Brakkt stood atop the ramparts of the Fortress of Pandora, looking out over the sandy desert. It wasn’t his first time here, but it was always somewhat depressing. There once stood a city, far out across that desert, that dwarfed Lyria in both size and grandeur. Even the lowliest peasant lived like a king, with wealth and food aplenty. Magic was currently a shadow of what it once was.

According to legend, of course. Legends had a tendency to get a little inflated, but there was probably some grains of truth in all the embellishment.

In reality however, Brakkt suspected that the First City was little different from modern-day Lyria. They might have had a different understanding of magic. Maybe even more powerful magic given that a ritual was supposedly what had turned the entire landscape to sand and dust. But magic back then had likely not been nearly as widespread. Today, most arcanists used magic as a convenience. That convenience only doubled when things like potions for lighting were taken into account. And he knew that light potions were a relatively recent development.

But even still, its destruction had likely set humanity back by centuries. If all their understanding hadn’t been lost, who knew what people would be capable of today. It was also one of the primary causes for the ire monsters received today. A war could be forgotten in time. But the wide-spread knowledge that a war with monsters led to the utter destruction of an entire country was something that stuck with people. It was something people could easily point to. The fact that even Lyria used the threat of exile to the First City as a deterrent to severe crimes meant that even peasants who knew little about the world at large would be aware of what happened.

Dangerous monsters attacking on the regular was another reason, one that stuck with anyone who was assigned to the guard down here.

It was a shame.

And something was up with it.

Monster attacks had dwindled in the past six months. It normally took that long just to get here from Lyria, but the portal to Illuna cut that time in half. Pushing Ensou and traveling with only draken saved nearly a full month and a half of time. During his travel, there had apparently been no attacks at all. Since his arrival two weeks ago, there had been no attacks either. The reprieve should have been a welcome one to the soldiers stationed here. This was a trying job and any lessening of the burden was generally appreciated.

Yet the reprieve had gone on for a little too long now. Tensions were rising. Even experienced soldiers and arcanists were growing nervous. They were no longer viewing this as a break from the action, but as the calm before the storm. Such things had happened in the past. A lull in individual attacks followed by a great and organized assault designed to take down the entire fortress. They were never pretty. Normal events were merely small groups of monsters trying to escape north. Often by stealth rather than direct attacks. Sometimes, such intrusions weren’t even noticed until people started going missing from nearby settlements, usually travelers, woodsmen, and hunters. People who were away from the safety of larger cities and settlements.

Those generally necessitated hunting parties sent out from Pandora. There were several squads dedicated to just such a purpose.

More monsters than were noticed surely made it north of the fortress, but if they weren’t killing all the humans they came across, they were generally not a priority. Most of the monsters who had come to Illuna likely originated from the First City, though maybe not this generation. Brakkt himself honestly didn’t care and might have even welcomed such monsters.

But this wasn’t about them.

This calm before the storm might be hundreds of monsters, each individually as strong as ten men or capable of magic that would turn the heads of even his little sisters. Never before had a lull in events gone on for six months so far as he was aware.

At the moment, he was considering a venture further south. A scouting mission to see if he could find any large gatherings of monsters that might be prepping for an assault. Heading south of the fortress wasn’t something he had ever done before. Even his father hadn’t ever gone down there. Not out of sight of the fortress, anyway. But he had to do something to assuage the soldiers’ fears and bolster morale. His presence helped a little, but returning from a scouting mission would help a whole lot more.

Even sending back information that there was an attack incoming would surely take some of the tension out. At least people would know what they were facing.

At the same time, he felt he shouldn’t go. That doing so would only harm morale further. That he should remain, train with the troops, ensure that they were aware of how to use muskets and the recently delivered cannons. There were dedicated instructors here, but he had more experience with them than anyone and had been closely involved with the blacksmiths that had developed them. He alone was a force to be reckoned with as well, should an army assault the walls. And with both Fela and Ensou at his side, he might even stand a chance at a successful negotiation. Should any approaching monsters be willing to talk, that was.

