[Aethel]
[Location: Galadriel Kingdom]
[Outskirts]
The sky above had lost its usual brilliance. Once a dome of blue had now become smeared with hues of gray and a deep black. It was as though the skies had been burnt.
Guinevere flew high above it all, her dress fluttered violently behind her, the residual turbulence of mana bursting in the distance.
Below her, chaos bloomed.
Villages now crumbled beneath the encroaching darkness. Entire hamlets were engulfed by crawling shadows—no, not shadows, she corrected herself—entities. Ink-black, malformed aberrations with too many limbs, with wrong-shaped skulls, some eyeless, some with too many, their flesh writhing as though it could not decide what it was trying to become. Some slithered and others galloped on hooves and twisted claw-feet. Still others crawled upside down along the undersides of trees or scaled mountain faces in reverse, dragging entire structures with them.
