THE LANDS FORSAKEN | THE FORSAKEN LANDS OF GENèSE

  600

  “Waaah!” Albane grabbed Solvanel by the collar and took off running.

  The escapees were close behind them, somehow keeping the mercenary’s pace despite the vast physical difference.

  However, it wasn’t enough.

  The locusts reared back like arrows drawn.

  And then they loosed, chopping the air with their stained-glass wings.

  The sound was unbearable. Wings like bone-saws, grinding the silence to dust.

  The black sand gave no grip, slipping beneath their feet as if it too were trying to slow their escape. Solvanel dared not look back.

  But the screams came anyway.

  One of the escapees, a woman with short-cropped hair and a burn down her neck, cried out. Her legs twisted as she fell, swallowed by the shifting ground. The nearest locust didn’t wait. It descended, impaling her through the back with a curved, serrated limb. A second joined. Then a third.

  The woman was lost in an instant, her scream reduced to a wet rattle.

  The creatures didn’t stop. Many lured by the scent of her final breath, they lunged for the same corpse, ravenous. Fangs clashed. Wings tore. Savage in their hunger and even more so in their consumption.

  Another man, trying to veer off-course to avoid the pile, tripped. He never hit the ground. One barreled into him midair, ripping him in two like a flimsy rag. A hot mist splattered across the sand, gone before it could soak in. That creature too was buried beneath a frenzy of its own kind.

  And then a third, the slowest of the group, trailing behind at too close a distance to the predators.

  A desperate jump that became flight. A pair of serrated mandibles latched around his neck, carrying him forward. His feet drew lines in the sand as the creature’s teeth gnashed. His flame extinguished in a single jerk, unseen in the dark. A bloody fountain to honor the arrival of a feast.

  Solvanel choked on the metallic stench.

  Thankfully, Albane lacked this morbid curiosity.

  He kept his head straight forward as they barreled into the unknown. Caution thrown to the nonexistent wind.

  Ahead, the path was unclear, but behind them, clarity and death were one and the same.

  “Do not stop!” he shouted, voice nearly torn from his throat. “Run while they tear each other apart!”

  The swarm convulsed behind them in a heap of gnashing limbs and flayed wings, their hunger turning inwards. As the number of their wounded grew in ones, so did their threat to the escapees in exponent.

  Locusts ripped one another apart, forming a mountain of their corpses.

  Solvanel thanked the…

  He noticed the flames didn’t return once consumed. Whatever these creatures were, they devoured more than flesh—it seemed their hunger was their own undoing.

  As Solvanel considered their next move, the crook in his hand stirred with faint light.

  He peered into it in confusion, feeling a subtle pull forward as they ran. After a few seconds, he raised it before him and swept it from side to side, hoping for the slightest flicker—some subtle shift in the pattern of its breath—that might reveal the way forward.

  Then, there was a slight jerk to the north-east.

  “Look over there, Albane!” he shouted over the headwind, pointing with the crook. “Tell me what you see!”

  “Nothing!” responded the oaf. “Trying… be blind… like you!”

  Despite his brave performance and victory, he must have been traumatized seeing the first locust up close. The shepherd felt a pang of guilt before remembering that this was a wolf rather than one of his sheep. Anything he suffered was only the natural result of his own actions.

  “You can’t protect me with your eyes closed, brother! You have to be brave for both of us, remember?”

  Albane growled low in his throat, but his eyes fluttered open.

  He looked where his brother was pointing. “House. White ones. Yellow ones. Broken ones.”

  “Is that all?”

  “All,” the brother repeated, correcting him gently—just like a certain pretty gold lady used to do. “But we stay on the line, remember? Visit friends later.”

  Solvanel directed the old man’s curses inward, narrowly resisting the urge to call him a dumbass and tell him to shut the fuck up.

  Solvanel remembered Jonah’s instructions.

  "Follow the line," he told his own comrades.

  I should have known.

  The line he carved into the sand—it wasn’t just the fastest route to the impact zone. No, not with him.

  Jonah never cared for safety. Never once. If there was a dirt path, he’d stray from the paved stone and take it with a smile. Not for the glory—he was too strange for that. No, he craved the struggle. The test. The chaos.

  The creature they sent ahead was no doubt meant to draw the brunt of the aggression. It was only natural that that guy would go out of his way to make his own.

  This line leads straight through the lions’ dens.

  Of course, the creatures will stir the deeper we go.

  That’s exactly how that mad bastard operates, even at the expense of his own people.

  And here, a straight path gave the enemy every advantage.

  If they wanted to reach the comet alive, they would need to break the line and shift the rhythm of the chase.

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  Otherwise, it was only a matter of time before they closed in.

  “Run for the ruins!” Solvanel commanded, pointing with the crook.

  Albane obeyed at once, hefting his brother higher on his back. The group splintered loosely as they veered off the line.

  Ahead, the horizon fractured into jagged silhouettes.

