The stars vanished with the mist.
There was a silence deeper than sleep around the plateau, thick as tar. No birds, no breath of wind.
Even Dee's soft trill had gone quiet.
Sarissa was the first to wake up. She felt the change not as sound or sight, but pressure, like the moment just before a storm breaks or lightning strikes. A tension older than language that made her fingers curl around the haft of her broken spear.
The bark beneath her palm grew colder. Not hostile, but watchful.
"You feel that?" Miles stirred across from her.
"It's coming back." She nodded once, slowly.
There weren't footsteps. There wasn't even a howl or crack of bone.
The thing that stalked them returned the way rot did. It seeped in, like gravity, like inevitability.
Its shape was still wrong, still a contradiction. Shadow without form, mass without flesh, hunger without purpose.
But this time, they did not run.
