Zel couldn’t help but stop her sturmgandr as they emerged at the peak of Jorfr’s secret mountain pass, gazing out at the mountain which was to serve as their passage to the Deterrence Fields. The maps had never given the eponymous Titan of Titan’s Bane its just desserts, that immovable artifact of a previous, perhaps greater age, and of the struggle to protect that age from the desolation which had inevitably claimed it. The Titan’s matte-black skeleton was sprawled out on its back against the mountain’s slopes, staring blankly into the heavens; two of its upper ribs were missing, right over the heart, and an unnatural canyon yawned wide-open in the mountainside. A wound left behind by whatever had killed the living weapon.

One could see the missing rib segments at the foot of the mountain, propped up as an archway, denoting the cave entrance which was too small to be seen from this far off by anyone but Zef. A hair-thin scar of carved-out rock spiraled up the mountainside.

“These things lose a great deal of the magic if you live inside one for a while. The fourth rib from the top kept blocking the sun out of my window, ” Vic remarked. Meanwhile, Zef took a moment to retrieve her fotoapparat and take a picture of the vista.

“Wonder how many of these things there are…” Zel thought aloud.

An answer came from Victor: “Dozens. Most buried in the Deterrence Fields. A separationist faction built a whole army of the things during the Ankhezian civil war to fight the Imperial Family’s army of Dragon Descendants. The Titan of Arches, Titan’s Bane, and the Mouth of Prasticaris, though… They’re new.”

“New?”

Vic shrugged: “It’s the blackstone skeletons. The originals have skeletons made of artificial dragonbone and weird wooden muscles that don’t decay, at least according to the books I’ve read.”

“Wish I could’ve seen one of them in motion,” Zel sighed. “Hard to imagine the sheer magnitude of such a gigantic thing just walking around.”

“I mean, there is one still around from the Three Kings Era…”

“No shit?”

“In Borea,” Jorfr interjected. “Just walking around. It simply arrived one day and took to patrolling one spot in the middle of nowhere. I think it’s waiting for something. A new command, maybe, or some enemy that was supposed to be there but never arrived.”

“An abandoned war machine trying to fulfill a purpose it doesn’t understand, forever… C’mon, let’s get a move on.”

The paths of Titan’s Bane constituted a windswept maze of rock shelves and narrow roads carved into the mountainside, which wound in and out through modified cave systems like some rock-eating parasite. Ancient, yet rock-steady bridges stretched across chasms, sprawling glyphs defiantly thawing frost from their surfaces. Navigating the network was time-consuming due to the necessity of moving relatively slowly, but it went altogether without incident. There, several hundred meters above ground, but only a fraction of the way towards the summit; a crossroad met them here, but there was no decision to be made.

One side path was marked on their maps as leading to Fortress Baritin, the north-westernmost town point of Grekuria, and the other had the vague mark of “to the Mountain Kingdoms”. A short while after passing the crossroad and emerging at the other side of the mountain, the Deterrence Fields came into view; the desolate, mist-covered plane sprawled out over the horizon, immense arms reaching skyward like a macabre forest.

A short while into the descent they began coming across signs of combat that starkly contrasted with the otherwise near-pristine state of Titan’s Bane. Bullet holes and gouge marks surrounded by molten rock scarred the walls and ground. A Grekurian armored trench coat of the sort worn by Inquisitors lay discarded on the ground, bloodstained and half shredded apart.

“There’s a dead walking tank around the corner,” Jorfr piped up, and lo and behold, there it was. It was a hollow shell of steel, gutted for its engine and cold-iron rich internals, one of its arms severed at the shoulder while the other was so badly ripped up it may as well not be there. What was left of the missing arm could be found embedded in the wall a few meters away, the long-dried stains of a crushed head and tatters of an inquisitorial gas mask telling the tale of its final act. Evidence of battle with several Inquisitors abounded in this place and a good distance further down, primarily in environmental battle damage and gore that hadn’t been scoured from the stone.

Descending to ground level, they found that the passage between the path and the Deterrence Fields was filled with warnings of how pointless it was to go out into the fields. They stopped for a moment, and Zefaris peered out into the Deterrence Fields, muttering: “There are… Swaths of smaller arms between the giant ones.”

Zef turned to Jorfr, blinking to reset her eyes.

“The Cursed Automata you mentioned?”

The Borean nodded: “My father only ever warned me of never straying too close to them, but it appears an active Sturmgandr irritates them. When I was hiding atop one of the titan’s arms, I saw them swarm the machine only to immediately lose interest the moment the engine shut off.”

“It makes little difference. We may as well assume that we’ll be chased the whole way to the Mouth of Prasticaris,” Zel stated matter-of-factly. She didn’t think so just because Jorfr had been pursued, but also due to a dream which she’d had a while back which predicted this very scenario without her having had any way to know she would come through here. “With that in mind, the automata might be able to catch up to us eventually due to the speed decrease caused by two people on one sturmgandr…”

“This place is a gigantic mausoleum,” Zef said. “If there is an ideal place for me to use Eternal Snow, this is it. I’ll just carve the glyph ahead of us and trigger it once we’ve passed through it to freeze the automata.”

“I could also use Mud Slick and Bramble Growth to slow them down if it comes down to it…” Vic offered.

Satisfied with these suggestions, Zel nodded: “No point in just waiting, let’s get ready and take the shot.”