I’m taking this one a little slowly because it’s the first week of school for the kids.
it was really a shame there didn’t seem to be anybody around to try it on. Guess it really is an abandoned road, he thought. Not even a peasant’s hut or hunter’s shack. That worried him, more than a little. Why was the road abandoned, anyway?
As the shadows lengthened, he started looking for somewhere to hole up. Somewhere away from any large or aggressive beasts, although… there weren’t any animals on this road, either. No squirrels or insects — and all of the birdsong sounded like it was a ways off. It was like everything that could be staying away, was staying away.
But that wasn’t the strange part, really. What was strange — and oddly unnerving — was the lack of any sort of malignancy. You could always tell when an area was suffering from, say, lifebane: the plants would be sickly and twisted, the air would be foul, what light there was would always feel wrong. Or there’d be strange visions out of the corner of your eyes, or malignant whispering from the shadows, or what have you. The typical manifestations of capital-E Evil were well known, so it was a little odd to have the absence of animal life without anything like a miasma of horror, or so forth. It was putting Gregor off his stride.