Chapter 5: Ancient Enemy
The mist curled low against the forest floor as Corvin moved, each step silent, measured.
The Verdant Shroud was thinning around him now, the signs of civilization, even fractured as it was, slowly returning.
He moved through it like a shadow. While his body stalked forward, his mind wandered.
Comparisons surfaced.
Memories, not from this world, but from a planet where men built their empires with steel and silicon rather than stone and sorcery.
Earth.
Corvin remembered the way technology had dominated everything there.Satellites peering down from orbit, drones humming through broken cities, data flowing invisibly through the air like blood through unseen veins.
He compared it now to Valtheris. A world that lived and breathed through magic instead of circuits.
Magic was infrastructure here.Magic was economy, politics, war, science, medicine, and superstition all twisted into one suffocating web.
It fascinated him.
Earth’s fictions had always portrayed magic romantically. Scholars raising armies of undead, healers knitting flesh back together with a touch, summoners bending eldritch beasts to their will.