been swallowed into the earth and lost forever as the land resealed itself. Fires covered entire coastlines. Seas drained, and deserts sank.
But that was only the beginning. After the initial devastation that had ripped the boundaries between worlds, humankind had to contend with what had slipped through the cracks.
People were hunted through the night by living shadows, and haunted by the ghosts of apocalypse cities that had stood for centuries but that no one could remember ever being there in the first place. Worst of all, earth was besieged by hordes of vampires led by the enigmatic Grim Father, who established a military regime over most of what was left of the northern continent.
Monsters were real. Myths and legends and horror stories were all real, and it was as if they had always been real. Even magic became real shortly after The Black. The ruins and histories of cities that had never before existed melted into reality and the collective consciousness as if they had always been.
At the same time, while many cities had been ruined and violently torn apart in the apocalypse, it was commonly agreed that other cities had simply faded, as if they’d never existed at all.
The Black had merged realities, and destroyed them. Worlds had bled together like spilled fluids.
No one even knew what The Black really was, where it had come from, or if it was really gone. All anyone knew for certain was that it had destroyed the known world, and that it had rewritten all that had come before as indelibly as it had forever altered what would ever come after.
“ Where else would it have started?” Cross asked. “Can you tell me one other place, besides the Bone March, that fits all of the criteria?”
“ The Skull Plains,” Cristena answered.
“ It’s lifeless enough,” Cross conceded, “but it bears little to no arcane residue, and least none that’s ever been found.”
“ Rimefang Loch.”
“ No. Even taking into account the residents of Ghostborne Island, the Loch is relatively unaltered by magic.”
“‘ Relatively’,” Cristena laughed. “Listen to you. All right, then…the Bleeding Straits.”
“ Now who’s talking about myths?” Cross laughed.
“ I’ve been there, Cross,” Cristena said. “Have you? Look, the point is, there are plenty of areas where The Black might have come through. It’s foolish to assume it’s here in the March just because it’s the most popular choice. I’ve been in and out of the Bone March and all of those other places, and I’ve never once seen anything that convinced me The Black started in any of them, let alone here.”
“ There’s a reason that the popular theory is the Bone March…” Cross started, but Graves cut him off.
“ Oh, who cares?!” Graves said. “What does it matter where it started?”
“ It doesn’t,” Cristena said.
“ Then why argue about it?” Cross asked with a bit of sneer.
“ I wasn’t arguing,” Cristena said. “I just don’t like to listen others spout off theories like they’re facts.”
“ Well, it must be nice to be right all of the time,” Cross smiled.
“ It is,” Cristena smiled back, and she spurred her horse around them and rode ahead to take the point.
“ Cross, you are so smooth,” Graves laughed. Cross didn’t answer.
Time crawled by. They hoped to only be stuck in the Bone March for two or three days at the most, but that first day had already felt like ten. The March smelled like bad eggs. They crossed sluggish streams of greasy gray water and shallow fields filled with black lichen and swollen fungus-covered patches of ice. The temperature grew noticeably colder, and after a time the air was filled with a semi-translucent freezing fog.
They crossed fields of aged bones, yellowed by time and the excess of sulfur in the air and the iron in the water. The bones lay in piles, protruded from the ground like stakes, or they hung from the branches of dead white trees.
Those trees were numerate. They were skeletal white, so unnaturally devoid of color they were like an absence, a missed spot on a painting or a tear in a photograph. The snaky roots jutted from the ground like frozen serpents. Black husks of prune-like fruit that seeped sickly purple juices dangled from gnarled limbs. The ground around the bases of the trees was pitted, as if eaten by acid.
Navigating the Bone March took its toll on them. There was no shade or cover, and the absence of any notable landmarks had a disheartening effect on Cross’ psyche. The ground remained soft and uneven, and consequently was difficult for the horses’ already weary legs to tread. The squad rested their mounts often, noting the thick and foamy sweat that developed near the animal’s necks and chests in spite of the incessant chill. The air tasted like salt.
This is taking too long, Cross thought. We have to hurry, or we’ll never stop her in time. We’ll never be there in time to save Snow. But they couldn’t go any faster, he knew that, they all knew that. They wouldn’t be able to stop Red at all if they pushed themselves too hard.
They finally passed some ruins, and they saw the hollow remains of a large stone building, whose stone pillars and crumbling walls were all that still stood. There was a lonely well, its bucket still on the ground, whose shaft led down into a lightless pit of briny black fluid. There was a long-abandoned motorcade, the skeletons of cars left to rust and fade in the frozen heat. These landmarks were fleeting, momentary distractions from the great black and red graveyard that surrounded them.
This, they knew, was what had become of the old human civilization, and if the vampires won the war, places like the Bone March would be all that was left. The vampires would lay everything to waste, and they’d rule over the blasted lands from the confines of their graveyard cities.
They made camp just before nightfall at the edge of a bluff next to a steep path that led to a rickety wooden bridge. The bridge, which looked less than stable with its splintered posts and rotting rope bindings, stretched over a thin but deep gorge. They decided it would be better to try and cross in full light, or what passed for full light there in the Bone March.
Cross sat warming his hands by the fire, nursing a flask of water and an open can of beans, when they heard the howls of wolves off in the distance.
“ Hooray,” Graves said, and he tossed the remainder of his coffee into the flames. The fluid was strangely combustible, which about summed up the quality of their coffee.
“ They’re still a good distance away,” Cristena said. She huddled inside of a thick green blanket, shivering and holding a steaming cup of the same dangerous coffee. “But we’d better keep our eyes out for them. There isn’t much for them to eat out here, except each other.”
“ And us,” Stone pointed out.
“ How can they even survive out here at all?” Graves asked. The crackling flames cast them all in flickering shadows.
“ Not much lives here,” Cristena explained. “The March can trap you. It’s unnatural, and it’s easy for an animal to get lost here. Some things wander in from the borderlands, and they just never find their way out.”
Their camp swam in a sea of darkness. They might have been in outer space. Cross looked up at the sky. It was frighteningly vast and deep, so much that he felt like he could fall into it. Between the fathoms of space and the darkness of the March, Cross imagined his body plummeting, on and on without end.
He dreams of falling. He sees the woman again, the refugee from the mountain glade, but while he falls through a black sky, hers is white. He falls down, and she falls up.
Wolves woke him. Cross came to with a start. His head ached and his heart pounded.
“ It’s all right,” Stone said from nearby. He was on watch, and he had the M16A2 in hand. “They’re far away. Try to get some sleep.”
The next morning, as they drifted along the bleak landscape, spurred on by the fact that with any luck they’d be away from the Bone March by day’s end, they realized they were being followed.
A group of riders trailed them in the distance. The terrain had turned flat over the course of their morning travel, so there was no way for their pursuers to avoid being seen. It was impossible to glean any details about them at that distance, save the number. There were six.
“ Could they be nomads?” Cross asked. He already knew the answer. He wasn’t even sure why he’d even bothered to ask.
“ They’ve been tailing us for a while,” Stone noted. “They probably just stayed out of sight until we crossed that gorge. The terrain has been pretty flat since then, nowhere for them to hide.”
