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I cannot help but feel like an utter fool. Why I ever gave Tom the benefit of the doubt remains a mystery to me now, a lapse in judgment I should have known better than to make.

Today, after the long, wearisome drive that seemed to stretch on endlessly throughout the day, Tom approached me with that same irritating persistence. He was full of questions—questions about the Graywalkers. His curiosity appeared genuine enough on the surface at the time.

The notes I had provided to Sam and his men about the Graylands offered little in the way of explanation concerning those enigmatic beings themselves. At the time, I hadn't felt it necessary to burden them with such knowledge. After all, there seemed no reason to believe we would encounter them on this expedition.

Tom, in his usual curiosity, asked me about the Graywalkers—how they acted and what they looked like.

Being asked questions about Graywalkers sparked my passion as a scholar of these strange beings. And, I began to explain wholeheartedly about them.

I described the Graywalkers to him, attempting to paint a vivid picture of their appearance. I told them they were something akin to a giant-kin in stature—towering but with long, thin limbs. Their skin, though, was a smooth, pallid gray, like ash or stone, devoid of any hair. What truly set them apart, however, were their eyes—large and obsidian black, with no visible pupils, vast and expressionless.

Their heads were large and bulbous, almost disproportionate to the rest of their frame, giving them an alien and unnerving appearance. Three elongated fingers extended from each hand, and their feet, similarly, had only three toes. They stood upright, but unlike any human—they moved on digitigrade legs, similar to some beasts.

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The mere memory of seeing the sole Greywalker specimen preserved and encased in amber beneath the Obsidian Towers still sends a chill through me. There was something so strange about these beings.

From there, I began to share what scant knowledge we had gathered of the Graywalkers' culture—a subject that fascinated me, even if the details were elusive and fragmented. I had barely scratched the surface when Tom interrupted with a question so arrogant and shortsighted that it made my blood pressure spike. He asked, with a smugness that only the ignorant can provide, how one would go about killing a Graywalker, as if they were mere beasts to be hunted.

The question stirred a deep sense of frustration and anger within me, a surge of indignation I struggled to contain. It was infuriating to think that this inbred, unhuman, unthinking fool had shown even a moment’s interest in my field of study! His inquiry wasn’t born from curiosity or a desire to understand these ancient beings. No, it was the kind of brutish, instinctual thought that disregarded the mystery and complexity of their existence in favor of base violence.

He attempted to justify his question, claiming he merely wanted to know how we could better defend ourselves against the Graywalkers, but I wasn't having it. His defense was flimsy, nothing more than a poor excuse for his ignorant bloodlust. The truth is, the Graywalkers have never posed a threat to anyone—if anything, the opposite is closer to reality. Humans, with our fear of the unknown and our tendency to destroy what we cannot understand, are far more dangerous to the Graywalkers than they have ever been to us.

For a moment, I felt ashamed that I had even entertained the notion that he might be capable of genuine interest in my work, that beneath his vacant stares and crude comments there might be some flicker of intelligence. But this—this arrogant question—only confirmed what I had suspected all along: that Tom was an unworthy mind, the result of being from bad blood. The thought of discussing the Graywalkers any further with him made me feel as though I were wasting my breath.

I made it abundantly clear to both Tom and Sam that, on the off chance—one in a million—that we ever cross paths with a Greywalker, under no circumstances are we to harm it.