The emerald tide did not merely occupy the room; it devoured it. The mist was thick, viscous, and carried a shimmering, oily sheen that clung to every surface it touched. It hissed against the silver-inlaid furniture and bubbled against the enchanted stone walls, but its most lethal property was not its acidity. It was its fragrance—the cloying, suffocating scent of rotting lilies and ancient, stagnant water.
As the first tendrils of the fog breached the sanctuary of the royal bedchamber, the air itself seemed to fracture. This was Viper's masterwork: "The Serpent's Whisper," a neuro-alchemical hallucinogen designed not to kill the body immediately, but to dissolve the mind from the inside out.
