The red wastes.

It's the name given to places like this. They're temporary. Eventually, nature will reclaim them. It won't happen soon. First, the earth must shift. Heal from the devastation. Only after that will the fireweed grow, and then the broom-moss, and the lichens and mushrooms and fire-moss, and then the willow and birch. Eventually, lodgepole. Larch. Poplar. It will take years.

But it will happen.

The crunch of dust that used to be something else and lost its shape under my foot. The smell of a burnt nose, like my senses had been stripped entirely from me. The corpses of stones, shattered into a thousand thousand pieces, now settling as dust themselves.

Storm clouds gathered in the distance, but the winds took them northbound, away from the red wastes, as if frightened of this scar on the land. Ants were not survivors here, they lay corpses even in the colonies that remained intact under the surface. But there were one or two. Not a colony, but individuals, now without a home, their entire cities annihilated, and running, screaming, until they escaped.

They wouldn't. The red waste was vast, and ants are so very small. They could run, and would run, until the end of their very short lives.

"Be careful," I warned Eskir. The danger of volatile, unstable magic still lingered. This could have been what had made the Hunak last so long.

My footsteps were hollow in the silence.

"Eskir," I breathed, "why aren't you talking?"

He answered reluctantly. Cautiously. "Does my voice bring you comfort?"

"No," I admitted, trying now to break the silence that persevered around us, no matter what sounds we made. "But neither you nor Jenny could shut up during Hunak."

"This is different," he said, stepping carefully over what remained of a dead soldier's vambrace, sticking up out of the dust like a forgotten relic.

"That was a life or death situation," I said.

"This is different."

The man barely spoke. It was unusual for him. He was so quiet, I barely noticed when he stopped to kneel down at the foot of a banner, somehow still intact and planted in the soil.

"Eskir?"

The banner, or what was left of the design, was a simple diamond.

"Sorry," he said. "Just... give me a moment please."

I waited.

"No, I mean, please leave."

I cocked my head. "Are you sure?"

He nodded. "This place is disturbing, but I think it's safe. I'll catch up in a minute."

I tried to ignore the crunch under the soles of my boots.

"It's only the grass," I muttered to myself. "Dried grass, cut too short. It's just the grass."

There was no grass, but at least I gave myself the courtesy of that fantasy. If I had been standing on a mountain cliff, or in a deep sea abyss with the wrong sorts of things beneath me, even those cases would have been preferable to looking down at this. As long as my eyes were fixed on the horizon, I could pretend this was all so very far away.

Walking all over it nearly made me puke. The red wasn't wet, it was crusty and dry. It didn't congeal. It crisped, like it had been cooked in the oven. But that signature shade of red, the same as I saw whenever I killed a man, a woman, a rabbit, we all bled that same colour fresh.

I must have disassociated, because Eskir tapped me on the shoulder what seemed like a few moments after I'd put him out of sight.

"I'm ready," he said. "Let's leave."

I nodded, barely managing to shake my head. I would have asked myself what was wrong with me, but the answer would have been too obvious.

"Bell Haven's not too far from that ridge," he said, pointing off at the eastern foothills. The sun was still low in the sky, the spring air still crisp.

"I know. As long as that Deacon doesn't come back."

"Wait, you don't think he will, do you?"

I looked back, as if he could be behind us. All I saw was more red. Where had I entered the wastes? Sets of footprints tagged along behind us.

"Jenny was right, you know," I said.

"What do you mean? What did she say?"

"She said that weird stuff happens to us. Death follows us."

"Paranoid, really."

"Maybe," I said. "Avengard is at war with itself. Maybe she was paranoid, and you and me running into that Deacon, that ambush, the Hunak. Now this. Maybe whoever tried to break into our room was just drunk and went for the wrong door."

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"She was paranoid," he said with a nod, as though affirming that piece of knowledge to himself.

"Sure, possibly. But then again," I said, "there are three sets of footprints behind us."

Eskir froze. I spun around, Stoneguard primed to release.

There was nobody there, same as when I'd last looked. Just the endless red wastes.

When I pivoted, Eskir startled himself into a slower, clumsy turn. He looked down at where the extra set of footprints should have been. They were gone.

"Okay, now that was just mean."

I knelt down into the dried blood dust and poked at it with a finger. It parted easily and stained the undersides of my fingernails a dark pink.

"Maybe."

They existed. I saw. I knew they'd existed.

"Can you maybe wait to scare me like that until we're somewhere safer."

His fingers were flipping a pink rock over and over in his palm. His boots scraped against the ground buried in the dust, kicking up heavy-weighted clouds of red ash.

"You should leave that behind," I said, pointing to the stone. "I don't want to find out what happens if we take anything with us. This place is missing markers."

He stopped turning the stone, but kept it palmed. "Markers?"

"Gravestones," I said sourly. "This place is a tomb."

He nodded. "I'll leave it behind when we get to the edge. I just can't get this knot out of my chest."

I stood up. The red had stained my clothes where I'd been kneeling. The wastes were that feeling of something watching you, made reality. Given flesh and bones and footprints.

