After waiting for the mercenary to disappear in the distance, Peter pulled out the surveillance drone and raised it five hundred feet high. The quadcopter rotated around, showing him the landscape.

  Eastward, Redroar was cutting a trail in the grass, beelining toward a village looking like a mixed medieval-far-west settlement. Northwest was his group. He dared not to make the drone go there to check on Regina for fear of being discovered. Still, the silhouettes were engrossed in picking flowers, so he supposed all was OK.

  The grass sea continued unabated in every other direction, with a line of blue mountains toward the North. But to the West and South, a shimmering coating covered everything.

  

  "Wanna check?"

  

  Recalling the drone, Peter used his movement skill, trying to travel longer distances. It did not work as planned the first time, exiting just a hundred yards from the departing point before a forested hill he had to climb on foot before jumping again. There were probably too many obstacles in the way.

  There were limits to what Warp could go through—or over, or around because Peter didn’t know exactly how it worked. The safest use was to go to a high point and jump lower or on another hill. He promised himself to try to get up in the air and then jump ahead, but for now, he stuck with a more prudent approach.

  Finally, he arrived at the margin of the fog. From close, the grass behind the haze looked different. Distorted.

  "What now?"

  Peter refrained from replying, as it would have involved cursing. It was a dumb idea. The drone was the safest bet, but the image disappeared as soon as it entered the haze. Strangely, they could still hear it buzzing.

  Looking around, Peter found a bush and broke a twig from it, using it to poke an ant nest. A few critters climbed on the wood, and he plunged the tip into the rare fog for a few seconds. The ants looked well and undisturbed, so Peter put them back in their home. Then he tried with his hand and felt nothing. Slowly leaning forward, he inserted the tip of his nose and inhaled a bit of fog. Again nothing. In the end, he crossed himself and took a step forward.

  "Oh my God!"

  The haze was a mirage. In front of Peter, the grass rarefied, leaving place to a sand bar on which the drone sat, the rotors still moving from inertia. Thirty feet farther, the ground plunged at a steep angle for about six hundred feet, then flattened, transforming into an endless landscape of dunes, going forever forward and to the left and right. A wrecked sailship displayed its masts in the middle of the incline.

  

  "No kidding, Sherlock. But who builds a town in the sea?" Peter pointed at a line of large but ruined buildings. Some were intact and colored a deep blue, with horses, bulls, and people over the base layer of paint.