I don’t hesitate, reaching for my pack and slinging it across my back, already moving in the direction Thaden pointed.
An hour later, we step out from the forest and onto a ragged mountain’s edge—a barren ridge that extends for hundreds of paces to my left and right and stretches far into the east.
The sight in the distance snatches the breath from my chest.
“Damn.”
Crimson clouds boil in the distance, turning the landscape beneath them to red. A wasteland of ash spread far, far into the east, as if crimson snow has fallen.
Dust storms swirl across the plain, the ash lifting and whipping across the flat land, all the way up the visible sides of mountains in the east.
Despite my need to hurry, I’ve missed a step.
Thaden slows a little, allowing me to catch up while Gallium follows close behind me.
Thaden points. “There used to be a fae city at the edge of the plain over there.”
I follow the direction indicated by his hand, making out the silhouettes of what could be crumbling stone structures in the distance.
“Then the blight took over,” he says. “Their animals died and their children got sick. If you look carefully, you can see a lake.”
I peer into the distance, locating the shiny, oval surface on the eastern side of the rubble. “I see it.”
“The water became poisonous,” Thaden says, shadows growing in his eyes. “Much like the lake near the Cursed City.”
“The Toxic Thirst,” I murmur. “Ingesting its water kills you.”
He nods. “The exodus of fae from the east began soon after that. Queen Karasi won’t admit it because she wants to cultivate the belief that there are many more fae ready to be called from the east, but what you saw back on the plain—that’s the entire fae population.” He gestures into the dark distance. “There are no living fae in the east now. Only bodies that continue to feed the blight.”
“What do you mean,feed?” I ask.
It’s always been a mystery to me how the blight spreads. Even more so, the way the wasteland outside the Cursed City would give rise to monsters that would attack the city—monsters that Asha was sent out to kill.
I know that Blacksmith magic, and all the experiments Malak and others conducted, led to this, but I don’t knowhow.
Of course, everything Thaden tells me could be a lie, so I watch him carefully as he answers, trying to separate fact from fiction based on his facial expressions and body language.
“I, too, wanted answers,” he says.
Truth.
“When I had the chance to gain information from Milena after she captured me, she said that the rot started with the murder of other Blacksmiths thirty years ago.”
Truth. Maybe. But also…nottruth.
I fight my frustration at how smoothly he speaks and how faultless his features remain. I can’t be certain how to unpick what he’s telling me into its truthful and untruthful pieces.
All I can do is listen.
“Apparently, when Malak slaughtered the Blacksmiths who opposed him at the beginning of his reign, he disposed of their bodies by burying them deep within the earth that is now the wasteland on the northern side of the Cursed City.”
The environment around the city was treacherous for as long as I knew it. On the northern side is an expansive wasteland of white ash that stretches all the way to the first ring of mountains. On the eastern side is a dangerous marsh the humans call theSunken Bog, filled with malformed trees, deadly snakes, and mud that’s constantly sinking in on itself.
The western and southern sides remained somewhat untainted—that’s where the humans grow their crops—but only because they built stone walls around those areas to keep the rot out.
Beyond those walls, the mountains grew wild.
“Milena thought that the creation magic had leached from the dead Blacksmiths’ bodies into the soil and started an unstoppable chain of events,” Thaden says.
