A floodplain of rubble lay before them. Where they stood atop that small hill, the vast deadness of the city stared only back.

  The great cloud of smoke blew away into the wind before they'd reached the vantage, and so there the whole extent of the destruction was to them incontrovertibly laid bare.

  Vague ruins of the once-proudest city structures were all that remained distinct, if only as mounds of jagged gray larger than most. Intermittent shards of the stoutest courtyard walls, or support pillars jutting from deepest-lain foundations rising uneven into the sky, even while no superstructure remained above to be held aloft. All else was leveled flat, as if vanished without a trace, or shred into an ocean of amorphous stone debris.

  And how terribly vast was the sea of broken stone.

  From their distance, it seemed the great city had been ground to a powder, with chunks of soft marble and strong granite alike so evenly fragmented and distributed throughout former city streets. And that particulate matter left behind was in turn char-blackened, burnt by some heat yet greater than that which their company had narrowly avoided, protected by Tanhkmet's barrier.

  Where the river Set had once bisected the city, instead was a craterous depression newly pooling with water as if blood from a wound. The river's egress from the city had run dry as the new lake had not by then risen to wet it.

  The once-great walls of Atum-Ra had fallen over outward, like wilting flower petals. In disrepair for lack of need for years, the tremendous blast had been perhaps little more than an excuse for them to finally collapse. Their ruin left behind its own unique ring of rubble, circling the city. Beyond that, outlying fields, meadows and their smaller peripheral settlements had been burnt and swept away, leaving only barren, cracked-dry earth underneath for miles in every direction.

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  The company gathered on that hill loosely, without any of the discipline otherwise famous of the Guard. It was simply the first plausible vantage they'd encountered on their journey back, after departing the hamlet. But it was nonetheless a vantage that could've been said, on any other day, to give those at its summit a 'good view' of Atum-Ra.

  Silent, once assembled there, they were all without exception transfixed.

  Many scanned the barren landscape for the ruin of the headquarters from which they'd set out mere hours before. Though they knew the rough location of where the imperial mall had once sprawled, both by intuition as well as through recognition of some of the largest piles of rubble grouped in that general area, none could identify any sort of remains of the headquarters' edifice in particular. Plenty of lonely single walls or the outlines of foundations yet visible very well could've once been a part of the building, or one of its neighbors in the imperial mall, or none of them. They all looked so similarly, utterly pathetic, and ruined.

  And it was clear all within the city must've perished. Such a revelation refreshed the sense of stunned paralysis most hadn't even yet overcome, first imparted after weathering the blast and firestorm.

  They wondered, then, why it seemed they few had been chosen to survive such instant, total destruction. Most felt guilt for their morbid luck.

  They all understood, too, that the emperor was dead, alongside all his heirs. The whole of the imperial house of Setet had been extinguished. As members of the Guard, they despaired as well at such failure in their paramount duty, their lives' work rendered futile.

  It was clear Tanhkmet felt such failure most of all, fallen to his knees at the sight atop that vantage, as he stared out over the gray-black landscape.

  And as Theo saw the city's ruin for herself, she knew she had betrayed her love Nebet for not perishing in the city alongside her, that day.

  And although she was ashamed as a rhiza to cry openly, she cried loudly and without reservation.

  Alone, on the hilltop, above the sea of broken stone.

  "Soldiers live, and wonder why."

  Glenn Cook