Two figures walked through the desert, scaling the frozen waves of sand in a landscape filled with strange, hollow rock columns.
“Listen, I said sorry,” Wretch said.
Elenya pouted, the cleaver fastened to her back.
“You idiot rat. You made me say all that embarrassing shit while you were bleeding out.”
“I was fine. And you should have seen the other guy,” Wretch said, stepping over a ridge on naked feet.
“Whatever,” Elenya answered sourly.
“Come on, I even caught bird meat for us,” he said.
She answered with a grumble, and Wretch shrugged his shoulders.
His eyes flashed with fire and a snap resounded from his left leg. The flesh squirmed and a bluish bruise grew on the pale skin.
“What are you doing now?”
Wretch limped forward.
“I’m stealing the ligaments from the fast one that almost killed you. They’re strong like cords of steel.”
Taking a new form always came with a tingle of enjoyment these days, despite the obvious pain. Previously he had taken the changes all in one go, but out here he did not have that luxury.
“As soon as my flame is full, I’ll make a small change and keep going like that. If we want to survive this place, we can’t be bothered by the cost of power.”
“Doesn’t that decrease your flame permanently?”
“It does, if only a little. The whispers grow slightly too, but as long as I don’t go overboard, we’ll be fine.”
Elenya only answered by blowing air through her nose.
They kept walking and Wretch slowly got the feel of his new tendon. It felt stiff at first, but with each step it became more comfortable until his gait was back to normal. A while later he moved on to the next.
The landscape was deadly quiet, but here and there remained tracks of the night’s battle. Broken black wings lay half submerged in the dunes and ancient armor refused to sink into the sand.
The strange rock pillars were becoming smaller and the distance between them continued to grow larger. They walked unceasingly during the day, keeping to the valleys when possible.
During the nights, they hid in the pillars, huddled together around the largest fire they dared produce and catching a few of the crows. Washing down their meager meat with rainwater from his boot. Something quickly became apparent, a new aspect of their ascension they previously had not noticed. The amount of food and water needed to sustain them had dropped. The hunger and thirst were still there, but they could walk for a day on a mouthful of water and a scorched bird wing.
When the suns peeked up over the horizon and the recurring chaos of the ground had settled, they stomped out the fire and quickly set off. On the night of the fifth day, they ran out of firewood and made another discovery. This deep in the desert, no lightning struck during the night. The furious storm had been reduced to a gust with a trickle of rain.
No lightning struck, no armor reanimating. As such, there was no battle during the night. Instead, a wave of black dots washed over the sky at nightfall, the crows heading to the battle at the edges of the crater.
They did not dare catch any. Instead they huddled against the rocks, trying to stave off the cold. By then every tendon in his body was strengthened. He had even changed the discs between his vertebrae. It left him an inch taller, and the sinew pulled him into a hunched posture more fitting a beast than a proud man. Still he felt it was a worthy trade. These ones would not snap as easily and they even allowed his muscles to pull more efficiently. It took time to get used to it, but now his steps were light. And in a march across endless dunes, that meant a world of difference.
The wind blew dry sand, and the suns stood high in the sky as the two trudged up another hill of scorching sand. A constant ache of hunger had replaced the grumble of his stomach and his throat felt dry enough to rival the sand they walked. Still, all they could do was walk.
Something besides the wind brushed against his senses. He snapped out of the lethargic state.
“I hear something.”
Elenya turned to him. Her hair was wild as usual, blowing in the hot wind. Having discarded her armor, she walked through the dunes in gray cloth attire with leather straps wrapping her white shirt tightly around her remaining left arm.
She was thinner than before. Even so, she looked healthier than she had any right to be. The wound was also healing nicely, even if Wretch got a hint of anxiety every time they inspected it.
“Where?” she asked.
He wore only a pair of pants, his bare chest partially covered in scales. During the days, his skin would blister, but he would regenerate it whenever it became too annoying.
“From the other side of the dune, like a flutter of wings,” he said and nodded towards the mound of sand in front of them.
There was nothing in sight beyond the dunes. They trudged on up the wave of sand, his feet sinking down with every step and sending cascades of sand tumbling downwards. They came to the top of the hill, shielding their eyes to look beyond.
“Wow…” Elenya said.
Wretch could do nothing but agree. Rolling dunes stretched to the horizon in every direction, and from them rose black stone domes and crumbling towers, half submerged in the shifting sands. In the distance, a shuddering mirage of a city reached towards the clear blue skies, similarly made of the black stone with a central tower stretching upwards. Cracks and splinters marred the ground on either side of the obsidian city, leading down into a chasm that spread both north and south. The city itself was placed over the chasm like a lonely stitch in a wound.
“A city out here. This might be where the lightning soldiers are trying to go,” Wretch said.
Elenya shook her head. “Whoever built this must have been mad.”
Wretch scratched the back of his head. “Strange, that tower looks familiar.”
“Kinda looks like a Spire,” Elenya answered. “The chasm is too wide. Might as well just power through. Besides, we could find something to eat in there.”
“Good. I wanted to explore it anyway.”
They walked down the dune as the suns ducked down low in the west, showering the black city in golden light.
They walked through ancient skeletons of buildings covered in sand with carvings covering their surfaces. The ruins stretched for hours and soon the suns were setting.
“Let’s find some shelter while we can. Don’t want to stand out in the open at nightfall. The birds will tear anything on the ground into shreds,” Wretch said.
