330

A full moon and a cloudless sky make your passage along this secret path much easier. It follows a tortuous route through the tall plants, around mossy mounds full of crawling insects, past the dark entrances to underground warrens, and skirts the fringe of a thicket of trees. Paido halts and crouches down, ignoring the bloated spiders that scuttle around his knees, and points through a gap in the trees to a settlement of crudely made huts. Dark shapes move between them, human once, but far from human now. ‘Ghagrim,’ whispers Paido, with fear in his voice. ‘The man-beasts of the Danarg.’

In the distant past the Ghagrim were a gentle, primitive folk, who lived as one with the animals and the birds, cared for by the Elder Magi in their jungle paradise. But the Danarg has changed and so too have the Ghagrim, poisoned by the evil that conquered the land.

If you wish to approach the huts, turn to 172.

If you choose to avoid the Ghagrim and continue along the secret track, turn to 229.