They moved forward in silence, fleeing the nascent light that now tinged the sky with a threatening pearly grey. The bamboo gave way to a rocky heath, bristling with strange black stone steles, similar to the ones near which they had fought the grey creature.
The air grew denser, thick with a cold, creeping mist that slithered across the ground like a living thing, clinging to their legs and obscuring anything beyond a few meters.
Ahead, a massive, indistinct shape, perhaps a statue or a sculpted rock, the "guardian" they had glimpsed earlier – emerged from the gloom, standing vigil over a field of rusted and broken swords driven into the soil like funerary markers. The atmosphere was heavy, charged with silence and old violence.
