Chapter Forty-Six - Snow

  It took them the morning to get to the main road. First a few detours, around a street blocked by a large, angry anomaly where the air was rent and shifting and felt like it was straining to hold back a wave of magic that stank of hate, then through a few buildings where they had to knock down walls in order to get through.

  The city being abandoned for so long was turning it into a ruin. In some places nature had taken over, roots cracking cement and trees pushing into the sides of buildings. Moss and lichen covered walls and the interior of any place in those kinds of areas was filled with mould and mildew and mushrooms.

  Other areas were dry. Nothing lived there. There were skeletal remains of people and animals strewn about. Whatever nature was there before the Zone remained, but only as desiccated spectres of their former selves.

  There were bodies of stalkers as well. Men wearing radiation-shielding equipment, others in old army coats with rusting Kalishnikovs by their sides. It looked as through they'd fallen down and simply died, though a little bit of investigation often revealed broken bones, bullet holes punched through their clothes, or skeletons that were warped and misshapen.

  The dead weren't their only company in this part of the Zone.

  It was only a block or two away from the veterinary clinic that they heard a shuffling from behind them. When they turned, they discovered that they'd been followed.

  Men, in ragtag gear, some with custom, poorly-made, armour. They had guns.

  They demanded, in no uncertain terms, for the girls to drop their weapons, to surrender.

  Alice suspected that Crystal would rather punch them. She suspected this because Crystal walked up to the nearest and punched him.

  The fight that followed was nothing to write home about. Vasilisa took a few shots in their foe's general direction while diving behind a car's wreck for cover. Crystal launched herself around, striking men with fists covered in crystalline knuckle dusters, and Alice smothered the rest in their own shadows.

  By the time Vasilisa peeked her head up, the battle, if it could be called that, was over.

  They kept on going. They wouldn't get through the Zone in anything approaching a reasonable time if they had to stop at every intersection to fight off some ruffians, but the Zone didn't seem to get that memo.

  It felt almost vindictive in the way that monsters leapt out of the shadows to ambush them, and how zombified once-humans stumbled into their path.

  Alice put them down with ease. It felt nice to flex her magic. The air here was filled with so much ambient magic that it made casting anything quite easy. Perhaps that explained some of the anomalies they encountered? Natural magic, chaotic and wild, only let loose because the magic here was so responsive?

  She didn't know, and didn't know how to verify it either. Not that it truly mattered.

  They made it to that government building she'd seen on her map eventually, then it was down into a dingy, poorly-lit bunker of sorts, one that had a long tunnel within. It was thin and narrow, with no real lighting to it.

  Crystal provided some, and Vasilisa cracked a glow-stick for more.

  They marched down the tunnel, feet eventually splashing in still water until it turned and they were suddenly within a metro station. "From here, we take that line to the next station, then up," Alice said.

  "Spooky," Crystal said as she leaned out into the subway tunnel to inspect it.

  Alice reached out and tugged her back just moments before a subway train rushed through. It was on fire, with sparks flying off its wheels. It was also deathly quiet. She could make out people and faces, screaming in terror within the train as it shot past for several long seconds.

  "Uh," Crystal said as she looked where the train had gone.

  "It should be safe now," Alice said. "The map says that it only passes when it's scheduled to, but it's usually a little late."

  "How do we know when it's scheduled to pass?" Crystal asked.

  Alice pointed to a timetable for trains several metres back. It was dusty and grimey, and covered in a fair few doodles, but it was still legible.

  "Oh," Crystal said. "Well, let's hurry along anyway? I've never been run over by a train before, and I'm not sure I want to be."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Alice and Crystal hopped down onto the tracks, then Crystal reached up and helped Vasilisa down. Once they were all there, they started down the tunnel. The darkness there was old. Untouched. Even before the Zone had appeared, the dark here had only ever been disturbed by the occasional passing train.

  There was a certain quality to old darkness that she liked. A taste that she didn't think she could put into words even if she was given a hundred years and every dictionary in the world. It was comfortable, she supposed. This darkness belonged here, had made this place its own, and now Crystal and Vasilisa's light was bothering it away, but even with that light, the darkness still clung as long, deep shadows on the other side of train tracks and old signage.

  They continued into the tunnel, which was blessedly free of any bothersome anomalies, until they made it to the next metro station.

