Nightfall was not as big of a help as Kaldalis anticipated.

He should have known better. Darkness worked differently in this world. Everyone could see with basically perfect clarity in a bubble around themselves. It meant that they only had to be worried about the noises they made in the dark that might be heard more than a dozen yards away, but they didn’t have any more capacity to see the guard patrols coming than the guards had against them.

But it was only Myrin and Balrim with him, so they could move quieter. Most of the guard patrols were larger groups. And most of them were wearing heavier armor. Between the three of them, Kaldalis was the only one in noisy armor, and all he had to do was stay at the rear of the trio and keep his gear from rattling too much. Myrin took point - being the smallest and least visible - while Balrim focused on running interference to keep the three of them together.

Their first move was to break through the initial patrols. They cast a relatively tight net, but the uneven terrain and scattered trees gave Kaldalis and his friends plenty of hiding places. The whole affair turned into a tense game of Red Light Green Light as they waited for the patrol to pass, and scooted to the next hiding place before the following patrol came into view.

Balrim was having a blast with this. The big grin splattered across his face told Kaldalis that pretty clearly. He seemed to have a knack for finding the right hiding spots, and even though Kaldalis and Myrin were a little slower than he was - due to the passive move speed his bow skill gave him - he kept himself between them to manage their positions.

Kaldalis was too anxious to enjoy himself. He wasn’t a big fan of high-stakes forced stealth sections of games, and the idea that this wasn’t a game was ruining it all that much more.

If he got caught, he wasn’t going back to a checkpoint with a little more knowledge of the patrol routes. He was probably going back to Kayore in shackles.

After about ten minutes of harrowing movement, leapfrogging between hiding places, Kaldalis was finally able to look up at his minimap and see that he was physically standing on the edge of the red line that represented the barrier they weren’t supposed to cross. He was standing stock-still behind a vine-covered tree as the next patrol walked right past him, barely three feet away. Balrim was right beside him, crouched behind a boulder. Myrin was on the other side of the line already, laying prone behind a fallen log.

As with most of the patrols, there were three people. Some had four, and there was one he’d seen with two, but the majority of them were this arrangement. Two armored guards clomping through the wilderness on their predetermined path, accompanying one priest.

Kaldalis found it hard to believe how many priests the Contender had brought, and wondered if any of them were happy to be out here in the jungle like this. How many had grander ambitions than guard duty when they’d boarded the ship to come out here?

From this close, he thought he could hear this priest’s body language. The guards were stomping because they were marching through rough terrain. It was a practiced motion drilled into them by discipline.

The priest was stomping, too, but it was heavier. Not practiced.

She was pissed. This priest didn’t want to be here.

As she passed, there was a squishing noise at one of her footfalls, and she grumbled at either the animal scat or mud puddle she’d just gotten all over her shoe.

The patrol continued past them and Kaldalis idly wondered if he could put a wedge between the Contender and his people. If he could learn some more about church politics and the chain of command, or possibly even the chain of succession…

He pushed the idea away. It was another distraction. Of course even now, even here, shoving his way past the obstacle towards the goal he wanted to pursue, he could find a thread that would lead him back to the Contender. Just more bait to lure him away.

The patrol passed by, and Kaldalis wanted to break into a run to get away from the line of patrol. Balrim reigned him in, though, grabbing his arm and pulling him into a hiding spot on the other side of the path.

“The next patrol will come too soon,” he warned. “We’ll never get far enough. And what if there’s a second line of patrol after that? What will you do when you run into them?”

Kaldalis wasn’t about to argue with Balrim when he seemed to be in his element here. The next patrol passed by, and once it was out of sight, they moved again, getting a little farther.

And again.

And again.

There was no second line of patrol, but Kaldalis appreciated Balrim’s caution. Now that they were well into the red region on the map, they could move with impunity, in large part because they had raised no alarm at all. The guards thought the line was secure. Even if they blundered into a wayward patrol out here, those guards would be looking the other way - towards the town - and would be much easier to sneak past than if word spread that there was some noise in the dark moving towards the forbidden raid entrance.

They didn’t have to commit to any shenanigans. They cut a straight path from where they broke through the patrol line towards their objective.

Kaldalis was struck by the difference in the wilderness out here. Both Cotanaku and Panbu were surrounded by similar jungles. There were different landmarks and features, and even different specific types of plants making up those jungles. But they were both still surrounded by dense jungles that even covered the rolling hills that were further inland.

Out here, though, the wilderness outside Kayore was much sparser in its vegetation. There were valleys filled with isolated copses of trees, and thin hardscrabble grasses, wiry bushes, and creeping vine plants still covered the ground, but so much of the area was bare rock, waist-high thickets of brush, and even straight-up open space. Navigation was entirely different here. Instead of picking their way along game trails that made a spiderweb network through the foliage, they were able to cut across long distances in straight lines, arcing around obstacles and clambering over crags and boulders. It meant they moved a lot faster, with their route being less circuitous.

Kaldalis didn’t even notice they’d reached their objective until it was all around him.

Even though he’d seen the sketches, and even been told what to expect, Kaldalis still had a picture in his mind of something closer to what he’d seen underneath the dungeons. The big city had been mostly intact, only missing those materials which would rot away. Even the ruins he’d found aboveground before were still mostly intact. They had looked like towns left to be reclaimed by nature for only a few decades. Maybe less. They were absolutely ruined, clearly abandoned, and smothered by the encroaching jungles. But they were recognizable buildings. Stone structures that were intact enough to live in, despite their obvious age and - occasionally - fragility.

This city was almost nothing.

Balrim pointed out the first building. Such as it was.

There was about half a wall still standing. Kaldalis mistook it for a boulder, since the rest of the building’s remains were mounded up against it. Myrin rushed over and started to pick over the rubble, but it had been collapsed for so long, the spaces between the cut stones were filled in with dirt. Grass was poking through the cracks.

Nature wasn’t just reclaiming the ruin. It had already reclaimed it.

The next building had been a structure that had stood out to Kaldalis in the city beneath the first dungeon. He wasn’t sure what it had been for, but it had contained rows and rows of giant metal vats. In the underground ruins, the building had been intact, and the vats were still in their rows. Kaldalis had thought if he took the time to explore the building, he might be able to discern its purpose.

Here, though, there was nothing to learn. The stone structure had collapsed. The metal vats poking out of the rubble were pitted and dented by time and the elements. Anything remaining within had long since seeped into the dirt.

As Kaldalis walked past that, another building loomed out of the dark into his globe of darkvision. This one was more intact, but it was just a box of crumbled stone. A multi-story building had fallen in on itself. Whatever Lataxinan building methods strengthened their foundations kept the first story’s external walls intact, but everything else was just rubble. There was nothing to discover here. Just a near-solid cube of rock.

“This is the place,” Kaldalis said quietly, whispering in the dark. “They lived here.”

“There was nothing to shield it,” Myrin said. She jogged over to the rusted metal vats. As she reached out to touch one, it came apart, a chunk of metal cracking and turning to thick red dust all over her hand. “Without the cave to protect it from the rain, or the jungle to protect it from the wind…”

“Are we even going to find anything here?” Balrim asked.

“There has to be something,” Kaldalis said firmly. “Maybe not here. Maybe not in this region. Maybe not on this island.” He started to move past this group of the ruins, pushing farther in, looking for anything still intact enough to be explored. “But we’re sure as hell going to look. We will find our answers. We will not be-”

Before Kaldalis could conclude his dramatic speech, a huge shape lurched out of the dark from around the blocky building beside him, slamming into him violently.