Chapter 1480 — The Vanished Nation
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
"Were there any omens when the fog appeared?" Maggie's voice came from across the way. "I mean short-term omens—we already know about the anomalies across the Kingdom of Violet over the past month."
"No omens," Hornet said, shaking her head. "The fog came all at once, without any warning. Night Owl and I were indoors at the time; we never even noticed when it descended, and only realized something was wrong when we looked out the window."
Maggie carefully noted these details, then pressed on: "The fog itself was harmless, correct?"
"Yes. We moved about in it as usual—it was nontoxic, harmless, odorless. I couldn't even feel its presence at all. It felt like some kind of... phantom, something that existed only to the eye, not a thing truly present in the real world."
"Mr. Mojin mentioned earlier that in the fog, very faint lights showed in the doors and windows of buildings, and that when a person turned their gaze toward them, blurred, shifting silhouettes would appear in those doors and windows—as if many twisted-limbed people were pressed against rough panes of crystal glass peering out. Is that so?"
"...Yes, and not only in the buildings—the carriages parked by the roadside too," Night Owl said beside her, recalling the details of the previous night. "Any enclosed space with transparent or translucent doors and windows produced those strange shadows. We suspect they are the 'citizens' who originally 'lived' in Prandel, and that in the fog they take on some... more essential form. Also, as you just said, these figures react to our gaze: 'they' only emerge when we look at those doors and windows, and the longer we look, the stranger their forms seem to become..."
Maggie nodded, silently recording the new details, then asked several more questions, bit by bit filling out the intelligence on last night's "Prandel fog." When she had finished, Mojin followed up at once: "Did the fog appear again while you were waiting for rescue? Or did any other anomalies occur?"
"...No," Hornet said, shaking her head as she thought. But then something seemed to strike her, and she quickly added, "Wait—after sunrise we did see some fog, not long after we got clear of 'Prandel.' Fog suddenly welled up on the stony beach, and Night Owl and I saw... the shopkeeper's figure emerge from it and say goodbye to us."
"...An unstable superposition state," Mojin said softly. "That must have been the final instant before the 'other world' severed its connection with reality."
As he spoke, the legendary adventurer slowly rose and lifted his eyes toward the island's interior. He saw the rubble-strewn shore stretching away in that direction; the former Prandel City had lain to the northwest of this stony beach, and that place was now an exceedingly vast wilderness, while due north of the beach stood a dense, verdant forest.
The forest was a shifting mass of shadow, as though even sunlight could scarcely pierce its outermost scrub—but something else drew Mojin's attention: there seemed to be no "fog" in that forest.
He did not mean the thick fog that had shrouded Prandel last night, but the "mist-locks" that the records said filled the forests throughout Violet's territory, never dispersing.
Before Prandel was swallowed, every intelligence officer reporting on the Kingdom of Violet had mentioned this mist. Their reports said that Violet was covered in dense forests, and that those forests were filled with a fog that never lifted year after year—a fog that seemed to possess transcendent power, able to cloud perception, bar a traveler's path, and even "banish" those who strayed into it back to the fog's entrance. Not even transcendents could pass through it.