There was no water on the wasteland that used to be a forest. I couldn’t find any plants, animals, or even insects. It was deader than a desert. Noel and I used water magic to condense water from the air, but it took a lot of energy to do so. Hunger replaced thirst, but there was nothing to forage.

The sun was relentless. It baked the earth, creating cracks in the ground and made me wish my shoes weren’t so tattered as to be non-existent. If there was any wildlife here, it must come out at night. Noel and I considered casting rain magic to bait out some food, but it was too risky. What if nothing came out? We’d be goners.

Instead, we figured out the direction we had to go thanks to the path of the sun, and held up light pieces of bark from the giant tree to shield ourselves from the sunlight. We kept an eye out for anything to eat, but found nothing. I’d heard people ate tree bark in times of desperation, but the bark we had was definitely not good enough to eat.

“I know he’s supposed to be mad and everything,” I said. “But don’t you think this is a little extreme, even for him?”

“According to the story, the God of Madness fought the God of Evil because the latter insulted his beloved. Wiping out an entire forest seems exactly like the sort of thing he’d do on a whim.”

I grumbled. “How big was this forest, anyway?” I looked up at the sky. The sun was well on its way down, which meant we’d been walking from dawn to late afternoon.

Noel stopped. “We should’ve been out of the forest by now.”

I nodded grimly. “So we’re on the Plains of Serenity.”

The plains definitely didn’t look serene anymore. The desolation was even worse than before, since there were no tree husks nor large rocky outcrops. As far as the eye could see, was wasteland sprinkled in dust. Winds blew the dust in formations above the earth, which quickly faded away in the vast emptiness.

Noel and I didn’t speak again. We found our first sign of life soon after. A centipede-like monster crawled out of the shade under a large rock when we got close. I burned it to cinders with a fireball, which made Noel mad.

“What?” I said. “We can’t eat that thing!”

“Why not?” she said. “We’ve eaten monsters before.”

“Those monsters were different,” I said. “All of them were looked and tasted like plants. This one was clearly an insect.”

“So?” asked Noel.

“Have you ever eaten a monster like that before? What if it was poisonous?” I said.

“There is nothing else to eat,” Noel said through gritted teeth.

“Maybe there is,” I said. I cautiously approached the monster’s rock and lifted it up a little with motion magic. We found a couple of large eggs. I had no idea if these were safe to eat, but it was clear that we were desperate. We cooked them with fire magic and prayed to the Immortal of Desire that this wouldn’t kill us.

After not dying from hunger or thirst, we made good time along the wastelands that used to be the Plains of Serenity. The sun was less harsh, our bodies less tired, and our spirits a little uplifted. We found a few other monsters on our way to the camp, but only a couple looked edible. Still, it was enough. The sun was orange and almost at the horizon by the time we reached the rocks that hid the Jora tribe’s camp.

My heart skipped a beat. Noel and I rushed forward. The rocks were covered in a mound of dirt, barely peeking out from the ground. We ran behind them to find an empty field. No tents, no campfire, no Jora tribesmen. There were no markings or signs that this place had ever been a campsite. If it hadn’t been for the barely visible rocks at the front, we wouldn’t even have known that we were here.

Noel dropped to the ground and started digging with her hands. I tried to lift her up but she struggled free and began digging again. I convinced her to use motion magic instead, and the two of us began excavating the land. She’d picked a place near the back of the camp. Our invisible hands brushed past something strange. Flint. We found small stone utensils and tools. Digging around the area, we found no tents nor dead bodies.

“They made it out,” I said at last. “They might have left in a hurry but they made it out.”

Noel nodded but didn’t say anything.

“Noel…” I began.

“It’s okay,” she said. “If they left, they must be at the highlands. It was almost summer when we left. They had enough food. They’re okay,” she said. “They’re okay.”

I looked at her, silently. Her eyes were unfocused and she was clearly holding in her worst thoughts. Just in case saying them out loud made them real. I decided to do the same. We stuck around the camp for a little while. There was nothing to scavenge or recover. The only thing we found were the few pieces of flint we’d dug up in the beginning.

With the sun beginning to set, we decided to go hunting. However, we couldn’t find anything but small insect-like monsters even as the temperature began to fall. Noel thought the elves might have gone to the highlands so we were going to have to go there too.

But there wasn’t enough food. Without food we wouldn’t have the energy to cast water magic, either. Noel suggested we make traps in various locations around the desolate plains with insect monsters as bait. The elves used snares made out of sinew or plant fiber as well as pitfall traps for big game.

Unfortunately, most monsters were too powerful to catch with normal snares and pitfall traps. The elves used clever designs such as heavy weights and water to kill their prey, but traps were mostly designed to catch small animals, not proper prey.

Still, I remembered a trap from a documentary I’d seen, once upon a time. I told Noel about the design and she seemed to like it, so we went about trying to set it up. Noel went to a handful of places with dried up riverbeds and ponds and dug large holes on their sides. I searched for large rocks or withered trees that could be given pointy ends.

With the last rays of sunlight threatening to leave the sky, I ran over to Noel. We split up and inserted the sharp pointy rocks and sticks to the bottom of the holes that Noel had dug and covered the top with things like dried grass, withered tree bark, and even our own clothes. We sprinkled a little dirt on top to hide the traps as best we could, then filled the dried riverbeds and ponds with a little water. After gently putting a little insect monster meat on top of the traps, we ran back to what used to be the Jora tribe’s camp and settled in for the night.

But neither of us could go to sleep. Neither wanted to share what thoughts were keeping us awake, but we wanted to talk about something. Something that would take our minds off things.

“See, there was this guy,” I said, “his name was Julius Caesar and he went on like this campaign—”

“Campaign?” she said. “My new translation magic is giving me a weird explanation for that word. What does it mean?”

“Right,” I said, “I meant he went to fight against some other tribes.”

“Got it,” she said.

“His tribe called those other tribes the Gauls, and so when Julius Caesar was on his Gallic campaign, he wrote a book.”

“A book?” she asked.

“Right, look, never mind. The point is, he went to fight another tribe, and told other people about it. While describing those battles, he explained the trap that we built today. He called them lilies, because they kind of looked like a flower from back home, but nowadays people call it a trou de loup,” I said.

“A wolf hole?” said Noel.

“Yes,” I said, “isn’t translation magic great?”

“This wolf hole, it’s like a pitfall but with something sharp at the bottom. We’ve tried stuff like that before but monster hide is tough. They might not get killed,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “then I hope you like insects.”

We talked about random things into the night and went to sleep with the moon staring back at us once again.

---

In the morning, we went around to our trous de loup. Most of them were empty, with some having never been triggered at all. Only one had a large looking monster inside it. The monster seemed to have whacked its head on the sharp rock rather than being pierced by it, but hey, it looked like a giant cow and I was starving.

We ate what we could and dried up some meat to take with us. We left what used to be our home and started walking towards the highlands.