It was strange, approaching a tall object on an entirely flat plane instead of on a globe. This was the first time Sera was able to really appreciate the strange shape of Omichlódis after hearing about it. On Earth, an object would become visible from the top down as one moved along the curvature of the planet, but as she got closer, she eventually realized it was only perspective that made the distance object look small.
Once she got close enough to make out details, it became possible for her to discern that she could actually see the base of the mountainous outcropping from the start, as the base became clearer but did not seem to rise up. She had only been partially correct when she assumed it was manmade, however. It seemed to be an enormous stone mass like Ayer’s Rock in Australia, a natural formation on its own, but atop its flat peak was a fortress, with towers jutting out in several spots.
Although the fortress looked big, it was hard to tell exactly how large it was next to the sheer bulk of the rock it sat upon. The inselberg was hundreds of meters tall and several kilometers across on the side Sera could see. Even assuming this was the long side, the fort must have had an impressive capacity. If this were the short side…well, then forget calling it a fortress. At that point it would probably be a city.
From her perspective, there was also a spire of rock to the left, directly up against the inselberg, and an additional rock shelf to the right at least half the height of the main formation. She wondered for a moment if there might even be people still living there, but if there were, surely the initial scouting mission would have detected them.
Sera had plenty of time to think about these things because it took her and Tiriana hours to approach the site from the time they first laid eyes on it. The flokkas which had gotten them through the forest at a rapid pace were a slight bit slower than horses on the plains, so by the time they finally got there, it was late in the afternoon already. Based on the previous days of the trip, Sera thought they may have another two or three hours of daylight left.
What they found there was both expected and not. Around the base of the rock laid the remnants of a battlefield. Unlike the previous one they had passed through, this one was fresh; months old at most. Nature had yet to reclaim the blasted landscape, stalks of grass just barely starting to peek up from the dirt, and it was hard to tell if that was new growth or simply remnants that weren’t fully buried by the upheaval.
Craters dotted the landscape, and this time, they were occupied. The battlefront was kilometers across, and it was decorated with the husks of armored vehicles that had long ago stopped burning. When they drew close enough to determine their size, Sera realized they would have been classified as super-heavy tanks on Earth, a classification that never actually saw service.
“High elves guide me,” Tiriana muttered, gazing at the first tank they reached. It had been flattened from above, crumpled like a tin can beneath a boot. Tiriana looked to Sera. “Have you ever heard of a weapon that could do something like this?”
“Not outside of fiction,” Sera answered, recalling a cannon whose shell created a gravity field that could crush anything inside it. “But look at the crater. It’s the same size as the largest ones from the battlefield we passed a few hours ago.”
“Odd how the tank is facing that battlefield, rather than the fortress ahead. Perhaps they spotted a sign of the weapon that killed them being deployed and attempted to flee?”
“Could be…” Sera agreed, dismounting carefully. She shuffled awkwardly towards the wreckage, her hindquarters still sore from riding all day. Even after dropping into the crater she still had to cover quite a bit of distance. The tank had been larger than she’d thought, as if designed to fit people that made humans look like children.
When she drew close, though, she smelled little more than fuel, grease, and a lingering bit of sulfur that may have been from the vehicle’s ammunition. All things she would expect to detect from a ruined vehicle, yes, but where was the blood? Of that, she saw nor smelt a thing.
“Tiriana, do you have any spells that can search for biomatter?” she called over her shoulder.
“No, I’m more of a combat mage than a utility mage. Why?”
“Because I’m not seeing any sign this tank was manned.”
“That can’t be right,” the elf refuted, hopping down from Soswa to join Sera. “Even if it’s crushed, there’s clearly hatches for personnel.” Tiriana didn’t seem to have any difficulty identifying a tank despite her confusion regarding the concept of trench warfare, Sera noticed. It was true that on Earth the early development of tanks was intimately connected to trench warfare, but that probably influenced the design of the product more than the conception of the idea.
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“See for yourself,” Sera said, gesturing vaguely towards the heap of scrap metal. Tiriana approached and sniffed the air around the vehicle, then got closer and peered into it for any sign of remains.
“Nothing…but, look. Parts of it look like they were pried open at some point. Maybe something or someone retrieved the bodies and the tank collapsed again when it was no longer being supported,” Tiriana suggested. She still looked confused, though. “There’s something else that’s wrong here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…”
“Any idea what did this?”
“I’d hoped you had something, as I can’t think of anything other than magic. But that can’t- wait, no, that’s it!” Tiriana abruptly spun around and pointed a finger at Sera. “Mana! There’s mana in the metal!” Sera furrowed her brow. It hadn’t been long since she got here, and what gave her away was…
“You knew I wasn’t from here because I didn’t have much mana,” she pointed out.
