When Willow reached the ruins, she was wholly unprepared for the sight. She’d seen ruins in the past—near Bridgewater there was what looked like an old road beside a rough chunk of stone shot through with rusty metal poles—but nothing like this.

There were heaps of the strange metal-stone mixture almost thirty feet high along the prominent road. As she walked, Willow was able to pry up several pieces of the black stone which made up the roads. Where that ancient race had found such stone, no one knew, for there were none left to tell of it.

They were well and truly heading toward winter now, and Annabelle had purchased a thick woolen traveling cloak for Willow to augment her half-charred tinned woodsman’s outfit. She held the edges of the cloak close to conserve heat as they walked along the widest road they could find between the shattered monoliths.

“Watch it,” Annabelle said and pointed to the ground. Willow glanced down and quickly sidestepped a long, thin chasm in the road which led down to inky blackness.

“What do you think these were for,” Willow asked as they passed the crack. “These roads and the tunnels beneath them. The ruins around us.”

“It was a city, just like any other,” Annabelle said. “But from a bygone age.”

“Do they tell you anything more about it in Asche,” Willow asked. “I never learned much about them in Bridgewater.”

Annabelle didn’t answer right away, taking her time as they walked down the center of the shattered road.

“In Asche there are streets like this,” Annabelle said. “The tunnels underneath carry sewage to the river. I don’t know if that’s what these were for.”

“There are,” Willow asked, amazed. It sounded like a magical place, even moreso than Durum.

Annabelle nodded. “The buildings aren’t anything like these, but we have several intact from that antediluvian era. They need a lot of upkeep and archiving, but they’re still there.”

“What do they look like?”

“Much like any other building,” Annabelle shrugged. “More ornate, perhaps. They’re made of the poured stone, so you don’t see any chisel-marks on the embellishments. A lot of the newer buildings in Asche copy them.”

Willow walked on beside Annabelle in silence, chewing on something she’d been thinking since killing the salamander.

“You have to use magic again sometime,” Annabelle said out of nowhere. Willow gritted her teeth.

“I did. I cast that barrier.”

“Battle magic,” Annabelle clarified. “I can teach you the basics—”

Willow shook her head. “I can’t. I killed Carl.”

“You saved Durum as well, if you recall,” Annabelle sighed. “Maybe you have more brain damage than I thought.”

“I remember just fine,” Willow spat, but the memory that came to mind was of her wandering through the streets covered with a fine layer of stone dust. When she hadn’t known yet what had become of Carl.

“That was a one-time deal,” Willow said. “Anything else that comes up, I’ll use my psychokinesis.”

“You’ve got to get over this block,” Annabelle said. “Or you’re going to get us both killed.”

“Killed? Did you see what happened to the salamander?”

“It let you kill it. If you were in a battle, a real fight, you’d have to use magic or die. These things are only going to become more powerful the closer we get.”

And there it was. The thing that had been nagging her since the salamander.

“Why,” Willow asked, and turned on Annabelle, even though the move almost cost her footing. She barely caught herself on the new, polished wood staff that Annabelle had purchased.

“Why are they sending these things out to fight me. Why are they even making them?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“They’re tests,” Annabelle said. “To see if you are truly what Carl said you were.”

“And if I fail? What about that town? What about Durum?”

Annabelle shrugged. “This is what war has always looked like. Except there’s never been an army packed into a single body like you before.”

“Why do they make them,” Willow said between gritted teeth. “It begged for death.”

“They’re weapons, like anything else,” Annabelle said, and the casual way she said it infuriated Willow.

“It was sentient. It spoke!”

“Of course it was. They all are. You shove that much essence into something, it’s going to become sentient.”

“But you don’t care,” Willow spat. “You don’t care about it.”

“It’s not real, Willow,” she said. “It’s not like you and me. It’s not human. It’s a tool like that staff or this shoe. They’re all tools.”

“You make me sick,” Willow said, then forced herself to calm down.

“There’s something else coming,” Willow said. “It’s coming fast. From the west.”

Annabelle jerked her head around but all she could see in the distance was a lone crow in the sky.

“Where,” Annabelle asked, shuffling off the road.

