Morning comes cold and gray beneath the party’s makeshift lean-to, canvas and scavenged blankets still clinging with last night’s smoke. The little fire has sunk into a bed of coals, and the ground around it is littered with what should have been impossible: the scraped-clean remnants of a full pot roast meal, manifested from an emerald-green stone pulled from inside a slain mutant bear.

The discovery had felt like a miracle the night before. The stone did not simply “create” food. It responded to a unified, obsessive thought. When the group committed to the same image, the same smell, the same certainty, it made substance out of imagination. They ate like the starving, because they were starving, and for a brief stretch of time it felt like salvation.

But waking proves the cost.

The meal does not vanish from their bellies. Their stomachs feel full. And yet a ravening craving blooms anyway, not the clean, honest hunger of an empty gut, but a compulsive itch inside the mind, a relentless insistence that food must continue to enter the mouth.

As they stir and take stock, the compulsion grabs Katya, Josiah, and even Reginald.

They lick plates. They pick at crumbs in the dirt. They scrape fat from the pot with their fingers. They pull morsels from wool and fabric, scavenging for taste that is already gone. It is frantic and humiliating, like watching grown adults become animals around a dead campfire. John, the only one not seized by it, backs away and watches with a hand near his blade, unsettled by how wrong it looks.

Only when every scrap is gone does the compulsion ease. Those affected “come back” as if nothing happened, but the shame sticks to Josiah like grease under fingernails. He is a chaplain, a decorated soldier, a man who has practiced discipline and decorum. Whatever the stone did to them, it did not ask permission.

The scene echoes something they saw before: a wrecked cart on the road, stripped so thoroughly that even flour dust was gone. Bones picked clean. Cans licked empty. Human remains among the debris.

When Josiah finally voices it, it lands like a stone in the stomach: they are repeating the same pattern.

If the emerald stone can feed, what else can it turn them into?

They speak it aloud in halting pieces. Maybe the thing that ravaged that cart was not a monster at all, but desperate survivors. Maybe a group like them found a stone like this and used it as a shortcut to survive, until the shortcut began carving away their humanity. The cart’s bones suggest a grim progression: horse first, then people, then fewer people, until only one is left.

The party looks at each other differently after that. Not with hostility, but with dawning fear. They have food in their bellies and hunger in their minds. They have a miracle stone and the beginnings of a habit.

They decide, together, that they need real food. Not imagined meat. Not dreams made edible. Something that will not teach their bodies to crave blood and bones.

And in the quiet that follows, each of them becomes suddenly aware of what they are standing beside.

Josiah’s unnatural presence. John’s death-touched face that suggests sickness without dying. Katya’s scar and old knife injury that throb like memory.

Even Reginald, the dog, seems wrong in a new way. Not wrong like a mutation, but wrong like a mind behind the eyes.

The discomfort opens the door to memory, and memory hits Katya first.

The world tilts and the cold wilderness dissolves into heat-hazed streets.

Four weeks ago, minus two days, dawn breaks over Atlanta. Smoke rises in ugly pillars, the sky bruised with soot and red haze. A crowd has formed in the street, not a united crowd, but a ring of different hungers: some jeering like it is entertainment, others sobbing like it is a funeral.

In the center of them lies a woman in her own blood.

A dog is sprawled over her, snarling at anyone who approaches. He is cute in the way a dog can be cute right up until he bares his teeth. He guards the body with desperate ferocity, snapping and barking, refusing to let anyone touch her.

A young girl in the crowd cries so hard she can barely breathe. Her parents hover behind her, helpless. The woman on the ground is not just a stranger. She is someone.

Then a hooded man steps forward.

He wears a long, heavy duster and keeps his face hidden, but his confidence changes the crowd’s tone immediately. Some people watch him like he is the next idiot about to get bitten. Others stare like they almost recognize him and are afraid of what recognition would mean.

He approaches the dog without flinching.

Reginald’s growl rises, his teeth flash, his body tenses to tear.

The man reaches out with a gloved hand anyway. When the dog does not calm, the man slowly removes the glove, exposing fingertips that are blackened and shriveled, like they were burned from the inside out.

The change is instant.

Reginald’s snarl softens. His eyes widen. His tail gives the smallest wag.

The man speaks, low and intimate, like a prayer meant for one listener.

