“Well, I don’t have any subjects, either.”
“You’re somethin’, kid. I tell you what.” The troll snorted and shook his head. His face lit up as they reached the end of the pass. “Now, this is what you want to…”
The skiff dropped softly down the incline when they emerged from the pass, carrying them swiftly over the rock-strewn hill at the base of the mountains. The Oronti Valley stretched out in front of them in gently rolling hills.
That’s the only gentle part of this whole place.
* * *
The travelers stared at the wasteland studded with dilapidated or ruined buildings. On their left, a dead forest reached toward them from the curving mountain range, the trees bare and gnarled. Most of them had fallen over or broken in bent, twisted fragments. Some patches still had their leaves, but they were few and colored a grotesque black-tinged yellow. Some of the trunks oozed a thick, noxious yellow substance that made Cheyenne think of an infected sore. Some of the grass had returned to the valley, but it was brown—white in some places—and untouched by working hands for a long time.
“No.” Persh’al blinked and scanned the destroyed land. “This too?”
“If farmers are known for embellishing stories, I’m guessing it wasn’t this bad a year ago.”
“A year?” The troll gave her a blank look, reeling from the realization that he’d been wrong about what they’d find here.
“That troll family.” Cheyenne frowned at the devastation. “They said they were driven out of their home and made the crossing a year ago. The radan disappeared, and things got bleak. They didn’t give me specifics, but I’m sure they would have mentioned something like this.”
Persh’al muttered something and shook his head. “In just a year Earthside.”
“Is time different over here?”
“Not that different, kid.”
The skiff skimmed above the broken land, sending small, unseen creatures skittering through the long white-brown grass in their wake. Persh’al took them to the right and toward a thicker forest that didn’t look nearly as bad as the first. However, the closer they got, the more wrong everything felt.
The trees still had their leaves, but they pulsed with dark light like a heartbeat. So did the trunks and the roots that had pulled up out of the ground, as if they were trying to remove themselves from the source of the sickness. Persh’al slowed the skiff to a crawl, and the air around them filled with a wet, slurping sound, almost in perfect sync with the sickly pulsing of the trees.
“That’s a river, right?” Cheyenne pointed through the forest at the slowly moving surface of shimmering black liquid. Where the river broke over protruding rocks, green foam built up around the obstacles, some of it trailing downstream.
“Not anymore.” Persh’al pressed his lips together and took them along the edge of the forest—close enough to see what it had become, but not too close. “I can’t believe this. Things have been bad enough to send refugees across the Border, but I haven’t heard anything about whatever this is.”
“It’s happening too fast.” The halfling’s nostrils flared when the scent of rotting meat wafted toward them on a cool, slightly humid breeze. That’s the opposite of refreshing.
“Must be. I’ve never seen a change like this happen so quickly.”
A huge dark shape lumbered away from the riverbank ahead of them. Persh’al moved the skiff out of the way to avoid the thing, groaning when they got close enough to see what it was.
The animal looked like a cross between a cow and a buffalo, with a gigantic rack of black antlers growing from its skull. The antlers were twisted and misshapen, ballooning into clubs in the middle and at the end, and they weighed the creature’s head down on one side so that it moved with its head perpetually twisted. The thing snorted when they passed, staring at them with three glassy black eyes and a fourth as disgustingly yellow as the sludge oozing from the other forest across the valley. A fifth limb protruded from its chest, dangling there without muscle or bone to give it purpose.
“Shit.” Persh’al ran a hand down his cheek and turned the skiff away from the tree line and back out into the valley’s open brown grass.
Cheyenne couldn’t help but look over her shoulder at the mutated creature. Two smaller beasts with blood-red snouts and what looked like claws instead of antlers sprouting from their heads stepped up behind the huge male. “Please tell me those aren’t the radan my neighbors were so nostalgic about.”
“Those aren’t radan.” Swallowing thickly, Persh’al clenched his jaw and dropped both hands in his lap, letting the skiff take them where it would across the abandoned valley. “Mutated, sure, but I’d go so far as to say they don’t even have half of the original makeup anymore.”
“Nothing mutates that quickly.”
“Nope. Not even in a world where magic is the norm, kid. Fuck with genetic code in nature, and you’re way outside the realm of magic the way it’s meant to be used.”
Cheyenne nodded. “So, things are bad.”
“Right now, I’m okay with that understatement.”
They approached a group of buildings barely hanging on to their frames. The roofs had crumbled in, doors broken, rubble strewn all over the place. The fence posts of what had once been livestock pens and stables were splintered and hanging sideways as if the animals had known what was happening and tried to outrun it.
Persh’al slowed the skiff again when they got closer, and they saw the bodies—four of them tossed against each other, purple skin and scarlet hair fluttering in the reeking wind. “Shit. These magicals were still living out here.”
“Until not that long ago.” Cheyenne scanned the wreckage of the half-dozen buildings forming a semi-circle beside them. “Looks
