Fine ashes fell from the sky. This poisoned snow never stopped. Summer and winter, night and day, her mantle of desolation continued to envelop the mountains and valleys of the High-Lands no matter the season. It was said that the heavens were ill. That they were falling apart piece by piece. This yellow powder was their shreds. Their last breath and their last vengeance.

The sun was dying. Or at least, it no longer shone like before. Its rays were an anemic orange and, every year, its silhouette disappeared a little more under the purple veil that tore the red sky. Because the sky had long ceased to be blue. The white cotton clouds had dissipated eons before. The heavens mirrored the fate of human civilization. Both were at death’s doors.

Erol cleaned his hat from the soot that had covered it. He had been roaming this forest of rust-colored pine trees for hours already. Ahead of him, the child they had met at the farm pushed through the thorns and the ferns that some illness had shriveled. Everything was so dry. The smallest pine needle tore through his skin like a razor blade. If he didn’t have his well-made boots, his calves would be bleeding.

On his back, the young woman was getting worse. A thin red trickle oozed from her mouth. She coughed in her sleep as a fever gnawed away at her body. This world was already too much for her. Their group could not afford to take a pause. Not here. Not yet.

He never thought they would be able to escape the soldiers. With his blade, he paved his way until reaching the outside of the attic. He could still hear the echo of steel against leather, the clattering of Octave’s crossbow, and the cries of the officer giving the alert. The archaeologist still had Octave’s blood on his face. Under that heat, the iron smell made him want to throw up.

“At this pace, we will be at the mill by nightfall,” yelped the young Luca ducking as best he could brambles with thorns as big as his fingers.

“How are you holding up, little one? You look banged up,” asked Erol.

The child coughed. “Do not worry about me. Rather, who is this woman? Is she hurt?”

“This does not concern you at all,” said Erol before Octave had a chance to open his mouth to respond. “Focus on the road.”

Luca nodded.

After a few more minutes of walking, their guide pointed with his finger at a ravine that flowed between the trees. They had almost reached the stream.

“She’s very weak, Sir. She needs help and rest,” remarked Octave pulling his hand away from the forehead of his burden.

He too was holding on despite his wounds. Erol had to acknowledge it: Octave had behaved more than admirably until this point.

The stream joined the river. The child promised once again that they would receive all the assistance they required once they reached his parents’ mill. Then, he picked up his pace, almost breaking into a run. Behind them, the group could hear something neighing. They had to flee faster, even if the horsemen could never track them through the dense woods that lined the riverbank.

As long as they did not have dogs. Or even worse still…

The small group followed this new course of water until dusk wrapped with its nightly mantle the peaks of the pine-tree forest. Their pursuers had disappeared with the moon’s arrival.

The chant of the lapping water bolstered his spirits. Erol would have liked to take advantage of this water that flowed so freely across the forest. Here in the mountains, it had not yet acquired that foul smell, nor was it loaded with plastic waste or heavy metals. In fact, the water appeared so clear he would hazard a drink without first filtering it.

“I can’t wait anymore, Sir. I need to quench my thirst,” said Octave out of the blue, as if he had read his mind.

The student approached the riverbank and Erol followed suit, the pebbles screeching under his soles.

To Hölle with dysentery, thought the archaeologist.

Thirst had been nagging at him for days already. The sweet water enveloped his ankles, scarred by many long walks.

“Let’s get to the dam,” he said, pointing at the construction located a bit farther down the river. “I am going to lay down our friend. The air will do her great good.”

“Strange. There’s never been a dam here,” warned the little Flumine.

“What is that then?” asked Octave, knees deep into the moonlight-washed current.

Erol lifted his eyes. What had first seemed like a dam of branches erected by the strength of the torrent, now revealed itself to be a macabre mass of bodies and limbs.

“What heinous spectacle must we still bear witness to?” whispered Octave.

The clinking sound of his disciple arming himself with his crossbow resonated behind Erol.

“Are they soldiers? From the Foundation or henchmen of the Inquisition?” wondered Erol as he placed the young woman against the roots of a willow tree. “It looks like they wore breastplates.”

“Who would throw into the river a regiment in full armor?”

The truth about that barrage of corpses revealed itself in full once the archaeologist lit one of the last light sticks at the risk of revealing their position. Rusty and partially dismembered, robots lay where they had been abandoned a few days earlier. Their plastic purple eyes, proof of their former military use, shone under the light of the artificial flame. Cables and components leaked from their joints, as did a harmful fluid of liquefied lithium sub-batteries.

