The sparser foliage up on top of the mountain was much easier to move through than the jungle below. It took me less than a half-mark to reach the stones I had spotted through the trees the night before.

As soon as I realized what I was looking at I sped up. These were stone buildings. My hopes soared as I ran to the first structure.

The overgrown doorway proved less than encouraging.

Creeping vines almost totally covered the entrance to the dwelling. Tearing through the vines, I peered inside. The interior was just as overgrown as the exterior had been. No one had lived here for a very long time.

Undaunted, I looked at the nearby buildings. I could see at least a dozen overgrown structures just from where I was standing. The buildings were lined up in a pair of neat rows. If a road had once run between them, it was now totally reclaimed by nature.

Trying to look inside each building, I found them each to be crumbling and overgrown. In the fourth one I looked inside, I spotted a grim sight.

The moss covered human skeleton in the corner didn’t suggest that things had gone well for this village.

With a much more dour mood, I moved past the row of vine choked dwellings. Beyond, I found more structures in a similar state of neglect. It was hard to tell how large the village had been, but it was clear it was long since abandoned.

Walking past yet more rows of ruined buildings, I wondered where everyone had gone. I only found the remains of a few people in my search.

If everyone were willing to put up with a few roommates, the entirety of Sanctuary Valley could have feasibly lived in this village. That was a lot of people to have simply vanished.

Such thoughts gave me some hope that a number of people could have feasibly relocated. Unfortunately I didn’t know why they would have chosen to do so. There wasn’t much to explain why the village would have suddenly been abandoned as far as I could find.

As I walked further into the village, the buildings grew larger. These more elaborate structures all seemed to be centered around an open area that I assumed was the village square.

Rounding the corner, I found a very likely reason that the village had been abandoned. There were bones in the village square.

A very, very large number of bones.

While many of the bones were human, most were not. It looked like hundreds of large, lizard-like creatures had died here.

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The bodies reminded me of the drake that had chased me a few days before, but were not quite the same. It looked like these creatures had been bipedal. Did these creatures attack the village?

Drawing closer, I examined one of the skeletons. I was quite surprised not to find any fangs or sharp teeth set in the beast’s jaw. Instead, I found the broad, flat teeth of a herbivore.

I reconsidered my notion that these things had killed the villagers. Perhaps these things had been domesticated? It would explain how such a large herd would have found their way into the middle of the village.

At the other end of the field of bones, I spotted a building that was much larger than any of the others. A few parrots squawked at me as I pushed through the foliage that had grown in the middle of the town square.

I spotted more human bones the closer I drew to this large building. From the looks of things, people had been fleeing towards this structure when they met their end.

Unlike most of the structures in the village, this building had heavy stone doors barring entry. Walking past columns that likely once held detailed carvings, I walked up to the doorway.

Even without casting a spell, I could feel mana flowing through the stone. Casting mana sight, I tried to make sense of what manner of enchantment had managed to last so long in this ruined settlement.

At first, I thought that there were hundreds of different mana forms set into the stone. On closer inspection, I found that the mana forms were almost entirely duplicates. Across most of the door, there were only about four unique mana forms, repeated dozens of times. At the center of the door was another couple mana forms not used anywhere else on the door.

Examining the repeated mana forms, I was able to figure out their purpose. Two of them were fairly similar to the storage and physical binding forms I used in my sigils. Another of the mana forms reminded me of my invisible force spell. The last component likely was a form of control structure to regulate the mana across the construct.

I was fairly sure that the magic would project an invisible barrier across the front of the door. The fact that no vines grew directly across the door definitely supported my assessment.

Turning my attention to the mana forms in the center of the door, I found that they were focused on a circle the size of a hand. The mana forms themselves seemed to be for control and something else. Perhaps it was used to raise or lower the barrier?

I was definitely curious about what was inside, but I didn’t know exactly how to activate the mana forms in the center of the door. Just experimenting until something worked probably wasn’t a good idea. It was entirely possible that a mistake could cause the barrier to block all further attempts to gain entry.

As I puzzled over the magic on the door, something started to feel off. Looking around, I didn’t spot anything different. I didn’t smell or hear anything unusual either. I didn’t hear anything at all.

The birds had all gone silent.

There were very few things that could silence all of the animal calls of the jungle. Even a large predator, like the thing that attacked me by the river, wouldn’t perturb the birds high above as it roamed the undergrowth. Anything that could bring such silence was a grave threat indeed.

I didn’t know how much time I had, but I needed to get some shelter quickly. The entrances to the other buildings were not terribly close and the trees between were too small to offer much cover.

I was about to bolt towards one of the nearby buildings when a creature’s head rose over the top of one of the nearby structures.

Gazing up at the titan’s twisted face, I knew I was in deep trouble.