The journey south was a grinding, monotonous affair, a rhythm of sore muscles, meager rations, and constant, gnawing vigilance. For three weeks, the Company of the Serpent's Tooth traveled, and with every league, the familiar, gentle farmlands of Aethel gave way to a harsher, emptier landscape. The villages grew smaller and more infrequent, the silence between them longer and deeper.
From her place in the center of their small column, Hanna, the healer, observed the toll the journey was taking. She tended to the mundane afflictions of their quest: blisters on the sailors' feet, a cough in Joric's chest, the persistent weariness that settled in their bones. But she could do little for the deeper maladies of the soul.
She saw the weight on Commander Eva, a straight-backed pillar of resolve who rarely slept, her eyes in constant motion. She saw the obsession in Praxus, who spent every halt and every campfire poring over his scrolls, as if the answer to their salvation lay in a single, forgotten sentence. And she saw the haunted look in Finnian's eyes whenever he was forced to glance at the blank, starless night sky.
Hanna's role was to be their quiet center, a source of calm in the growing storm of their mission. She focused on the world that was still alive: the hardy autumn flowers that grew by the roadside, the flight of a hawk on the wind, the simple, honest ache of a body that had worked hard. These were the things she understood, the small echoes of Qy'iel's grace that the Tyrant had not yet managed to extinguish.
It was on the twenty-fifth day of their journey, as they traveled a lonely, ancient road that marked the unofficial border to the Sunstone Wastes, that the world went wrong.
It began not with a sight or a sound, but with a feeling. A sudden, unnatural cold seeped into the air, a cold that had nothing to do with the setting sun. Hanna felt a wave of nausea so profound it nearly made her retch. The air, which moments before had smelled of dust and dry grass, now seemed to carry the scent of old meat and deeper, more ancient decay. She thought she was falling ill, a sudden fever from the road.
"Something's wrong," Finnian said from the front of the column, his voice a low hiss. He had stopped, his head raised like a deer sensing a predator. "The air… it feels like it did during the storm."
That's when they saw him. A lone figure, walking towards them on the road, emerging from the long shadows of dusk. He was dressed as a simple traveler, his face and form completely obscured by a heavy, grey woolen cloak and a deep hood.
Instantly, Eva's command cut through the air. "Halt! Formation!"
The Royal Guards formed a tight, disciplined shield line at the front. Malik and his sailors fanned out to the sides, their hands gripping their heavy belaying pins. Praxus pulled his mule to a stop behind the soldiers, his hand resting on his satchel of scrolls as if it were a shield. Hanna dismounted, her legs unsteady, the wave of nausea intensifying with every step the stranger took.
As the hooded figure drew closer, the feeling grew a thousand times worse. For Hanna, a woman in tune with the rhythms of life, this was a metaphysical assault. It was a pressure of pure, undiluted despair. It was the taste of ash in her mouth, the feeling of a grave-digger's dirt under her fingernails. It was the absolute, crushing certainty that all life, all hope, and all effort was meaningless. It was the antithesis of everything she was, a void that sought to unmake the very life force she nurtured.
The feeling was so overwhelming, so viscerally wrong, that she stumbled to the side of the road, her body convulsing as she was wracked by a violent, dry heave.
The others felt it too. The guards' perfect shield wall trembled, their faces pale with a primal fear that bypassed all their training. Finnian looked as if he was drowning, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Even Commander Eva's iron composure seemed to crack, a fine tremor running through her sword hand.
The figure stopped about thirty paces from them, making no threatening move. The shadows within his hood were impossibly deep, a patch of absolute black that no twilight could penetrate.
"Halt!" Eva's voice was strained, fighting through the wave of oppressive dread. "State your name and your business on this road!"
For a long moment, the figure was still. They did not see a smile, but they all felt it. It was a feeling of ancient, chilling amusement, the condescending interest a man might show a line of ants struggling with a leaf.
When he spoke, his voice was unnervingly calm and unremarkable, a placid river flowing over a bed of absolute horror.
"Such a serious little company. So much hope on such a hopeless errand."
He took a slight, almost lazy step to the side.
"Please, don't let me stop you. Go on and play your little games."
Before Eva could issue another command, before any of them could react, he simply turned and continued on his way, his form fading into the twilight with an unnatural swiftness until he was simply gone.
The moment he vanished, the oppressive aura lifted. It was like a physical weight being removed, the air suddenly clean and breathable again. Hanna collapsed to her knees, gasping, the taste of bile and despair still lingering in her throat. Joric, his face the color of milk, leaned on his shield for support.
"By the lost light…" Malik breathed, his voice shaking. "What was that?"
"One of Ouen's sorcerers?" a guard ventured, though his voice lacked any conviction.
They all looked to Praxus, who was staring at the empty road where the figure had been, his face a mask of scholarly terror. "No," the Magister whispered. "That was not the power of a man."
They helped Hanna to her feet. She was trembling, her eyes wide with a horror that chilled the others more than the encounter itself.
"What did you feel?" Eva asked her, her voice low and urgent.
Hanna looked at her friends, her family of defiance, and tried to put words to the absolute violation she had just experienced.
"It wasn't a person," she whispered, her voice cracking. "It was a void. It was the taste of what a soul feels like when it dies."
The company huddled together as true darkness fell, their small campfire a pathetic defense against the memory of the cold they had just felt. Their journey had been a race against a distant, faceless enemy. Now they knew the truth.
Their enemy was on the road with them. And he was watching.
---
The Chronicle of the Fallen
Time Period Covered: Approximately Days 91 through 115 of the Age of Fear
Victims of The Reaping: 8
Victims of the Covenant: 62 (The Covenanter ideology, now free of the King's direct suppression, is spreading like a plague through the rural and foreign territories)
Deaths from Civil Unrest: 7
Total Lives Lost: 77
Of Note Among the Fallen:
— The High Chieftain of a prominent clan in Karak, who made a bargain to find a lost silver vein. His death has thrown the northern political situation into chaos.
— The last master seed-saver in Aethel, a woman who maintained a library of all known agricultural plants from the Age of Grace, reaped.