At that moment, several dozen wheels away along the Beam, Daniel and Gwyn were cresting a great hill directly in their path. They would ordinarily have moved around it to avoid overly exerting themselves, but their horses obviated the issue. He was forced, bitterly, to recognize their superiority to flesh and blood animals, responding to even the slightest touch smoothly and gracefully, never having to move at anything less than a gallop… but he would have preferred a real horse anyway.

Amazing, how blasé he felt at riding upon this technological marvel.

Some hours after they had started riding their steely mounts along the Path of the Elephant, the sun hung at the absolute height of what it would reach that day. The shadows of trees and rocks were slight but distinct, reaching away from them.

They were confused, then, when the shadows around them suddenly darkened and lengthened. A brief speckling like sparks in his vision disoriented him, and he called for Gwyn to halt.

Squinting his eye, Daniel did not recognize what was happening for a few seconds. He turned in his saddle, and it became all too clear.

Rising high into the sky behind them was a fireball of impossible size. It wasn’t that big in his field of vision, but it billowed and rose with the ponderous slowness of any giant thing, spewing fire and smoke into the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere.

For the first time, he truly understood how the Great Ones may have all disappeared. Anyone capable of such destruction must be insane, it was the only thing that made sense to him anymore.

It was eerily silent, as well… Realization dawned on him. “Quickly,” he screamed at Gwyn, “ride down the hill! We must take cover!”

They urged their steely rides back to full speed, clambering out of view of the atomic explosion. A scant minute after they dipped down away from the awful sight, the shockwave hit.

They heard a bang that sounded as if it had come from God’s own gun. He was thrown from his horse, Gwyn just barely managing to keep from being bucked off her own. As he tumbled headlong onto the rolling slope, the air went out of him in an awful whuff. It reminded him of the dream he had, back in Deepwood. The earth groaned and shook around him, the trees shivering and rocks tumbling from places they had no doubt rested in peacefully for millennia.

As suddenly as the blast came, it was gone, but for some minutes he was unable to even move. His eye was wrenched shut, his ears filled with a ringing like the whining of a million gnats.

For a moment he thought he was in Hell.

Slowly, in waves and starts, the ringing faded away in his right ear, and he was able to open his eye. Just a hair, but it was enough to tell him that they were still alive. The topmost branches of the trees around them were snapped at oblong angles, dangling pathetically like so many broken and useless limbs.

Slowly coming to trust that his journey was not yet over, he rolled over on his stomach and promptly emptied it onto the grass. His head felt like it was spinning, and that damnable ringing would not stop in his left ear. He touched gingerly at the outer canal and his fingers came away wet with his own blood.

Grimacing, he summoned his concentration and stood up. Several yards away, Gwyn was leaning over the metal neck of her horse, eyes shut tight and hands clapped over her ears. He stumbled over to her—his horse had gone, presumably summoned back wherever it had come from. After a dizzying walk, he tapped her on the shoulder. She gasped at the touch, snapping her head up to look at him.

“You—” he coughed, sending a sharp pain through his ear, “you alright?”

“Yeah,” she breathed. Dust and dirt covered her face, except for two clean tracks where she had shed tears. “What was that?”

He frowned and shook his head, annoyed at the loss of his hearing. Less an eye, and now an ear, he thought grimly. “I don’t know for sure,” he said out loud, “but I’m pretty sure that was the bomb. The description is similar to old descriptions I’ve read of atomic warfare.”

“Atomic,” she rolled the word around in her mouth. “Why is it called so?”

Daniel shook his head. He knew the basics of chemistry, having studied what pieces of the elemental table Gilead’s scientists still possessed, but it was not in him to describe it right now.

Gwyn looked back at the top of the hill, where they had descended for safety. “Dad did that, didn’t he?”

Daniel thought on it for a moment. He had no way of knowing, but that sounded right to him.

She started crying again then, haltering and ugly. Tears and snot unabashedly ran down her face.

Daniel turned away as his own tears followed soon after.

They were not permitted much time to their sorrow, however. Another rumbling shook the hill underneath them, and in his dizziness Daniel fell over.

Gwyn gave another gasp, wordlessly pointing downhill along the Beam.

He was tired in his very bones; the last thing Daniel wanted was more trouble. Dutifully, he looked where her finger stretched, and abruptly his tears stopped.

There was another hill in the distance, a couple wheels maybe, that seemed to be trembling. Individual trees atop it shook, some losing the last of their colorful autumn leaves, others falling entirely as the land underneath seemed impossibly to lift into the air. They heard the distant snaps and shrieks of roots and other matter being ripped from the ground.

