Chapter 31
The Way of Worms was not a path; it was an absence. A suffocating, geological silence that pressed in on all sides, broken only by the scuff of boots on stone and the guttural, reassuring rumbles of the troll earth-shapers. The air was cold, ancient, and utterly still, tasting of wet rock and the deep, dreamless sleep of the earth. It was a darkness so profound that it felt like a physical substance, a pressure against the eyes and the mind. Aria walked at the head of the column, a single, stable sphere of twilight floating before her like a captured star. It cast no shadows. The gray, harmonious light illuminated the faces of her strange, desperate army: the grim determination on Kael’s face, the primal focus in Fenris’s pale eyes, the stony stoicism of the trolls, and the feral anxiety
- Writer
