Then he emerged on the other side, and he was whole again, struggling to find his bearings as the memories of unnatural geometries and impossible colors already fading from his mind.
“This is Wyland’s Way,” Aumir said. He had crossed over first. “A safe enough place, long as we stay on the road. Our jaunt through here should be a short one, in any case.”
Hunter looked around. They seemed to be at a rest stop, for lack of a better word, a couple hundred feet away from what looked like a red-brick country highway. The road cut through flatlands of cornfields stretching to the horizon, broken only by distant foothills. Fluffy clouds drifted lazily overhead, and the sky glowed with the golden light of summer dusk—though no sun was anywhere to be seen.
Behind him, Fyodor and the ravens stepped through the portal. The direwolf sniffed at the air, sneezed, and nuzzled his hand. He didn’t seem rattled by the experience. Moments later, the portal sealed shut, and the Arch fell silent.
A notification flashed across Hunter’s HUD, something he’d never seen before:
Warning. Connection to datasphere severed. System functions may be impaired until link is restored.
Great, he thought. He pulled up his Character Sheet and other system windows. Everything looked normal, except for an asterisked note at the bottom, repeating the error message.
“Let’s be on our way,” Aumir said, squinting at some arbitrary point in the distance, and put on his headdress.
They set off. The atmosphere was eerily still, the silence of Wyland’s Way broken only by the soft rustle of a warm breeze passing through endless fields of corn. There was something uncanny in the silence, a stillness that made Hunter feel as though he were trespassing in a place where he had no way of knowing whether his presence was be welcome or not.
Fyodor and his familiars felt it too. The direwolf kept close to his side, his usual curiosity smothered by the place’s eerie weight. As for Biggs and Wedge, they clung to his shoulders as if fixed there. They refused to fly outside the narrow bounds of the road and over the corn. If they’d ever been so quiet before, Hunter couldn’t remember when.
Aumir kept a fast pace. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. Not that there were many options; beyond the ribbon of brick road, the corn rose twelve feet high and grew so dense it might as well have been a wall.
They had been walking for the better part of an hour, not a word exchanged between them, when the hairs on Hunter’s arms stood up, and he was filled with the nervous certainty that someone was watching him. The feeling was so string he had to stop dead in his tracks and take a look around, looking for what might be causing that feeling. Not three seconds later, his eyes felt drawn toward the top of the distant foothills, and he caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye.
The figure stood near the ridgeline, looking down over the valley. It was unmistakably humanoid—though, judging by the distance, it must have been enormous. Whatever it was, It loomed tall. It had a hunched back, and its shoulders were set broad and unnaturally straight. Details were impossible to make out, as the shape silhouetted against the golden sky, but Hunter could clearly see the outline of a cape and a wide-brimmed hat, non unlike the one the man who had introduced himself as Rowan earlier in the day had been wearing.
What really unsettled him was how perfectly stationary the figure stood, like some kind of statue. For whatever reason, that felt wrong, and it proved to be more than what he could handle. His first instinct, oddly enough, was to wave. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then dark figured waved back.
It was a perfectly natural response; friendly, even. Still, it didn’t feel right. There was something too deliberate about the movement. It was too perfect, a flawless mirroring of his own wave. Before Hunter could even register what he’d seen, Aumir wheeled around, clamped a rough hand around his wrist, and yanked him forward, setting a pace that left no doubt they had to move.
“Don’t look at it,” he hissed, his voice a rough whisper muffled by the respirator. “Don’t even think about it. Eyes on your feet. Just keep putting one in front of the other.”
Hunter laid a hand on Fyodor’s back, more to steady himself than the direwolf, and did as he was told. He kept his gaze fixed on the dusty bricks, not daring to look up for a long while. When he finally did, the figure was gone.
“They call them Watchers,” Aumir said. “Best to forget you saw it.”
A quarter of an hour later, they reached another rest stop, virtually indistinguishable from the one they’d entered Wyland’s Way from. This time, Aumir had to open the portal himself. He raised raised a hand toward the Arch and intoned an incantation. It was nothing like the one Widebrim had spoken, Hunter noted; the awakening took longer, too, as if the ancient structure was reluctant to stir.
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“Go on, young osprey,” he told Hunter once the portal finally flared to life, voice spent. “I’ll have to be the last to step through.”
Hunter stepped through, Fyodor and the familiars at his side. A few seconds later the huntsman followed, and the portal sealed shut behind them.
This time, they found themselves in some kind of cavern deep underground. The portal’s shimmering surface was the only source of Illumination. When it faded away, everything went pitch black.
“Right,” Aumir mumbled. “I always forget about this part.”
He reached into one of his many pockets and pulled a luminous shard of crystal tied with a length of yarn. Its light was faint and sickly, but it was enough to reveal the long lines painted on the floor under their feet. There were five or six, each a distinct color. They were a wayfinding system, like the ones they used in hospitals.
