They could not actually stop for long times, no matter how charming the lakes were. They had to reach the city before the sundown, but it appeared to be so that they had severely overestimated their own speed and underestimated the speed of the night, falling around them even before they even realized that they had to set up a camp.
The forest was beautiful in the blessed moment of twilight, but the trees were also scary and massive and they gave off the impression that they could hide entire packs of monsters.
This was not such an impossible feat, setting up a camp by the side of the road in a little clearing, on higher ground where things were not so wet, but then the howling began.
Serenica had never thought of wolves as a credible threat, but she saw nothing and heard everything. Her hunter senses kicked in. She counted ten different howls and then she lost count.
There were probably more than thirty wolves circling them in the night.
