“Should we move back into the canyon and hide there?” Laze asked. “Wait for them to pass, then make a run for it?”

  “Don’t think it’ll work,” Nidina said. “I saw scouts watching the flanks of the group. There’s a good chance they’ll find the monkey bodies we left behind. If that doesn’t lead them to the canyon, it’ll at least tell them somebody else was around.”

  “Did I hear right?” Tas asked, jogging up. “Scouts? Patrol from behind?”

  “And another one ahead, with us stuck in the middle,” El explained.

  “Small enough we can take?” Tas asked, though by the tone in his voice, he didn’t have much hope in the answer.

  “Not unless you were really holding back on us before,” El said. “Two hundred plus in each. Sound like they’re heavily armed too.”

  “And wearing heavy armor. If you couldn’t get through the scale bear’s plate, I don’t know how you can punch through this,” Dayne said.

  Something about what Dayne said made Tas blanch. “Heavy armor?” the man asked. “Red? Kind of looks like pipes extending above their shoulders, and running along their arms and legs to their joints?”

  “I wasn’t close enough to see most of those details, but, yes, they were red,” Dayne said.

  “Seven Cinders!” Tas said it like it was a curse.

  “Those people in red, they’re bad?” El asked.

  “Very,” Tas said. “We can’t fight them. We can’t even let them see us. If they do, we won’t be able to get away from them.”

  El glared at Tas, but didn’t push him on it—for now. This felt like one of those things he was holding back on her. “We’re going to talk more about this later,” El said, making it very clear this wasn’t a request. “For now, options?”

  “River?” Nidina asked, then looked from it to the civilians. “Never mind. We’d lose people.”

  “One or two of us could create a distraction,” Dayne said. “Give the others a chance to slip through.”

  “Could work. We can fly, so don’t have to worry about leading them back to the others if we’re careful,” El considered.

  Tas shook his head. “These aren’t amateurs. If they have the Ashes with them, they’re going to have commanders who won’t get fooled that easily.”

  “Ashes?” Nidina asked.

  “The people in the armor. It’s a legion we call the Ashes,” Tas explained quickly.

  “Mushrooms!” Laze suddenly said.

  “Not… a legion of mushrooms…” Tas said slowly.

  “No, not that,” Laze said, shaking her head and waving her hand at the same time. “The mushroom tunnels.” She pointed at the fort town with the smoke still rising above the walls. “You said the tunnels run under the islands—in the direction we need to go. We can take the tunnels and literally sneak by right under their noses.”

  El nodded. “Best plan so far. Tas? Can it work?”

  “If we can get to the town before the Ashes do,” Tas said. “They’re bound to check the status of the tunnels, but it might not be right away.”

  “Can we collapse the entrance?” Nidina asked.

  “We don’t have that kind of firepower with us,” Tas said. “Might be something in the city we could…” He trailed off as he noticed Nidina’s smile.

  “Leave firepower to the Firestorm,” she said.

  “You’ve always wanted to say that, haven’t you?” Dayne said.

  “No,” Nidina said, turning so she didn’t meet Dayne’s eyes, and color rising up her neck.

  “Tas? Will it work?” El pushed.

  “It could. Even if the collapse doesn’t work, as long as we get far enough in, and they don’t know we’re there, they’ll be more focused on the town itself,” Tas said.

  “Then we need to hurry,” Dayne interjected. “They were less than two miles away, and that was before I raced back and we started talking about it.”

  “Nidina, is the other group going to spot us as soon as we step out onto the road?” El asked.

  “No, it twists enough we have some time. Not a lot, though,” Nidina answered.

  “Macer!” Tas shouted and turned. “Get everybody up and moving. We’ve got to run again.”

  Only a few small groans of discontent escaped the lips of the civilians, but whatever fate awaited them if they got caught seemed to be enough motivation to put the discomfort aside. Impressively, the whole group was jogging up the sandy coast towards the bridge within a short minute. Nidina and Dayne had already gone ahead to check the progress of the two army patrols, while Laze and El had stayed back with the group.

  Another minute later, and the first civilians were turning onto the road and crossing the bridge.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “This town we’re going to, is it right on the road?” El asked Tas, jogging beside the man. He’d spread his soldiers out along the line of refugees again to support anybody who fell or faltered. Despite the constant running, none of the troops looked even half as exhausted as the civilians. Stronger Sparks.

  “No, there’s a turn off. Then about a quarter-mile until you get to the walls,” Tas explained. “It’s… uh… a mile from the bridge, I think?”

  “Three-quarters,” Macer filled it from nearby, then she looked at El. “You know men, always saying it’s longer than it is.”

  Tas’s head snapped in Macer’s direction. “I feel like I should be offended, but that’s actually pretty accurate.”

  “Whatever, it means we’re closer to the town than the patrol is. We can make it,” El said.

  “Plus, we’re rushing, and they’re being careful,” Tas said. “Which does lead me to my next point…”

  “We don’t know what we’re running into,” El finished for him.

  “Besides a burning, likely ransacked town,” Tas said. “No, we don’t.”

  “One of us needs to go ahead,” El said, turning to Laze. “And it’s got to be me. I’m leaving the civilians in your care. I’ll make sure the town is as secure as I can before you get there.”

  “Understood,” Laze said, giving El a salute. “And, be careful.”