Daniel could not quite believe what he was witnessing. Was this some effect of the atom bomb? Was there something to this weaponry they had lost over the years?

That did not ring with truth, he thought.

As time stretched on (it could not have been more than a handful of seconds, but it felt much longer to him), the great island of earth took form in front of them. It rose into the sky on four pillars, bigger around than the oldest, grandest trees Daniel had ever seen, a shower of mud and dirt falling betwixt them. At one end of the mass was a gnarled knob that looked roughly the size of the courthouse back in Deepwood.

From this lump spurred two great prongs, scattering their own soil and debris onto the land beneath. Underneath the head (for that was what it was, he realized) a long, dangling shaft protruded, undulating back and forth slowly at first, and then rising with titanic strength into the air between the tusks. This mammoth snout ejected yet more dirt, spraying it in great gobs and clouds.

Even from this far away, they dimly heard a whoosh as air passed through the trunk for the first time in gods knew how long, and after it came the braying he could feel deep in his chest, a call whose oscillations rocked the sky above and earth below.

Babar was awake to walk the land once more.

Every ponderous step the Elephant took rattled the leaves and shook the earth underneath him. To watch him was to watch the continents shifting on their plates in the mantle of the earth, to watch the gentle rise and fall of the moon in the night sky.

And watch they did, Daniel and Gwyn both lost in their thoughts at the sight of this creature from out of legend and creation.

The godly creature shook its head, dislodging more muck that had accumulated on it from untold centuries of sleep.

Its right eye was unearthed, a milky void situated in a rich, earthy brown. It was probably larger than Gwyn sat on her horse. Unseeing, it rolled cumbrously around in its socket. Daniel shivered as its blind gaze passed over them.

Shortly, Babar began in earnest to walk, covering wide stretches with each step. He passed south, at an angle to them, moving around the hill that Daniel and Gwyn were frozen upon.

The quakes of his steps grew and then dwindled, until they could feel it no more.

They sat there in silence together for some time. Minutes, hours, neither of them particularly cared to keep track. Eventually, wordlessly, Daniel took another step down the Beam’s length, and Gwyn followed in his stead on top of her hissing, clanking horse.

A few hours later brought them to the massive rent in the earth where the Elephant had been resting. They had little choice but to make a berth. The land was torn to shreds here, with mounds of fallen dirt festooned with decaying plant matter, and a fissure that they would not be able to climb out of if they fell in. As they traveled around, they heard noises from inside the crevasse: whirring and clicking, grinding like the guts of some terrestrial machine. Gwyn could not help craning her neck, hoping for a glimpse of whatever lay beneath.

Once on the other side, they trekked for a short while longer until they came across an unnatural object.

It seemed to be a metallic box, centered in a small glen that formed a ring about thirty feet in radius, a clean break in the throng of spruces and fir pines. The thing was about twice as tall as Daniel, black with stark lines of yellow painted across it diagonally. Impossible to miss among the foliage, it seemed to say, “Tread carefully around me.”

The closer they got, the more they could discern a hum. It was very faint at first, passive and low enough to be confused for the ambience of the wilderness around them. At first, Daniel thought it was merely the ringing in his ears worsening… but then he found himself breaking into a smile, almost against his will.

He looked back at Gwyn astride her horse, and she was smiling too. He dimly registered shock that he could smile after everything that had occurred that day, but indisputably there was a growing sensation of elation in him. A pleasurable warmth bloomed in his stomach, and as he stepped into the glen of the portal, that warmth rocketed up into his head and burst into euphoria.

He found himself laughing, despite everything. A small part of him felt guilty that he could feel so rapturous even with the death of his friend. Tears flowed again at that thought, but there was mirth to mix with the anguish. It was an exquisite pain, and he wrapped himself in it as he walked forward. He knew without looking that Gwyn was doing the same.

The humming grew in intensity, a euphony that doubled and redoubled until it was not one but many lovely sounds together, a choir that showered them with affection and joy. Standing right next to the portal, he did not think it strange when he spread his arms wide, leaning into the metal box as if to embrace it.

As he laid his working ear against the surface, he fully expected it to be cold, but whatever arcane mechanisms that worked inside the machine gave it a pleasant warmth. The harmonious sounds coming from inside seemed to use him as a conduit, vibrating his very bones. His body was like a tuning fork, and his happiness amplified until

(a rose a rose a lovely rose)

it felt as if he were going to explode with it.

