Sienna-Rose had finally acquired the stretch of cursed land no one dared to touch for half a decade. It was a vast, ragged scar on the edge of the valley—land once fertile, rich with orchards and how people made a living, now nothing more than a rotting grave of twisted trees and blackened soil.
It had been abandoned since the last monster frenzy, when a wave of lesser and greater fiends surged through the southern reaches of the kingdom, slaughtering livestock and tainting everything they passed. The aftermath left something far worse than just burnt cottages or scattered bones.
Monster shards—the crystallized remnants of a creature's essence after death—had rained across the land like hail. Beautiful to look at, many of them glowed faintly with unspent magic. But their beauty was a lie. The shards bled corruption.
