He hears the pain of the prisoners in the trees, bound there for eternity. He feels he should not free them, but he doesn’t know why.
Night stretches slowly across the sky and spreads like a stain. He senses the women in the glade, trapped in a prison of trees. He feels their heartbeats across the dust, vibrating through the sands. He hears tears that fall like raindrops.
The lonely dirge of a train cries out. A plume of churning smoke appears in the distance, spat into the sky by a steel goliath that tears across the ground, a train with no tracks, an iron juggernaut that brings a cloud of black souls in its wake. He is afraid of this ghost train. He knows he will see it closer, and soon, but he doesn’t want to.
He calls out to her, to any of the prisoners, but all he is rewarded with is the sound of his own meaningless voice, a fading echo carried away by the wind as easily as the black sand. The train draws nearer, inevitable, unstoppable.
He has lost her. He is alone.
FIFTEEN
They rode through a land of dust and ash.
The Bone March was a region of midnight sand. When the sun was eventually sucked into the horizon they knew it would be difficult to discern where the world began and where it stopped. Red dust had been blown into drifts as tall as a man, but the ground beneath the sand was all black: black soil, black water, black stone. It was as if everything had been burned and had yet to heal.
That’s not far from the truth, Cross thought.
Once beyond the dangers of Dirge, they rested and made sure that all of their supplies were in order and that they had their bearings. Cross compared his translated map with Cristena’s knowledge of the area, and they used the compasses and water-globes to align the sun’s position with their location to make sure they were in the right place. Once they charted a course, they set off.
After an hour of riding into the Bone March, it felt as if they’d traveled to another planet. The world was a black desert, an endless sea of onyx soil and crimson dust and gnarled, lifeless white trees that protruded from the ground like dug-up old bones. The air was as dry as paper, but the soil underfoot seemed unstable and almost fluid at times, and they rode with an eye out for sinkholes.
The utter stillness of the March was unnerving. There were no insects, no coyote or wolf calls, and no wind. Even the footfalls of the horse’s hooves were nearly silent. The loudest sounds to be heard were the creak of the saddles and the shift of guns and equipment as they rode.
It was midday, though it was difficult to tell, since the sky had been the same pale shade of red for hours. The color reminded Cross of a bloody steak. He dismounted and led the nameless camel for a while so that he could stretch his legs. The air was cold, and it smelled like something sick. Cross had been constantly thirsty since they’d entered the March, as were the horses. Luckily they’d had the foresight to stock up on water, but at the rate at which they had to consume it in order to stay even relatively hydrated, and thanks to the apparent scarcity of potable water there in the March, they knew that their supply wouldn’t last very long.
I guess it’s a good thing we aren’t going far.
“ This is where it all started,” Cross said.
“ What?” Graves asked.
“ The Black broke through into our world here. Well…” Cross turned about in a circle, taking in the breadth of the Bone March. “ Somewhere out here. They think.”
“ They think,” Cristena repeated. She rode at the rear of the group. Her palomino looked downright exhausted, and Cristena looked listless and sleepy, herself. Cross suspected that raising that shield back in Dirge had taken more out of her than she’d let on. “It’s a guess. There’s no way to ever prove it.”
“ Well, they did find arcane residue from The Black out here in the wastes a few years ago,” Cross answered. “Not to mention the remains of old Soth. We shouldn’t even be too far from some of Soth’s ruins, if my map is right.”
“ Old Soth is just a myth,” she said. “El Paso used to be here, not some faerie vampire capital.”
“ I am so lost,” Graves said.
There was no way anyone could prove or even understand the truth about The Black. All that could really be agreed on was that there was a time before The Black, and a time after, and that no two worlds could be further removed.
The destructive phenomenon called The Black had arrived completely unheralded, and it ravaged the world with a single-minded fury the likes of which humankind could still barely conceive. Millions died in the days and months following The Black. The initial colliding of worlds had caused tidal waves and earthquakes. Entire cities had been swallowed into the earth and lost forever as the land resealed itself. Fires covered entire coastlines. Seas drained, and deserts sank.
But that was only the beginning. After the initial devastation that had ripped the boundaries between worlds, humankind had to contend with what had slipped through the cracks.
People were hunted through the night by living shadows, and haunted by the ghosts of apocalypse cities that had stood for centuries but that no one could remember ever being there in the first place. Worst of all, earth was besieged by hordes of vampires led by the enigmatic Grim Father, who established a military regime over most of what was left of the northern continent.
Monsters were real. Myths and legends and horror stories were all real, and it was as if they had always been real. Even magic became real shortly after The Black. The ruins and histories of cities that had never before existed melted into reality and the collective consciousness as if they had always been.
At the same time, while many cities had been ruined and violently torn apart in the apocalypse, it was commonly agreed that other cities had simply faded, as if they’d never existed at all.
The Black had merged realities, and destroyed them. Worlds had bled together like spilled fluids.
No one even knew what The Black really was, where it had come from, or if it was really gone. All anyone knew for certain was that it had destroyed the known world, and that it had rewritten all that had come before as indelibly as it had forever altered what would ever come after.
“ Where else would it have started?” Cross asked. “Can you tell me one other place, besides the Bone March, that fits all of the criteria?”
“ The Skull Plains,” Cristena answered.
“ It’s lifeless enough,” Cross conceded, “but it bears little to no arcane residue, and least none that’s ever been found.”
“ Rimefang Loch.”
“ No. Even taking into account the residents of Ghostborne Island, the Loch is relatively unaltered by magic.”
“‘ Relatively’,” Cristena laughed. “Listen to you. All right, then…the Bleeding Straits.”
“ Now who’s talking about myths?” Cross laughed.
“ I’ve been there, Cross,” Cristena said. “Have you? Look, the point is, there are plenty of areas where The Black might have come through. It’s foolish to assume it’s here in the March just because it’s the most popular choice. I’ve been in and out of the Bone March and all of those other places, and I’ve never once seen anything that convinced me The Black started in any of them, let alone here.”
“ There’s a reason that the popular theory is the Bone March…” Cross started, but Graves cut him off.
“ Oh, who cares?!” Graves said. “What does it matter where it started?”
“ It doesn’t,” Cristena said.
“ Then why argue about it?” Cross asked with a bit of sneer.
“ I wasn’t arguing,” Cristena said. “I just don’t like to listen others spout off theories like they’re facts.”
“ Well, it must be nice to be right all of the time,” Cross smiled.
“ It is,” Cristena smiled back, and she spurred her horse around them and rode ahead to take the point.