With a sigh that tickled his lungs and throat on the way out, he stepped away from the portal. The humming dropped away, not entirely, but enough that he was able to return to his senses somewhat. He felt the ringing in his left ear again, and the pain with it, but somehow even that was a right and goodly thing to him.

This Beam was safe and in good order. He could have cried for the wonder of it. The nuclear blast that had filled them with such horror felt like it might as well have happened on a different world, in a different life.

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As long as the portal remained untouched, he thought he could be happy if he dropped dead on the spot.

And that’s just what the hulking man behind them intended to do to them.

“Daniel Bryne, you dog!”

The rapture that had enveloped them was hidden away, like a cloud covering the moon. Gwyn turned the horse around, eyes wide in sudden distress, and Daniel shuffled on his feet as his weariness stole back over him.

“I bet you think you’re real hot shit, sending that little man to do your dirty work for you,” Roedrick Davram shouted at them. He was mounted on his own horse, a great wicked thing that made the metal steed carrying Gwyn look like a child’s play toy. Steam jetted from its rigid nostrils, and its eyes pulsated with a glowing red like coals. It pawed at the ground just as a real horse might.

Daniel’s first thought was that it was crass. Fitting for the buffoon that rode it, certainly.

His second thought was of the massive crank gun held in Roedrick’s chunky hands. Six barrels protruded from it, long and of sizeable bore. It began to rotate, slowly at first, and then picking up speed.

Something in him was not working right, and he couldn’t seem to bring up the motivation to get out of the way. He blearily heard Gwyn screaming, saw her yank the steering column away out of the corner of his eye, but his heart just wasn’t in it.

“I don’t need anyone’s help to bring this thing down, mark my words you shitheel,” Roedrick shouted as he cranked the gun up to speed. “I’ll do it with my bare hands if I have to!”

Something in those words got through to him, and he finally felt his limbs spur into action just as the first round of deadly bullets began to fill the air, chaos spewing from the madman’s gun.

He heard a rapid set of sharp pings from projectile striking where his head had just been, and knew that his life would have ended right there if not for his timeliness.

It was too little too late: the next salvo caught him, striking him in his gut and his legs. His staff clattered against the portal, falling out of his hand. He crumpled hard to the ground as he felt lines of fire shoot through him, the strength in his legs evaporating. The pain in his left ear was still there, but it felt insignificant compared to the agony that ripped through him now. He reached a trembling hand down and touched at the tear in his abdomen, wet and warm membranes parting between his fingers. The sensation made him gasp, and he fell onto his back.

Roedrick clambered down from his massive horse, his barking laughter filling the air. “Somehow I expected more from you, Daniel Bryne. You were always weak, but this is just pathetic!” The cruel warrior dumped his gun in the grass and strode into the glen, his massive feet scoring marks in the grass and soft soil. “Of all our class, there were none so meager as you. That senile codger Vannay spent so much time with you, giving you extra lessons and letting you in the library. All that paper left to rot away in a dusty building, and look where it got you in the end.” He stood over Daniel now to block out the overhead sun, dazzling in his victory. Enormous guns sat low on his hips, practically hand cannons.

Daniel realized he was shaking, but he could not get himself up off the ground. His thoughts raced in his head; he could not get them under control. His life was running out of him, into the soil around the box.

“Hm,” Roedrick grunted, looking up and away from his hapless prey. “So this is the portal.” He stepped around it, observing it from every angle as Daniel felt himself growing colder. Roedrick closed a circle around the portal of the Elephant, finishing his examination. “Pretty bare. Considering how important they say this thing is, I thought it would be bigger.”

Daniel coughed up a little blood, covering his chin and getting some in his hair. The tiredness thickened in him, laying over him like a blanket. “You were always crude, Roedrick.”

The giant seemed to remember his existence, and stooped down over him. “You don’t know the meaning of crude, rat.” Roedrick picked up his quarry by the arm, using only one hand to yank Daniel painfully into the air. His legs dangled uselessly underneath, blood dripping from his wounds.

Daniel got his first good luck at the ghost of his past. The same sores that Robby had seen back in camp were now wildly out of control, freely oozing clear liquid that smelled foul. One of Roedrick’s cheeks had rotted away completely, leaving a gaping hole that showed the inside of his mouth—not that it mattered much, because his lips were almost completely melted off, giving him a permanent rictus grin. Around his golden eyes the flesh also peeled away so he could not blink, and the whites of his eyes were shot through with blood vessels, inflamed by dirt. Around the ridiculous metal plates that he used as armor were massive, angry looking burns—Daniel realized that Davram must have been much closer than they when the bomb went off, perhaps unable to find cover. Casting a more careful glance, he saw blisters and boils opening up all over Roedrick’s skin, red splotches seeming to cover every inch of him.