“What a waste!” railed Erol.

“Ancient assault machines? I have never seen that many,” said Octave. “It would seem that the soldiers of Firehorn follow to the letter the directives of those technophobic fools of the Inquisition.”

“They wanted to poison the current. So that any troops in flight would not be able to drink from it. To think that their allies are ready for anything to gain control of the region.”

“Poison?” mewed Luca with a trembling voice. “What do you mean? The Wassen mill is located below.”

“I am hoping that the mill still exists,” concluded Erol, before demanding that they hit the road once more.

Following along the banks of the soiled water, the group did not stop until they reached the Wassen mill which turned out to be no bigger than the farm of the hung. Straddling the river, it sported two huge paddle wheels standing motionless on the trees linking the two banks.

Luca’s father, Bart Flumine, was waiting for them on the porch. The miller was a gigantic man. Only a dark red nose in the shape of a potato emerged from his shaggy beard and long curly black hair. He tapped his wooden clogs against the stone wall that surrounded the entrance before opening the door to his abode with a hand as large as a silver plate. He invited Erol and his companion to follow him without pronouncing a word.

Following Luca, Erol went through the doors and passed a set of dangerous and imposing steel gears to finally find himself in the center of a room flooded with light. A fire roared in a central fireplace while Luca’s mother was busy repairing an antique welding torch at the dining table glued to the back wall.

When she saw her son, she leaped from her chair and began an angry tirade in a mixture of Russian and untranslatable patois. Luca seemed lost in a sea of excuses. With tears in her eyes and red from indignation, the miller’s wife finally turned to the visitors and addressed Erol in the common language of Renaissance: “An Envoy of the Foundation? Here? This is nothing but a race for trouble, mark my words,” she cried out, concealing her tears.

Before the archaeologist had a chance to explain, Luca recounted every event to his parents. He highlighted his encounter with them in the attic, their fight with the Firehorn soldiers, and the sad destiny of the farmers and their home.

As the young boy spun his tale, the faces of the miller and his wife grew paler. Their gaze turned to look at the young woman when Luca finally mentioned her.

Without further delay, the miller’s wife rushed towards Erol and asked him to place the survivor in the family bed upstairs. “But this woman is on the brink of death! Look how white her skin is!” she shrieked. For a moment Erol thought he was dealing with how she spoke on a daily basis. “Place her on the bed. Get a move on! I am going to look for my herbs!”

“We give you many thanks for your assistance, Fräulein,” stuttered Octave, helping his mentor place the young woman on top of the sheets.

“I am not doing this for you. Go back down now, my husband must wish to speak with you! Out!” she bellowed, before slinging a bunch of insults in old Russian.

Erol left the room reluctantly and returned to the main room accompanied by the sound of the miller’s wife’s tirade. In less than five minutes, her rant had brought his entire family tree into question.

“If there was still a god, prayer would be enough. Unfortunately…” grumbled the gentle voice of Père Flumine who was leaning on a pile of flour sacks. Luca was at his side.

“Alas, God is dead,” responded Erol.

The miller nodded. “We still wish to thank you for coming to the assistance of our bandit son. My wife and I were going crazy with worry.”

“Nevertheless, we would have liked for this to end otherwise,” added Octave with a wince that did not escape Erol’s notice.

The pain on his back wound must have flared up again. It would be necessary to apply new chemical bandages before they reached the city of Renaissance.

“And yet, it’s always the same story,” continued the colossus. “The masters are constantly at war and we, the common folk, suffer the consequences. What chaos!”

“Anarchy can be quite convenient for some. Very convenient even.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your son. Does he have any implants?” asked Octave when the child coughed again.

Père Flumine raised his eyebrows. At first, Erol had taken this to be a demonstrative gesture of surprise, but it gained another meaning when their host pinched his nose very forcefully until blood spurted out of his left nostril. The liquid disappeared inside his mustache, although three black drops dribbled on the miller’s upper lip. Then, he placed his nose on the table with a loud metal thump. It must have been very heavy. “Here you go, the sole implant in this whole house,” confessed Bart Flumine. With his sleeve, he wiped the black secretion that dripped from the two skeletal slots that now marred his face. “And, since we live close to the Southern Lands, it’s the only one there will ever be. It dates back to another time. It’s a particle filter. Of Soviet origin.”

“Very useful for a miller,” commented Erol.

“Exactly,” concluded his interlocutor while, behind him, the control panel emitted a warning sound and several gears started off to activate the haystacks. But that didn’t seem to be the end of the story.

