They walked deeper into the Wilds the next morning, and the forest itself seemed to notice.
The wrong-jointed trees grew denser the further in they went, red light bleeding thicker through cracked earth, and the pulse beneath their boots had stopped feeling faint. It beat now, slow and enormous, like they were walking across the chest of something asleep and dreaming badly.
"Whatever's ahead," Marcus said, markers spinning slow around him, reading currents in the air none of the rest could see, "it's the source. Everything we've fought so far has been standing guard for this."
They found it in a hollow at the center of the grove, and for a long moment nobody moved at all.
