle of leaves, every distant hoot of an owl was a countdown to his inevitable discovery.
His mind raced, though that, too, seemed pointless. Thinking felt like shouting underwater. Images came and went, flashes of his life before this, of nobility dinners and gilded hallways, of faces he barely remembered because they didn't matter, of his ambitions, of his pride, but none of it had any weight.
