Night descended like velvet soaked in thick black ink, pressing heavily down.
Outside the camp, burning arrows set the piles of firewood hastily stacked that afternoon alight. They slowly became enormous, dancing braziers, their orange-red glow fighting back the darkness and brightly illuminating roughly a hundred meters of ground before the camp's wooden walls.
Beyond that light, however, lay pitch-black darkness that neither moonlight nor firelight could penetrate.
At the boundary between light and shadow, and even farther away in the shadows of the forest, countless cold, eerie green eyes with vertical pupils lit up.
They drifted like ghost lights, moving slowly amid the scalp-prickling sound of countless scales scraping over the ground.
Those sounds blended into a low, malevolent background noise that battered the ears and nerves of everyone inside the camp.
The Snake-Men had arrived, and in greater numbers than the players had expected. From the sounds alone, they knew the ground outside the camp was packed with those disgusting creatures.
The players gripped their muskets and blades nervously. They crouched behind the wooden walls, which stood only about two meters high, and aimed into the darkness outside, waiting for the ferocious charge they expected.
A minute passed...
Five minutes passed...
Ten minutes passed...
Yet the tidal wave of attackers they had anticipated never came.
The Snake-Men merely prowled along the very edge of the firelight. Their long, twisted silhouettes flickered in and out of sight, sometimes revealing bodies covered in dark scales, sometimes disappearing into the darkness.
They neither advanced nor retreated, simply fixing their countless cold eyes on the brightly lit camp.
"Fuck... what are they doing, milling around out there?"
One player could not help cursing under his breath, his fingers turning pale from gripping his weapon for so long.
"Waiting for us to drop