The rolling green hills lazily scrolled by below El as she flew in formation. Fifteen pairs of flaming wings carried her unit along at almost one hundred fifty miles per hour. Without the flame armor that protected her, she’d never be able to keep her eyes open at that speed. Though, she’d never really agreed with the name. Maybe it should be called heat armor? It wasn’t like she was engulfed in flames. It was barely more than a shimmer of heat. A shimmer stronger than any steel.

To their left, Esis’s unit held tight formation. Oril, alone, flew ahead of both groups, his eagerness to be home pushing him farther and faster.

Barely underway on their third straight day of travel, El could hardly fathom how Lilin had walked the same distance. Outside the city it was all so… empty. Nature had reclaimed many of the abandoned cities, leaving them little more than oddly shaped forests, and she could count the number of still-active homes on her fingers.

At least finding food wouldn’t have been a problem. Where people had deserted, wildlife flourished. Small game scurried under cover as her shadow passed over, and greats herds of some kind of brawny, horned animal dominated the landscape. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

And Lilin, Oril, and Sol had walked through it all.

Sol. Sparkless. Sparkless?! People without the Spark were so rare. Rare to the point of extinct. And yet, she’d seen Sol with her own eyes. Felt the absence of the Spark that was… everything. Life. Hope. Power. How could he live like that? Did he even know what he was missing?

“Ruins of a small town, two o’clock,” Esis’s voice echoed through the magic of El’s flame armor. “We’ll set down there to check for evidence of the lizard army.”

“Salid is another two hundred miles past that, at least,” Oril responded, his voice so clear he might have been right beside her. “We should keep going.”

“We’re landing,” Esis repeated, her tone brooking no room for argument, and her wing angled toward the edge of town.

A signal from Faled, and El’s wing followed suit.

“Teth. Nidina,” El spoke quietly, though the two would clearly hear her. “You’re our eyes.”

The two aforementioned soldiers slowed and then gently circled above the rest of the unit as it landed.

Esis and her second-in-command broke off their quiet discussion as Faled and El jogged over. “We’ll give the town a quick check and then move on. Report anything you find to me or Nite,” she nodded at the man beside her.

El always had to suppress a chuckle when she looked at Nite. The albino did not match his name. But then again, she’d never been this close to him. Never seen how his pale skin barely contained the power of his Spark. Like a roaring flame just beneath a sheet of paper…

“Is there a problem?” Esis asked, and El snapped her attention back to the matter at hand. Faled was standing in salute beside her, and she mimicked the gesture.

“No, ma’am,” El answered. “Just considering how best to deploy.”

“Suggestions?” Esis asked.

“This town, Helibak was its name, is pear-shaped, with us at the fat end. We’ll spread out here along the edge and converge toward the narrow end. Four in the air, ten on the ground checking the buildings,” El stated. The unevenness irked her, but it was close enough, and they’d need more people going door to door than scouting from above.

“Convey those orders,” Esis said to Nite, nodded to El and Faled, then turned to confer with her second-in-command, leaving Faled and El to themselves.

“I’ll lead the ground search,” Faled said, relaxing his salute. “Take Dayne and join Teth and Nidina in the air. I doubt we’ll find a lizard army hiding in the buildings here, but keep an eye out for any sign they passed.”

“Understood,” El said with a quick salute, and leapt into the air. “Dayne, with me,” she spoke into her armor, and the big soldier followed her into the sky a moment later. Teth and Nidina joined them as they hovered two hundred feet up, five times as high as the tallest building.

“Orders?” Nidina asked.

“Four of us are keeping an eye out up here while they knock on a few doors. Teth, you’ve got the north side, Dayne the south. Nidina and I will bring up the middle, and we’ll go west to east. Speak up if you see anything, anything, out of the ordinary. We’re only an hour or two away from Salid; who knows which direction the lizards went.”

The other three gave a quick salute, then sped off to their assigned areas, a small trail of flaming feathers fizzling out behind them.

If the lizards were nearby, they had to know the Firestorm was too.

El scanned the city below her, trying to spot anything that stood out, while her brain ransacked itself for knowledge on the enemy. It’d been decades since the last encounter, long before El was even born—was the information still good? She’d have to trust it was.

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Humanoid, six to eight feet tall on average, with the bigger ones weighing in at almost a thousand pounds, and covered head to toe in red, steel-like scales, the lizards were creatures of brute strength. They favored weapons that capitalized on that raw power, hammers and axes, and the like. There was something else… right, they breathed fire.

Could they still do that without the Spark? What had they lost when the Firestorm had captured their Ember and taken it back to join the Pyre? And would it even matter? El had never felt any discomfort even from the largest flame, thanks to the Spark in her chest.

El shook her head. Not the time for questions. She needed to be…

“…ignoring me, El?” Dayne’s voice popped and snapped into clarity in her ear.

“What’s that, Dayne?” she asked and turned south to find Dayne speeding in her direction.

“Never mind. You need to see this,” he said, then stopped and hovered in place.

“Teth, Nidina, I’m going to check something out with Dayne, spread out to cover for me,” El ordered, then closed the distance to join Dayne. “What’ve you got?”