“Hashmiji. It’s me.”

Katya, on the ground, wakes into the memory like she wakes into pain. She looks up at the hooded man and for a heartbeat the shadow parts just enough to reveal his eyes.

She knows those eyes.

Her brother Yuri.

The girl in the crowd scrambles to her mother’s body, shaking her, patting her face, refusing to accept the stillness. “Mama, mama,” she pleads, dragging denial across the street like a blanket that cannot warm the dead.

Katya’s rage rises like fire. Where were you? Why weren’t you here?

Yuri’s answer is fractured. He speaks of a sickness, something that took him down, something that forced absence. Even as he tries to explain, he pulls the glove back on, hiding the burned hand like a secret.

The moment becomes sharper, more violent, because Yuri’s presence is not just reunion. It is a collision with the truth of what has happened to him.

Katya sees it in pieces: the blackened fingertips, the way Reginald reacts to him like family, the way Yuri’s shadow seems too deep for the morning sun.

The memory is not kind. It drags her through grief without pause.

She remembers the aftermath: Yuri dying, not in a clean way, but in a way that feels like an inner fire consuming him. She remembers trying to roll him, trying to stop what cannot be stopped, watching light build behind his eyes until it streams out like something escaping.

His last words land like a knife.

“Katya… I love you.”

Then his eyes burn out, and his body becomes ash where he lay.

Katya’s grief in the memory is not elegant. She screams. She sobs. She buries what remains in snow like the world is not already full of buried things.

And then the wilderness returns, the lean-to returns, the hunger returns, and Katya is left with the image of Yuri’s burned-out gaze fused behind her own.

But she is not the only one whose past rises in the cold.

The coals under the lean-to become coals in a ruined chapel.

Three weeks ago, minus three days, outside Philadelphia, a burned-out chapel stands like a broken tooth in the snow. Inside, hastily hung canvas tries to keep out the worst of the cold. A small fire fights to live in the hearth.

Josiah is there.

A man named Chip enters, leading an older woman. She carries a child wrapped tight in a blanket, cradled like an infant despite being far too big for that comfort. The woman sobs in a way that suggests she has been crying for days and has only now reached the part where the tears feel like knives.

Chip brings her to Josiah because Josiah is what remains of “help” in a world that has burned all its churches.

Josiah does what he can. He speaks to her gently. He tries to offer structure, ritual, meaning, anything that might turn catastrophe into something survivable. But the grief is heavy and uncooperative, and the dead child in her arms is an argument that prayer cannot easily answer.

The memory paints Josiah’s role clearly: he is not just a man with a weapon. He is a man people bring their broken lives to, because they do not know what else to do.

And in the present, that same man has just licked grease from his fingers like an animal because a green stone insisted.

The contrast leaves him quiet when the memory fades.

The party breaks camp, not because they feel ready, but because the wilderness offers no patience.

They follow their compass toward smoke on the skyline, something they spotted before the night’s miracles and shame. They travel through fog of their own making at first, the lingering consequence of the stone’s power twisting the air. When they finally emerge from the cloud, sunlight hits their faces like a reminder that the world still has rules, even if those rules are cruel.

The smoke is closer now.

As they approach, rooftops begin to rise from the winter haze. It looks like a good-sized small town, and from a distance it almost promises shelter.

Then they get close enough to see that the smoke is not one fire.

It is everywhere.

It rises from multiple points across the town, a quilt of destruction instead of a single disaster. The party has seen this kind of place already: abandoned streets, ransacked homes, and that same disturbing signature of hunger. The kind that strips a place down to bare wood and bone.

They move in carefully, keeping their spacing, watching windows and alleys, eyes drawn to any movement.

And as they step into the ruin, the wilderness reminds them it is not empty.

At some point on the approach, the party hears footfalls that are not their own.

It is not the delicate crunch of distant animals. It is heavy, uncaring movement pounding through snow and ash, stopping, starting, testing the air like a predator deciding whether to commit.

Katya signals for silence and sends Reginald out with a command, telling him to search.

Reginald hesitates.

Not the hesitation of a dog confused by a command, but the hesitation of someone who understands danger and does not want to walk into it. His eyes hold an intelligence Katya is not used to seeing, like words trapped behind an animal skull.

Katya insists.

