“A small step for me. A big step for the Order.”

  With those words, Adarin jumped off the Magnolia's gangplank onto the overgrown and dilapidated stone pier. His foot sank into the black humus, the muck too deep, too sticky, too wrong. He scanned the collapsing undergrowth and skeletal trees. The river’s clear water contrasted eerily with the black expanse of decaying plant matter. It smelled faintly acidic and alcoholic, richly organic in all the wrong ways.

  Behind him, musketeers marched forward, securing the edges of the kai with guns at the ready. Adarin waved his expeditionary force forward with one manipulator: Francesco, Devon, Magus Cooper, as well as a hundred skeletons, twenty scout archers and twenty musketeers right in front of them.

  The eerie line of a main street connecting the port to the city center was strangely outlined in fog. Adarin clapped two manipulators together, shattering the tense silence.

  “Very well. No time like the present. Let’s march.”

  He let the scouts advance, scrambling over ruins and onto side streets. Arrows were nocked, eyes darting from shadow to shadow—nervous glances betraying frayed nerves. Their formation set out as a main column marching down the street, flanked by scouts forming a line nearly two hundred meters to both sides.

  The fog clung low over shattered chimneys, thick with the stink of wet ash and mold. Roots split the old flagstones, slick with rot. Every step squelched into thirty years of decay, ripped open by his actions.

  Adarin studied the buildings near the port. Nearly nothing remained. Most likely a warehouse district, and so close to the river there wouldn’t have been cellars. The ground sloped up with a gentle steadiness, and soon beyond the structure of the old street grid they came upon piles of rubble and a few eerily still-standing chimneys—most broken, but some still towering, ominously decorated with thick moss.

  Suddenly something crashed with an ungodly rumble. Everyone swung around. The whites of eyes widening with the sudden release of tension. Adarin expected someone to pull the trigger, but discipline held admirably. Two dozen muskets hunted for targets. Adarin studied the rumbling avalanche of stone piles and spoke up loudly.

  “Our spell decayed the moss that held the chimney together. It collapsed, probably from our footsteps. There’s nothing wrong. Onwards.”

  Silently he sneered to himself. Yeah let’s maybe repeat that so you believe it yourself…

  They pushed further into the old city, now nearly halfway between the temple and the harbor. Ponds filled with the putrid rot of reeds and algae the spell left behind marked old cellars. Adarin noticed Francesco frown next to him and noticed Devon frown and walk off into one of the ruins toward one of the still-standing chimneys. There was a sword hanging over the fireplace, apparently pristine.

  Adarin called a halt as the kobold advanced. Devon jumped up, tried to grab the blade—but an electric crack made everyone jump. Within the eerie silence of the dead forest it sounded like a gunshot. Devon muttered to himself just as his fingers began glowing and he inscribed symbols into the air.

  Francesco spoke up. “Let me take a look at that. That enchantment survived out here, and the blade—” He walked over, but as soon as he was halfway into the ruin of the house, a loud cracking noise could be heard. The floor sagged nearly half a meter. And the young mage swayed and went down.

  Francesco screeched and scrambled in the rapidly pooling black muck, while Devon hissed, taking a step back. Where he stood, the floor was still steady. Francesco had fallen but was about to get up out of his bathtub when Adarin called out.

  “Stay on all fours! Don’t get up. There’s a cellar underneath you. You’ll collapse downwards. You have to crawl back to the side.”

  Francesco shot him a look, his eyes wide. “I could fall—”

  Yes, you idiot. What do you think is beneath you? Crawl. Adarin didn’t share his exasperated thoughts. “Crawl. Slowly and deliberately. No sudden movements.”

  Francesco’s eyes widened. Then, unbidden, he went from all fours onto his belly and crawled out of the ruin. He slithered through the reeking slime like a snake—an utterly miserable one.

  Devon ignored the whole affair, flickering runes between his fingers. Just as Francesco reached the safety of the street again and got up with a groan, his green mage’s robes sloshing with slime and reeking like a compost pile. Adarin noted that the young man was too preoccupied to notice the grinning faces of the soldiers.

  Devon let out an excited “Yes!” and returned, walking close to the piles marking the old walls, while holding a delicate sword in his hands. The kobold briefly showed his teeth as he studied the disheveled wizard. Was that a smile there?

  Stolen story; please report.

  Adarin shook his head. Musketeers and mages kept their expressions steady again, eyes outward. The silence of the forest was simply too oppressive for anyone to relax. Adarin, not for the first time, blessed them for their professionalism while he looked at his two wayward officers.

  “Next time,” he said slowly, “before we go looting, we ask the commanding officer to call us to a halt. That cellar could have collapsed in, and we don’t know what’s down there.” He raised his voice. “Nobody walks into any houses without my express permission. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” erupted from all around him.

  Adarin looked at Devon. “Did you at least get something worthwhile?”

