Chapter 58: A Test of Faith.

The shadows seemed to be pressing in from all sides, choking out the world in a suffocating miasma of inky blackness. Chloe could feel her heart thundering a frantic staccato against her rib cage as she forged ahead, the frigid tendrils of dread coiling ever tighter around her insides. She murmured more to reassure herself than anything else, so her packmates flanking her wouldn't really need any directions at all, their heavy fur brushing against her legs as they followed on silent paws. "The ranger station should just be through those trees." Her voice seemed small and brittle in the oppressing silence over the forest. Gone were the natural ambiances she had become so attuned to over the years—the spirited cadence of birdsong, the ambient hymns of scurrying life underfoot, the reassuring whispers of the canopy swaying in gentle zephyrs. Here, all such vitality had been replaced by an unnatural void, where the borderlands between the world she had fled and the realm she now call