The Revenant moved.
It did not move as a man would move, nor even as a beast might lunge, but as though the ruin itself had been given will and dragged forward by invisible chains. Its vast shadow spilled outward like a tide of living darkness, flooding across broken stone, crawling up shattered walls, drowning every torch flame until the night seemed to swell inside the ruin's heart. With every step, its shackled limbs dragged and scraped, the rusted iron of those chains gouging trenches into the stone deep enough that a man could have lain down within them and vanished. Each grinding pull rattled the very foundations of the ruin, as though the ancient bones of the earth groaned and cracked beneath the monster's weight.
And then came the voices.
