Evangeline's eyes were wide, dark circles staining the skin beneath her beautiful golden irises. Her exquisite face was marred with soot and dust, and yet… even then, it did nothing to diminish her beauty. When Damon said he was going to make her walk for those mana cores, he wasn't kidding.
Her head throbbed from the strain of using mana without pause… her legs ached from the unending battles… she hadn't closed her eyes or rested in four days.
That's right—four days.
That's how long they had gone without rest. Four days of fighting, surviving, barely clinging to their sanity. Beyond the mental strain and trauma of battle, they had to endure the presence of things… strange and eldritch… horrors that twisted the world around them.
People were surprisingly… adaptable. Even unimaginable fear and terror—after enough time—just became normal. Maybe that's what made humans terrifying in their own right… or maybe they'd all just gone mad.
