I presume to be the afternoon, we hear the rumbling of something closing in on us from behind. Severin quickly brings his soldiers about to face it, pulling me by his side and having the soldiers form two lines across the narrow path before us. Images of the dead from the fortress flash through my mind, and I start to panic, though I try to tell myself that the soldiers with me will be able to protect me.
To my relief, a small band of soldiers wearing the same uniforms as those with me comes around a bend in the path a few hundred yards away, and Severin gives the order for his soldiers to stand at ease. He then walks through them and rushes back to speak with the soldier at the head of the band. After a brief exchange, he yells back our direction.
“Go on without me. Tell Anastasia I will return before the darkness sets in.”
One of the soldiers next to me, a shorter one who has been by Severin’s side ever since we began our march, nods his head as though the order was directed specifically at him.
“You heard him, let’s move,” he says in a scraggly voice that matches his thin frame.
Once we are out of Severin’s sight, I start talking to Minerva again.
“What you said makes it sound like your ancestors are from somewhere else. Why did your people choose to come here?”
“I don’t think anyone chooses to come here,” she replies, then quickly picking up on my confusion at her answer. “Wade didn’t tell you much about the plains, did he?”
“No,” I bemoan. “He said it would be best to wait, that the truth can be a bit much to hear, whatever that means.”
“I can relate,” she reassures. “I was born here, too, without any memory of anything else, so at some point I had to have it explained. But I think it’s more than that. Most people here don’t like to think about where they come from. It’s easier to survive day to day in the world you know, I guess. That’s what makes Sanctuary different. The idea there is to not forget where you come from, but to somehow draw peace from it.”
“You don’t sound like you want to tell me, either,” I tease.
Minerva chuckles, which draws attention from the soldier now leading us. The look he gives us is much like the one from Severin, but Minerva doesn’t seem to take it as seriously and keeps talking, at least to finish what she is saying.
“I’d rather you hear it from Anastasia. She’s the leader of Sanctuary. It’s probably best you go to her with a clear mind.”
We march in silence for a little while after that as I try to put everything I’ve heard together. The seed of doubt that the Necromancer planted in my mind makes that difficult, leaving me to question just what I can trust, from Minerva or anyone else. Despite Wade’s conviction that the Necromancer meant to deceive me himself, Wade didn’t exactly seem to have much confidence in Sanctuary either. I wonder where he went.
“Is Wade dangerous?” I ask.
“Depends on which stories you choose to believe,” Minerva answers. “Wade’s true nature is clouded, just like all of the other rangers who have managed to survive.”
“Rangers?”
“That’s what they were called, long before my people came to this land. There used to be many more of them, hundreds if not thousands. They were once a force for good, men who kept the land to the south of the Aspros Wild safe, or relatively safe, for centuries. Many villages dotted that part of the plains back then, but now they’re empty, left in ruins. Only the great fortressed cities remained intact after the rangers disappeared.”
“What happened to them?”
“That, too, depends on who and what you believe. The only thing I know for certain is that someone, or something, preferred chaos to the order that the rangers provided. Whatever it was, it hunted the rangers one by one for years until they were all but extinct. Those who survived… well, I think that you can only be hunted like an animal for so long before you transform into one yourself.
“To answer your question, it is likely that Wade was once an honorable and good man, but I can’t tell you what he is now. I like to think that goodness is always to be found inside the souls of those who were once good, no matter what they do, but this world has a tendency to prove me wrong.”
To my surprise, this actually makes me feel much more at peace with the thought of Wade. The way he acted toward me, what he described as being two-faced, makes much more sense given the history that Minerva has described.
“You mentioned that the rangers were around for centuries,” I say. “That would make Wade—”
“Very old,” she finishes. “It’s one of the more peculiar things about the plains. Age, it seems, has a lot to do with where you’re from. That’s another thing that Anastasia will probably be able to explain a lot better than me.”
