Moon walked deeper into the island, and gradually, the landscape began to change around him.
The familiar twilight-dappled forest was long gone, the sky returning to its ash-grey colour. The trees grew more sparse, and the ground beneath Mirage's hooves shifted from soft soil to cracked, pale stone.
Moon felt the change visually and physically. He could feel a very subtle oppressive aura of a hidden beast somewhere within the region.
The trees ended entirely, and Moon, Honeybun and Mirage emerged onto the edge of a vast sunken basin.
It was unlike anywhere else Moon had seen on the island. A huge, bowl-shaped depression carved into the land, its floor a maze of towering stone pillars and jagged rocks that rose like petrified trees, threaded through with lines of a glassy black mineral. Pale mist pooled along the basin floor, drifting between the pillars in slow, ghostly currents.