Before Octave had a chance to refocus on the fact that the man had just placed one of his limbs on the table, Erol resumed the conversation: “Droids had been thrown upstream of the river. The contamination must have already reached your mill. If your son has drunk the water…”

Bart Flumine first turned red, then became a purple magenta within such a short period of time that Erol thought he was having a heart attack. “Those dirt bags,” muttered Flumine. “Scum…”

“We shall notify the Foundation.”

“This situation concerns no one but us. They are our problems now; you have done enough for us.” Luca extricated himself from his father’s arms. Père Flumine typed for a bit on the control panel before disappearing upstairs. The entire cottage creaked. “But what were you doing in their lands, strutting around with such an ostentatious belt?”

“We are archaeologists with the Foundation,” replied Octave in lieu of his master. “We were exploring caves under the valley.”

Erol nodded before removing his sword from its sheath. Using a towel that the miller’s son had brought him, he began to clean his blood-soaked blade.

“You do have some curious hobbies over there in Renaissance!” exclaimed the giant, tapping the tiny wooden table with the palm of his hand, a gesture that shook his metal nose. “And why the hell did you involve this young lady in your shenanigans? She doesn’t look like she was made for such adventures.”

Erol and Octave exchanged a timid look. The young woman was to remain a secret. It would be unthinkable to scream from all the rooftops that they had found a survivor from the times before. The situation was delicate. Therefore, Erol preferred to lie to their hosts for the security of everyone: “She is simply the daughter of an illustrious merchant who wanted to make sure that we would not skim off the top of our discoveries and that everything we found would be delivered to him in full.”

“This monster sent his kid in the belly of the mountains dressed so poorly? Did he want her dead?” retorted the astounded miller, having swallowed their story a bit too easily. “The bourgeois of Renaissance make me want to vomit more with each passing day.”

“Speaking of this,” hesitated Erol. “Given the state of health of our… protege, we wish to reach the capital as soon as possible.”

“In these times? It will be days before the brigands of Firehorn depart for the North and lay siege to Altdorf,” resumed the man, screwing his nose back into place.

Erol noticed that he had put it on backwards, but given the state of the nose, it didn’t make much of a difference. “And by water, do you think that would be possible? By following the river. Your son mentioned a boat.”

The archaeologist got up. He repeatedly glanced at the stretch of forest that was visible from the window before sitting down next to the entrance, oiling his blade.

Meanwhile, Bart Flumine exchanged a look with his wife who had just joined them downstairs. She gave Erol a nod, confirming that she had administered the necessary care. The miller continued: “We are going to leave for the peaks at dawn. It will not be long before the situation here turns sour. If you are going down the valley to Renaissance, take the boat.”

“My master, Marian, and the other Founders will be grateful for your generosity. If your path shall ever lead you to the City—”

Bart Flumine interrupted him with a wave, indicating that it would most certainly never happen. He was not the only one to distrust the Founders and the Inquisition in equal measure.

“Nevertheless,” continued Erol, “Are you not afraid that a patrol may come this way? We are not that far from the farm and—” Erol pointed with his thumb in the direction of the path that led to the forest he had been surveying this whole time.

“We are too far from the main road and from the pillaging. And furthermore, no one of sane mind would dare venture into this forest at night.”

After these remarks, Bart and his wife served the meal. It was a veritable feast, as they readied themselves to eat everything that the Flumines could not transport through the mountain. Every product was natural and had nothing to do with the recomposed food of the capital. Erol and Octave finally had their own share of organic ham.

His stomach full, Octave went to sleep next to the mill’s control panel, where Père Flumine’s work station was located.

Erol would have liked to imitate him, but despite the exhaustion, he was unable to sleep one wink that night. Sitting on the doorstep, he gave free foreign to his thoughts. The massacre at the farm and the presence of those mechanical beings in the waters of the stream did not reassure him one bit.

He also asked himself what sort of creature could lurk in these woods at such a late hour and grant them such profound self-sufficiency. Then, he remembered those stories about living mutants in the East or the genetic experiments that had supposedly taken place in certain underground compounds of the region.

“Bah! Old wives’ tales,” Erol comforted himself, since he had yet to see a shred of evidence for any of this.

Lost in the middle of the mountains, he nevertheless felt vulnerable. Far was the security of the ramparts of Renaissance and he couldn’t wait to be back.

