Once they stepped past the final, salt-rubbed stakes of the camp's perimeter, the world turned into a monochromatic void of slate-grey and bone-white. The air here was a different beast altogether, sharper, more invasive, a jagged blade that found the microscopic gaps in even the finest Valtrane steel. Zarius led the unit from the front, his heavy cloak billowing like a funeral shroud. He didn't look back to see if his men were keeping pace. He knew they were. The rhythmic crunch-hiss of boots on frozen crust was the only heartbeat this wasteland had.
There was a stillness today that felt... wrong. It wasn't the peaceful silence of a snowfall, but the breathless, suffocating quiet that precedes a landslide. No one spoke. The report of the "abnormal" Velkyn had trickled through the ranks like slow-acting poison, and while these knights were veterans of a hundred skirmishes, they held their polearms with a white-knuckled intensity that hadn't been there yesterday.