I wonder what Anastasia actually plans on sharing with me. Wade’s promise to tell me what she won’t makes me think that the answer is not very much. Or maybe his promise had more to do with whether or not she would tell me the truth. I wish he were still around. I need to try and find him if I can.
My next thought is to start asking questions about Anastasia, but the rising of smoke in the distance as we turn a corner grabs my attention. Dread immediately fills my heart, but none of the soldiers seem concerned, Minerva included.
“Relax,” she says calmly. “It’s just steam from the river.”
The pathway we are on slopes up gradually toward a ridge that the smoke is rising from. When we reach its top, which overlooks the largest canyon I’ve seen so far, I’m able to understand exactly what she means. This canyon, unlike the others, is filled not only with a river of lava, but also one of water. The river is small, at least relative to the Lethe, and runs along an elevated portion of the canyon on its far side. A lava trench forms closer to where we stand and runs parallel to the river, lying hundreds of feet further down.
The river itself is kept from flowing down into the trench by a wall of rock that separates it from the rest of the canyon, but waterfalls pour down into the lava through small holes in the rock, evenly spaced ones that appear to have been drilled. The whole canyon is a wonder to behold, and I stop to admire it.
“Even this desolate land has places of beauty,” Minerva comments from behind me. “The holes were made anciently by those who lived here before Sanctuary came into being. During seasons flooding, the smoke from the overflowing river would make the path impassable. It’s better to constantly have a little smoke than brief periods of blinding whiteness.”
Our march turns west along the south side of the canyon. After some time, a bridge comes to view in the distance, one of stone that looks much sturdier than the causeways that we’ve been traveling on. The broken roadway it connects to on our side curves northwest with the canyon and is also much more elegant than the pathways we have been treading. It must lead somewhere important.
“Where does that go?” I ask, pointing down that way.
“To the marshes,” Minerva answers. “That’s where Sanctuary gets most of its meager supplies. These canyons separate the northern and southern lands, but they also cut us off from everyone. The marshes are our only hunting and foraging grounds, but they are also filled with the plains’ most dangerous creatures. You should avoid them at all cost.”
Once we cross the bridge, the roadway cuts directly toward Sanctuary by using a tunnel dug right through the canyon wall. My heart stops once we get to its other side and I see our next obstacle. As the road reaches the mountain, it narrows to the width of a person, meandering up the mountainside in a thin trail that ends at an entryway in the distant cliffs.
“How do carts make it up?” I ask nervously.
“They don’t anymore,” Minerva laments. “The way up fell into disrepair a long time ago. The founders of this place had the means to fix it, but we don’t. It used to be just as wide as the bridge. You can still see some of the metal supports.”
My eyes scour the pathway, and sure enough, beams stick out in a few places, some still holding up small portions of the old road, which a
ppears to have been made of some kind of dark cement. Enough of the road remains that I can imagine, at least to some extent, how it must have once looked.
“So how do we get there?”
“Carefully,” the soldier leading us says, smirking as he walks over to stand by me. “That’s why you’ll be with me.”
He then grabs my arm, firmly but not forcefully, and nudges me toward the ledge next to the start of the pathway. I don’t think he is strong enough to be much more than an annoyance with how scrawny he is, and that makes it hard to believe that I will be any safer with him than with Minerva, who is herself much taller and stronger. Then again, his lack of size will also give him much more space to work with.
Before we begin, he places a simple harness, little more than a small belt, around me, connecting it to a metal wire that runs along the narrow pathway. I lean forward and look over the ledge as he finishes. It is a dead drop into a wide gorge.
When he’s done, he doesn’t put on a harness of his own but instead springs right up the path without hesitation. I follow him as best as I can using metal grips that run along the path to help keep me balanced and tucked snugly against the mountain. We move much faster than I’d expected, giving me a false sense of security that flees the instant a strong gust of wind comes rushing by, nearly ripping me off of the ledge.
‘It’s just like