Reginald obeys, bounding over rolling hills, disappearing and reappearing as the terrain dips. The party waits, listening to the rhythm of his movement, tension climbing with every second he is out of sight.

When Reginald finally stops on a ridgeline and points, rigid and focused, the party closes in.

Reginald begins backing away from whatever he has seen, his eyes locked, his body telegraphing fear.

Then the footfalls explode into motion.

Something is coming fast from the far side of the ridge, crunching through snow and ash in a heavy sprint.

The party snaps into readiness.

Katya tries to angle Reginald away from a direct line, calling for him to veer so whatever is charging will not slam into him head-on. John listens hard, trying to read what the sound is. It is bipedal. A person running, not a beast on four legs.

Josiah shifts position to avoid friendly fire. John prepares his saber. Katya readies what she can.

And beneath all of it, the strange new magic they have touched begins to stir again, volatile and uncertain.

John opens his book and calls for a weapon, asking the pact-magic to form a rifle for him. Something useful. Something that can reach out before the thing reaches them.

Katya infuses a revolver cartridge with blood and dawn, hiding the light so it does not make her a beacon in the snow.

Reginald howls.

The howl is not just sound. It carries something. A pressure in the air, a swell of power that rises from the dog’s throat and touches Katya in a way she has never felt before. It is as if Reginald is not only warning the world, but calling to it.

Then the runner crests the ridge.

A humanoid figure bursts across the ridgeline, frantic, fast, moving like desperation has replaced all restraint.

When she comes into full view, the party sees what she really is.

She was once beautiful, likely in her mid-twenties. Now she is hollowed out. Skin sunk tight to bone. Teeth sharpened into something like fangs. Eyes black and dead, not merely bloodshot, but like ink has filled the sockets and erased the whites entirely.

Drool ropes down her chin.

She is locked onto Reginald with absolute focus, as if the dog is the only food left in the world.

She barely acknowledges the party. In her mind, they are either obstacles or nothing.

Reginald does what he can. He keeps moving, baiting, staying just out of reach, pulling her along a path that draws her away from immediate contact while giving the party angles.

The party commits.

Hex-magic lashes out. Weapons come up. The fight becomes a scramble of movement and grim necessity, because the woman is not “attacking” in a tactical way. She is hunting.

In the chaos, the party sees more evidence that the green stone’s influence is not isolated. This woman has the same wrongness threaded through her. The same hunger. The same unnatural persistence.

When they finally bring her down, it is not clean.

She is tangled in coagulated blood-like tendrils of magic as she dies, bound in a way that turns her into a grotesque puppet. When the party tries to move her body, the binding nearly tears her apart. Her mouth hangs open. Her eyes stay wide. A pool of blood reforms beneath her as the magic loses cohesion, as if the world itself is trying to decide whether to keep pretending this was once human.

And from her wounds, a faint green glow drips like sick light.

The party does what desperate survivors do.

They search her.

Josiah and Katya dissect the corpse, looking for what they have come to fear and rely on: another emerald stone. The woman’s stomach is filled with non-food, a diet of bark, rocks, pennies, broken glass, and human teeth. A catalogue of starvation and madness.

At first, they cannot find the source of the glow.

Then Katya realizes why.

The fight has already ripped it loose.

With renewed digging and a moment of eerie “help” from Reginald himself, Katya finds it, dragged up and out during the violence and lodged near the back of the skull.

She pulls free a glowing emerald-green stone, twin to the one they already carry.

For a moment, the stone in Katya’s hand feels like victory.

Then the craving in her chest reminds her what victory costs.

The party debates its use. They talk about what else it might do. If it can make a meal, can it make transportation? Ammunition? Something that saves them from walking and hunger without turning them into monsters?

No one has an answer. Only theories.

They take the stone anyway.

Because they do not have the luxury of purity.

With the new stone in their possession and a conjured draft horse already pulled into existence to haul what they can, the party pushes into the smoking town.

It is a familiar ruin.

Buildings stand, but their insides have been turned out. Food is gone. Personal effects are scattered and broken. Jars smashed and licked clean. Cans pulled open. Everything of value either stolen or consumed.

They split their attention across multiple houses, balancing urgency against risk. John moves with intent toward a larger house at the end of a block, the last house on the left, drawn there by instinct and the possibility that “bigger” means “more left behind.”

