The Shattered Courtyard

You hit the cracked cobblestones hard, pain blooming through your palms. Around you, broken statues leer from the darkness — kings and saints worn featureless by centuries of shadow. The air is cold and wrong, carrying a smell like extinguished candles and old grief.

They drift between the ruins in slow, purposeful arcs: shadow-wraiths, their forms half-dissolved into the dark, trailing silence like a wound. Where they pass, the frost thickens. The palace spire rises at the courtyard's far end, impossibly close and impossibly distant.