SIX
TANITH
We walk in silence for another hour. The Dead Roads wind through increasingly ruined territory, past landmarks that used to mark thriving communities.
My journal fills with notes. Boundaries marked. Magic conditions documented. The picture that emerges confirms what I already suspected: the Reach is winning. Whatever forces hold the corruption in check—ley-line stability, natural magical resistance, the slow regeneration of the world’s underlying fabric—they’re failing.
We stop for midday rest near a spring that still flows, one of the few water sources in the Dead Roads that hasn’t gone metallic or dry. The water tastes flat but clean, and I drink deeply while Arax conducts what I’ve come to recognize as his standard perimeter check.
He doesn’t sit. Doesn’t rest. He patrols the boundaries of our temporary stop with the same relentless thoroughness he applies to everything, eliminating threats I can’t see and probably wouldn’t survive.
“You should eat.” I toss a travel ration in his direction without looking. “Even dragons need fuel.”
He catches it one-handed. “Dragons require less sustenance than humans.”
“Less isn’t none. Eat.”
A pause. Then the sound of the ration’s wrapping being opened.
I hide my satisfaction behind another mouthful of water.
“You’re documenting patterns.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question.
“What about them?”
“You’re tracking expansion rates. Comparing current conditions to historical data.”
“Someone has to.” I cap my water container and tuck it back into my pack. “The Reach doesn’t follow normal patterns of magical decay. It’s not entropy—it’s acceleration. Active expansion rather than passive spread.”
“The Ashen Flight has similar documentation.”
“Then you already know how bad it is.”
“We know.” He finishes the ration and disposes of the wrapping with a precision that borders on ritualistic. “We have known for decades. The question isn’t whether the Reach will consume the realm. The question is how long we can delay the inevitable.”
The casual fatalism should surprise me. It doesn’t. I’ve spent three years watching the world unravel. Hope died somewhere around the second city I watched disappear.
“What happens when there are no more rituals to end? When the Reach expands on its own, without catalysis?”
He doesn’t answer. The silence stretches long enough that I think he’s refusing to engage.
Then: “We adapt. Or we die.”
“That’s not a strategy.”
“It’s the only strategy that matters.”
I can’t argue with that. I’ve lived by the same principle for years—adapt or die, survive or become another absence in a world full of them. The difference is I never stopped hoping for a better option.
Looking at Arax—at the flat certainty in his posture, the absolute acceptance of extinction—I wonder if hope is a luxury the Ashen Flight never learned to afford.
We resume walking.
The afternoon brings worse terrain. The Dead Roads deteriorate from damaged to actively hostile, paths crumbling under our feet, ash storms materializing without warning to reduce visibility to arm’s length.
He watches. I notice.
This is how you survive in the Reach—by not naming the things that might kill you. Speak a danger aloud and you give it power. Keep silent and maybe, maybe, you can pretend it doesn’t exist.
