Dark clouds glowered, hung low in the air, low enough to nearly touch, completing the picture of gloom. It was the exact picture of the Underworld that Thor remembered, when he had been marching through the wasteland of the Empire. Yet Thor forced himself to remember, to know that he was not in the Empire. He was in the Land of the Druids, he told himself. All that he saw before him was a creation of his mind. He was not walking through a landscape, he knew, but walking through the contours of his own mind. Consciously, Thor knew it to be true, and he wanted to stop it, to change the picture before him, to think happy thoughts; but oddly, he found himself unable to change it. He did not, he realized, have the power to do so yet. As much as he tried to will a different landscape, a different world, he found himself trekking through this one, his feet sticking to the mud with each step he took, each step labored, his breathing hard. And he felt a deeper sense of foreboding the farther he went, as if he could be attacked at any moment.