“I don’t know. Maybe its invisible,” Willow said. She couldn’t bring herself to care that Annabelle was retreating toward one of the collapsed ruins, effectively leaving her in the middle of the road to fend for herself. It’s what she’d done in the settlement.

The crow was still coming, but there was something off about it. It kept growing, larger and larger, until it became clear that it was no crow at all. Or at least not a normal-sized one. Willow set her stance in the cracked rock of the ancient road and waited for the bird to land.

It didn’t. Its size grew as it approached until it was larger than a house, and as it swooped low over Willow it crushed a spire of ancient poured-rock and sent the remains tumbling all around her. Willow crouched and was only clipped lightly on the shoulder by a speeding chunk.

Was it not going to stop and treat with her? It circled around again and Willow couldn’t help but recognize the silhouette it cast in the sky. A roc, but a much larger one than usual. Rocs were pestilence for sheep farmers, but not usually dangerous to humans. This one was easily twice the size of the few rocs she’d seen.

It banked until it was coming at Willow. She crouched low, touched a chunk of the ancient rock that had fallen near her and cast herself into it. It became a part of her, as the ax and her staff had, and when she rose clutching it it felt as light as a feather.

The massive roc angled down the broad street, swooping low, and let out an ear-splitting screech. Willow winced and dropped to one knee, but threw the stone in her hand anyway. The chunk looked like a pebble as it shot toward the roc, but the bird was forced to pull up to avoid it.

Something the salamander said came back to her then. Had the roc already gone insane? Could it not speak with her anymore? Was it as ruined as the corpse hound—the warbeast which stood seige around Durum?

The roc flapped its massive wings and the gust would have knocked Willow over if she’d not had her staff. It flapped twice and alighted on a thirty-foot high obelisk of iron-riddled stone, fixing Willow with its glare. It’s head kept twitching to the side, like a tic.

“Can you understand me,” Willow shouted toward the roc.

In answer the bird opened its beak and screamed with such force that Willow fell to both knees. She covered her ears from the pressure of the shriek, but another gust of wind caused her to look up and see that the roc was taking off again, straight toward her.

It had incapacitated her before it came in for the kill!

Willow pushed her awareness into the ground around her, seeping along the cracked and blackened stone of the road, even touching the crest of the buried sewer tunnel. The amulet she wore grew uncomfortably hot against her chest, but she kept pushing. If she was going to fight the roc, she’d need more.

Wider, deeper, she became the world around her. The sensation was familiar, like a half-remembered dream, and she gasped with the pain of the amulet.

The roc flew in, wicked talons outstretched for the kill, and Willow drew the surrounding road up around her into a protective shell. Suddenly she was in the dark at the center of a small hollow sphere, and a great crack signaled the roc’s failed attack. She’d barely had to push against its claws.

She parted the sphere down the center and spied the roc gaining altitude. It swooped around, graceful and deadly, and homed in on her once again.

There was nothing she could do for it, not now. Why it had to be a contest between her and it, she didn’t know. Why was Annabelle and Carl’s mentor sending these creatures to test her? Why did she have to destroy them, when all they wanted was peace?

The sphere cracked into a hundred fist-sized chunks and shot out in a cloud of death toward the roc, whipping Willow’s cloak around her like a hurricane. The roc realized what was coming and attempted to turn, but too late. The stones smashed into the bird with a colossal sickening crunch, and the roc fell from the sky. It landed several hundred feet away behind another iron-riddled ruin.

The world was silence once again.

Annabelle came out from her hiding place as Willow grasped the pendant around her neck. It had begun to cool again, but was still much too hot for comfort. She tried to keep it off her skin.

The woman walked up as Willow regained her feet with her dropped staff, and they looked at the settling cloud of dust that marked where the roc had fallen.

“I hate to say it—”

“Then don’t,” Willow interrupted.

“—but you could have taken care of that roc before it even reached the city with magic. If you’d been a bit slower on that shield…”

Willow bit her tongue. She wanted to scream at Annabelle, shake the woman and ask her ‘why gods why did this keep happening’, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Not this close to the body of something once intelligent, which had been ruined by her master.

She’d murdered it, just like she’d murdered others.