  Remnants of a forgotten city, half-buried in darkness.

  What rose before them was no mere village.

  It was a monument to a dead age, a sprawl of mud-brick and stone.

  Towering pylons marked the gate, made of lime. Their surfaces etched with worn reliefs—winged beings, serpentine carvings, and men with radiant halos.

  The eyes of these carvings, perhaps once bright with the colors of myriad gemstone, now wept sand from empty sockets.

  As they entered the city, unpaved streets stretched in winding lines beneath crumbling arches and colonnades. Fallen columns lay like broken limbs. Great doorways, framed by lintels and guarded by statues, yawned open into pitch black.

  The walls glimmered faintly in places where bands of deep blue and tarnished sheen had survived the centuries, clinging to temple facades like forgotten prayers. Murals blurred with time stared out from cracked plaster, their messages lost.

  The locusts—their number was fewer than before, but only because the weaker of their lot had been culled.

  What remained were the most ferocious of the bunch. Limbs serrated, wings frayed at the edges, bodies glistening with blood that wasn’t theirs. Survivors of survivors. Predators or predators.

  Stone chips rained down from above as the swarm scraped against the walls in its pursuit, wings lashing the trim from walls, antennae dragging trails in the dust.

  But here, in the maze of a dying city, the wind did not favor them. Narrow corridors choked the swarm’s numbers. Cornices and shattered roofs disrupted their flight. And in that chaos, Solvanel’s flame, and the crook that hummed softly in his grasp, burned a little brighter.

  “Keep moving!” he barked.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw one of the escapees fall, struck by a brick come loose by their commotion.

  He turned forward. Didn’t look back again.

  The scream behind them was swallowed by a sound like tearing papyrus and snapping bone.

  The swarm’s cry shifted pitch.

  The locusts, ravenous and mindless, had turned on the fallen girl like deathbirds on spoiled meat, their shrieks dulling into gluttonous clicks. Wings folded in, teeth clattered in unison.

  He yanked Albane by the sleeve. “Turn right, Albane. While they are distracted.”

  “Right!”

  Albane veered left, down a narrow alley, past statues crumbling into themselves and inscriptions worn smooth by centuries of sand-wind. The stones whispered beneath their feet. Somewhere above, a slab of limestone groaned, but did not fall.

  Solvanel’s eyes caught the edge of a structure half-sunken into the black sand, its entrance a pair of slabs with a narrow gap between them.

  “This way!”

  They ducked inside.

  Albane slammed the stone-slab door behind them with a grunt. Dust shook loose from the ceiling. The sudden silence was suffocating.

  Darkness settled like a shroud, broken only by the faint light still glowing from Solvanel’s crook. A light visible only to him.

  For a long moment, nobody spoke a word.

  The giant fell to the ground, chest heaving. “Not worthless?”

  Solvanel pressed a hand to the wall, feeling for vibrations.

  There was buzzing on the other side of the wall, so he knew the creatures were there, but once again, something was impeding his sight. Through this wall, he was unable to see their flame.

  “For now,” he said. “You did well, brother. Thank you for saving my friends.”

  “…protect brothers…” Albane toppled backward, the back of his skull hitting the stone like the crack of lightning.

  The sound cut through the tone, and every racing thought turned toward him.

  “Is he… dead?” One asked. They all wondered.

  A long, heavy snore tore through the silence.

  “Great. Either out there with them or trapped in here with him. Some leader you are. Why don’t you look me in the eye and put me out of my misery?”

  Solvanel ignored whichever one of them it was that spoke just now while taking number. Three of them were killed on the outskirts of the Forsaken Lands, and a single one died in the ruins.

  Sixteen remained—not counting himself or the mercenary.

  For now, this was sanctuary.

  Temporary and fragile, but sanctuary all the same.

  “The locusts know where we are, but they cannot breach stone. Please rest while the opportunity allows. I will try to find us another exit. And if Albane awakens, tell him stories about our supposed friendship. It would do you well to keep this facade.”

  Their breath squirmed with discomfort as they huddled together in a corner.

  Solvanel sighed, shaking his head.

  The crook pulsed again, tugging him in a new direction.

  A hand grasped his arm as he was about to leave.

  Three flames stood before him. The first two, on either side of the third, were unremarkable among the procession, but the one between them burned brighter. It was the same flame that had caught his eye earlier.

  And he said, “We’re coming with you.”

  Solvanel felt slight comfort in the fact that he was still alive.

  Being from a small village, what happened next was an awkward first for the young shepherd, but a necessity should they walk together for the present hour. Still, he had never had to do this before. How do people ask this again? “Who the fuck are you?”

  The flame flinched as though struck.

  “Saint,” the stranger answered after a beat. “Saint Myles.”

  Solvanel tilted. “Did your parents choose that name because you are well-behaved?”

  Saint frowned. “No. It’s a family thing.”

  “Understood, Mister Myles. Then, until we find an exit, I will trust you to be my eyes.”