Yann raised his hand in front of his face and tried to squint through slashing wind. A wall of grey surrounded him on all sides. He couldn’t see where he was or where he was going.

He searched the terrain ahead—if there was any terrain ahead. He’d been staggering through this windswept hellscape for hours—or it sure felt like it.

He slowed and eventually stopped walking. He might be moving farther away from the rest of the Watch. He could be walking off into the unknown. He might end up walking around out here forever and never find his way back—to anything.

Without warning, someone rushed him from the side. Wesh appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him. “This way, boy!” Wesh bellowed over the wind. “We thought we’d lost you!”

Yann couldn’t find the voice to answer. Wesh tightened his fist in Yann’s shirt and dragged him to the right. They eventually stumbled back to the rest of the Watch.

They all held onto each other. Yvan grabbed Yann’s shirt by the other shoulder, pulled him into their group, and they all plowed their way deeper into the chaos.

“How much farther do we have to go?!” Yvan had to roar to make himself heard.

“I don’t know and I can’t stop now to find out!” Wesh called back. “Just stay together—and keep your eyes open for Darklings!”

Yann got a whipping spray of dust and spikes in the face just then. He clamped his eyes shut and tucked his chin into his chest. He couldn’t even open his eyes to see where he was going, much less look out for Darklings.

The other Watchmen pulled him where he needed to go. He eventually blinked enough crap out of his eyes, but he didn’t see anything but the same wall of debris and flying particles surrounding the Watch on all sides.

The Watchmen even held onto Wesh. He practically towed them through the landscape—if anyone could call it that.

If only Eliska was here….

What would she do differently? What could she do differently? Yann didn’t understand the Coil well enough to know that.

She could shatter a landscape to fall into another Layer. She’d done it more than once to get herself out of danger.

She knew so much more about the Coil than he did. Then again, he knew nothing about the Coil except what he’d experienced since leaving Middleborough.

She knew more about it even than Wesh. She knew more about it than anyone.

She wasn’t here now—which meant the whole Watch would probably die out here.

He heard the men nearest him yelling. Were the Darklings attacking again?

He squinted his eyes open just a little bit. The landscape kept darkening. Did that mean anything? He wouldn’t know.

Vidal yanked him sideways. Omer and Niyazi both stumbled. The others tightened their grip on each other to steady each other.

The whole group walked a little faster and Wesh yelled again.

The next instant, the Watch broke through a sheet of thin, stretchy film. It snapped against Yann’s face and the wind stopped instantly.

Wesh sagged with a relieved sigh. “We made it!” he panted. “We can rest here for a minute.”

“Where are we?” Rien looked around. “This looks like nowhere.”

It really did. Darkness surrounded the party on all sides. A faint light shone on everyone’s cheekbones and foreheads—just enough for Yann to see who was here and in which positions they were standing.

He couldn’t exactly tell where the light was coming from. He didn’t see any moon, stars, or any other sign of…well, anything.

From what he could tell, he, Wesh, and the rest of the Watch just walked into a vast container of black. The place had no weather, no features, no nothing.

“We’re in one of the Dark Layers.” Wesh turned away. “We can’t stay here for long…”

“Why are we even here?” Niels asked. “We’re trying to get back to safety—back to the Ancestral Empire—although why we would want to go there when it’s collapsing, I’ll never understand.”

“The Ancestral Empire is the most stable Island near here,” Wesh replied. “It’s the nearest and the safest….”

“Even with all those bandits and Barbarians?” Barsali asked.

“Even with all those bandits and Barbarians.” Wesh turned aside and sat down. Yann couldn’t even see any surface for him to sit down on. “Sit down and catch your breath. You’ll need it when we move on from here—which will be soon.”

He folded his legs under him. The Watchmen obeyed him, but they did it reluctantly. Yann didn’t want to sit down. He wanted to stand watch or at least fight whatever was out there.

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If this was a Dark Layer, then Darklings must live here. Wasn’t that the whole point of it being a Dark Layer?

Rien sat down first followed by Vidal and Niyazi. Yvan didn’t sit down right away, either. He cast hard glares at the surroundings, but there was nothing to see.

The more Yann looked at it, the more his brain struggled to accept just how little there was here. He didn’t know until right now that a place could have so little in it.

Yvan finally gave it up and sat down with Barsali and Omer. Yvan glanced up and saw Yann standing there. “Sit down, son,” Yvan ordered. “You might not get another chance.”

Yann had no choice but to obey. He crossed to the other Watchmen. Neils and Rien made room for him to sit down.

“Where do we have to go to get to the Ancestral Empire?” Omer asked Wesh. “That girl made it sound like she could break any Layer and get there whenever she wanted to.”

“That’s her. She has power I don’t have,” Wesh replied. “It’s a pity…..”

He didn’t say what Yann had been thinking all this time—that the party should have gone to any lengths to keep Eliska with them.

Yann always knew she would leave eventually. He’d even watched her walk away before. He just didn’t think it would happen like this.

Her absence violated some unwritten law of nature—kind of like the absence of any distinguishing feature in this Layer. She should be here. She had to be here somewhere.

He didn’t want to let go of his glaive, so he rested it across his lap—which made sitting next to the others more complicated.

