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Beneath the smothering canopy of Blackroot Vale, the hamlet of Duskhollow clung to existence like lichen on a tombstone. Five villagers had vanished this moon-cycle—each disappearance marked by a crude effigy of knotted briars left where they’d last stood. You trace a gloved thumb over the thorny figure in your pack, its edges biting even through leather. The alderman’s daughter slipped this into your gear at dawn, her remaining eye glazed with witchweed haze. "They’re hungry again," she’d rasped, spittle catching in her scarred lips. Your boots sink into peat that reeks of spoiled meat as you approach the standing stones. No birds call here. The carvings swim under your torchlight—not ancient runes, but overlapping teeth marks gouged deep into granite. Something crunches underfoot. Bones, but not from any beast that walks on four legs. The amulet at your neck sears sudden ice against your skin as shadows detach from the monoliths. They move wrong, joints bending backward, whispers coalescing into a single word you feel in your marrow: *enough*. Steel hisses free as you pivot, but the real threat isn’t the shifting dark—it’s the warm trickle of blood from your nose, black and thick as tar. The alderman neglected to mention the blight spores. Your vision doubles. The effigy in your pack writhes, thorny limbs scrabbling against oilcloth. Choices crystallize—feed the thing clutched in your bag, or let it feast on what’s left of you. Torchlight gutters on the stones. Somewhere behind that wall of rot, a child’s laugh echoes.
