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  A day has passed since we entered the Graylands, at least, I think it’s been a day?

  Before we entered the Graylands, as part of an experiment, I made sure to bring two watches and synchronize them perfectly together. But examining them when I woke up, they both had completely different times on them. At least a four-hour difference.

  I had known this would happen, of course, but witnessing it firsthand was an entirely different experience. The records I have read speak of how keeping track of time in the Graylands was said to be impossible. Mechanical tools were unreliable here, particularly those designed to measure things like time. They would unexpectedly give back bad information or suddenly break down due to some strange influence of the Graylands.

  Even some of the vehicles in our caravan were not safe from these inexplicable mechanical failures. Engines that had been perfectly functional before we crossed the border into the Graylands now sputtered and choked as Sam’s men had trouble starting them this morning. The team of engineers we had brought along—a precaution I now realized was more essential than I had initially believed—were busy diagnosing and repairing the problems. They worked diligently, hunching over the machines, their faces etched with concern as they wrestled with malfunctions they couldn’t fully explain.

  I could see that even more unease was beginning to spread among the crew. Some of the men exchanged worried glances as they watched the mechanics work. The vehicles that had once seemed sturdy, built to withstand the harshest environments, now appeared vulnerable—susceptible to forces we do not understand.

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  And as if the mechanical failures weren’t enough, tracking time in the Graylands proved utterly futile. Days? Hours? It was all meaningless here. At some point during our journey, I realized the sun had vanished entirely from the sky—slipped away without any warning. There had been no sunset, no fading light to signal its departure. One moment it was there, and the next, the heavens above us had transformed into a uniform expanse of gray, an endless stretch of dull monochrome that swallowed the horizon.

  Yet, curiously, despite the absence of the sun, the world around us remained illuminated. It wasn’t the soft glow of dusk or the dimness of twilight. It was a strange, pervasive brightness, as though the sky itself had taken on the role of the sun. There were no shadows, no variance in the light. It was as if the Graylands had created their own unsettling version of daylight—a flat, artificial illumination that stripped the land of depth and contrast.

  I couldn’t help, but wonder if what we were seeing—or, more accurately, not seeing—was the result of some vast illusion. Perhaps the entire Graylands were shrouded in a strange, omnipresent veil that masked the sun from view, hiding it behind an endless curtain of gray. Was this some natural phenomenon, a quirk of the land itself, or was it something entirely else?

  Whatever the case, the effects were disorienting. Without the sun to mark the passage of time, we were left in a kind of limbo, unsure of how many hours had passed or how many more lay ahead.

  It was unsettling to think that this was only the beginning. How much stranger would things become the further we ventured into the heart of the Graylands?

  I will update the journal if anything of interest happens.