As the last rays of the sun disappeared, they found a submerged oval shaped dome with a blocked entrance of sand. Digging away at the doorless gate, they made just enough room to squeeze inside.
“Let’s go,” Elenya said as she disappeared inside.
“Let me just watch for a second,” Wretch said as he gazed at the black city rising in the distance.
The rumble of a storm came from somewhere far away, no stronger than the rumbling of his empty stomach. The black city stood quiet, then the ground trembled ever so slightly. From the black tower an unending stream of black dots spiraled upwards before spreading out like a living veil of soot, rushing towards every edge of the desert.
“Damn,” he mumbled as he crawled inside after Elenya. He pushed back some sand to mask the entrance and looked inside. There was no furniture visible. Instead, they were sitting on a bed of sand and a dome roof pressed down on them from above.
Elenya was leaning towards a wall. He could still see her clearly in the low light. She had refused to leave the cleaver, and now it dug into the sand by her side and the Blinking Blade was fastened to her belt. It was more dangerous in her hand as a regular dagger than a Blessed one in his.
“They are coming from the city, the birds I mean.”
“Well, they are just birds,” she said with a shrug.
“There are thousands of birds,” he answered.
Elenya gave a slow nod. She had bags under her eyes, and her cheeks were sunken into her skull over cracked lips. Wretch could scale spires, turn into forms of horror, regenerate lost limbs and see in the dark while Elenya could bend metal with her hands and slay a hundred men. But despite all that, they were still human, lost in a desert without water.
Wretch looked around the crawlspace as the sound of fluttering wings grew louder.
Not thousands, hundreds of thousands, he thought.
He crawled forward to sit by Elenya. From far away, a rumbling of thunder could be heard, but it was distant and unimpressive. Through the black stone, a cold crept into his bones and he shuddered. He had draped his shirt around Elenya’s wound and preferred to leave it there, even if that left him with a bare upper body.
“Probably no need to have a guard tonight. Doesn’t seem like it will rain,” Elenya whispered over the sound of feathers on the other side of the stone.
He could hear the myriad of tiny bodies flap by in clusters, as if driven mad.
Wretch nodded. “Let’s split the last water.”
He revealed his only remaining shoe, which had served as a container for water during their desperate journey back to civilization. Elenya reached out with her hand in the dark. He could see her clearly in shades of gray, but to her it must have been pitch black.
He grabbed her wrist, leading it to the worn boot. She took a swig before extending it back to him.
“It’s not too bad, barely tastes like feet,” Elenya said as she leaned back. Wretch gulped down the last of the leather tasting liquid.
“It’s strange. I feel so much more at ease out here. It’s so simple, just move forward. No matter what stands in the way.”
“I know the feeling,” Elenya answered flatly.
“I’m just not sure if I’ll ever truly sleep well in a bed again. But out here, hunted by a hound, in between Blessings so powerful I can’t even understand them. I actually sleep.”
He swept his tail tight around him to hold on to the heat.
“Even if the desert is a bit cold,” he said with rattling teeth.
Elenya exhaled through her nose, as if she found it pathetic. Then she reached out into the dark, grabbing him by the neck with her only intact arm, lifting him up onto her lap with ease. Her padded clothes were warm compared to the sand.
Were it not for the fatigue, he might have protested. Instead, he curled up in her lap, and a thick arm lay over him. He dozed off to Elenya’s deep breaths and the fluttering of wings through stone.
By sunrise, a murder of crows large enough to blot out the skies flew back to the city, like specks of dirt disappearing down the drain of a running sink. They walked in silence, working the cold out of their bones as the two suns cast long shadows across the dunes.
“Imagine a steak,” Elenya said.
Wretch gave a dry laugh. “Imagine a shower.”
Elenya nodded with a smile. “That’s a good one.”
“Maybe there is one in the city,” he said.
“Better be.”
By midday, the city looked twice as big. Or perhaps it was wrong to call it a city. It was more of a fortress. Piercing towers of black stone hid behind a wall of the same slick black material. One of the central towers reached almost twice as far as the others, reminding Wretch of the inner wall in Nov Yanosk, if only much smaller.
He stopped for a moment and looked to the closest ruins by his side in the dunes. All that remained were lonely pillars and arches in a frozen wave of sand. If this had been Nov Yanosk, this would have been the slums and that would have been the spires. It looked quite similar. Was it a coincidence? He did not have the mental energy to ponder further.
A caw came from the fortress and he looked up, shielding his eyes. By day, he had not seen a single crow.
A black dot flew upwards from the highest tower.
“Something flew up from the city just now,” he said.
Elenya followed his gaze. “A crow?”
“Sounded like one,” he said.
He squinted his eyes, following the black dot across the blue sky. “It’s coming closer.”
“Maybe we can eat it,” Elenya said, putting a hand on the Blinking Blade in her belt.
Wretch’s eyes went wide, and suddenly the image of the black city clicked into place. He had seen it before. “We’ve got to go, now.”
“Looks like a normal crow to me,” Elenya said without a hint of worry.
Wretch ran up to her and dragged her across the sand. “I remember the tower. It’s a monster from my father’s book. A giant bird of death. It’s a Blaze.”
From the skies above, a shriek pierced towards them, loud enough to make their ears ring and the sand vibrate. A name bloomed to life in their minds, as certain as the heat of the suns.
Yarok, Glutton of the Black City.