  “I’ll leave careful for you,” El said with a wink, igniting the small wings on her back. With that, she leaned forward, and shot off down the road past the surprised civilians. Lowering herself, she whipped along with the stone only a few inches below her, devouring the three-quarters of a mile in no time.

  “Dayne, any chance you can hear me?” she asked as she barreled ahead. No answer. Communications really must be blocked. Putting that aside for later, she wound her way down the road. The island was supposed to be narrow, but the sheer number of cliffs made it impossible for the path to follow a straight line. Hopefully, the same would hold true on the other side of the fort, to block the patrol’s view of the civilians.

  Around one bend and the next, El kicked up a line of dust behind her, then suddenly pulled up and angled her feet in front of her. Flames ignited on the bottoms of her feet to slow her down, then pushed her backwards until she lined up with the turn-off she’d blown past. Unlike the main road, a straight, wide path led to the front gate of the fort a quarter mile away.

  Even from where she hovered, she spotted the gate blasted off its hinges in the courtyard in front of the building, and half a dozen bodies accompanying it. No movement, though she watched for a few more seconds before igniting a sword in each hand and flying up the road.

  Halfway to the fort, a bouquet of new smells reached her. The rotting smell of death was strangely not present—How recent was this?—and was instead replaced with a combination of barbeque and something briny. El slowed and landed as she reached the first body.

  Similar clothes to the people they were escorting, the woman had been cleanly cut in half. Her top half lay stretched in front of El, arms stretched out as if reaching for El’s feet, while the woman’s legs lay another five feet beyond that. What did Tas say the seawyrms could do? Jets of water powerful enough to cut a man—or woman, apparently—in half. No immediate sign of said beast, though, and El went to take a step forward, but stopped.

  No, something was wrong here. The woman was lying face down, and her legs were closer to the fort than to El. If she’d been running away from the seawyrm, wouldn’t her torso and legs be in opposite places? Why was she running towards the seawyrm?

  El looked at the other bodies, spread out almost in a semicircle curved away from her. And, looking closer, something had gouged a line in the solid stone following the same path as the corpses. Something that had to have originated from the front gate. Her eyes went to the heavy metal door sitting on the ground not far from where she stood.

  The door with indentations on the inside.

  Whatever happened here… happened somewhere else first. Something smashed the door off its hinges from inside the fort. They must’ve broken in somewhere else. Another gate, or a wall on the far side. Or, maybe they snuck in and then knocked the door out to let reinforcements in.

  While the explanation was plausible, the twist in El’s gut kept her on guard as she stalked towards the open gate, and then into the fort. It didn’t really matter what had happened there—her role was to make sure it was safe enough now for the others to pass through.

  On the tall walls above her, intimidating cannons pointed back the way she’d come, but sat undamaged. Unmoving. Was there even anybody left up there to operate them? As for the walls themselves, they appeared to be made out of some kind of heavy, dark stone, smooth and solid as far as she could see. No windows or ledges that could be used for climbing, and far too high for a scaled bear to jump. From the looks of it, even the monkeys wouldn’t be able to scale it.

  And, like the cannons, the walls were practically pristine, all things considered. No external damage that looked recent. No sign of an assault.

  Well, not on this side at least.

  Done with her inspection of the walls, El continued in, but stopped as soon as she crossed the threshold into the fort. While she didn’t really know what to expect, this wasn’t it. This was worse. The columns of smoke rising into the air didn’t do the destruction justice.

  The buildings within the walls were simple—squat, stone longhouses in ordered rows. Makes sense considering the limited building materials, part of her brain thought to distract herself from the sheer devastation. Something had torn the nearest sides out of the buildings on each side of the streets. Like peeling open a long, rectangular can to get at the good stuff inside. Beyond the ripped-out walls, what looked to have been homes within lay in utter ruin. Furniture, inner walls, and remnants of the lives that’d lived there, all of it was torn apart.

  A wide splash of blood covered one wall El saw, while a single leg—nothing else connected to it—lay across a pile of rubble in the next room. No smoke rose from these buildings, but something told El she wouldn’t find any survivors even if she looked.

  Weighing the risks of being spotted, El used her four smaller wings to lift her off the ground to hover above the low silhouette of the town. The massive outer walls still shielded her from the eyes of the patrol, but her new position gave her a much better view of the town. Of what was left of it.

  Almost entirely made of the same row-houses—block after block of them—the town had probably held somewhere around ten thousand people, and only two sections of the city really stood out. The first was a taller—if still blocky—building that had to be the army’s local headquarters. More weapons dotted the small fort within the larger one, and they had clear lines of fire to each of the three gates El could see. Like the one she’d come through, they all seemed to be blasted outward.

  So where did you all come in from?

  Like the rest of the town, something had smashed its way into that headquarters, and the biggest plume of black smoke billowed from the windows of the building. Something to do with the weapons they use?

  The other section of the town that stood out was centered around a second, taller building. This one had a wide front entryway, and a number of smaller buildings immediately around it. That was the only area—other than the army HQ—that broke the mold of row-houses. Must be the entrance to the mushroom tunnels.

  And it was the only building that wasn’t damaged. Around it, all the smaller structures had been peeled open or outright knocked down… but not that taller central building. Why? And there was that twist in El’s gut again.

  The door into the building was easily big enough to fit several carts through side by side, and more than tall enough to let them back out piled high with boxes of mushrooms. Which meant it was also big enough for a seawyrm to go into.

  Or come out of.