“Exactly! The plants are one thing; they can absorb mana from the air and water, and they don’t have much capacity to begin with. But metal shouldn’t have any at all,” Tiriana explained excitedly.
“Mana warps things, right? So why can’t it get into metal?”
“It can, but it takes centuries of exposure even for the least dense metals. Normally mana gets into metal when it’s processed, because it’s impossible to prevent it from being mixed in when the material is separated from the ore it’s found in and forged into something. Which means there was mana present when this tank was built!” Tiriana was so hyped up by now she was hardly remembering to breathe.
“So, this frontier came from a world with its own mana. But this entire world was a frontier at some point in time. Are you telling me you’ve never encountered another one with mana?”
“Never! Not even once! Until now it was only a hypothesis. We knew monsters had to be coming from somewhere, but we had no proof they weren’t just being transformed from animals when they came through to Omichlódis. This discovery changes our understanding of mana itself. I could write a research article on this subject alone and get into one of the major journals, even!”
“What does that change for us?” Sera asked, thinking of the here and now. Was it enough to bring outside attention? By the change in Tiriana’s demeanor, though, it was not.
“Well…not much. No one is actually going to believe a claim like this until I can submit the research and evidence. But that’s alright, because that,” she gestured towards the fortress above, “is a very different matter. We just need to…confirm it’s not empty, first.”
Sera gave Tiriana a look. Something wasn’t right about that last part. Ruins were ruins; the architecture itself would be of interest to the people that studied that sort of thing. And while the ruined tanks could be transported elsewhere, anyone that wanted to study the ruined buildings had to come here.
“You just wanted to be the first one to explore it, don’t you?” Sera accused, prompting Tiriana to click her tongue and look away, caught. Sera shook her head slowly at the behavior, but didn’t comment on it. “Sure, whatever. We’re already here, so we may as well find a way up, right?”
“Right! Let’s split up, we’ve only got so much daylight. Meet me on the other side?” Tiriana asked, but she was already running back to her flokka as she spoke. Sera returned to Verinilla at a more sedate pace, mostly because she could not physically run.
“Yep, just come running if you hear frenzied screaming, please!” Sera shouted after the elf, who was already veering left. Once Sera was mounted again, she pulled the reins to the right to get her flokka moving. She examined the battlefield some more as she rounded the inselberg. She wasn’t much more than a layman, but she tried to gather whatever information she could.
One, there were no trenches this time. In fact, she didn’t see anything that would have indicated the presence of infantry on the battleground. Every vehicle she passed was another tank. And every tank was facing away from the fortress, as if that wasn’t what they were fighting. She didn’t see any damage to this side of the fortress either, but that could be chalked up to magical barriers.
Two, only the tanks in the center were flattened. The one on the flanks bore the marks of several different types of weapons, but they had clearly been burned through, blown up, or sliced apart- just not flattened. She didn’t get the sense there had been any landmines here either, for some reason. None of the craters were the same size as the one she’d seen explode earlier that day, and none of the tanks she saw appeared to have been destroyed from below.
It wasn’t adding up. If the tanks were the attackers, the fort should have had some kind of static defenses around it, like dragon’s teeth or a minefield. Razor wire, maybe. And if they were defending, the logical thing would be to place them hull down, behind berms or in ditches, to present a smaller target. Not to mention supporting them with infantry. Sera had followed the news on Earth at least well enough to understand what happens to tanks with no infantry support.
All of it pointed to one conclusion, but she didn’t have enough evidence for it just yet.
Getting to the other side of the inselberg took at least an hour by Sera’s reckoning. It had to have been a few kilometers longer than it was wide, pointing towards there being a good-sized settlement up top. Castles weren’t that big, generally. It seemed closer to a fortified city, the more she thought about it.
Along the way Sera observed the rock face and the walls hundreds of meters above her. It was hard to make out details at this point in the day, but the sun was shining through gaps in the walls, illustrating that this side, at least, had taken fire. She couldn’t make out much lower down except vines clinging to the rocks, transitioning from relatively thin cover towards the top to a thick and tangled mass near the ground.
After walking in silence for a while Sera finally found the other side of the rock formation and rounded the curve, passing another spire on the way. Now, seeing this side of it, she knew this was indisputably the ‘front’.
“That is a turtle,” she said in disbelief when she finally met up with Tiriana in the middle.
“That is indeed a turtle,” Tiriana agreed as they both gazed up at the fortress’s huge, roughly-hewn head.