Chapter 174: 172 – Horizonward

Beauteous vistas to make the soul sing.

Vistas that had perhaps once been beautiful, yet now laid ripped apart, littered by uncountable wrecked war machines, abandoned fortifications, and who knew how many corpses. So many war machines. Standing unmoving, steel sentinels watching over the fields. 

Watching.

Waiting.

“It has been months since the commander left. It matters not. I will defend the homeland on my own,” they must’ve thought.

Destruction beyond reckoning, like strokes of blood and mud and sewage strewn across an immaculate pastoral mural.

Zelsys had no words. Not for the literally breakneck velocity she was driving the steel beast, or for the landscapes which her senses took in. The only thing she had at this very moment was an esoteric drive, a welling-up spirit from deep within that made her want to reach the other side of this ancient road, to see everything between here and there.

To fill in those gaping voids where memory should’ve rightfully been when she woke up in that tank with something new, and to share those sights with Zef.

It didn’t matter that, even with this steel steed’s inhuman velocity, they had no hope of reaching the Ikes mountains. For this first outing, Zel settled for a far more achievable goal.

The nearest northward mountain range, which she knew to be the exact same distance from the city as the mountain range which the dungeon was buried in, at least by a straight line. Days of travel on foot, rendered down to no more than a proportionately short ride, helped in no small part by the immaculate condition of this ancient road and the fact it was a nearly straight shot compared to a zig-zagging trek over bumpy, dubious terrain in enemy territory.

Indeed, it sat unmoved even as they rode past great faults in the earth, deserted outposts, a burned-down trading town, and an entire battlefield whose lines had been drawn and battles waged around the unimpeachable bulwark of this road. The landscape sat ripped apart, dotted with craters, carved with trenches and speckled with discarded armaments for hundreds of meters on end, and through it all…

...The Ankhezian Road stood, unmoved. A fitting metaphor for the remnants of those ancient peoples. 

Then, at the far edge of the cauldron at whose center Willowdale’s fertile valley sat, the road climbed hundreds of meters, reaching a fork. 

Forward led towards a mountain pass, one that doubtlessly led through the mountain as much as it did over it - such an undertaking wouldn’t have been beyond Ankhezians, not for a road of this scale.

The other fork climbed the mountain itself in a snaking pattern, and this was the one she decided to take, knowing they would likely return to Willowdale after taking in the sight at the top. 

With caution and relatively slowly they rode up the serpentine path, this alone taking them nearly twenty minutes. A mighty gust of wind blew over the mountain’s peak as they neared the top, the air frigid and cold. 

Zelsys kept her gaze turned southward until they were at the top, stopping the motorbike and getting off before she turned to face the north.

Sprawling out before her stood what felt like all of Ikesia. Fields, forests, mountains, serpentine rivers, lakes great and small. Roads, towns, and cities in the distance, many scarred and damaged so badly it could be seen even from up here. The landscape itself was speckled by desolate battlefields and less overt signs of warfare, both old and fresh. Cannonfire carried on the wind even now. 

A large portion of the Blackwall could be seen from here, and strangely, it did not seem all that tall from this far away… But the sky above it shimmered, if the sun hit it just right. 

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A barrier of scale beyond human reckoning.

What grabbed her eye, however, was not the wall, or the scarred sprawl of fields and forests below. 

It was far, far in the north, far beyond the horizon, defiantly rising above it with their cloud-splitting peaks. The Ikes Mountains, and upon their slopes, the bones of dead titans, themselves the same shade of black as the Wall. Great stone arms reaching for the summit past the crown of perpetual clouds, as if they had died trying to reach something up there. Dotting the landscape between here and the horizon she could see similar bones, too. 

Arms and legs sticking up from the ground, an overgrown skull in the middle of a lake, an entire city built in the shelter of a massive ribcage.

Zel sat down, and Zef sat down next to her. 

One burning question wriggled its way free of Zel’s mind: 

“What’s with all those gigantic skeletons?”

“Dunno. They’ve always been around,” Zef said plainly.

Zef pointed off to the north-east, “There’s a logging hamlet some three-hundred-ish kilometers that way. Andalton. Only some two-dozen houses and the nearest town half a day’s travel away. No aetherwave or anything, barely had a sewer… Wonder if it’s still there.”

As she spoke, a foreboding sadness crept into her voice. A sort of hopeful uncertainty mixed in with dread.

“Animals kept vanishing from the farm. People kept talking about these bizarre-looking vine things slithering about on the ground or puppeting dead animals… Turned out the logging had woken up a leshy. It’s uh… A forest god, of sorts.”

“When we started chopping up and burning its servants, it came around in person. Just stood there in the treeline like an overgrown old man the size of a house, staring angrily.”

A dark chuckle rose from Zef’s throat, and she rested her head on Zel’s shoulder.

“I don’t think I quite grasped the gravity of what I’d done when I threw my entire body weight against a four-pounder cannon to turn it and set light to the touch hole. In retrospect, it makes sense why loggers would be on-edge around a kid that killed a forest god. Sure helped me find my natural talents, though.” 

“Wonder if that podunk hamlet is still out there.”

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