They set off after the missing team immediately—the bright, otherworldly moonlight providing the visibility necessary to navigate the forest—while following the marks left on the tree trunks by the children.

For a couple of hours absolutely nothing happened as they continued their march through the forest. Even at night, the humidity persisted almost unchanged, and to be frank, Eik didn’t know what was more annoying between the humidity itself and Heath’s constant moaning about it.

“Are we there ye—“ Heath began, but Sonja cut him off with a hiss as she put a finger against her lips.

“What?” Eik whispered.

She pointed somewhere into the darkness to the left of their path, then gestured for them to follow her into some shrubbery a few paces away. Once they sat and quieted, it became very apparent that something was out there among the trees, stomping through the forest. It was growling—a deep, rumbling sound that sent shivers down their spines.

“What is that?” Heath mouthed wordlessly. Eik gave him a look as if to ask how the hell he was supposed to know that.

The four of them sat there, hugging their knees to their chests, as the beast slowly inched closer. If it had a good nose, they might be well and truly screwed. None of them made a sound as a huge tail swished out of the darkness, grazing the leaves almost soundlessly before it disappeared again. The beast itself would have to be tens of meters long.

So entranced were they by the giant, that they almost screamed in shock when the clawed foot of a second individual momentarily appeared from the blackness as it swept out and back in a massive step. The outline of a third monster convinced them to absolutely not attempt anything with this encounter. This was a stay quiet, hidden and hope for the best type of encounter.

“There’s no way we can fight something like that,” Michael whispered so faintly that Eik could barely hear him despite his ear being literal centimeters from the healer’s mouth.

They never saw more than vague silhouettes fading in and out of sight. They were big. Big enough for their heads to be obscured by the canopies, only six powerful legs, belly, and thick tail visible. Either they didn’t notice the four humans or they didn’t deem them worthy of attention, but the titanic monsters soon became nothing more than the sounds they made as they moved.

For fear of giving the pack a reason to come back for them, the four of them unanimously decided that waiting another ten minutes before emerging from their hiding place would be supremely wise. The things had disappeared in a direction that was not the one they were following, so when they could continue, they felt safe enough to not correct their course.

When the sun began to rise again, the dense tree cover was starting to dwindle in favor of vaster and more numerous clearings, soon making way for rolling plains, the wind sweeping across the grasses like waves on the ocean. It looked a lot like the plains around Forest. It hardly felt like a foreign land, but Eik knew from speaking with Atla that the Unified Mass abounded in bizarre, fantastical, and grotesque worlds.

Unwilling to be caught out in the open, they hugged the tree line as they went, following the marks left by the other team, the position offering a good view of the open plains while providing a quick escape from anything that might crest the distant hilltops.

“I’ve been thinking,” Sonja said, a couple of minutes after the marks left by the children had lead them away from the plains and back into the forest. “Doesn’t this feel a little… manufactured? Like, why are there no trees in a more or less straight line that way,” she said, gesturing ahead with a hand. “And it’s flat. Very flat.”

She knelt down, drawing a small hunting knife from a sheath on her hip, and used the butt to dig into the ground. In just a moment, the knife hit something hard and noisy, the metal pommel grating roughly against whatever was buried. With a foot, she scraped the soil away from the object beneath.

“Is that a cobblestone?” Michael questioned, kicking more dirt away from the surroundings, revealing several additional stones, all of them coarse and damaged but clearly processed with intent. “I thought there were supposed to be no intelligent natives on this planet.”

“To be clear, I don’t think it’s so much that there are definitely no natives, but rather that they hadn’t located any natives yet. My guess is that when Earth opened up, they probably sent expeditions to us as well, found out that there were humans societies, and waited until they could send someone like Atla to establish communication with us,” Eik said.

“Damn, you’re probably right,” Heath said. “It’s kind of scary to think about how long they have kept an eye on us while we thought we were alone.”

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“The kids must have noticed something as well, since they chose this road. We’ll have to go after them.”

Continuing along the previously cobbled road, they gradually began to notice more signs of civilization pop up here and there, now that they were actively looking for them. A broken, smooth post of wood, on which something would presumably have been mounted, such as a light source or a road sign. A suspiciously circular arrangement of stones where someone might have lit a fire. A single wagon wheel leaning against a tree, overgrown by grasses and other plants to the point where it had become one with the environment.

After a while, other, more obvious signs of an established society began to pop up, albeit broken and forgotten, as far as they could tell. Dilapidated buildings of varying size, overgrown fields, water wells, and other common, low tech things stood as a stark contrast to the deep forest surrounding them.