This man was a walking corpse. How he still possessed such strength was baffling.

Daniel chuckled, then. “You fool. You don’t even know you’re dead.”

“What, this?” Roedrick looked himself over. “I’ve had worse. Farson had some pretty useful stuff back when I joined him, kept me from getting smoked a few times. Walter’s got even better.” He shrugged. “Once I’m done here, though, none of that’ll matter anymore.”

Off behind the brute, Daniel saw Gwyn had abandoned her horse and was tiptoeing towards the massive machine gun in front of Roedrick’s stamping horse. His pulse began to race as she realized what she intended to do. “That’s what I don’t get,” he inhaled, trying to settle his heart. It just made the holes in him hurt more deeply. “You realize what destroying this portal will do, right? Surely you’re not that stupid.”

“Of course I do,” Roedrick laughed in his face. “You know, Walter also looked a bit miffed when he told me. Said some nonsense like, ‘fools be unto fools.’ That kind of pissed me off, but in the end he gave me whatever I asked for.” Roedrick actually looked thoughtful for a moment. “You know, I don’t think he believed I would make it happen. That’s a little strange, don’t you think?”

“Whoever Walter is, he sounds like he was toying with you,” Daniel grunted through his teeth. “There’s no reason for doing this. Destroying the Beam will level the Tower, and all of creation with it.”

“Ah, I don’t give a shit about any of that though,” Roedrick waved him off casually, the fingers of his other hand black crisps. “I’ll tell you something I never told anyone else, though it should be pretty obvious.” Roedrick leaned in, then, putting his face square up to Daniel’s so that he was almost kissing him, filling his vision. The moist stink of the big man’s breath roiled over him, strong and unpleasant. “I enjoy it when the weak fear the strong; it’s only proper. I’ve done what I do because it’s fun, and no one has been strong enough to stop me so far. I--”

Daniel grimaced, having had enough of this drivel. He tapped into the whole of his remaining strength, stars exploding in his brain as he willed every bit of it towards the rotting ogre that held him captive.

As a great mass of his precious remaining blood squirted out of Daniel’s nose, Roedrick halted midsentence, his mouth hanging open. Drool pooled around his ulcerated tongue, a bead of it escaping out of the corner of his mouth. The small man screamed to Gwyn, now sat upon the mechanical Clydesdale: “DO IT, SHOOT HIM!”

Propping the gun so it sat flat on the grass, she was barely able to operate the crank. Heaving at it with all her strength, she barely managed to get it up to speed, lasting just long enough for three volleys to rip straight through the flesh of Roedrick’s lower half.

The daze left him as the bones in his legs shattered and splintered, and the giant man began to scream even as he toppled over like a tree. He lost his grip on Daniel, dumping him unceremoniously onto the ground next to him.

Roedrick wasted no time turning around, staring at Gwyn. “YOU BITCH! I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL RING YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK!” Horribly, he started to pull himself forward in the dirt on his hands, startlingly fast even with the tattered stumps of his legs dragging behind him. He screamed at her over and over, a wailing monster that refused to die even as his blood poured out of him.

Daniel closed his eyes, chest heaving pitifully. Everything in him hurt, though the hum of the portal—mercifully whole and concordant—took a little of the edge off. He knew he was spent. He faintly registered the ground shaking at intervals beneath him.

Roedrick, on the other hand, showed no sign of stopping his rampage. He was no longer a man, but a revenant: every inch of him reflected the inhumanity within now. The holsters of his guns flopped behind him, forgotten in the sheer depth of his bloodlust. Gwyn stumbled over herself in her haste to retreat from the awful visage, and he closed the gap at an astonishing pace.

Gwyn bared her teeth, and following in Daniel’s footsteps, she bent the whole of her mind at the monster that was bearing down on her, and a little dab of blood erupted from her too.

It was less effective than before: his rage blunted the impact, barely slowing him down, but it bought her a few valuable seconds. She scrambled to her feet, gaining a little more distance—

--and passed under the shadow of Babar. She stared up at the behemoth, who seemed to fill the sky like a mountain. Trees still dotted his backside, swaying in the high winds. So close to his terrific bulk, she saw that the gray and brown above his colossal legs turned to a deep, mossy green. It reminded her oddly of a coat.

