The Devourlands didn't have roads. Only trails of torn trees, cratered soil, and the bones of things that used to roar.
Rein stepped carefully around a set of massive claw marks etched into a stone, still steaming.
Wind, dry and bitter, scraped across the jagged plains and kicked up ash that clung to his hair, his throat, his tongue.
The sky overhead was a sickly red-gray, never quite dusk, never quite dawn. No stars. No sun. Just a constant, dull glow—like the world itself was quietly smoldering.
Rein stumbled over a ridge of cracked black stone and winced as his foot caught on a hidden bone shard.
He barely kept his balance.
"Lovely," he muttered, brushing dust from his leg. "Whole damn continent to walk into, and I pick the part that looks like a dying god's spit bucket."
The wound on his palm had scabbed over, but throbbed with every heartbeat.
He adjusted the stolen satchel across his shoulder—the one Asmodra hadn't taken back—and checked its contents again:
A half-eaten strip of dried at.
A pouch of crushed nerveleaf powder.
Three leaves of dreamroot.
One glass vial marked — Do Not Inhale.
He looked at the last one for a long second.
Then put it away.
He had no map.
No plan.
No idea how far he'd co since fleeing the Crimson Sanctuary.
Just a vague sense of not wanting to be found, and a stronger sense that he already had been.
The landscape stretched ahead like the back of so buried, long-dead beast—craggy, furrowed, broken open in places where roots and old bones burst from the ground like veins.
No trees.
Just thorn-bushes.
And occasionally, the remains of sothing that looked too big to die.
A dragon ribcage.A pile of humanoid skulls with jagged tooth marks.A crumbling statue carved with the words — Run, If You're Wise.
Rein ignored the warning and kept moving.
By nightfall—if it even was night—the air dropped ten degrees.
The glow overhead dimd to a deeper crimson, and the ground began to whisper under his feet.
Literally whisper.
Not words.
But breath.
Like sothing buried just below the surface was dreaming, and waiting to wake up.
Rein found a shallow stone alcove between two sharp ridges and collapsed inside, back against the wall, breath heavy and fast.
He took out the dried at and bit into it.
It tasted like salted leather soaked in disappointnt.
Still, he ate.
Then, from the pouch, he pulled out a small spiked stone—rigged with a tripwire and a compressed herb burst.
A trap.
Crude, but enough to spook animals.
He set it just outside the alcove's entrance.
As he returned inside and curled against the stone, he muttered,
"If I die out here, it'll be because so oversized mutt wolf thought my ass looked like dessert."
He chuckled low.
He didn't know how close he was.
Didn't know the wind had already stopped.
Didn't notice the ash outside the alcove had settled in a perfect ring.
Didn't hear the heavy breath above the ridge.
But sothing was there.
Watching him sleep.
And it was smiling.
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