The feast lasted two days. Forty-eight hours of noise, dancing, and endless toasts to the happiness of the newlyweds. Finally, we piled into the carriage and headed home.

  Only now, we were one person short.

  The moment we crossed the threshold of the farm, silence descended upon the house. Aya and Alastor, those great and terrible destroyers of the past, were the first to break. They simply sat down in the kitchen and started crying. Loudly, sobbing, mourning the "loss" of their daughter, who had merely moved into a castle with her husband.

  Erol was walking around looking darker than a thundercloud, kicking empty buckets in the barn. Only Tizor couldn't care less. The little guy was perfectly content: he still had his toys, his sandbox, and a complete lack of parental supervision while the adults were drowning in their own snot.

  I went outside to check on the homestead.

  The animals were acting strangely. The horses weren't neighing; they just lazily shifted from hoof to hoof, their heads hanging low. The cows stared into the void with glassy eyes. But the worst part was the field.

  The grass was dying.

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  It wasn't just drying out—it was fading, turning gray and brittle. I crouched down and picked at the dirt. It would have taken another ten years of active plowing to reach natural erosion or soil degradation, so why did everything look like the aftermath of a magical drought right now?

  "This is all very strange..." I muttered.

  This year's harvest didn't just promise to be poor; it was shaping up to be catastrophic.

  Three days later, my suspicions were confirmed. The neighbors started trickling in. Gorston and the other farmers, who used to look at us with caution, now stood at our gates with their hands out. Things were even worse for them: livestock was dropping dead, and the grain in their bins was turning to dust. They asked for seeds; they begged to rent our "tireless" horses.

  It was as if the world around us had started to lose its flavor and its will to live. It seemed someone—or something—was sucking the life force out of this region.

  I knew my cycle wasn't standing still, either. Green hair, fog in my head... soon I would become a blank slate once again.

  I went into town and bought a regular, thick leather-bound notebook.

  "Since my Book of Oblivion isn't handy right now," I said to my reflection in a shop window, "I'll write in here."

  I sat at the table on the porch and penned the first line:

  "March. The grass is gray. Planus is dead. Yara is married. The neighbors are starving."

  I had to record every single moment. So that later, when I found my Book with Anna or Georg, I could transfer these fragments of reality into it. Because if I forget this too... then absolutely nothing of Greg will remain, except for these dying fields.