  This one had collapsed in on itself. Water that was shin-deep filled the passage, and they had to help Vasilisa up when she tripped into it.

  The station had rents above it so large that sunlight poured in freely. The exit was still open, however.

  They moved up and through it, arriving in open sunlight.

  Open sunlight on a snowy day. "Huh," Crystal said as she looked up to a cloudless sky. "It's snowing."

  Alice sniffed the air. "It smells burnt," she said.

  "Is this really snow?" Vasilisa asked. She scraped her foot across the ground, shifting white dust aside.

  Alice had seen snow a few times in her life, though not all that often. It did snow in Brasil... in the very southern part of the country. She never cared to visit, and when she did see snow it never fascinated her. Cold water wasn't that interesting.

  "Ew!" Crystal said after craning her neck back and sticking her tongue out. She spat and sputtered. "Not snow," she said before wiping her tongue. "Ash."

  "Ah," Alice said. Perhaps that made more sense.

  Vasilisa turned, dropped her bag, then fetched out a small device from within. It beeped as she turned it on. When she brought it close to a mount of fresh, cold ash, the device started to click wildly, then its clicking turned into a wild, hissing screech.

  "It's radioactive," she said simply before tugging the collar of her shirt up and over her mouth.

  "Annoying," Alice said. It wouldn't affect her. She was hardly going to allow her cells to mutate, and the dark swallowed all, including radiation. Crystal, likewise, would be fine.

  She eyed Vasilisa, the frail, very human girl.

  "Annoying," she muttered again.

  They took a moment to allow Vasilisa to put on a mask from her pack. It wasn't rated for radiation, but it would keep the dust out of her lungs. She tugged her hood up as well, and put on some gloves. The less she exposed herself, the better.

  In any case, they'd made it to the main road. The notes she had showed that no one ever made it past the middle.

  The main road stretched on for a few kilometres. It was lined with small shops, a few grocers, car dealerships and garages, even a small clinic and a barber's shop. A busy, central kind of space that could have been the middle of any minor city in the world.

  The road was covered in a blanket of ash. It gathered atop signs, it hung off of walls, it clung to billboards and piled up atop cars and before doorways.

  It wasn't all bad. The ash made some anomalies obvious. They distorted space, and therefore moved the ash around or cleared it away. In other spaces, she could see footsteps and traces of where people had ploughed through the ash to move around.

  "It's kinda pretty, in a Christmassy kind of way," Crystal said.

  "It's radioactive ash," Alice replied.

  "It's sparkly," was her counterpoint.

  "Sparkly and deadly," Alice said.

  Crystal grinned. "Just like me?"

  Alice sniffed in lieu of laughing, but it was a fair point.

  They started ahead, and she made sure to keep an eye on Vasilisa even as the girl's Geiger counter kept up a steady, rapid tick-ticking behind them.

  She was no expert on radiation and the like, but she imagined that the amount here would be lethal, eventually.

  Which begged the question, why was the centre of the Zone so damnably radioactive to begin with?

  Something wasn't adding up, and Alice suspected that in a few kilometres, they'd be discovering exactly what.

  ***

  https://www.patreon.com/RavensDagger/redeem/CF533

  Here's the crappy AI mock up cover! Real cover coming as soon as the artist is done with it!

  Blurb:

  The dragons are dead. Their colossal forms, once the lifeblood of an empire, now rot in the wastelands of a cursed continent. The people they empowered—humans made unnaturally strong by dragonkind's gifts—have been driven to madness by their absence. The land festers, shrouded in mystery, death, and a creeping decay that no living being dares approach.

  Magus Maldrak Hollowspine is no stranger to impossible odds. Driven by curiosity and a desperate need to save the daughter lost on the decaying continent of Draya Calyrex, he crafts a solution that skirts the very edge of life and death: puppet-automatons animated by necromantic sorcery. Through their lifeless eyes, Maldrak will walk the ruins of a dead empire, searching for the truth behind the plague, the madness, and the dragons' fall. Yet some truths are meant to stay buried—and some lands are better left forgotten.

  Basically, it's what happens when I play 300 hours of Elden Ring in two months and then get ideas. Male MC (I know, right?) but cute gay puppet deuteragonists. Lots of magic, exploration, combat, and weird sword-and-sorcery flavoured post-apocalyptic city building?

  Uh... trust me? It's better than it sounds?