Sometimes, he wished there were two of him to go around. Companion and Irulon would be able to scout and train at the same time. He had to decide if it was a good idea to send someone else to do the scouting. Even with as well trained as the people here were, he didn’t think he could truly count on them to return from a dangerous mission like that. He considered asking Fela if she would head out. As a monster herself, she would likely not attract too much negative attention. But…

Brakkt glanced to the side, watching the hellhound stare out, panting slightly in the hot air—the fur she had was probably a bit much for this climate.

If something happened to her, Alyssa would kill him.

Fela had been by his side almost constantly since Alyssa disappeared. At first, she just popped in to check on him every now and again. She acted much the same with Irulon and Companion. But after a month of no sign of Alyssa, Fela started spending more and more time with him. Him and the draken. Oddly enough, she didn’t spend all that much time with Irulon. A little, sure. But not as much as Brakkt would have expected.

She was, at the moment, standing alongside him on the ramparts, watching out while wearing the armor Alyssa had crafted for her. Her back was straight. Her eyes were sharp. The flames framing her face burned bright even in the bright sun. She had come with him down to the Fortress of Pandora, mostly because she wanted to stick with him and Izsha, he was pretty sure. He doubted that she was too interested in the actual lack of attacks on the fortress.

“Any notable scents on the wind?” Brakkt asked, more as a way to get some conversation going than because he thought she might smell an army in the distance. If she did, that was great as a source of information. But really, he enjoyed a little conversation now and again. It didn’t used to be that way, but maybe he had changed in the past year or so.

Fela didn’t answer right away. Tilting her chin up, she sniffed at the air a few times. Eventually, she relaxed with a casual shrug. “The air here is strange. It smells funny. Like…” She gave another two quick sniffs, this time closing her eyes as she did. “Like a pot of meat left over a fire for far too long, but not to the point of actually burning?”

“So it is a good smell?” Knowing her propensity for meat, he was surprised that she wasn’t constantly salivating if the air smelled like that. He couldn’t say that he smelled it though. It just smelled like nothing to him. No plants. No animals. It was a wonder anything could survive down south of the fortress. Yet monsters had been attacking for hundreds of years.

But Fela shook her head. “No. Not really at all. I can’t really say why, but it is actually a bit repulsive. Makes me lose my appetite.”

“You seemed to eat quite a bit last night.”

“Real food helps cover up the smell.”

“Mhm. Have you ever been this way before?”

Fela shook her head once again. “I was born far north of Lyria, up at nearly the opposite end of the desert… That desert. There are a lot of deserts in and around Lyria, aren’t there.”

“Not more than other places, I think. Granted, I’ve only traveled outside Lyria a handful of times.”

“I guess. I don’t really know… I think I prefer wide open plains to deserts, but I like deserts better than forests or swamps. Lots more area to run around. Trees just make it so you can’t run in a straight line and really push yourself.”

“There is something nice about relaxing in a forest though. Hiding from the heat in the shade of a good tree, smelling the dew on the leaves…”

“I guess that’s alright, but—”

When Fela abruptly cut herself off, Brakkt glanced over, worried, but mostly expecting one of the fortress guards to have approached. None of them liked Fela. Or monsters in general. They were even less tolerant of monsters than the most abject protesters in Lyria. Which wasn’t necessarily unexpected. Hellhounds were among the many kinds of monsters that frequently tried to assault the wall. In fact, hellhounds frequently made it past the wall, either through sneaking or simply rushing too fast for humans to effectively handle. It was likely how Fela’s ancestors made it up to the northern desert who knew how long ago.

Because of that animosity, she had taken to sticking especially close to him since arriving and generally hadn’t spoken much at all in the presence of others. But that didn’t seem to be the case this time.

