Willow woke to the pale light of early morning. Annabelle was still fast asleep, but it didn’t take long to figure out what had woken her.

There were voices down in the general store below their room. They were quiet enough, but the timber of anxiety they carried set Willow’s nerves on edge. With only a single hitch in her breath and a blossom of pain through her spine, Willow carefully slid out of bed and began to assemble their supplies. If they were forced to flee the little settlement, then she wanted to escape with all haste.

Willow’s quiet shuffling eventually woke Annabelle who wove a quick spell, put it to her ear and leaned to the floor. By that time the group who had been chatting with the owner had stepped outside on the covered porch and Willow doubted Annabelle would be able to hear much even with magically augmented hearing. Annabelle got up with the disappointment evident on her face.

“Let’s buy up and clear out,” Willow whispered. “If they’ll let us.”

“You’re full of pep this morning,” Annabelle said, which made Willow take inventory as to where the storm of anxiety was coming from.

“I hate being suspect. The faster we get out of this town, the less these people will think we’re involved in whatever they’re discussing. It’s bad news that something might have happened right after we arrived last night.”

Annabelle nodded, shouldered her pack, and they made their ungainly way down the stairs. When they came through the door to the store itself, the man they’d met the previous night was standing behind the counter and writing on a piece of paper. He looked up at their entrance.

“Ah. Good morning ladies, I hope the accommodations were to your liking.”

“Well enough to pass the night,” Annabelle said, and approached the counter. “I’ve a list of supplies we’d like to secure before we head out. I’ll pay a premium for haste—we’ve a long road ahead.”

Willow wandered over to the dozens of small, warped panes of glass which made up the window of the storefront, close to a group of men speaking outside.

“—to the west,” she picked up. She pushed through the door and into the group.

The men startled at her appearance—apparently Frank hadn’t told them that he had boarders the previous night, or perhaps it was just at the way she looked—and she craned her neck to look down the hardpan street. It ran in a slightly crooked east-west orientation and she was able to spy great gouts of black smoke rising in the hills far away.

“Is that a wildfire,” Willow asked. “I didn’t hear thunder last night.”

“Not a brushfire,” one of the men, a stocky and broad-chested fellow who reminded her of her woodsmen crew, answered. “The brush burns light gray. I’ve never seen smoke like that before.”

“It could be the…” another man started, then trailed off. The stocky man turned on him.

“Don’t call that devil down on us.”

“What,” Willow said, and looked from man to man. They faced her, tight-lipped.

“We’re headed west, as soon as my companion stocks up.”

“I’d recommend against it,” the stocky man said. “Straight west is one of those ruins. I’d turn southwest for a dozen miles or so, then continue west if I were going to. You’ll thread the needle.”

“What’s in the ruins,” Willow asked.

“It’s all collapsed,” another man said. “But there are tunnels there that’ll open up beneath your feet. More likely than not to break a leg walking through those. Don’t know why the scavengers risk it like they do.”

“Is that where the smoke is coming from,” Willow asked, shading her eyes. She felt the eyes of the men go to her wasted arm, exposed by her missing right sleeve, and she tried to shrug off the creeping sensation.

“No, that’s twenty or so miles straight west,” the stocky man said, and motioned past the dark, billowing cloud. “Past whatever that is.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it before,” Willow asked, but she suspected the answer. A strange sensation mounted in her body by the second, like she was becoming shaky with adrenaline. She’d only felt like this once before, and that was in the hour before the warbeast attack on Durum.

The stocky man shook his head. “Not like this. There were some flames earlier in the morning, but I can’t see them now. Whatever it is, its not burning very high.”

Willow went into the general store again to find Annabelle inspecting a boiled-leather canteen hanging on the wall. She put her mouth to the woman’s ear.

“You said that thing that attacked Durum came from Asche? That it was a test for me? Do you know if anything else is coming from there?”

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Annabelle pulled back in surprise and shot a suspicious look out the window to the group of three men. She shook her head.

“Something strange is approaching, and it feels just like that thing did.”

“Then I suggest we get out of here posthaste,” Annabelle said. “In a couple minutes I’ll have the supplies, then we’ll take off perpendicular to whatever it is you feel. By the time it gets here we’ll hopefully be long gone.”

“No,” Willow said, and the conviction in her voice surprised even her. Annabelle was certainly surprised.

“No? What do you mean ‘no’?”

“If I hadn’t been in Durum to kill that thing, it would’ve destroyed the entire city. You said so yourself. I won’t let this town be destroyed because of me.”

“Oh come on,” Annabelle huffed. “Look around. These people are as podunk as you can get. They’ll scatter, whatever it is will come through, then they’ll rebuild. People on the edge of the world are used to taking the good with the bad.”

Willow shook her head. “Not because of me. Not this time,” she said, and turned toward the door.

“Willow,” Annabelle called, but she was already heading out.

