POV: Gretchen Stinkford
The failure of the Shadow-Shaman at the Well of Whispers did not come as a shock. I felt his transition from flesh to ash like a distant, disappointing pop of a bubble. He had been a tool—blunt, arrogant, and ultimately disposable. While Jackson Reynolds was busy playing the hero beneath the mountain, and Amethyst Walker was exhausting her spirit to tether nodes that I had already marked for death, I was far to the south, where the earth screams in a language only the damned can translate.
I stood upon the Altar of the Shattered Moon, a jagged plateau deep within the Iron-Mist Valley that the pack-wolves feared to tread. The air here was not air; it was a pressurized soup of sulfur, necrotic energy, and the residual static of the "Killing Box."
"They think they h
