Smoke hung in the horizon, twisting in the sky like the scar of a wound that never healed. Pale gray, thin, and stubbornly rising into the silent heavens. And with every step the hero took toward it, the place did not draw closer. It felt instead as though the world stretched beneath his feet, and the smoke watched him from afar—retreating when he approached, yet never vanishing.
The land here was unwelcoming. Everything about it whispered of abandonment.
The soil was gray, cracked like the skin of an old man who had long forgotten the feel of water. Pebbles scattered randomly—not the randomness of nature, but as if someone had placed them deliberately. The trees were thin and bent, bearing black leaves that looked like frozen, liquid rust. Some had no trunks at all, just sprouting from the earth like metallic hairs born in a cold night.
(Inner monologue) "This isn't a path... It's the remains of one that forgot how to be a road."