None of them put down their weapons, either. Everyone kept looking around at everything that wasn’t here. Did any of them revolt against Eliska’s absence the way he did?

He didn’t ask.

“It’s too bad we don’t have any food,” Niyazi muttered.

“I’ll get you some once we get to the Ancestral Empire,” Wesh told him.

“How will you get that?” Vidal asked. “Will you steal it from someone?”

“Of course I won’t steal it!” Wesh snapped. “What do you think I am? The Guardian Templars have a code of honor! We would never…..”

“All right, all right, old man,” Vidal explained. “I was just asking.”

Wesh looked away. “I can use magic to hunt—the way Eliska did.”

“Do you have any experience with that?” Omer asked. “She caught that gar thing in less than ten minutes.”

Wesh refused to look at anyone. “I’m sure it can’t be that hard.”

Yann and his fellow Watchmen exchanged glances. They knew how to hunt the old-fashioned imp way—with bows, arrows, spears, knives, and traps.

None of them told Wesh that. No one challenged Wesh to a race to see who would catch something to eat first. Yann didn’t want to offend Wesh or make him think he didn’t appreciate everything Wesh was doing for the party.

“Where is the Ancestral Empire from here?” Yvan asked. “Can you use a map the way she did?”

Wesh turned his head even farther away. “I’m afraid not. She can do many things I can’t. I’m beginning to understand how she moves around the Coil so well. A map like that would be so helpful.”

“Why can’t you create one?” Yann asked. “Is your magic confined to certain kinds of spells?”

“Hold your tongue, boy,” Barsali interjected. “Don’t accuse him of parlor tricks. He can do what he can do and not what he can’t. We’ll just have to accept it.”

“Let him ask,” Wesh replied. “I don’t know how Eliska created that map. I was as amazed as you were.”

“What about that window you looked into?” Yann asked. “You saw that forest collapse before it happened.”

“My window can only see parts of the Coil and sometimes how different Layers will interact with each other. I can’t see the whole Coil. I’ve never met anyone before who can do that.”

“How is it that Eliska is so powerful?” Yann asked. “How can she be more powerful than magic-users who have studied in the Guardian Temple all their lives?”

“I suppose someone has to be the most powerful magic-user,” Wesh mumbled. “I guess it just happened to be her. It’s such a shame….”

“Can she be more powerful than the Voyant?” Vidal asked. “Could she defeat him?”

“I don’t know how powerful the Voyant is,” Wesh replied. “I suppose it stands to reason that there must be others as powerful as she is—and as powerful as he is. After all, the Voyant must have come from somewhere….”

“Unless he got his power from somewhere else,” Neils suggested. “Maybe this thing he wants will give him more power. Maybe that’s what he does. Maybe he goes around taking things that increase his power. Maybe that’s how he got as high as he is.”

Wesh shrugged again. “I suppose anything is possible.”

“I would have expected the Guardian Templars to understand the Voyant better,” Yann pointed out. “What do you study if not these forces that affect the whole Coil?”

Wesh didn’t look up. He didn’t accuse Yann of insulting the Guardian Templars for not understanding the single most powerful wizard in the entire Coil—the wizard who just might hold the key to all of this.

Wesh only mumbled, “You’re right, my boy. It’s a sign of serious negligence that we didn’t at least find out if he is controlling the Coil, and if he is, how we could somehow rein him in to stop him from wreaking all this destruction. We failed in our duty….and now I’ll probably never live to return to the Temple and tell my brothers what I know.”

No one said anything to soften the blow. Those words hung heavy over the whole group.

Would Yann live…..to do anything after this? He could barely see his way to surviving the next few hours.

Building any kind of life after this felt like a million miles away.

The words hardly escaped Wesh’s mouth before the floor under the Watchmen’s seats collapsed. It buckled in a heartbeat and all the men plummeted into another Layer just below the Dark space where they’d just been sitting.

They fell down one Layer, crashed through some dark tree branches, and landed in a deep snowbank.

All the men took a long time to flounder out of the drifts. By the time they swam out onto the surface, snow clung to their hair and faces. It saturated their clothes.

Black trees towered above a forest packed almost to the branches in snow. “I….I don’t know…..if I’ll be…..able to find….food here….” Wesh stammered.

“Forget food,” Yvan ordered. “Light us a fire. Hurry.”

Wesh didn’t have a problem doing that. The Watchmen crowded around trying to warm their frozen fingers and dry their clothes.

“Are we in the Ancestral Empire now?” Rien demanded.

Wesh opened his mouth to answer, but before he could make a sound, a blasting hot furnace wind smashed into the forest from the side.

Searing heat melted all the snow, snuffed out his fire, and plastered the Watchmen full force.

The heat scorched the trees away, blew them to scrap, and scoured the landscape of every recognizable feature.

Yann bent his head behind his arm trying to survive the blazing wind. It bombarded every inch of his skin.

The freezing water in his clothes that nearly froze him to death a minute ago—it all evaporated in seconds. He really wished now that his clothes were wet again.

The wind would have ignited his clothes and burned his flesh off his bones, but a second later, the wind changed into a colossal torrent of rushing water.

The wave drowned the Watchmen in the flood, ripped them off their feet, and tumbled Yann head over heel in the chaos.

End of Chapter 14.