>>5410289It has been a long time since you dared to reminisce at such length about the Esoteric Fraternity. The memories provide some entertainment and distraction from your current situation and your weary journey. Weeks on horseback, through the petty kingdoms and principalities sworn to the Church, past vineyards and fields and villages. Away from the lands you have known your whole life.
Your mind is drawn back to reality when you pass the first of the great curtain walls, marking transition into the Charnel Lands. . The cursed land has no exact borders: it is surrounded by concentric walls that arbitrarily divide areas of increasing malignity, built over generations by the early Church in an attempt to contain the horrors of the World Father’s heartlands and delineate the old from the new.
With each wall you and your escorts pass, you notice some familiarity of the world is off kilter. The colour of the sky does not look right. The grass takes on a sickly tone. Sometimes the sounds of animals, and even the rustling trees and running water, suddenly falls silent, as if everything is hiding from an unseen predator.
Most obvious of these unnerving changers: <span class="mu-s">the Lurkers</span> become more common. You have never known a world where they are not ubiquitous, one or two always visible on the horizon, behemoth and unmoving, but as you plod deeper into the Charnel Lands you see more than ever before: mostly in the distance, but sometimes uncomfortably close to the road.