And most importantly, there were no signs of the actual inhabitants of the village. Not even rotting corpses, skeletons, or bloodstains marred the place. It was as if the people had simply vanished one day, leaving their homes to fall into disrepair as nature claimed them as its own.

Still, they proceeded with the utmost caution, their original formation with a shield-bearing Heath as vanguard maintained at all times. The eerie silence as they passed between buildings from which anything might suddenly emerge kept them on their toes. They even went into a few of them in the hopes of finding anything that might shed some light on the case of the missing villagers.

Old bows hung untouched on their racks, the quivers full of arrows. Swords and knives still laid on night tables next to the beds or stowed away in closets or drawers. In one of the houses they found a little doll made from old fabrics and stuffed with some sort of dried grass. It was soft and cuddly, but dropped haphazardly by the front door. That was almost the weirdest thing. Besides the fact that the place looked like it had been abandoned after a sudden mass migration, that little doll seemed the most out of place.

Eik also found a herbalist’s hut complete with a large garden. Weeds had invaded mercilessly, but even then some of the plants remained. He took as many samples as he could reasonably stuff into his pack for experimentation later.

They continued along what appeared to be the main road, passing through a large open space with numerous abandoned stalls peppering the place, some of which still had wares on display on the counter.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Sonja muttered as she dragged a finger across a dirty surface. “There are no signs of battle, but people don’t just leave without taking anything with them. It doesn’t make sense,” she repeated.

With another few minutes of cautious progress, they ended up in front of some manner of temple, three spires reaching almost high enough to be as tall as the surrounding canopies. The building was made almost entirely out of wood, save for the foundation and a couple of other components, which was stone and brick. The shutters were closed up, all of them bearing the same carving of a crescent with a circle inside of its curve. Double doors stood slightly ajar, a rusty key hanging loosely in the keyhole.

“Do we go in?” Michael asked, the tone of his voice exposing his own opinion on the matter.

Eik pointed to one of the dark, wooden logs that served as the door frame for the double doors. A small mark, similar to the ones they’d been following since the fracture location, was carved into the old wood. Michael sighed. There was no way around it.

One would think that the hinges hadn’t been oiled in a millennium judging by the deafening screech as the door ground open, pushed slowly by the tip of Heath’s blade, his shield still held up protectively to cover almost the entirety of the opening. It was dark inside, the closed shutters blocking out any natural light that might otherwise have streamed in through the faintly matted windows.

The boarded floor too creaked with every single step as the four of them went around to open the shutters. With the light bathing the floor and furniture, it became apparent that the temple was in no better condition than any of the private houses outside, thick layers of dust on every surface with a generous smattering of dead insects across the floor and window panes.

Sonja had to suppress several bouts of sneezing as they made their way through a series of rooms, each seemingly dedicated to a different aspect of temple life. One room had layered cots stuffed with straw lined against the wall with a small table in the middle. Another had been made into a small kitchen, outfitted with racks for utensils, windowed cabinets containing plates and mugs, and a massive stone hearth with a large, round iron cauldron.

A foul, rancid odor emanated from the cauldron, the smell overwhelming the nostrils and drawing tears. They hurried out and into the next room, almost running into a row of high-backed pews. The room looked like a room designed for worship. Five rows of pews took up most of the space in the room, the rest consisting of a raised platform upon which a large, carved icon of a crescent moon and what they now realized was a sun was placed. It was the same as what was carved into the window shutters outside.

Every available surface around the altar was occupied by dozens upon dozens of candles, already melted down to the end of the wick, the wax spilling over the edges like ice from a roof in winter.

“It’s like I can still smell the smoke,” Heath commented, sniffing the air near the altar.

“No, I smell it too. I smell it very clearly, actually,” Eik added, a sense of dread settling heavily in his stomach.

They all drew their weapons and proceeded through the building slowly, communicating only in hand signal, refraining from speaking. After passing a few more ordinary rooms, they found themselves in a narrow hallway, lit only by a few windowed slits in the ceiling above. It made it difficult to see, but not enough so that they missed the stone steps leading underground.

Even looking down from the edge of the first step, the staircase descended into nothing but blackness.

They looked at each other, weighing their options but knowing what they would have to do in the end. Eik ran a finger over the surface of one of the supporting pillars of the building, his nails catching on the tiny ridges scratched into the wood. It was another mark left by the Alliance team.

This was where the children had gone.