After dinner, Pike began to play a few songs on his harmonica. He heard the songs and howls from the beasts of the wood echoing among the trees, but they didn't seem so scary to him by fire light. He even tried to play along with them a few times, but their songs seemed too sad, too abrupt. Pike preferred the more lively pieces he'd picked up from other travelers in the settlements along the Merchant's Highway. They gave him a sense of excitement he'd only known among his dreams and even more so when he played them himself. They felt full of hope and life, he thought. But after a while he grew tired from the days travel and laid down to watch the fire die to a warm ember until he finally fell asleep and into the soft cloud of dream.

As he slept a fog began to roll into the wood like encroaching sea foam. The forest floor disappeared into swirling grays and whites, and the roots of the trees seemed lost. The cricket chirps and toad croaks muffled and suffocated under the blanket of fog and the entire wood fell into a delusive silence.

The world seemed asleep for a time until the lonely padding of bare feet and a wild heavy breathing filled the thick air. A cloth-sack cowled figure sifted through the fog, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on 4, barking out clouds of heaved breath as it moved. Tearing at branches and bark with dark heavy limbs, it seemed aimless, exhausted, wild. Then suddenly it's hooded head caught something in the air. The smokey warmth of charred wood tickled it's nose. It's yellow eyes fixed now on a lingering red glow in the distance. It began to move towards it as it's breath quickened with excitement and hunger.

At the camp Pike slept heavily as the dark red fire crackled on it's death bed and the fog and chill of the wood circled the camp, keeping it's distance and waiting. But the dark cowled figure had no time for such pleasantries and stumbled out of the trees into the vale.