Chapter 5: Caelen's Certainties and Rook's Good Silence

The Greywood announced itself before it arrived.

I noticed it first in the quality of the light — something thinning at the edges of ordinary afternoon, the shadows of the trees ahead lying at angles that did not quite match the sun's position. Then in the sound, which did not so much diminish as become selective: birdsong stopped at a boundary one could not mark, and was replaced by a deeper arboreal silence of the sort that suggests the trees themselves are listening and have been for some considerable time. Then in the smell, which was damp and silver and very old, like the inside of a library that had been sealed for a century and opened only this morning.

Caelen paused at the margin and looked at it the way a craftsman examines a piece of work he has not made but recognises.