Makiel. He had known she would never leave the survivors, and had planned accordingly. Even before she’d come here, he had known.
The Way zipped closed, and Gadrael vanished.
[Four hundred sixty-two Grade Six anomalies and counting,] her Presence said. [Pursuit recommended before expansion threshold is reached.]
Suriel set thoughts of Gadrael aside. He was a loyal dog, collared and leashed, and she would gain nothing from a conflict with him. Makiel was the one writing the script, and his plans could span eons. She had to meet him face-to-face.
But first, she had a job to do.
A world divorced from the Way gave birth to chaotic distortions. These were nightmarish monsters, entities that strained the rules of existence. If Harrow was allowed to fester over the next half a year, it could give birth to thousands of these abominations. Once they entered the void, they would drift, until even Makiel couldn’t predict where they would emerge.
She had to destroy them now. At the same time, she had to reach as many of the two million survivors as she could, transporting them to Iteration 213. The world was known as Scour, the most inhospitable place she’d ever seen with a native population, but it should keep them alive.
On the north pole, a black spire shattered the ice, shooting thousands of kilometers into space until it stood out like a rigid hair against the surface of the planet. A featureless black tower, an obelisk standing so tall it shouldn’t be able to physically support itself. An anomaly.
Suriel gripped her Razor and blasted forward.
Like a dying animal, a world was most vicious at its end.
As Lindon hurtled through the blackened forest on the Thousand-Mile Cloud, chasing after a legion of monsters, he contemplated their greatest danger: thirst.
They flew for the rest of the first day and past dawn of the second, and Yerin skirted every Remnant or rotten beast they encountered. But they had no more water, and the few times they stopped at a likely pond or creek, they found the surface stinking and corrupt.
Whatever blight produced the black, rotten trees and the twisted dogs, it extended to the water. They didn't need to taste it to know it was poison.
Before long, Lindon's head pounded and his throat burned so that he could hardly talk. It frightened him how quickly he'd weakened without water.
So when the trees parted to show a pyramid in the distance, Lindon's first feeling was not a call to adventure or a sense of danger, but a heavy relief. A structure meant people, and people would have water.
When Yerin slowed the cloud at the sight, Lindon wanted to strangle her.
She choked out a word, swallowed, and tried again. Her words were simple and quiet, as though she meant to save water by speaking as little as possible. “That's it. Headed there.”
Between the thirst, the lack of sleep, and the tension of the past few days, Lindon was having trouble thinking past the possibility of food, water, and shelter. He grunted something that sounded like “What?”
Yerin stabbed her finger at the pyramid. “Aura.”
With an effort that felt like crossing his eyes, Lindon focused on the aura around the pyramid. The edifice stood as high as Elder Whisper's tower back in Sacred Valley and a thousand times wider at the base, but it was assembled from layers of house-sized stone blocks. It was brown as mud, its first few layers obscured by black trees, but the visible portion was enough to dominate the landscape like a mountain jutting out of a field.
A rainbow of vital aura rose over it, spiraling down into the structure like a narrow cyclone. The aura from miles around had been drawn here, which meant...
He finally caught up with Yerin's observation. If the aura was drawn here, then those trees at the foot of the pyramid would be swarming with Remnants and twisted beasts.
He nodded to show that he understood, even as she took the cloud a little higher. The cloud was meant to skim over the ground rather than fly, and it started to struggle at about ten feet above the earth. At fifteen, it stopped entirely, and Yerin's face tightened in focus as she held them there.
From their new vantage point, they surveyed the land ahead of them. Two things stood out immediately.
First, while they couldn't see any sacred beasts through the canopy, there was something swarming around the pyramid: people. Lindon glimpsed a distant crowd, the peak of a few tents, and even a wagon rumbling across a clearing. These people must hold the structure against the Remnants and sacred beasts. Maybe the pyramid was their home, and they were drawing in aura for some purpose.
But Lindon couldn't consider that for long, because the second feature of the landscape had snared his attention: a wide lake, bright as sapphires, just south of the pyramid. He could only see the corner of it through the trees, but it was obviously not as tainted as the rest of the water around. His throat convulsed involuntarily at the sight.
“We have to get there,” Lindon croaked.
Yerin didn't say anything to agree, she just pushed the cloud to its highest speed and slammed back into the ground, dashing through the trees at reckless speed. For once, Lindon didn't mind that he was almost sent hurtling off the back of the construct. He added his own trickle of madra to the cloud, hoping that it might coax a little extra speed out of their mount.
It wasn't entirely a surprise when they crested a hill and ran straight into a slaughter.
Lindon had long expected to catch up to the host of twisted beasts, and he’d smelled the heavy scent of blood even before they’d reached this hill. But he still wasn’t prepared for the field of torn, dismembered, and disassembled creatures strewn over the ground.
For what must have been a mile across and many miles wide, the black forest had been cleared. Stumpy logs dotted the ground here and there, and the grass must have been lush before some battle mulched the soil. The people camped at the base of the pyramid would have wanted a clear perimeter, so they cleared the trees so that anything advancing on them would be visible. They posted guards, obviously waiting for any Remnants and sacred beasts to attack.
And when that horde of creatures had rushed at them, the guards had turned this field into a butcher’s shed.
Half of a corrupted bear-sized beast hung from a slowly dissipating Forged spear. A pack of six rotten dogs had been blown apart, bodies strewn in pieces around a fresh crater. A pile of glowing green debris marked the death-place of one of those insectoid snakes that had been stalking Lindon and Yerin; one centipede leg was still scratching at the bloody mud even as motes of green essence drifted away from it. Similar scenes of destruction marred every step for a mile.
Across the clearing, a line of sacred artists stood in front of a low wall of spiked wooden logs. Even at a distance, Lindon could tell they were powerful.
There was a unique confidence, almost arrogance, in highly advanced sacred artists. The Patriarch of the Wei clan had carried himself like a lion among cats, and Yerin spoke as though she was destined to win and her enemies had already lost.
The warriors against the wall moved with the same awareness of their own superiority. One figure, carrying a huge hammer on its back, knelt to rifle through corpses as though sacred beasts may have held something valuable. A group of people carrying hook-curved sickles took turns kicking a rotten dog to each other. It was the size of a full-grown wolf, but the sacred artists kept it in the air as though it weighed no more than a leather ball. The twisted hound turned in midair, trying to bite each new human, but a foot always caught it in the side and sent it sailing away.