Gradually, I felt dread and butterflies in my guts. The destruction seemed to fill the horizon. We retraced the long path back to where we started, decaying branches lashing out from the sides of the worn path. Horse and cartwheel imprints were long covered with withered leaves, perhaps nature itself embracing for the worst as the landscape became grim and colourless. Instead of insects creaking and birds chirping, only a lame wind with moments of silence seemed to talk with us. There wasn't even a smell in the air, a hint of ashes maybe but nothing hinting at previous life. If this was hell to us then it was the life of a colour-blind drifter who only knew death , total lack of life just beyond the village's old perimeter. Husks of trees seem to haunt and gasp with twisted trunks, arced over useless palisades and fencing to penetrate the grounds. "Damn. There goes my favourite bar." I took my eyes off a familiar building in the distance, I muttering and shedding a tear for a place that I didn't seem to care about until now.

While that was going on, we were getting rather unusually close to the dust's boundary. The sky became duller with each step we took, now only a few meters away. A few signs leading to nowhere were uprooted and cast onto the dust, the surrounding bushes stripped of vines and stones uncovered against the tide of grey. We were approaching an atmosphere of stillness and deafness, maddening to my senses as we figured out what next to do. "We're here. Let's grab the stuff quickly, this place is creeping me out." If one was daring enough, the edge of the dust seemed to wipe and clear away grass centimetre by centimetre, slowly creeping towards us. For a moment I felt a tightness in my arms, a little tense at odd figures in the distance. "Uh... there appears to be things living in the distance."

Just as I finished my sentence, I caught a massive glimpse of the princess seemingly betraying us to the greyness. She barely hesitated to push and thrust both Robert and Backstabs straight into the dust-laden ground, drawing my snarl and a quick flick of my knife against the drowned-out sun. "What the hell do you think you're doing?!" I spoke out, a rough tone grinding against my clean accent. What the others said and reacted though left a puzzled expression on my face, facts I never knew about as I wasn't involved with the group until much later.