By the time Willow emerged into the early-morning sunlight, the column of smoke was perceptibly closer. It was certainly moving faster than any wildfire ought to from and it was coming against the breeze at her back. Whatever this was, it wasn’t natural.

“Miss,” the stocky man called out as Willow limped to the street. “Are you going to turn southwest? I’d recommend it.”

“No,” Willow said, and began her plodding walk to the edge of town along the hardpan main road, her rough staff her only companion.

She thought Annabelle would catch up with her at some point, but when she reached the edge of the town where the tall plains-grass took over, she couldn’t see anyone rushing to meet her. If Annabelle was concerned about her, she was back there with the gathering group of townspeople, watching. Willow could see harried men pulling beasts of burden into their yokes. It appeared as if the townspeople really were planning to abandon their homes for the thing to rush through. How often did calamities like this happen?

As she pushed through the tall grass, the buzzing in her body rose to an unsteady crescendo. Her muscles felt as though they were tensioned wires and she doubted whether she’d be able to move at all if she was still using psychokinesis. Whatever this creature was, it was absolutely chock-full of essence.

So was Willow.

She walked for half an hour out into the grass as the tower of smoke loomed. Soon she heard a distant crackling which quickly became the roar of an inferno. This close to the burn she could see flames licking the underside of the smoky pillar.

Willow planted her feet, leaned against her staff with one hand, and began multi-shaping a spell with the other. Layer upon layer of protection she pushed into the spell, until it was positively humming with unreleased power. She cast it backward and felt the air thump at the barrier which had been erected between her and the town. Hopefully if she were to fail in her task, she could at least spare the townsfolk.

There was something moving in the flames at the base of the tower. It crawled forward, low to the ground, and it wasn’t until it was about two hundred feet out that Willow recognized its form as that of an enormous salamander, fully twenty feet wide. The heat which radiated off its body caused grass forty feet away to smoke and burst into flame. Even Willow was beginning to feel its burning rays on the bare skin of her right arm.

She constructed a small sphere of essence, then intentionally destabilized it. The sphere detonated with a shockwave which thumped in her chest. She hoped it would catch the creature’s attention.

It did. The salamander slowed its headlong advance and stopped a hundred feet away from Willow and the sparkling barrier at her back. She tried to stand tall, but the heat was intense and she felt sweat coursing down her body. Some material in her tinned woodsman’s outfit was leaking from the surface. It looked like molten wax.

The salamander regarded her in silence. The world was soaring smoke and roaring flame. Willow ground her teeth.

“Salamander,” Willow shouted. “Have you been sent here from Asche?”

The creature regarded her for so long that she doubted whether it had the intellect to understand her, until it opened its mouth.

“Yes,” it said, its voice lower than rolling thunder, but deafening over the roar of the flames.

“Then you have come for me. I have been told that you are a test, that I will be tested on my journey. I have destroyed one of your bretherin already, but I do not wish to destroy you.”

It was almost a minute before the salamander responded.

“It was not my brother,” the lizard said.

“O-oh,” Willow stuttered, too soft for the salamander to hear. She’d hoped to scare it off with this proclamation, but if the salamander held any feelings about the thing that had attacked Durum with lightning then it wasn’t showing them. How would a salamander show emotion anyway? It certainly didn’t have a human-enough appearance to interpret its facial movements.

“I won’t let you destroy this town,” Willow shouted. “Your battle is with me. I will fight you here.”

“My task is to destroy you,” the salamander droned. “But I was not told what you are.”

Then, the salamander did the strangest thing: it bowed its head to her. The grass beneath its chin, already blackened, burst in a puff of white smoke.

“My queen,” it rumbled. “Please, if you have mercy in your heart, kill me.”

“W-what?”

It raised its head once more. “My purpose is to do battle with you, it is what I was grown believing. I have known no other life but vague memories of a stream. Memories before the mage took me. I beg of you, please end this life. I have known nothing but pain, and my only hope up to this moment was that after slaying my target, I might wander the earth until found something to end my misery.”

“Can you not be helped?”

The salamander bowed its head. “This is the fate of those who emerge from the essence wombs. One mission, then insanity. If you could undo my mutilation, I may regain my previous form. But I suspect such an operation is impossible.”

“I… I don’t know how,” Willow said, and she felt hot tears roll down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

It laid down. A burst of flame from the remains of the grass underneath it igniting simultaneously, then it closed its eyes.

“I beseech you,” it rumbled. Willow watched the giant salamander lying perfectly still in the roaring inferno for a long, long time, before she lifted her staff from the ground. She held it out in both hands, then dropped her arms. The staff floated, because it was a part of her. It swept around like a compass needle until it pointed directly at the salamander’s head, and with a thought crossed the distance in an instant. If the salamander felt anything she couldn’t tell, and the fire licking its skin began to consume its corpse.