"Every stone remembers, every shadow speaks; the past waits for the living to listen, or fall." , Fragment inscription from the Codex of Whispering Shadows
The ruins rose before them like the skeleton of some long-dead titan. Blackened stones clawed upward through a lattice of strangling roots and thick vines, their jagged edges etched with scars of forgotten storms. The air here was colder, heavy with damp, as if the mist itself thickened to resist their breath. Even broken statues, limbless, faceless, toppled, carried a weight of presence, as if the ground itself still bowed before them.
Shadows swam in the fog, curling around the stones, taking forms too fleeting to name, trees, wolves, or perhaps the remnants of something older, something that remembered.