  The kobold swung the blade. “Titanium, I think.” He placed a few more spells and runes, sneered, and shrugged. “Gavin will be able to figure out the exact alloy, but—” He tilted the blade in the sunlight so Adarin could see intricate circuit-like patterns on its flat. “The enchantments. This is good work. This thing must have belonged to a mighty powerful adventurer.”

  The kobold stashed the blade in his belt, ignoring Francesco’s outstretched hand pointedly, and began walking to the front of the formation.

  Magus Cooper cleared his throat next to Adarin. “If the houses are like this…” He swallowed. “Do you think the temple will be safe, sir?”

  Adarin made a shrugging motion with his manipulators. “I’m not sure.” He turned his head to Francesco. “But we have a young mage who has already volunteered once to test the integrity of the ground. Right?”

  Francesco looked up from casting spells to clean his robes and glared. “Very funny, Sir Special Envoy. Very funny.”

  Adarin tapped a manipulator on the young wizard’s shoulder. “Don’t take it too personally. On one of my first missions, I fell into a septic tank. My call sign was ‘Shitfaced’ for two years. I’ll make a soldier out of you yet.”

  Francesco sighed as his spell removed the last remnants of the sludge on his robes, restoring them to—if not pristine—at least non-disgusting condition.

  They walked on, dodging the small trees, trunks no more than twenty centimeters thick, that had grown all over the streets. Now nothing but matches of cleansed wood stood around. Magus Cooper stopped and touched one.

  “Your spell,” he spoke with closed eyes. “This is actually good work. The tree feels like a tree in winter. All the bark, all the leaves are removed—even the smaller branches. This will save us a lot of time.”

  Adarin called another halt while the Magus finished his inspection. “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” He bit his avatar’s tongue. I shouldn’t be so taciturn. But this place…

  After walking in silence for 200 more meters, they reached the central market square. What had once clearly been a large public well had become a small lake. Adarin judged the distances with his accelerometers and figured they were about twenty meters above the level of the river.

  Next he inspected the temple. The pillars of its entrance stood before him: a 250-meter-long fa?ade with pillars at twenty-meter intervals, and hundreds of statues looming against the black soil and white trunks—like intruders from another world.

  Francesco frowned. “The statues—”

  He began walking forward, but Adarin grabbed him. “Wait. What do you see? Don’t just approach the thing in the creepy environment that looks mysterious.”

  Francesco gave him a sheepish smile. “Rüdiger said something similar to me once when he found me at the bottom of a trapdoor.”

  Adarin smirked. He ordered the men forward toward the center, expecting to find the main entrance there. As they closed in, the scouts began whispering. Just as Adarin was focusing his Thousand Eyes on the statues to figure out what the men were going on about, Magus Cooper gasped.

  “The eyes. The eyes of all the statues. They are bleeding.”

  Adarin registered the detail he had considered part of the art and swallowed. Under the cover of the pillars and pavilion-like front roof, there was a gigantic artwork: a wall with scenes of people, all of them looking outward—bringing in the harvest, soldiers winning duels against monsters, saints and healers blessing the poor. But every single face, beast and man alike, had eyes tearing blood, fresh blood. And from the corners of the mouths ran the same liquid. Hundreds, maybe a thousand faces, all smiling bloody smiles while crying tears of blood.

  For nearly a minute no one dared move as everyone studied the fresco in horrified silence.

  Adarin ground his teeth. I’d bet everything the fucking vampires did this. How did he even do it? Did he spend the night climbing across the fresco, painting with a brush?

  The image brought a chuckle out of him, and half the soldiers looked at him incredulously. Fuck. Not my smartest move.

  He raised a manipulator and pointed toward the bronze doors of the temple. They were tainted, oxidized into greenish hues.

  “Let’s check the doors, shall we?”

  Nods were exchanged and two scouts carefully approached the doors. A squad of shooters assembled at the midline split, readying their guns as others spread out to cover all directions, taking positions between trees and temple pillars. Francesco readied a spell, and the other mages prepared the undead pikemen, forming a defensive line in case something charged out of the temple.

  Two scouts pulled the temple doors.

  The doors opened smoothly, without a single sound, as if freshly installed and oiled.

  “This is even worse. The worst possible outcome,” Adarin whispered. It felt as if someone had prepared the temple to host them.

  Francesco looked at him with an anxious expression. “Yes.” The cocky confidence was gone from the young mage’s voice.

  The gates opened onto a ten-meter-long path with more bloody-faced frescoes. The bright green of a living forest could be seen at the end of the tunnel. Distant birdsong washed over them.

  The scouts hesitated, whispering among themselves, until the sergeant coughed. “Move out.”

  The scouts looked back at the men, reluctance written on their faces. They hesitated at the threshold and exchanged looks. Then the female scout, apparently having lost whatever wager they had, took a deep breath, knocked an arrow to her bow, and raised a foot, ready to enter the tunnel.