By the time Ren's group reached the waypoint, the miasma had thickened into something almost tactile, curling around his ankles in slow, deliberate spirals that seemed to test the edges of his resolve the way water tested the edges of a wound.
The five minutes had not yet begun.
'This gets worse before it gets better,' he thought grimly, planting his feet at the marked stone and forcing his breathing into a steady, controlled rhythm. 'Grael said hold position. Five minutes. I can survive five minutes of anything.'
He was wrong about how long five minutes could actually feel.
The whispers sharpened almost immediately once the group stopped moving, no longer vague pressure but something closer to genuine intrusion — half-formed images flickering behind his closed eyes, fragments of scenes that weren't memories, weren't real, and yet carried an emotional weight that landed in his chest like a physical blow regardless.
