The blight was a physical weight, a greasy film on the world that clung to the skin and soured the tongue. But the deeper they journeyed south, following the ghost of the severed star-vein on the Starborne charts, the more the nature of the sickness changed. The grey, crumbling decay began to give way to a sharper, more frantic energy. The air, once stagnant, began to move.
At first, it was just a breeze, a sigh through the skeletal trees. But within hours, it had built into a constant, keening wind that tore at their clothes and whipped stinging particles of dead earth into their faces. This was no natural weather. It was the Starwind, the celestial breath of the world, the great current that carried energy along the star-veins. And it was breaking.
It whipped in chaotic, contradictory
