We rode ahead on top of the rise, where the road sloped downward straight into the town.

The entire town was gone, replaced by charred remains, where once homes and stores, and workshops had been. Only in the middle stood a single building, half-burned—the former town hall, the same one I leaned against before the three thralls attacked me. The only difference was that only the stone foundation and a few thick burned beams remained.

Shuffling around slowly and grimly were some thirty soldiers. They walked, limping and dragging their feet, carrying whatever they could find and throwing it into the many fires that were around the disaster site. There was no wind here, and the heavy smoke rose in a straight line.

And carried by a gentle breeze came a nauseatingly sweet reek of decomposition that mixed with the sharp smell of smoke. It hit us hard and Jaxine threw up in her mouth, and Jace covered his face with a spotless white handkerchief.

The stench here was even worse than I remembered a month ago.

After he composed himself, Jace stood up in his stirrups for a moment, looked around, and sat back down.

“They burned it all down…” he muttered, looking at us with hauntingly empty eyes.

What else was there to do? I thought. There were human remains hung on chains, or driven through by rusty pikes. Such a terrible sight should be burned to the ground.

“So this is the famous Veneiea,” said Iskander. “What do you hope to find in this ghost town, Jonas? Why even stay here? We’d be wasting our time.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But there’s a possibility that Vranik was here. We have to make sure.”

I nudged Velluta with my heels, urging her to continue down the path into the burned town. At first, she obeyed my command, but the further closer we got, the more nervous she became. Her strides became slow and clumsy, and she stopped abruptly, snorting with unease. I reached out and stroked her mane, whispered some words of comfort, and we went ahead, her heavy hooves thudding the soft mud.

Six soldiers came slowly forward, dragging their feet sluggishly to block the road.

“Goxhandar, do you sense anything?” I asked as the others followed my lead. Florencia led her horse Luminello beside me, and she was looking ahead with a frown and holding back nausea.

“This place has a foul reek about it,” Goxhandar said, as it was already attentive for some time. “But I sense nothing here but a disharmony of life.”

That was my suspicion as well. I asked Florencia whether she thought it was safe to use our powers more carelessly.

“I think it should be fine,” she said. “I don’t notice anyone who could pick up on it. And these soldiers are not of the strongest stock.”

“They don’t seem to be, no. I can’t sense anything either. I hope it’s safe,” I said.

Together, we sent a powerful pulse of thought and intent over the desolate area before us. All felt motionless and grey, and time seemed to be slowed down. The flow of aetheric energies was still weakening—the remnants of the dark magic that had happened here.

The tragedy tainted the air and was like a poison that seeped slowly into the very soil, rendering it barren. Life did not flourish in these fields anymore, and I suspected nothing would grow here for many years to come, and the grief would persist for longer still.

Stricken by the tragic weight, I had to shift my attention to something else, and I examined the soldiers that were waiting for us. None of them had any extraordinary abilities, save for strength of mind and tenacity. I couldn’t imagine myself doing this work.

“Why use your powers so blatantly?” whispered Jace, having caught on to what Florencia and I were doing.

“I hardly think any of these men are a danger to us,” I said. “I don’t think they are even aware of what we’re doing.”

“Alright,” said Jace. “But I would keep a low profile. We never know who might be watching.”

“I’d agree with you, but I had to make sure the surroundings are safe, that there’s nobody spying on us from far away,” I said, to which Jace nodded as that thought didn’t even cross his mind. “We already have the full attention of the guards. Let’s go.”

We had, indeed, their full attention.

There were six soldiers waiting for us, clad in dark cloaks, and standing in the middle of the muddy road. They were grim and thin, almost looking like ghosts with sunken eyes, their skin a colorless white that was stained by grime and soot. None of them said a word, merely standing hunched over and unmoving, their grey mantles waving in the soft wind.

As we rode closer, all of them only stared in silence.

“Stop!” yelled a young man. He stepped forward and held out his hand.

“By the order of the baron, you can’t enter the town. Turn around now!” he said in a high-pitched voice. The young man must’ve been in his early twenties at most. His comrades were even younger than him and ill-equipped for this kind of assignment. And it was only in their eyes that one could see the boys had grown older beyond their years doing this desperate work.

I halted Velluta and jumped off, right into a deep puddle of mud, caking my new boots immediately. Iskander chuckled for a moment, but his laughter quickly died when he took notice that the guards were all covered in the same mud from head to toe.

I shook my boot clean as best I could, popped up the collar of my coat against the piercing cold that had appeared, and stuffed my shirt back into my trousers.

The young, ghostly, guardsman watched as I approached him, and his back stiffened, and his eyes betrayed the breaking of his nerves, which was not a difficult thing to do. All of them were almost at their breaking point.

I was about to greet the boy I almost towered over, but no words came out and I stuttered.

How should I address these men? Should I just flash Pitties’ Mark, or would that even be necessary if I acted as though I had the right to enter? After all, according to the Warrant, I could. I realized just how little I had given thought to how I should act in situations like these.

