The air changed the moment we crossed the invisible threshold into the Whispering Glades. Behind us lay the Blood-Crag territory, a jagged, soot-stained wasteland of civil war and Lucien's grey-eyed Forsaken. But ahead, the world seemed to have been preserved in a pocket of ancient time.
The grey haze of the continent did not penetrate here. Instead, a soft, perennial mist clung to the forest floor, glowing with a faint, bioluminescent silver. The trees were not the twisted, petrified giants of the Iron-Root Valley; they were weeping willows and silver birches, their leaves shimmering with a dew that tasted of starlight. The silence here was not the heavy, suffocating silence of the Frozen Sea. It was a living thing—a thousand tiny whispers of the wind rustling through leaves, sounding like voices speaking in a language lost to the rest of the world.
