As Lillia ensured every last piece of her plan was in place, a heavy shroud of darkness hung over the slumbering Kingdom of Wolfsbane, swallowing the distant forests and smothering the jagged silhouettes of the surrounding mountains. With no moon in the sky, it stretched into an endless sheet of black, the stars faint and distant, as though even they had chosen to retreat from the land below.
Beneath that thick blanket of darkness, torches burned along the cracked walls of a courtyard, their flames were small, flickering as the wind whispered through the narrow passageways. Their weak light stretched unevenly across the ground, revealing little more than broken cobblestones and the damp stains that had long seeped into them.
The courtyard seemed abandoned, collapsed in several sections t
