POV: Aphrodite
The land itself warns them to turn back.
We've been walking for two days since we left the ruins behind and the change happened gradually enough that I didn't mark the exact moment it started. That's the thing about gradual — you don't notice the first few degrees of shift. You notice when you're suddenly somewhere different from where you thought you were.
The moonlight is wrong tonight.
It's not overcast. The sky above the tree line is clear, I can see stars, and there is a moon up there, nearly full, the kind that should be flooding the forest floor with silver light and making the walk easy. Instead the light seems to stop at the canopy. Like something between the sky and the ground is absorbing it before it can arrive. The forest floor where we're walking is dark in a way that has nothing to do with cloud cover and everything to do with the land we've crossed into.