Her ears were standing up as tall as they could, twitching slightly in all directions. She heard something. Her face wasn’t stressed or panicked, so it probably wasn’t anything dangerous, but… Brakkt still found it alarming. The wide eyes wasn’t helping matters. In fact, looking close, she seemed more surprised than alarmed.

“What is—”

“Shhh. Quiet,” Fela whispered, holding out her hand with her claws pointed in his direction, but not actually threatening him. “There’s something happening. It’s… big. I’m not sure what, but—”

The ground beneath Brakkt’s feet trembled. He kept his footing, but only thanks to the brick of the ramparts coming up to his waist. Fela barely moved her upper body, though her feet dug into the stone. But their footing wasn’t the problem.

“Something tunneling?” Brakkt said, alarmed. There were a few monsters that liked to travel through the ground as if it were nothing more than water. His mind raced through the possibilities, trying to think up what might be the worst case scenario. Sandworms were possibly the worst. The monsters were as large as Lueta, just as intelligent, but covered in an impossibly hard carapace. They did have a weakness—their flesh was incredibly vulnerable to heat and fire, but pretty much all their exposed flesh was inside their mouths.

Not exactly where someone should be.

The only other thing he could think of that might be large enough to cause such a tremor in the ground was… a dragon. One landing might have sent out such a quake. There was known to be one dragon out in the ruins of the First City—or there had been one when the last scouting report came back well over three decades ago—but it had never been seen in his lifetime by any human eyes. Could it have woken? Was it hungry?

Part of him wanted to venture out and find it. Striking up a conversation had worked well with Companion, after all. But…

He grit his teeth, watching for any sign of a mountain moving in the distance.

There were no mountains in the distance, just relatively flat rolling dunes. As such, it should have been easy to spot any changes, but… There was nothing. Just empty desert. No shadows crossing the landscape from a being too large for most humans to comprehend. No mirages on the horizon that might have been even larger than they appeared.

“The smell is different,” Fela said, interrupting Brakkt’s thoughts. “It smells nicer. Like trees and grass.”

“Trees and grass?” Brakkt repeated with a confused frown. At first, he thought that the wind might have changed. There was a forest not far away that was regularly harvested to supply Pandora with wood, but… that couldn’t be the case at all. The wind was picking up, blowing a little stronger and a little harder than it had been, but it was coming from the direction of the desert.

Smelling the air himself, Brakkt was surprised that he noticed a difference as well. There wasn’t an immediate sensation of being surrounded by trees and forest wildlife, but it didn’t smell… dead and lifeless. That small change was almost jarring. He had smelled nothing but empty sand for weeks now.

Was it dryads then? Plant monsters spreading their roots through the sand enough to destabilize the very foundations of the fortress?

He didn’t think such an attack had ever taken place before. Neither did he know how to go about stopping it. But before he could shout for the other guards to ready themselves—a likely unnecessary command given their training—he saw something. Something out there.

It wasn’t a monster, but he couldn’t quite tell…

Pulling out the binoculars he had found among the items Alyssa left in his room, he was able to take a closer look without mounting up on Ensou and riding out into possible danger. The movement he had thought he saw off in the distance, however… was just a tree. A large redwood, standing tall over the edge of the closer dunes. A very out of place tree. Even ignoring the impossibility of a tree growing south of Pandora, Brakkt knew the types of tress that grew around the area immediately north. Redwoods were not among those trees.

As he watched, another tree sprouted up over the edge of the horizon. Then another. And another after that. Between blinking, an entire forest covered the ground as far as he could see. It wasn’t just spreading away from him either. Saplings pierced the sand, turning the surrounding ground to dirt as they grew to fully-formed trees. Bushes, grass, plants, and even animals all appeared from nothing, filling out the underbrush and turning it into a true forest.

True being an extremely subjective word at the moment. “An illusion?”

“It doesn’t smell like one… Is it going to stop before it reaches us?”

