Supressing their urge to turn away, the quartet made their way through the ruins of the border town. Buildings had collapsed, the roads were painted in red from the butchery and the rain, and here and there, you could see rotten limbs peeking out from the debris in the most unexpected places. All around Enzak, you could see monolithic structures growing from the ground in unnatural forms, as if the entire town was intertwined and tied up into some ball of yarn.
Just as they were mired in despair, Yurian suddenly whispered, "Someone's alive."
The entire group began to run recklessly with Yurian in the lead. In front of them, stood the only church of the Moon Spirit. It was the only standing building in a pile of desolated rubble.
When Alistair broke open the door, Marianne saw the cowering bodies of the townspeople, some who started to scream in fear.
"Ah! Ah! Ah! Help, the monsters broke through the door!"
"Run, run!"
Those closest to the door tripped over their fellowmen as they struggled to scramble away from the Marianne and the other knights, while the others flew into a similar panic. Even the injured tried to crawl away. Few were familiar faces.
Alistair quickly explained who they were, but they only calmed down when Marianne demonstrated her healing powers by treating one of the injured. Once the quartet entered the church, two burly townspeople who looked worse for wear quickly closed the door and reinforced it with broken planks of wood.
Alistair frowned. "What are you doing?"
One of the burly men trembled. "It's nearly evening. Night's when they are most active." He pointed out the window frantically and whispered, "Look, it's starting again."
Alistair, Yurian, Marianne and Sylvester moved carefully to the broken windowpanes and peeked through the nailed floorboards.
The entire landscape looked like it was shifting. The huge monolithic structures they had noticed before were now pulsing. Slowly, they started to writhe and move.
Marianne gasped.
One of the closest structures slowly straightened into a height ten metres tall, and she realised that it was a beautiful stargazer lily. But instead of its lovely appearance, the textured freckles on the lily's petals were now pulsing in different vivid colours, and its stamen had become elongated whips dripped in poison.
Aside from the stargazer lilies, Marianne also saw other monster plants start to awaken, and soon the entire landscape of Enzak had become a hellhole of writhing monster plants and demons as they arched their backs and howled with the setting sun as their backdrop.
"What is this?! How did things come to this in Enzak?" Yurian turned to the townspeople for answers.