The entrance to the abandoned mine resembled a gaping maw gnawed down to its skeleton by time, silently breathing the cold air of the depths, laden with the scent of ore and decay.
The moment Douglas and Lupin stepped into the abandoned mine, it was as though they had walked out of the noisy outdoors and into a vacuum beneath a glass dome.
Outside, the valley air still held the earthy tang of rain-soaked soil, the scorched stench left by holy light, and the strange, sweet fragrance of aconite.
But here, in the mine's main passage, there was no smell of blood, no ozone from lingering magic, not even the rank musk of a werewolf tribe's habitation.
The air was dead.
There was no dust, no debris. Even the moss that should have grown on the rock walls after years of dampness had been scrubbed away.
That cleanliness was more unsettling than a heap of corpses.
It was not natural cleanliness, but a suffocating blankness left after every trace had been forcibly erased.
"This... is impossible."
Lupin lowered his voice, as though the dead air had swallowed the echo of every word.
His brows knitted tightly. He closed his eyes, his nostrils twitching slightly as he tried to catch any hint of a clue in the deathly stillness.
Yet he could smell nothing.
No, more precisely, an invisible force had forcibly reset his sense of smell.
A powder hung in the air, colorless and odorless, yet like countless tiny, icy needles piercing his senses. It left his mind blank, with nothing but a buzzing in his ears and a nauseating, dry taste like chalk dust.
Frustration surged through him like a tide.
The tracking instinct he took the greatest pride in as a werewolf had become a complete joke here.