The northern valleys were not a graveyard. They were a fever dream.
Seth's Free Folk, hearts pounding with the twin fuels of fear and hope, crossed into the zone of permanent interference. Their tech died instantly—comms, scanners, even electric torches fizzling into uselessness. The air grew thick, silent, and heavy, pressing on their eardrums. The world became a study in monochrome greys and the eerie, pervasive glow of the strange lichen that clung to every surface, emitting a soft, sickly light.
It was Ken who saved them. His blindness, his reliance on a perception beyond the physical, became their compass. He couldn't "see" the psychic corruption as light or sound, but he could feel it as texture—a greasy, dissonant static in the air, dense in some places, thin in others.
