The land had turned against them.
Each step into Dahaka felt like wading deeper into a graveyard that refused to stay buried. The trees had withered into jagged silhouettes, stripped bare, some rotted through with strange runes carved deep into their trunks. The wind no longer blew—just breathed, slow and sour, thick with decay and burnt ozone.
Aden rode at the front of the Twelfth Pillar's column, his eyes sharp under the lowered brow of his helm. Behind him stretched a legion—marching, silent, wary. Not from exhaustion, but dread.
The ground underfoot was soft and damp, sucking at boots like it didn't want to let go. Even the horses moved slower now, unsettled by things they couldn't see. Birds were absent. Insects, too. The only sound was the crunch of gear, the dull rustle of cloaks, and the far-off caw of something that didn't sound like anything native.
Aden looked up. The sky was darkening prematurely.
"Don't like this," one of the younger knights whispered to another. "Feels wrong."
"It's just fog," the second replied, but his hand lingered at the hilt of his sword longer than it needed to.
Egmund stirred in the back of Aden's mind.
"They're getting twitchy."
Aden didn't respond.
"You're thinking the same thing though, right? Something's watching us. Something... ."
Aden's fingers flexed around his reins.
They passed the remnants of an abandoned scouting post—just broken stakes and a collapsed tent riddled with black ash. Something had come through here. No bodies. No blood. Just absence.
"Sir," a scout reported, riding up from the flank, armor spattered with black mud. "We've cleared the ridge. Beyond that, it drops into what looks like burial grounds. Bone monoliths. Signs of necrotic ritual."
Aden nodded once. "Lich territory begins there."
"Should we hold, or...?"
"We don't stop," Aden said. "Not until we reach the forward ridge."
The soldier nodded and turned back.
The army moved on, quieter now. Torches stayed low. Mages cast faint orbs of light that shimmered like candlefire, barely piercing the thickening gloom.
Egmund stirred again, voice lower now.
"They can feel it. Whatever's out there... it's not just undead. It's listening."
He wasn't wrong.
The men—veterans and rookies alike—had stopped talking. They were scanning the treeline more than the road. Checking shadows. Watching clouds that didn't move.
Something was changing in the air. Not just fear—pressure. An invisible weight that tightened the further they moved east.
Aden's thoughts flicked back to the novel—the parts he'd read before waking in this world.
The Lich Domain was never meant to be a battlefield. It was a grave where gods were meant to stay buried.
In the original story, this place had wiped out four elite units. No survivors. No warning.
The cause? A High Lich Lord, capable of bending the fog itself into chains, soulbound hounds prowling like smoke, and something else—something never confirmed, only whispered between dying characters in footnotes.
And Aden was walking straight into it.
He raised his hand. The column stopped.
Ahead, the last stretch of cleared path gave way to jagged cliffs—and beyond them, the beginning of the Bone Fields.
White spires jutted out from the ground in crooked spirals. Some looked carved. Others... grown. At their base, the soil was blackened, scorched from old magic. Soulflame flickered inside hollow crevices—cold, pale blue, like will-o'-wisps trapped inside skulls.
This was it.
Dahaka's first true threshold.
Aden dismounted and approached the edge, boot crunching down onto dry bone and ash. He scanned the valley below—the twisted towers, the unnatural fog swirling like smoke above a dead battlefield.
And then he saw it.
At the far edge of the fog, just for a moment: movement. A tall figure. Hooded. Cloaked in scraps of armor, holding something like a staff or blade—he couldn't tell.
But it was watching.
He stepped back.
"Form up perimeter," Aden ordered. "No fires tonight. Set double wards. I want scouts rotating every two hours, and mages on pulse detection."
"Yes, Lord Vasco!" the captains barked back, already moving.
As the camp began to form behind him, torches flickering low and tense whispers returning, Aden turned one last time toward the fog.
"Whatever's in there," Egmund murmured, "it's not asleep anymore."
Aden didn't answer.
Because he knew.
The Bone Citadel had seen them coming.
And it was waiting.