Katya, meanwhile, is not fully steady. Whether from injury, exhaustion, or the way memory and whiskey are entangled in her veins, she drinks from her flask as she moves. Reginald stays near her, anchored to her side like he knows she is one bad moment away from falling apart.

The town feels wrong in the quiet way. Not just abandoned, but emptied.

And then Katya makes a drunk decision.

She turns sharply and walks into the wrong house.

Katya steps through a doorway and the world drops out beneath her.

The floor collapses into a cellar with a sudden crash. For a heartbeat she is half-hanging, half-falling, grabbing at a table, legs scrambling for purchase above a hole yawning into darkness.

Josiah rushes to help, grabbing her arms, hauling her up with effort. Katya kicks and scrambles and claws her way back onto solid ground.

Inside, the house is just another version of the same story: ransacked, broken, scraped clean. The only thing left intact is the evidence of absence.

Katya, still unsteady, still fueled by whiskey and grief, looks around and sees it clearly. Nothing edible. Not even scraps. The hunger that haunted their campfire has haunted this town too.

The party’s split becomes more dangerous in the moment.

John continues toward the intended house at the end of the block, reluctant to abandon his goal even as the others stumble into chaos behind him.

Katya slumps against a burned-out wall outside, sliding down to sit, scratching Reginald behind the ears while she keeps drinking. Yuri’s eyes, burning out, will not leave her mind. She drinks like she can drown a memory.

Josiah tries to reorient, moving through the wreckage, trying to regroup.

And somewhere in the street, something runs.

Katya hears heavy footfalls charging straight at her.

A shadowy figure comes into view, sprinting full tilt across the ruined expanse. It does not move like someone who wants to talk. It moves like someone who wants to reach her, hit her, grab her, or kill her.

Katya reacts, dragging herself from the comfort of the wall, trying to bring whatever readiness she has left into her hands.

The party’s scattered positions snap into motion.

Josiah attempts to cross the broken floor gap in the house and missteps, his movement awkward in the chaos. He slips, the world lurching again, and he crashes down into the cellar with a thud.

The crash is loud, immediate, and terrible in a town full of empty echoes.

Katya, hearing it, forces her body into action. She tells Reginald to guard her back and throws herself to the ground at the cellar hole, reaching down to grab Josiah and pull him up.

Before Josiah can even fully stand, unseen hands seize his shoulders. Katya’s grip locks in. She hauls with desperate strength, yanking his lanky, seven-foot frame up and out of the hole in a single ugly motion, dragging him back into the daylight.

As they spill out into the street, John sees them, realizing how close the situation has come to fracturing completely.

And the shadowy runner is still out there.

John reaches the large house he intended to search, the last house on the left. It is damaged like the others, but its size suggests there may be more than scraps left behind. He moves with care, weapon ready, senses sharpened by the constant fear that every door hides a hungry thing.

Inside, the ruin repeats itself: walls missing, rooms gutted, evidence of frantic searching, the same sickness of consumption.

But the house is not entirely empty.

Sounds and signs hint at presence. Not monsters, not immediately, but people.

John presses further, driven by the same reason they came into town at all: if there are survivors here, they need to know whether those survivors are threat, help, or both.

Eventually, the party’s attention converges on a different kind of discovery.

Not food.

Not stones.

A basement with a fire.

Inside, two figures hunker near warmth: an older man wrapped in layers and a younger boy, both looking like they have survived by being small and quiet in a world that hunts the loud.

The meeting is tense. It is never “safe” to find other people anymore, because other people might be starving the way the party almost became starving.

Conversation stumbles forward anyway.

The party checks gear, confirms what they still have, what might have been lost in the scramble. They try to project calm without pretending calm is real.

The older man watches them like a man on a knife’s edge, measuring every movement. The boy stares in a way that suggests he has learned too early what happens when adults make mistakes.

The party’s presence triggers something in the house, a distant disturbance in the street or the wind or the ruin.

The old man’s head snaps toward the sound.

The boy’s posture changes instantly, recognition flickering across his face like a reflex.

The party’s eyes follow his gaze.

The boy lifts his hands.

Flame erupts from his palms, a gout of fire thrown into the direction of the disturbance, casting flickering light across the ruined interior.

Everyone turns to see what he has targeted.

And the session ends on that moment, the fire still burning in the air, the promise of whatever has come next hanging in the smoke.