The suggestion tied his stomach into a knot. The rate of expansion was fast. Too fast to flee on foot. The draken and Fela might be able to flee. But all the people here? All the guards… If it consumed the fort, if trees and plants appeared where people were standing… was it going to kill them all? What manner of creature could attack with such an ability. This went far beyond the capabilities of any dryad he had heard about.

Brakkt pulled out a Message spell card, ready to warn his father of what happened before it could consume him as well.

But before he could send it off, the growing trees stopped. They stopped growing. They stopped moving. There was a wide empty space filled with nothing but sand between the wall of the fortress and the start of the line of trees. It was enough empty space that he should be able to see anything approaching the wall with ample time to respond. Much less space than there used to be, but…

He let out a small sigh of relief, glad, for the moment, that he hadn’t been turned into a tree.

“Wow. Do you know any spells or monsters that could do that?”

Slowly, Brakkt shook his head. “I wonder if some monster dug up ancient rituals in the ruins of the first city. A ritual then was what turned this land into desert in the first place. Perhaps there could be another ritual out there that would reverse it.”

If monsters got access to spells in the First City, this was definitely an emergency that needed to be brought to the attention of his father. This spell seemed to have spared them, but not even his sister would be able to tell what sorts of sorcery they had access to now.

“An Edict:” a voice without a body boomed over the fortress, stopping him from sending the message once again. “Crossing the border with violence in mind will result in consequences. So proclaims Dominion Tenebrael.”

Narrowed eyes grew wide as Brakkt heard that name. The voice wasn’t familiar to him, but the way of speaking struck a note deep inside him. He had heard the same power in Alyssa’s voice when she constructed the statue at Teneville. The same… holy power. He straightened his back, drawing in a breath.

But Fela shouted out the question on his mind before he could speak. “Where is Alyssa?!” Her loud voice was more of a roar than actual speech, yet even that was a sentiment that Brakkt shared.

But the voice didn’t respond. Just a low hum of rustling trees and brush, a sound that likely hadn’t been heard in the area for thousands of years.

Quite the panic arose among the guardsmen. They were trained to deal with a lot, but not for a forest to rise up in a matter of seconds followed by a booming voice. A small squad of scouts were dispatched to the very edge, mostly to ensure that the forest was not an illusion. Brakkt cautioned them not to attack anything they saw under any circumstances save for self defense. But they returned without incident after a few hours reporting having seen nothing larger than a small toad.

Meetings ran on. Messages were exchanged with just about every important member of the military, the guild, and the Pharaoh. It went on deep into the night. Only near daybreak did Brakkt finally get a chance to return to his quarters for rest with Fela dragging her feet from exhaustion alongside him. He had almost forgotten about the lack of response to Fela’s question, so overshadowed was it by the forest and meetings.

But seeing a small letter folded up on the stand between his and Fela’s beds brought it all rushing back. He recognized the paper as being out of place nearly instantly, even despite his eyes being half closed from tiredness. Rushing forward, he unfolded it to find two simple words written down in a familiar handwriting. He stared at them, wondering why there were only two words, staring like he might be able to will a more detailed explanation into existence.

A headache started to form as he stared, one that grew in intensity the more he reread those two words. Eventually, he had to look away.

“What does it say?” Fela asked, watching him.

He simply flipped the paper over to show her, only for her to grimace, wincing away and rubbing her eyes.

“That… hurts. What is it?”

Looking back, a pressure welled just behind his right eyebrow. Gritting his teeth, he folded it back up, glad the thumping in his forehead subsided as he did so. “It just has two words on it. ‘Sorry. Soon.’”

“Ugh.” Fela hadn’t stopped rubbing her eyes, making him wonder if she couldn’t see something more with her inhuman vision. He thought to ask, but watching as she slumped down onto her bed, still groaning a bit, he decided against it.

It said soon, after all.

What was a little longer after nothing for a few months? He could wait.