“Greetings,” I said, just going off of instinct. “Are you guardsmen from Caffria?”

“We are,” said the lanky young man, his voice shaking as he examined the five of us. “And by orders of the Lord Mayor, I can’t… let anyone go into the town.”

“We need to search those ruins that you are masterfully burning,” I said, taking a step forward and gazing at a small fire burning close by. Instead of coming up with something clever, I opted for simplicity. I opened the hem of my coat and showed him Pitties’ Mark. “I’m afraid we don’t have much time to waste.”

“Oh!” the young guard stuttered, eyes wide and white, and stumbled back a step. “My apologies, sir—”

“It’s alright,” I said, and I tried for a smile, but the men twitched and took another step back, and hid away their hands in their grim cloaks.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“I… I’m sergeant Grasso, I’m in command here. We have orders to… to—”

“To remove all trace of what has happened here.”

“Yes, that’s right. How did you know?” said the young sergeant. “Captain said nobody knows what happened here?”

I was about to tell them a simplified version but then heard Florencia whisper in my mind: “Just tell them something simple. They don’t have to know. Be simple but firm.”

To this, I nodded.

“We have to search the ruins,” I said. Simple but firm. “We won’t bother with any of your work.”

“Of course, sir,” the young sergeant Grasso said, and rubbed his ashy chin. “My apologies. Captain didn’t say anyone would come by.”

“We will only be a moment,” I said and waved for the rest to dismount and enter the ruins of Veneiea.

The rest dismounted their horses, and we walked past the other five guards, who all were nervously biting their lips and hiding half of their faces in their cloaks.

What remained of the gates of Venice was only a beam that was split in three and trampled mushy by heavy boots.

I had expected the stench of corruption to be stronger here, but it was not so. It was the same everywhere, and as we walked forward into the ruins, the reek hung heavily in the air, permeating everything around us. The familiar mud was still thick on the streets, but now mixed with ash, sawdust and wood shavings and splinters, and shards of glass and… fragments of bones and broken trinkets.

“Well, this place looks grim,” Iskander said, breathing through the sleeve of his coat. “I wasn’t expecting Veneiea to be like… this. This is worse than Odel.”

You should’ve seen it before; I thought, and Goxhandar stirred in amusement.

“Please,” Jaxine whispered, talking through the woolen collar of her sweater. “Don’t—”

“I won’t,” said Iskander, and turned to face me. “So, what’s the plan? Dig through the mud until we bury ourselves?”

“We go around the town a few times,” I said. “See whether we find something that catches our eyes for any hint or something strange. Use your powers if you wish. There’s no danger here.”

“Very well,” said Iskander. “But I’m already going to say it. We won’t find a damned thing.”

But instead of arguing further, he took Jaxine’s arm and moved slowly toward the opposite side of the town, kicking half-burned pieces of timber away.

Jace stood close but kept looking at the ghostly guardsmen who stumbled around, carrying one or two pieces of whatever they could find and throwing them into the fire-pits.

“What about them? They’re just boys!” said Jace. “They’re miserable and drunk. I’m sure that they’ll off themselves after this is done. We must help them.”

“How do you suppose we do that?” I asked.

“I’ll go talk to them,” Jace replied, spun around, and went off.

“Do you think he’s right?” I asked Florencia.

To which she shrugged and said: “I don’t know, but they are hanging on by a thread. I can sense it.”

I shrugged and took Florencia’s arm to guide her along the street, further into the town.

Soon we were in the middle of the Veneiea main square, where a thin layer of white ash covered the thick mud, and a light rain began to fall upon the ruins. As we passed the remains of the town hall building—the same one I went to for cover after waking up. Its charred beams were still smoldering, and I noticed that the single blood splatter, from when I broke the skull of the thrall with the spiked cudgel, was still there.

Despite the atrocious state the town had looked like weeks ago—cursed sigils etched into every surface, all those dead bodies that had been suspended from rusty chains and driven through by pikes—the guardsmen of Caffria had done an impressive job of cleaning up. We found no hints of human remains, no weapons, no sign that a battle had taken place here.

This place was so utterly surreal and bleak, a great oppression began to weigh heavily upon my heart. There was total silence all around, except for the lone, slow footsteps wandering in the distance, and the low crackling of flames.

It was then I found a deeper appreciation that Jace went to raise the morale of those young guards.

“This is the place,” I told Florencia when we had arrived at where I woke up. I kneeled down along with her and hovered my hand as if I was trying to sense any disturbance.

I hovered my hand over the exact spot, and the air felt colder and more… agitated. It was like the aetheric flows were disrupted by what had happened. I closed my eyes and expanded my mind, this time with more intent.

The barriers between worlds were thin here, and… There were creatures poking and knocking at that weakened boundary. It was like a thick canvas sheet that was stretched by a finger or hand, but impossible to break through. And what were the creatures on the other side that were trying to come over, I did now know.

They remained trapped in their own realm, and that was probably for the best.

