We step forward together.
Out of New Jersey.
And into Nightfall.
Chapter 3
Alina
Nightfall
The first thing I notice is the silence.
Not the absence of sound—there’s plenty of that.
Wind sliding over stone.
Water running somewhere below.
Distant clangs from what might be quarries or forges.
No, this silence is different.
It’s the silence of ground that isn’t screaming.
Which, after working most of my adult life in New Jersey, is new.
We step out of the tunnel and into twilight, and for a second I forget how to breathe.
“Whoa,” I whisper.
We’re standing on a broad stone ledge halfway up a cliff face.
Above us, dark rock rears up in jagged spikes, crowned with something that looks a hell of a lot like a fortress carved straight into the mountain.
The Barrow.
The name enters my mind unbidden, it just appears. And I know this is Dagan’s home.
It doesn’t sit on the rock so much as grow out of it.
Towers and ramparts and arched windows are all fused seamlessly into the cliff, like someone coaxed the stone into this shape instead of building it.
Below, the land drops away in a series of broad terraces that curve out and down in gentle arcs—layer upon layer of cultivated earth forming a vast, stepped landscape.
The Verdant Strata, my brain supplies, unhelpfully dramatic.
And yeah. It fits.
Each terrace is different.
One is a riot of dark green crops with luminous seedpods that glow faintly like constellations fallen into the soil.
Another is scattered with trees whose trunks shimmer with veins of softly glowing sap.
Farther out, I see quarries cut like deep geometric wounds into the rock, blocks of stone stacked neatly beside them, waiting to be shaped or shipped.
The entire place hums.