“Easier to show you,” the big man said, and glided backward until he was sure El was following, then turned and raced to the south, El hot on his heels.

El followed in silence, though the question itched at the back of her skull. Dayne wasn’t much of a talker, sure, but this was odd even for him. They flew for thirty seconds, El’s eye’s scanning the ground and the horizon for something out of the ordinary, but there wasn’t anything. No lizards. No tracks. No refugee camps. Nothing.

She was just about to ask the question, when the answer appeared literally right in front of her, so suddenly she almost didn’t react in time to stop before she hit it. But, what was it?

A wall of white stretched high into the sky, much higher than she was, and east to west as far as the eye could see. And the wall was moving. No, moving wasn’t specific enough. It was falling.

“Is that… snow?” El asked. She’d never seen snow before, just read about it in history books, old history books, but this fit the description. El turned to Dayne when he didn’t respond to her question, and he looked at her then pointed at his ear, shaking his head. “You can’t hear me?” she asked. No response, so she glided closer.

“Guess you weren’t ignoring me on purpose,” Dayne’s words barely reached El’s ears without the aid of the magic.

Something was interfering with their communications?

“Teth, can you hear me?” El tested. No response. “That’s odd,” she said to Dayne. The big man just nodded, and they both pivoted to take in the massive snowstorm.

“No wind,” Dayne said.

He was right. The huge snowflakes, each at least an inch across, were falling straight down.

“When you were coming back to get me, were you trying the communicators the whole time?” she asked Dayne.

“I was,” he answered.

“Is the storm causing interference? Can a storm even do that?”

Dayne shrugged, but stayed quiet.

“Only one way to find out. Head back toward where you found me until your communicator works again. Let Faled know what’s going on. Bring him, probably Esis too, back here. Also, keep track of how far you have to go for it to work again. Any questions?”

Dayne shook his head, then took off when El gave him the nod to go.

Turning back to the storm, El tentatively reached out her hand to the falling snow, then stopped herself. Looking at the two-hundred-foot drop to the ground below, she shook her head with a chuckle. If it actually was the snow blocking their communications, could it suppress any of their other magic? Like, say, oh, her wings?

El hovered down to the ground while she watched the snow fall with her. The dark clouds above were monstrous things, and would need to be inspected later, but first she needed to know more about the snow itself.

With her feet firmly, and safely, on the old overgrown cobblestones, El opened and closed her right hand, then stuck it into the storm.

Fluffy white flakes hit her flame armor, settling there and slowly accumulating. They weren’t melting, or if they were, it was a slow process, but her armor didn’t fail.

“Maybe it’s not the snow?” El asked herself rhetorically. But there was definitely something strange about it. She hadn’t seen the storm until it was right in front of her. And the way it fell…

El crouched down and peered into the white curtain. Three feet, maybe four, was as far as she could see, before it was like looking at a solid object. But the ground wasn’t piled high with snow. No, it was…

A tap on her shoulder, and El turned to find Faled and Dayne standing behind her, with Esis and Nite landing a few steps further back. All eyes were on the storm, understandably so.

“By the Pyre,” Faled said with a shake of his head. “What’ve you got?” he asked El.

“I think we can all agree this isn’t natural,” El said, then had to repeat herself louder when Esis and Nite got closer. “Something, I don’t know if it’s the storm or not, is blocking our communications, but I’m guessing you’ve already figured that out.

“How far, Dayne?” she asked.

“About two miles,” he answered.

“We’ll need to test if it’s the storm, or something else,” Faled said. “What else?”

“The snow doesn’t seem to interfere with the flame armor, so we might be able to fly through it if we need to,” El said.

Faled nodded. “We’ll have to. Salid is straight through there. That it?”

El shook her head. “No. The storm is moving steadily north.”

Faled shared a glance with Esis, and it was the senior officer who spoke up. “It doesn’t look like it’s moving,” she said.

El waved for the others to join her closer to the storm, then crouched back down and pointed at the ground just inside the boundary of falling snow. “Look at the snow piled on the ground. There’s no wind, but do you see the incline? That’s got to be because the edge of the storm is moving north. Not quickly, but it’s definitely moving.”

“Did Oril or the others mention anything about a storm?” Faled asked Esis.

“Nothing,” Nite answered for her, and stuck his hand up to his elbow into the curtain of falling snow. Like with El, the snow gradually accumulated on his arm, but didn’t melt.

“Orders?” Faled asked.

“Gather the others,” Esis said quickly. “We’ll stage from… the roof of that old building there,” she pointed at a nearby three-story structure. “First we figure out the communication range, then learn everything about this storm.”

“Salid? The lizards?” Faled asked.

“Both will have to wait until we’re sure this is safe to pass through. Besides, without the Spark, I suspect a storm like that would be lethal to the lizards.”

“Dayne and I will get the others,” El volunteered. “We can run a few quick tests on the communication interference while we go and give you a preliminary report when we get back.”

“Good. Don’t dally though,” Esis instructed. “I don’t want anybody surprised by the storm and cut off.”

“Yes ma’am.” El saluted, jumped into the air, and with Dayne close behind, they raced back to gather the two wings.