The impact never came.
A sudden, crushing force seized my torso, freezing me in mid-air.
"HERMIONE!"
Father's voice roared through the mist, carrying the concussive force of a physical blow.
The abrupt volume jolted me violently out of my panicked demeanour. I gasped for air, my boots softly touching the mud as Father's wandless levitation charm released me. I spun around wildly, my vinewood wand raised and trembling as I frantically searched the ruined village for the weeping woman, but the mist was entirely empty. There was no one.
I looked up at Father, who remained seated atop his own violently shifting horse, his hand outstretched. My chest heaved as shame flushed my cheeks.
"I—I apologise," I stammered, my voice cracking. "I was not paying attention. I heard her again."
Father's emerald eyes blazed with terrifying severity. "Being distracted in this situation will get you killed, Hermione. Or significantly worse."
I flinched at the harsh reprimand, but I knew he was entirely correct. I slowly lowered my wand, finally noticing the absolute stillness that had fallen over our immediate surroundings. My mount was gone.
I looked around the empty, fog-choked ruins. "Where did the horse go?"
Father stared into the impenetrable grey, his expression hardening into stone. "It went mad."
He then firmly grasped the reins of his own unsettled mount. "Soon this one will as well. Better to let him go now than to await that dreaded moment."
He dismounted swiftly, moving to the horse's flank and striking its hindquarter with a loud slap. The gelding let out a panicked neigh and bolted directly into the mist. Within seconds, it entirely vanished from sight, and even the heavy sound of its galloping hooves was suffocated by the unnatural fog.
Father turned to look at me, his emerald eyes severe in the gloom. "Stick close. Do not go wandering, no matter what voices you hear. We are not alone here, Hermione, and the mist deeply desires us to be singled out."
I gulped, my throat painfully dry, and nodded. I fiercely dragged my Occlumency shields back into place, forcing myself to focus entirely on the broad sweep of Father's coat as he moved forward at a steady, deliberate pace.
We walked through the damp remains of the village, our boots sinking into the slick, diseased mud. Desperation gnawed at my composure, forcing my eyes to dart toward the collapsed husks of the thatched huts. What I saw made my skin crawl. Thick, pulsing vines and bloated, sickly undergrowth had violently wrapped themselves around the decaying timber. It did not look like natural flora reclaiming the earth; the vines looked almost muscular, greedily constricting the ruins as if attempting to strangle the very memory of the people who once lived here.
"Nature claims that which humans no longer want," Father voiced, his tone cutting through the suffocating silence. "Eight hundred years of utter isolation from humanity have made the Rhoynish cities ripe for this aggressive takeover."
We eventually trudged past the splintered remnants of the village boundary, stepping back into the untamed wild.
Father halted, turning to face me. "Since we can no longer accurately ascertain the time nor the passage of the sun within this mist, it is best we establish our camp here for the cycle."
"Why can we not just fly over the mist towards Chroyane?" I asked, the sheer exhaustion and creeping paranoia making my voice tight. "You have the power. Why must we slog through this cursed mud?"
Father sighed heavily. "You have not noticed it yet?"
"Noticed what?"
"The mist is actively reducing your ability to control your magic the more you attempt to wield it," Father explained grimly. "Your Occlumency shields have been violently subverted time and time again today. The mist is intentionally breaking the steady, natural rhythm of your internal mana. The phantom wailing you hear is a direct symptom of this psychic intrusion. You must be mindful, daughter. Sustaining flight at this juncture requires continuously injecting massive amounts of my mana outside my body. The mist will eagerly latch onto it and corrupt the spell almost immediately. I could lose flight while we are a mile in the sky, or mere feet above the jagged rocks. We absolutely cannot take such catastrophic risks yet. I need time to devise a method to insulate my mana from the mist's corruption before I dare perform greater magic."
I nodded, a fresh wave of terror washing over me. A simple weather phenomenon—something so entirely unassuming in the rest of the world—was actively hunting us, specifically targeting the very magic that kept us alive.
Father began setting up our meagre camp beside the ruined boundary of a thatched hut. I sank down beside the damp timber, drawing my wand with a trembling hand. I needed a fire, but the thought of casting a spell now felt deeply dangerous.
I pointed my wand at a pile of gathered brush, but instead of hastily incanting, I focused my mind precisely on the flow of my magic.
"Incendio."
I cast the spell, intentionally feeding the barest minimum of mana into the incantation. The moment the magic left the tip of my wand, I felt it.
It was horrifying. The grey mist instantly surged forward like a starving beast. It swarmed the invisible current of my mana, violently tearing at the spell's structure before breaking it down entirely. A sputtering, anaemic flame managed to leap from my wand and catch the dry brush, but only because I had cast it so rapidly. The mist continued to aggressively claw at the edges of the newly formed campfire, trying to corrupt the heat itself.
The terrifying realisation settled in short, violent bursts of mana could survive just long enough to take physical effect, but the more prolonged a spell was, the greater the catastrophic loss to the corruption.
"You are doing exceptionally well to adapt to these circumstances," Father complimented softly, having watched my grim experiment. "Small, rapid bursts of mana. The faster the spell is cast, the lesser the window for corruption. That is precisely how we must fight this environment."
Just as the words left his lips, a sudden, wet rustling violently tore through the dead silence.
The sound came from the twisted, overgrown trees just beyond our campfire, heavily masked by the churning grey. My heart stopped.
Without a single sound of warning, a shape lunged from the mist directly toward me.
It moved with horrifying, unnatural speed. In the span of a single heartbeat, the firelight illuminated a terrifying visage. I saw a humanoid face, its skin crusted and grey like diseased stone. But it was the eyes that froze the blood in my veins. They were completely, milky white, utterly devoid of pupils, burning with a hollow, ravenous hunger.
A ragged, guttural hiss ripped from its throat as it sailed through the air, its stone-scaled hands reaching directly for my face.
The paralyzing horror of the ambush shattered my mind. I screamed, squeezing my eyes shut in primal terror as the Stone Man descended upon me.