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GRAY ONE

The granite was cold and rough against the gray-cloaked ranite, from the bones of the earth itself He traced barely perceptible seae blocks of the wall It was the seams, he believed, that held the key The key to the wall’s destruction

The wall towered above hiht It was many feet thick, and it followed Sacoridia’s southern border for hundreds of miles, from the East Sea to Ullem Bay in the west It protected Sacoridia and the rest of the lands froue as Blackveil Forest

The wall had endured for a thousand years It had been built after the Long War at the turn of the First Age For a thousand years, the denizens of the dark forest had grown restless, had festered, trapped behind the wall

Now the Gray Onethese night them slowly Slowly at first

The as bound with such deep ic was ancient and powerful, even for the works of those long-ago humans Today humans understood none of it They knew little of what their ancestors had been capable of Nor did they knohat they, the citizens of present-day Sacoridia, were still capable of

A good thing

He brushed the layers of ic had been ranite fro, and place spells not only to ensure that the wall stood for all ti it

Oh, the spell songs the stonecuttersas they hammered drills into the rock and refined the reat accoenerations of humans to complete A pity it must be destroyed

The Gray One smiled beneath the shadows of his hood He would return the world to a state it hadn’t known since before the Long War, far beyond the First Age, a time lost to memory; a time when huaanized religions Just superstition and darkness During the Black Ages, as that long-ago tiic than they did today

The Gray One looked up The pink clouds of daere fading, and birds squabbled in the trees His collaborators would be growing iht to be impatient: they were mortal

He closed his eyes and shielded his of quarryuefrom the earth’s bones; it wove strands of resistance, barriers, and containment