Dumpling wanted to give me something else to eat, but I wasn't much of a gourmet, so the naked woman found me sleeping with my face in the salad. I was soaked by the burning fireplace, and as soon as I sat down, I fell asleep. Two days on horseback through one of the most dangerous regions of the Empire. I bet anyone, even the toughest of men, would have passed out after that. So at the first opportunity, my body took its own, feeling safe.

The woman sighed and sat back in her chair with her foot on her leg, pouring a strong drink. Wake up the dangerous black bird that had flown into her house? A hunter? A killer of the chilled? She didn't dare.

A small black-backed varan with luscious yellow flanks blocked the way, opened its bright scarlet collar, sharply poured with blood, and hissed, chasing the intruders away. He was not intimidated at all, so he preferred to move out of their way, noticing the glint of glass and metal and the confidence with which the intruders were advancing. Folding its crests and blowing its yellow flanks, the varan hid in a burrow beneath a boulder overgrown with rusty moss.

The two travelers emerged from the Dark Forest where not a single strand of Titan reached the ground. The well-lit edge, however, allowed a few rays of Titan Yodkheim to fall upon their serious faces. Before them stood the burial ground of the ancient highborn. A stone-walled cemetery with the same centuries-old marble slabs and mounds of forefathers who had been the continent's explorers. Behind them, a mysterious crypt was in a light haze, waiting for rare guests. Five feet high and with a massive colonnade, it could have rivaled the small walls of the First Gate that stood on the road in front of the Fortress of Rukh. Only here the archway led not to the last Lands of Light, but somewhere deep in the centuries, into the impenetrable darkness.

The fog was not uniform. It flowed like a marshmallow, parting under their footsteps, swirling along the trunks of trees, and creeping over the ground. The bottom layer floated and drifted right over the dirt as if it were smoking. The soil squelched and implied a swamp, in time safely hidden behind fall, moss, and bumps. The branches did not crunch underfoot, they remained damp in such depths of dark woods.

A man in black robes took the first step onto the cemetery ground, right through the masonry of a marble arch that had long ago collapsed. With the arc of his crossbow he cautiously beckoned the other man behind him and walked along the stone fence, leaving a direct path along the same stone path to the steps up to the colonnade in front of the crypt.

Serenity reigned over the ancient ruins. Centuries-old elms and oaks swayed on all sides from the wind walking through their crowns here. The leaves murmured, shimmered, whispered. But the travelers shunned going out into the open, they walked along the masonry fence along the edge of the burial grounds. This fence, heavily pierced by roots, had been the only barrier to the darkness since the cemetery had been here. On three sides, surrounding the space of the buried, it served as a solid defense that had stood there for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. On the last, fourth side, there in front, stood the crypt, a gaping passageway leading down into the depths of darkness. Two rows of massive columns, right and left, gradually protruded from the golden haze of mist. They stood on a level elevation of slabs. And behind the immense columns rose equally smooth high walls that closed off the back side of the cemetery from the forest. They shaped the burial ground into a regular rectangle. And even the trees of the Dark Forest were afraid to enter it and preferred to avoid it.