The group walked in silence.
Not the heavy kind, like after a fight — but the exhausted kind. The kind that settles in when your body keeps moving long after your mind has shut down. Dirt caked their boots. Blood and ash streaked their arms. No one had eaten in what felt like a day and a half.
The air was thick with mist now, cool and strange, but peaceful. Birds chirped overhead. Trees bent slightly inward, like they were guiding them.
And then… they saw it.
Tucked between two jagged cliffs and wrapped in ivy, stood an old, crumbling stone church. Its steeple was cracked. One of the doors leaned off its hinges. But even from a distance, something about it felt… safe.
Shoto stopped at the edge of the clearing, eyes narrowed. "That's not a trap, is it?"
Elizabeth stepped beside him. "It doesn't feel like one."
Pate muttered, "I don't care if it's haunted. If there's a floor and four walls, I'm going inside."
⸻
They entered slowly.
The doors creaked open, revealing a single large room lined with old wooden pews and faded stained-glass windows. A layer of moss covered much of the floor, but candles lined the altar — already lit. Their flames didn't flicker.
There was no dust.
No smell of decay.
It was warm. Still.
Gage walked ahead and dipped his finger into a half-filled bowl of water near the door. "It's clean. Fresh."
Riley raised an eyebrow. "This place shouldn't exist."
Brandon checked a side room — and returned with wide eyes. "There's food. Preserved. Like it was just cooked and left for us."
Elizabeth turned toward the altar.
The journal was glowing faintly in her bag — pulsing once, as if acknowledging something.
"We're supposed to rest here," she whispered.
⸻
And so, for the first time since arriving in Valoria, they did.
They sat in pews and on the floor, sharing pieces of food, slowly patching themselves up.
Pate cracked the silence with a tired grin. "Weirdly cozy for a cursed dimension."
KJ didn't laugh — but he nodded.
Shoto leaned back against one of the pillars, Elizabeth sitting close beside him, and for just a moment…
it almost felt like home.
⸻
Outside, the wind calmed.
Above, the clouds began to part.
But something — far beyond the forest, buried beneath the land — kept whispering.
Waiting.
Watching.