The archaeologist suddenly felt the pressing need to jump into the river. To hell with the bionic plague propagated by the droids, he had to wash himself, purge his worries and be born anew. But he had to abstain. He would have the right to rest once he reached his destination. Once Octave was back at the desks of the University and the young woman was handed over to Marian against a good sum of credits.

“Perhaps with all that money I will also be able to afford a nose that filters sawdust and become a baker’s boy,” joked Erol out loud.

“It’s a military model. You won’t be able to find one in the add-on markets of Renaissance.”

Erol jolted. He had not heard the miller’s heavy step behind him.

The man continued his explanation: “Even contraband, they are extremely rare. Perhaps you may have more luck further south. With those traffickers who speak Mandarin.”

“How is the Fräulein doing?” asked the archaeologist trying to mask his embarrassment.

“Better than the boy,” responded his interlocutor, “My wife is examining his wound. He will need a new carbon or steel backbone. But there won’t be much left for your nose.”

Erol smiled, but under the moonlight he saw that Flumine still wore a serious expression. His eyelids creased, he seized up the raider. His eyes were not bionic. They could not read through metal or skin; instead they could peer into his very soul. It was an incredibly unpleasant experience.

“How much is the girl worth to cost you the life of this young boy?” The miller’s words pierced him like frozen steel through the stomach.

Flumine was not an idiot. But neither was Erol. “And what is a simple worker doing with a military-grade implant?”

Bart Flumine smiled, before revealing his right bicep. There, branded with hot iron, was graved the insignia that the Inquisition had been using for some years: the circled triangle. “A mistake from another time. It’s long behind me, way before even my son was born.” Bart then concealed his tattoo and proceeded to gather some wood logs before placing them under his left underarm.

“That’s impossible!” retorted Erol bringing his gloved hand to hover over his blade. “How could a Paladin have access to an implant? I thought the Inquisition was technophobic!”

Now standing, he defied the miller with his stare, but the difference in size made the scene look ridiculous. The giant could knock him down with a single blow from a log.

“Paladin? No, I was an engineer when I served,” Bart responded calmly with a slight smile. “An engineer on the Inquisition’s excavation sites. In the Western Colonies.”

Erol could not understand. The Inquisition fought technology with fervor. Bart Flumine must be a madman or a liar.

“The Inquisition is two-faced, Mr. Feuerhammer. Special units, like my unit, explore to this day the ruins of the Ancient World, just like you do in broad daylight. The rest of their brotherhood of dimwits remain ignorant of this fact.”

“For what—what purpose?” stammered Erol.

“This indirect war with the Foundation will not last forever. The Inquisition is working to overcome their technological delay and when that happens—”

“It will cease to pull the strings of these puppet Barons and will strike.”

“That was the plan at the time at least. The project was heralded by Sainte Maev herself. Rummage the ruins of the Ancient World as the University does. Its goal is to arm the Foundation, is it not? With the help of all the junk that you pull up.”

Erol remained fixed as a marble statue.

“Nevertheless, at times we did find some interesting things,” continued Bart addressing a wink at the archaeologist.

He knows.

“But the follies of the High-Lands no longer concern me after all,” he concluded before leaving Erol under the timid stars that pierced the black veil of the night.

Erol could have sworn that his heart had stopped for the minute that their conversation had lasted. The Inquisition and Father Flumine had hidden their game well.

The next morning, the journey towards Renaissance unfolded smoothly at first. Although the torrent was still brutal in certain places, the two archaeologists were able to navigate it using their oars.

During their journey, Erol and Octave were shaken around and drenched by the will of the current, and managed to finally find a moment of peace and quiet only after leaving the shadow of the Dammastock.

They had shielded their protege from the sun’s rays that pierced dangerously through the thin orange clouds and the mantle of dust that covered the sky. The archaeologist stroked her forehead and swiped locks of brown hair from her closed eyes. She had lost the fragile appearance of a porcelain doll.

As the afternoon passed, the descent became slightly sharper until their reached the heart of a wooded valley. The pine trees gave way to beeches and oaks that were later replaced by small prairies and pastures. Finally, the town of Altdorf stood proudly before them, still free.

But the city at the mouth of the river was already preparing for combat. Trenches and barricades were taking shape. Nevertheless, Erol’s belt allowed them to cross the blockade without obstacles and to reach the Silver Lake.

After a long journey, the lake stretched before them and it was only once the sun came to its anemic zenith that the fortified city of Renaissance revealed itself to them.

But suddenly, the sight of Renaissance disappeared from Erol’s view as he descended into obscurity after an oar hit him violently behind the neck.