A few hours after breaking camp, we paused at edge of the sea of fog.

  “Doesn’t look that bad,” Tomas commented while I surveyed the area ahead with binoculars.

  “The grass is gray, not brown, Tomas.”

  “I didn’t say it looks harmless. Does this smell off to you?”

  I breathed in and actually had to think about what filled my lungs. It wasn’t the heavy earthy smell of the forest, the dry dust of the Fingers, or anything in between we’d run into covering the open plains. If anything, the air struck me a simply just damp and slightly medicinal. “It doesn’t really smell like anything, not really. Maybe a bit like cleaning chemicals or— ah, right, not that there’s much like that here. Think herbal infusion meant to prevent wounds from getting infected.”

  Tomas nodded and gazed out into the gray mists with a distinctly unhappy cast to his face. “How far do you figure it is to Annesport?”

  “Maybe an hour or two, if we don’t get lost,” I answered while digging Fiachra’s cloud chamber out of my chest pocket. Naturally, since I was holding it in my hand, the cube filled with random colors going this way and that. A few short lengths of paracord bound it to the end of my sword-turned-walking-stick where it dangled safely at the edge of my influence.

  “Got something in mind with that?” Tomas asked as I stepped down into the fog’s thinnest reaches. “Uh, Sam?”

  “Yes?” I asked, eyes focused on the cube and the scintillating blue specks that began winking in and out of existence inside it.

  “The fog is reacting to you.”

  My focus shifted and I realized he was right. As I took slow steps forward, wisps of fog visibly pulled away. “Huh. That’s probably not a good thing, you think?”

  Tomas shrugged. “Nothing in life is purely one thing or another. So, what’s the cube have to say?”

  “That I really am out of my depth. Back in the Lord’s residence, the colors were clear streaks. This looks like sparkles.”

  “Sparkles?” Tomas echoed with a mix of curiosity and disbelief. I heard stones and gravel shift as he slid down the steeper section of the path I’d avoided. “Uhm, Sam, that’s not sparkling. Black is a color.”

  I eyed the bard. “Black mana is a thing?”

  Now thoroughly uneasy, Tomas rested a hand atop the pommel of the short sword on his hip. “It is. Fiachra was teaching Jenna about the various colors of mana before we left. If I remember what I overheard, black is the force of dissolution.”

  I squinted into the fog as I used my empty hand to briefly retrieve my compass to double check our orientation. “Dissolution? So, like anti-magic?”

  “Anti-everything, Sam. Happiness, misery, magic, life, it dissolves them all.”

  I snorted. “On the plus side, that implies it can dissolve taxes. We just need to find a way to make that happen and we’ll be set for life. Bottle it up and we’ll be rich.”

  “You’re an odd person, Samuel.” Tomas said, following as I moved forward into a fog that pulled away as we went.

  Within minutes, we’d well and truly passed through the upper layers and visibility became measured in feet, single digits in some areas. The mist smothered smell, swallowed sound, and dispersed light into a wall of uniform white as we trod over what had been open fields of grass in the memories I shared with Alex, but was now bare, featureless dirt not quite damp enough to be mud. Nothing grew here, not even fungus or molds as far as I could tell.

  We moved in silence, stopping momentarily every fifteen minutes for me to check the compass. The paranoid part of me insisted on that much, a whispering voice of doubt in the back of my head. That same part quickly worried that maybe we couldn’t trust the compass, that we’d walked into some macabre version of the Bermuda triangle with 100% less cute islander women.

  “Tomas, how are you holding up?” I quietly whispered as we stopped for another round of orienteering.

  Several seconds of unnatural quiet passed before Tomas whispered back. “I’m ready to leave the moment you are. Something’s out here. I can feel it. It just hasn’t noticed us yet.”

  Well, that’s reassuring. We were still holding straight on the bearing I’d taken before entering the fog. As long as we didn’t veer off unexpectedly, we’d hit what was left of the standing walls of Annesport, probably before the next stop. I glanced back to say something and saw that Tomas had unslung the Benelli. Despite the calm in his eyes, his knuckles were white.

  “Tomas,” I said with a hand motion to catch his attention, which jerked to me. I almost felt bad when I lied. It’s not entirely a lie, right? “I got the impression from the others that this could have mind-affecting properties. Make sure of your target before you shoot something, okay?”

  Tomas nodded, almost more nervous tic than honest response. “Gotcha. Yeah, probably the fog just making me jumpy. Sorry.”

  Not that I wanted to spook him further. The mist had grown darker as we descended further down the hillside, but now that Tomas had given name to the feeling, I realized he might be right. Something was down here with us, something alien enough my instincts hadn’t recognized the feeling for what it was. My rifle moved from its home in my pack’s stirrup and into my hands before we set off again.

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  No more than five minutes later, I froze and several tense seconds passed before I recognized the yawning darkness before us wasn’t moving. It was a shadow. We’d reached the city walls.

  “What are we even here for?” Tomas whispered after a few seconds.

  “According to Fiachra, the Syr planned to fall back into the city as a last resort to funnel the enemy into more manageable paths. If we’re going to find what’s left of any of the three archmages, it’ll be here.”

  “So, we’re here for a few dusty corpses? That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Not the corpses,” I quietly noted and started forward with my rifle up. “What they were carrying.”

  A few steps into my quiet advance, I recited Fiachra’s explanation, word for word. “Each of the brothers could annihilate an entire army on their own. While a good amount of that came from the knowledge they’d spent a lifetime accumulating, much of that ability came from the tools they carried with them. One of their staffs, even only reasonably intact, would increase our offensive capability by an order of magnitude, if not more. Just one could change the course of the coming war with the Kharkans.”

