The storm had already passed when they woke.

Cold wind moved over the High Moor, flattening the grass and dragging low clouds across a sky the colour of old iron. Rain still fell in thin, stinging sheets. The air smelled of wet earth, blood, and the fading trace of incense long since burned away.

They rose together from the wreckage of the caravan.

Chains hung loose at their wrists and ankles, the locks opened, cloth wrapped where metal had bitten skin. Their robes were white once — ceremonial, penitential — now soaked through with mud and darkened blood. Some of it was theirs. Most of it was not.

They knew each other.

Not as strangers met by chance, but as companions long travelled together. Names came easily: Dobby, Huepucha, Maudie, Pong, Zhilak. Familiar voices. Familiar movements. Familiar trust.

But when they reached back for the road that had brought them here, memory simply stopped.

Nine months of their lives had been cut away as cleanly as cloth beneath a blade.

The High Moor stretched around them — broken ground, standing stones half-sunk into peat, wind and ruin without road or shelter. Among the dead lay their belongings, arranged as if chosen: a weapon, a book, a symbol, a tool. Only what their hands would need.

And among the torn packs, a small white-and-grey kitten stirred and cried for warmth.

One dying monk saw them standing and whispered a single word before his breath failed:

“Go.”

Across the moor, horns answered the wind.
And somewhere beyond them, hounds began to bay.

⸻

They fled the open ground ahead of the storm and found refuge in the shattered remains of an old watchtower. There they made their stand, and when the hunting dogs came, they met them with discipline and steel. The beasts fell quickly — but the answering horns were already turning toward them.

Beneath the tower they found an altar and, hidden below it, a narrow passage leading into darkness. They descended, and the stone sealed behind them.

The tunnel opened into a dry gully.

Moments later, the storm surge came.

Water roared down from the moor, flooding the passage and cutting them off from whatever had hunted them. Through the night they moved again and again as the rising waters swallowed each place they tried to rest.

By morning they had nothing left but their weapons and the grey robes that chafed against bare skin — penitents’ garments for sins they could not remember.

To the north and east, the land was gone beneath a new torrent.
The horns still sounded there, faint and searching.

To the south, a thin thread of smoke rose against the low sky.

They turned toward it.

⸻

The High Moor offered no easy passage.

In the mist they encountered watchers who did not blink — serpent-blooded slavers measuring them for chains. Steel answered silence, and the strangers fell. Whatever trade had brought them to the moor ended there.

Not long after, the land itself demanded a choice.

Two children burst from the fog, running blindly, terror at their heels. The beast that hunted them died beneath the party’s blades, its hide taken as proof of the kill — and carried, raw and dripping, across the grey miles.

With the children as guides, the moor changed.

They crossed a hollow bright with wildflowers untouched by storm or track, a place where the land seemed to remember gentler days. They found the remains of a small camp — a careful fire, a single grey bedroll matching their own robes, abandoned without struggle.

Someone like them had been here.

Someone had left in a hurry.

Someone had not come back.

⸻

At last they reached the smoke.

The cottage of Thom and Ellyn was poor but warm, its hearth bright against the long grey of the moor. Fear greeted them first — weapons noticed before robes, suspicion before reverence — but the children’s words settled the house.

“They’re monks,” they said.

And so the strangers were fed.

That night, for the first time since waking, there was warmth, music, and human voices not carried by wind. Maudie’s songs filled the low room. The kitten slept by the fire. Outside, the moor lay dark and endless.

Thom and Ellyn spoke of what they knew.

Dragonspear was a ruin, haunted and avoided.
The monks who once crossed the moor had not been seen in years.
A hamlet lay to the south.
A young wyvern hunted the western skies.

And the Misty Forest…

People went in and came back changed.
Or came back years older.
Or never came back at all.

Once, Thom said, he had found ruins there — not broken, but grown over, stone shaped like flowing water. From one carving he had made the pendant Ellyn still wore.

He had thought it beautiful.

She still did.

⸻

That night the travellers slept on the cottage floor, full and warm, more at peace than they could remember being.

Outside, the High Moor stretched on in every direction.

The horns had fallen silent.

For now.