Eskir placed a hand over his stomach.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"It's not just a knot," he said. "Can't you feel it? This place is a scar."

I looked around at what was left of the desecrated corpses of trees, scattered as twigs and coloured sawdust. "Feel it? If you mean does this leave me reeling..."

"It's a scar on the earth."

"Yeah, I can see it," I said.

"No, I mean deeper than that. I'm talking about the land itself."

"The land? What, like the dirt?"

He shook his head. "The dirt, the grass, sure, but the earth itself. You can feel it in the magic here. It's dead. Gone. There's no soul or spirit to it. This entire field, this used to be foothills before that thing," he spat the word like any mention of the Deacon burned his tongue, "killed it. Our world, beyond just Avengard, it's alive. I'm not even talking about magic. It's the closest thing to a god that I believe in. We care for it. It cares for us. But this..." He closed his eyes. "The land is dead. Completely, entirely dead. The magic lingering in the air doesn't belong to it anymore. It's unbound, disconnected. The things you could do with magic like this..."

I couldn't feel the magic. I've never had much of a talent for that. But I saw where he was going. "Wait, are you saying this was done intentionally?"

He gave a half-hearted laugh. "I wish. If it were, at least there would be some rhyme or reason. Some purpose. But there's no reason for this to have been done just outside of Bell Haven."

I held my breath, unwilling to even whisper the fear that struck my mind.

Eskir said it for me. "Unless Bell Haven doesn't exist anymore."

My blood might as well have dried up and joined the rest of it. Thoughts froze up in my mind. Everything tangled up like a knot on a string, halting the cascade from untangling further from the forbidden fear Eskir had verbalised.

Please, not again.

"These are bodies," I said, practically pleading. "This is blood. People were here. Maybe it was just a battle? The Deacon could have dropped in on a warfront and annihilated both sides."

Eskir opened his mouth into a half-gasp. "I didn't mean — no, not like that. This isn't Senvia. Bell Haven, I'm sure it's fine. Even if it isn't, it's not the same thing. That wasn't a Deacon, that was a —" The air caught in his throat and strangled him until he stopped trying to speak through it. He knelt over, gasping for air.

I gave him a thankful glance. "I'm just saying, maybe he went after the people."

Eskir didn't answer. He wanted to, I knew that much from the fact that he was once again fighting against the magic that kept him silent. But he had said... The words blurted from my mouth, trying to keep up with my own thoughts. Everything hit me like a crashing waterfall. My speech came out as a jumble, barely coherent.

In the simplest terms, not recalling the actual mess of words I used, I said with a flood of realisation, "He did go after the people. Not armies. Not a war. Deacons don't do this. This kind of mass destruction ends wars. Deacons don't end wars, they encourage them. They wouldn't want to slaughter two perfectly good armies. He went after the people. This was targeted. You asked for a moment by that banner. You knew these people. You just said it wasn't the Deacon who took Senvia, it was something else. You know what it was. Anything that could have wiped out Senvia, a Deacon would consider an enemy. Something that needs to be purged, root and stem." I looked at him, and I know I said this exactly: "It was you. Your people are responsible for Senvia. That's why they took your voice, why you wanted me to come with you. You disapproved, didn't you?"

He gave me an empathetic wince. "I can't answer your questions."

I nodded. "You disapproved. They stole your voice to shut you up."

He closed his eyes. "I did."

"Then we're friends," I said. "You disapproved, and you found me despite all that. That's why they want you dead, because you still won't keep quiet, even with your mouth sewn shut."

"I should have done more," he said.

"What more could you have done?" I asked. "It's easy to blame ourselves."

He pinched his lips into a thin line and gave me an ironic look.

"I'm alive," he said. "I didn't need to be."

I gripped him by the shoulder, trying to snap him back to today. "Exactly. You're alive. That means you can still fight your way forward."

A hoarse laugh escaped his lips. "You can't punch your way out of every problem, Xera."

"You think I don't know that?" After all, I was the one who ran. "Maybe I can't break something to fix Avengard, but at least I'm alive to break it."

I really hoped I wasn't lying to myself.

He sighed. "I think you need to ask yourself if the truth is worth your life."

"Twice over," I said without hesitation, not quite thinking about the ugly truth. There were two of us.

"Look around you."

"I have," I said, staring directly at him. "I've seen enough. Bell Haven is going to be there. The city is standing. I can feel it. So let's go. We need to wash ourselves off, so we don't carry this wasteland with us. And there's a chance that there are signal markers here, put in place to see if anyone comes back. We need to leave."

He couldn't speak, but not from his curse. His guilt pervaded the air with a foul reminder of what he could have sacrificed. I let my own guilt hang with it, because I could have stayed. The both of us could have chosen not to be cowards, and been rewarded with our deaths. His voice was stolen, perhaps, but we would have nothing at all if either of us were dead.

For the first time, I felt a bit of relief at my own decisions. My own cowardice. My life actually meant something moving forward. I could do something with it.

And I would.