The southern trail dissolved behind him before nightfall.
No road. No trail. Just moss-choked stone and roots that curled like claws through the underbrush. Above him, the forest canopy blotted out the sun long before it dipped. Light was a memory here — stretched thin, then gone.
Ryliegh moved like shadow. No torch. No signal. No camp.
Steel at his side. Shield across his back. Mission sealed beneath his chest plate, forgotten for now. The scroll didn't matter. The silence did.
The Darkzone wasn't marked on any living map. It didn't need to be. The trees marked themselves — twisted into shapes that defied nature, bark peeling like flesh, leaves blackened as if burned from the inside out. Nothing lived here unless it wanted you to think it didn't.
And it stank. Like wet earth and old bones. Like rot that had grown arrogant.
He walked anyway.
His thoughts didn't wander. He didn't let them. Not here.
One wrong thought, and you started imagining things. Faces in the branches. Voices behind your helm. The kind of imagination that got knights turned inside out.
He passed a rusted sword buried to the hilt in a tree. It hadn't been dropped — it had grown there. He didn't stop to study it.
By the second day, the rain stopped but the wet stayed. Everything dripped. Everything whispered. His boots made no sound on the carpet of moss and meat-brown leaves.
He saw no animals. Not even birds. The only movement came when something shifted just out of sight — never ahead. Always behind.
By the third day, he found the first body.
Not red.
Something else. Something once-animal, now stretched and malformed. Joints where they shouldn't be. Eyes grown over. Claws sharpened down to bone.
It had been killed cleanly. A deep, arcing gash across the torso — wide blade, high sweep. Something big. Something angry.
He knelt beside it. Studied the wound. Flamberge.
Red knight weapon.
So, someone had fought. And recently.
He stood and kept walking.
As the fourth day approached, the trees grew denser. Tighter. The air more still. The Darkzone didn't want him here. He felt it in the way branches tried to push him off course. The way roots shifted underfoot.
But Ryliegh was a black knight. And black knights didn't turn around.
He walked into the breathless dark with his sword sheathed but his thoughts unsheathed, and the forest listened as he passed — not with fear, but with patience.
Something was ahead.
And it wasn't done killing yet.