“This doesn’t feel right,” said Florencia suddenly and stood up. “It’s like I’m being stabbed or… prodded. And why is it so cold here suddenly?” She popped up her collar as well, and buried herself into her coat, with only her loose hair waving in the faint wind.

“I think it’s the side-effect of the spell that brought me back,” I told her, and also told her about the creatures on the other side.

Florencia went pale and looked around her.

“Is this dangerous?” she asked. “Can we close it somehow? This is so beyond any magic I know that—”

“No,” I said firmly and shook my head. “Luckily, they can’t get through. This whole place needs time to heal. Nothing will grow here for a long time, but with care, it can recover.”

“How do you know they can’t get through?” she asked with more fear in her voice.

Of course, I didn’t know for sure, but that was my gut feeling, and I told her this. It did little to calm her down, obviously. Neither of us knew any answers to this type of magic, and neither did Goxhandar.

“There’s nothing here except for death,” said Goxhandar after I asked it for input before it fell back into dormancy.

Florencia’s eyes wandered over the muddy square until she said: “And where was the… demon?”

I pointed to the spot some dozens of paces away, on the edges of the main square, to where I had flayed the demon with the spell. Lying around in the muck, we found shards of broken glass and pieces of broken wood and stone while poking around with the nose of our boots, but nothing that could tell this spot was in any way special.

“And this demon differed from the one in Scorro?” said Florencia, but she was more than talking to herself.

“This one was a demon, stronger, more formidable,” I said. “And the one in Scorro was a host, a parasite.”

“And what… what does Goxhandar think of this place?” she asked. Despite not having accepted Goxhandar yet, she was making occasional efforts to do so. I couldn’t ask for more.

“Goxhandar is asleep. There’s nothing here, so it got bored.”

After some more time walking around the ruins, sensing nothing and finding nothing, Florencia said: “Iskander was right. There’s nothing to find—”

We heard shouting. It was Jaxine, whose voice carried over the rubble, and it was sharp and urgent. Iskander stood beside her and gestured for us to join them, and we ran over. Jace came also, tucking his black book back inside the pocket of his coat.

Jaxine was kneeling next to the corner of a ruined wooden building and carefully digging at the mud. I peeked over her shoulder and saw a square-shaped box buried underground, almost filled with brown mud water.

“I was walking here,” said Jaxine, scratching her nose. “And I saw some rainwater flowing into a strange place on the ground. I thought that was strange because water shouldn’t be flowing into the ground like that, so I came over and found this thing hidden away. Someone wanted to hide this, so I thought this might be important.”

Jaxine pulled out a sodden mass of papers from the hide-space. Most of them were utterly soaked through and illegible, but the topmost two still had ink on them. And while I couldn’t make out a single thing on those pages, scribbled on the edges were hauntingly familiar symbols—the same ones were painted everywhere in Scorro and Veneiea.

“Jonas,” said Jace quickly. “We need to dry them before the water seeps into the paper and the ink spreads. Give them to me.”

Without hesitation, Jaxine handed the clump of mess to Jace. He swiftly ran to the nearest fire pit, where two short guardsmen, who were little more than boys, had just thrown a handful of soaked wood. Soon, heavy grey smoke filled the air near the fire, and Jace carefully warmed the papers on a flat piece of wood. As the pages warmed, and the water evaporated, a dark ink regained its vibrancy. Once they were slightly more dry, Jace picked them apart gently, taking great care to not rip or smudge the ink, and spread them out to dry separately.

As Jace worked, Florencia crouched beside him and her intent was fixed on keeping an air of warmth around them, to help the drying process along. And from a distance, I saw the guards from Caffria had stopped their work and were peering curiously in our direction. But they dared not to come closer.

After some time had passed, and the rain had stopped, Jace managed to make a single piece of paper readable, while the ink on the other pages was too distorted to make out a single letter. Jace held the salvaged paper against the sky and stiffly spoke what was written: “… vu kirrack juham na dvomu ek akkrash na bazebubian.”

He then turned to us and said: “I’m sorry, my pronunciation is probably way off. I don’t know what language they wrote this in, but my guess is from the northeast—Baversian, or maybe from Hexen or Ksiorak?"

Iskander spit on the ground at those names and said: “Cursed lands. How do we know this scribble has anything to do with Vranik?”

“We don’t,” I replied. “Even if this is useless, it’s better than nothing. Those symbols—” I pointed at the crude circular script, “it’s the same writing I saw in Veneiea, and in Scorro as well. It must have some importance—”

“Is,” said Jaxine, calling Iskander by his shortened name. “Nobody would hide something that’s useless.”

When all the pages were dry enough, Jace folded them in half, put them between the pages of his own black book, and put that away into the pocket of his light-blue coat.

As the rain slowly stopped, and a light wind picked up, I said: “We should keep looking before we leave. I don’t think we’ll come back here anytime soon.”

And for the next few hours, we went over the ashes of Veneiea to find some hint or a lead but found nothing more than broken bones, shards of swords, and a lingering dread and gloom.