  Gravel and dead dirt crunched under Tomas’s boots behind me. “Fair enough, I guess. I just don’t have a good feeling about any of this.”

  Ten minutes passed before we came across the southern city gate. We didn’t linger to marvel at how the portcullis was torn open and bent in, or how every inch of the thick, ironwood gate behind it was covered in deep grooves and scored by hundreds of clawed hands until something had bored far enough through to open multiple scattered points of ingress.

  “Where are the bodies?” Tomas asked while we took a tactical pause just inside one of those torn holes.

  I strained my hearing nearly as much as I did my memory, trying to remember the layout of the towers that still reached the open sky above us. “They probably got up and left on their own. Better question: where are all the weapons? Why haven’t we seen any arrows lodged in the dirt?”

  Dispersed as they were by the fog, the shadows here only made the darkness deeper everywhere. Part of me really wanted to use the high output light on my rifle’s vertical foregrip, but I knew just as well that using high-beams in thick fog never worked the way you wanted. Doing so would be blinding, as thick as the soup had become.

  Not quite trusting my sense of direction, our momentary pause stretched into a few minutes as I unpacked the drone and sent it straight up. The moment it poked up into the thinner regions, I spotted our destination roughly a mile ahead of us.

  By the look of the edifice, it had been a church, a massive stone cathedral whose stained glass had been stripped away by time and violence. Only the twin bell towers reached open air. Fiachra had stressed this was one of two fallback points the brothers had discussed. Even if they never made it this far, we can shelter up in the towers.

  I explained as much to Tomas as I packed the drone once it landed.

  “Are we going to be here that long?”

  I shook my head. “Hopefully not. If we have to, we’ll spend the night here. Once. Back to higher ground after that and we’ll look for a place to cross the river upstream where it should be easier.”

  We set off again, both of us with weapons at the ready, and I noticed Tomas had palmed a shell and held it carefully against the bottom of the weapon, ready for an immediate reload.

  A hundred yards later, we ran into the first barricade, what might’ve been several wagons tipped on their sides at one point. Whether it was the inexorable creep of time or something else I didn’t want to think about, the wood crumbled to granules and dust when I crouched next to one and accidentally brushed up against it. The disintegration spread from point of contact with amazing speed and within seconds what I’d hoped might be visual cover became a pile of dust and rusted bolts.

  Well, shit. I clenched my jaw. Hopefully the stairs up the tower don’t react the same way.

  Every step forward, the fog seemed to grow heavier around me. Minutes of cautious advance later, we passed another set of barricades made from tables, chairs, benches, and bookcases. Tomas’s breath hitched as I cautiously poked the nearest segment and it crumbled the same as the last. The worry in his eyes was apparent when I glanced back. All I could do was nod and keep moving forward. Still no bodies. No debris. This is some horror movie bullshit. Fuck all this. We should take off and nuke it from orbit. Only way to be sure.

  Thick as the soup was, every step forward meant wisps pulling further back. In the eerie uniform lighting, that meant constant wall of circulating motion in all directions. Unable to reliably scan for movement, my nerves were now ratcheted to their highest setting.

  My only consolation was that if these barriers crumbled at the slightest touch, nothing had been through here in decades. We should be alone. It should be safe. Deep down I knew it wasn’t. My finely tuned survival senses, all of them, screamed every step led only closer to death, not further.

  When we hit the third barrier, I knew it would be the last. Someone had driven tree trunks into the soil, angled outward toward the direction we’d come from, and shaved the ends into points. Spaced the way they were, this fortification wasn’t meant to stop a charge, just disperse it enough to make life easier on the defenders. Passing between a pair of spikes as long as I was tall, I noted the bent one bore mottled dark streaks that stretched several feet toward the base, like something enormous had impaled itself and then just got up and fucked off on its own afterward.

  Not long after, the dirt and gravel transitioned to brick pavers. I knew we were close. At first I didn’t recognize the shape laying on the steps that suddenly emerged from the darkness ahead, but as the fog fled and thinned from my presence, metal and bone left no questions. We’d found the first body, one from the lead companies in the Syr column I’d seen based on the armor. The head was missing, as well as everything else it might’ve carried, leaving it nought but a crumpled mass of scaled armor and bone.

  Tomas stepped up and toed the armor, which spread a wave of discoloration across the surface. It promptly crumpled in on itself, leaving only a skeleton half covered in a thick layer of corroded metal. The bard’s head twisted in my direction, aiming a look filled with curiosity and horror in my direction. Thankfully, he had the presence of mind to remain quiet.

  I replied with a bewildered shrug and pointed up the steps toward our destination. He slowly nodded and let me go first. We passed another body a few steps up the rise. And then another. And another. None of them were whole. One was missing a leg, another an arm. One was missing both. None of them died well, as far as I could tell, but I came up short at the top of the steps and decided they’d died better than the bodies in front of us.

  The stone face of the walls next to the enormous doors ahead of us was cracked and dented, as if some creature the size of a house had tried to punch through the stone. Over dozen shattered bodies had been scattered around the damaged wall, the bone of each already mostly powdered.

  Instinctively, I tilted my rifle and checked the little clear window in the side of the polymer magazine. I immediately felt more than a little silly for checking my mag when I had yet to fire a shot. Part of me knew I didn’t check because I thought I was close to out; the act was reassuring. I spared a second glance for the bodies, noting they were just as barren as the rest. Just armor and bones. What the hell happened here?