The west region of the valley had gone completely silent.
Not the natural kind of silence where the wind still moved and small things still rustled in the dark. The absolute kind. The kind that only happened when every living thing in an area had either fled or been put down, and there was nothing left to make noise.
Melissa was the first to notice it.
She turned slowly on the spot, scanning the tree line, the open ground, the broken terrain they had spent the last stretch moving through, and found nothing. No movement. No sound. No red eyes catching the moonlight from somewhere in the dark.
"That's it," she said.
Melisandra walked up beside her and looked around with the same slow, careful scan. Then she nodded once.
"That's the region," she confirmed.