His left eye, clear and black unlike its other, stared down at her. She was transfixed by it, felt like she was drowning in its inky depths.

Roedrick had stopped mid-assault, also staring up at the titan towering above them all.

This was something he could understand. The fey box in the glen was nothing—as important as it might be on an existential level, to him it was merely an oddity from an age that had long passed the world by. It might as well not be real.

The Elephant, though, was very real, and very large. For the first time in his cruel life lording over everyone around him, he felt small.

He began to lift one leg, raising it over their heads with judgmental precision.

Roedrick, realizing his doom for what it was, began to scuffle away in the dirt, arms skittering like the legs of ant.

Babar set his foot down, and Roedrick Davram was no more.

Gwyn’s mesmeric fugue broke with the footfall. It shook the ground less than she would have expected: there was deceptive grace in its movements, she realized.

Then her mind returned to her with alarming clarity. “Danny!” she yelped, running to his side near the portal.

Daniel was deathly pale, contrasting with his bright wenberry hair. The flow of blood at his midriff was slow now, and his breath was shallow.

Despite the peaceful hum that surrounded them, she found herself dripping tears into his face, streaking the blood away. “Danny, please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me alone here.”

“’s okay, Gwyn,” he whispered. So weak. So weak.

“First dad, now you,” she sobbed. “You still have so much you could teach me.”

“You…” he sighed. “You’ll have time to figure it all out yourself. You know where the Beam lies: follow it, if you would.”

“No! Not without you!” she patted desperately at his chest. “You can’t…” but she couldn’t find the words in her.

She felt a breeze stir her deep brown hair. Through her bleary, watery eyes, she saw the Elephant’s massive, lumbering trunk reach down in front of her. For a second she feared it would smother the life out of Daniel, but Babar showed more of that assiduousness as only the very tip of the snout brushed against his face. It was practically a caress.

Daniel laughed then. So quiet! “I can’t believe…” he started to say, reaching his left hand up to the leathery flesh. There was a deep fondness in his touch, a fascination for the marvel that stood cosmically large in front of him.

After a second he recited a poem, a small thing that he had heard as a boy.

See the Elephant’s mighty trunk,

The world he guards with pointed tusk.

He greets, he stomps, he calls with glee,

And even greets a child like me.

And his hand fell away.

Babar’s trunk lifted away, back into the sky. He called, at first a low, nigh imperceptible rumbling that quickly turned to a deafening roar. It was a funeral clarion, a trumpet to shake the heavens.

The blast rolled across the trees and the hills around them. She felt Daniel’s ka leave them as he entered the clearing at the end of the path.

The bellowing fell away, echoes from the surrounding hillsides calling back for a short while. His part done, Babar lifted his bastion leg away from the glen, resuming a patrol he had left unfulfilled long before any man living.

Gwyn watched him depart, the trees growing on his backside shaking at every foot fall. His eminence gradually mingled with his surroundings, and after a while she could hear and see him no more.

Gwyn was well alone then, and her grief overwhelmed her once more. For a long while she did nothing, not even having the energy to cry.

The sun winded its way down into the hills, and she was plunged into darkness. Feeling the cold once more, she determined that she should at least make a fire. Using the knife—Daniel’s knife, she reminded herself sadly—she cut flakes of bark and twigs into a loose pile. Trying to avoid looking at his body directly, she lifted his leather bag away and looped the strap around her instead, fishing the flint and steel out.

After a moment’s thought, she took the oaken staff too.

As she tendered flames into the kindling, she heard a bleating from down the path.

Fiona ambled quite peacefully into the glen. Shame on you, leaving me behind, she looked at the girl, and promptly started to chew on the sweetgrass.

Gwyn’s heart swelled, and she motioned for Fiona to join her in the warmth.

Night passed them over, and she woke from a sleep she did not remember entering.

Babar had not returned; she assumed his land must be great as he was, and he probably had a lot of ground to cover.

“As do I,” she whispered to herself. She cast a look at the humming portal behind her, and then faced back in front of her, down the path where she had come from.

The puffy clouds in the pink morning sky above dragged as they briefly passed through the Beam, disorienting their cirrus path. The grass and the trees in front of her leaned away, tugged by that invisible, eddying force.

“Might as well get moving,” she told Fiona, who simply baaed at her. “We’ve got a long path ahead of us.”

She set off on the Path of the Elephant heading southeast, the Beam flowing strong above and through her.