The sky had dulled to a gray-green smear above Umbra's End, casting a pallid light over the warped treetops. Beneath that eerie sky, three Hunters crept along a ledge half-swallowed by fungus and twisted roots—silent, deliberate, and tense.
Garrik moved first, his boots skimming across stone without a sound. Bane followed, axe sheathed but close. The final of their trio, Phil, brought up the rear—his sharp eyes darting from glyph to glyph as if expecting the stone itself to attack.
"This path used to be stable," Garrik muttered, kneeling to brush aside moss from an old elvian marker. It pulsed faintly, reacting to his touch. "Residual magic. From the First Warding."
Phil crouched beside him. "Still active?"
"No," Garrik said. "But awake. Like it remembers the last thing that passed through."
They pressed forward. The terrain turned volatile—magma-like veins beneath the roots, air thick with static. Old magic. Not Fallen, not Harbinger. Something older.