“All we have to do is follow the red line,” the hunstman explained, his voice varely a whisper. “You can see in the dark, yes?”
“Shapes, mostly. Colors, not so much.”
“That’s what this is for,” Aumir gestured at the small crystal. “I’d light a torch, but that might draw the wrong kind of attention.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s not find out, yes?”
“I thought you said the Ways we’d be traveling through were fairly tame.”
“They are fairly tame, young osprey. Or, well… you know. Considering.”
They barely exhchanged another word after that. The gloom was oppressive. The red line took them through winding tunnel after winding tunnel for an hour or so, before it finally reached a galley so large, Hunter’s Low-Light Vision couldn’t reach the ceiling. At its center was the next Propylon Arch. Aumir opened the portal, and they crossed over to what should be the last leg of their journey.
“This is Thraggoth’s Run,” said Aumir as the portal closed behind him. “Or, as some call it, the Desolation. Suffice to say, it’s not a good place to linger around and loiter, yes?”
He needn’t have said that; the place spoke for its own. Thraggoth’s run was a bleak moorland that extended as far as the eye could see in all directions. It remimded Hunter of an immense, ancient junkyard, half-reclaimed by the elements and the low-growing, hardy shrubs that made up the majority of the vegetation.
The land stretched out in a graveyard of unlikely debris, where broken pieces of masonry and shattered, strange machines lay half-buried in the dirt like bones. The sky sagged low and heavy, a swirl of bruised clouds lit by restless flashes of light that never quite became lightning. A moaning wind carried the smell of rust and ash, rattling through twisted metal and the husks of things that could best be described as undescribable. Nothing seemed to belong; just ruins stacked upon ruins, an endless horizon of discards. Even the air felt dead.
Like back in Wayland’s Way, there was some kind of road here, too, though Hunter wasn’t sure he’d call it that. Rather, it was the remains of a road; broken patches of cracked and dusty tarmac was the only thing left of what must once have been a six-lane highway.
Sometimes the road disappeared completely, swallowed by centuries of dirt. When it did, Hunter would sent out Biggs and Wedge to scout forward and spot the next patch of crumbling blacktop. They did, though far from eagerly; whatever Thraggoth’s Run was, his raven familiars weren’t immune to the bleakness it cast over everything.
Three hours passed; Hunter found himself trudging on, his eyes on the ground and his mind empty of all thought as he put one foot in front of the other. By his side, Fyodor did the same. The place was taking a toll on the direwolf too; his hackles were raised, and he didn’t dare make a sound. Even his coat looked duller, as if drained from color.
Not even Aumir seemed to be undisturbed; every few minutes, he would slow down and take a look around, gazing at the clouds hanging above as if trying to pierce them by sheer will. Around the three-hour mark, he left the road to carefully climb upon a nearby mound. There were enormous, weathered bones and part of an odd-looking skull jutting from one side, right next to the scuffled, rusted-through ruins of an honest-to-god car, a sedan. Hunter could swear they belonged to a blue whale. The car was a Takuro Spirit.
At the top of the mound, the huntsman took of his headress, pulled out a looking glass from his pack, and scanned the road ahead. Nodding to himself, he put the headdress back on and returned to the road.
“We’re almost there,” he told Hunter. “Shouldn’t take us more than half an hour. Maybe less.”
That was a relief. Hunter couldn’t wait to be out of there. There was something about Thraggoth's Run that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
As it turned out, however, it wasn’t in the cards for their journey through that place of dust and rust to come to an end without incident. Not five minutes later, they came upon the first signs of recent life since they’d crossed the Arch—and Hunter immediately wished they hadn’t.
Right there in the middle of the road was a strange procession; a dozen men and a handful of mules, turned to cinders mid-stride. Hunter could make out just enough from the figures to see that some were looking at something behind and above them, raising their arms before their faces as if to shield themselves. One figure was hunched over, frozen in time as it tried to shield a second, smaller one with its own body. They couldn't have been there for long, or their ashes would have already been scattered and carried away by the elements.
“Don’t go near them,” said Aumir. He needn’t have to. Hunter had seen enough as it was, even from a healthy distance.
They were nearly past the unfortunate throng of travelers when the wind shifted. Fyodor’s ears shot up, his head angling into the breeze; he sniffed once, twice, then sneezed, the sound sharp in the quiet of the wasteland. The gust gathered strength, lifting dust from the shattered blacktop and scattering the ash of the cinder-like statues that had, not long ago, been living souls.
A storm broke somewhere far in the horizon, approaching fast, curdling to the color of steel and grave-dust, streaked with jagged veins of orange and purple lightning.
“Aumir?” called Hunter, panic seeping in his voice.
“Llerwyn’s breeches, young osprey,” the huntsman said. “You’re about to learn where this graveyard of a place got its name from.”
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