The border of the Ashlands wasn't a line on a map. It was a change in the air.
For three weeks, the Army of the Ash had marched south. They had scavenged water from deep-wells and eaten ration-bars looted from Spire outposts. They looked like a parade of ghosts—armor coated in grey dust, banners black as pitch, eyes hollow but burning with a strange, cold fire.
Then, the smog broke.
It didn't fade gradually. It ended like a cliff. One mile, they were walking in the eternal twilight of the Ash. The next, they stepped into blinding, searing light.
"The sun," a soldier whispered, shielding his eyes. "It burns."
Kael walked at the head of the column. He didn't squint. He looked out at the land before them.
The Killing Fields.
It was a hundred miles of flat, scorched earth. Craters from the First War dotted the landscape like pockmarks. Coil-gun turrets, rusted into silence, pointed at the sky. Miles of razor-wire, monofiloment sharp, glittered in the heat.
"It's quiet," Elric said, pulling his hood tighter. The scholar looked frail in the sunlight, his skin paper-white. "The automated defenses should be tracking us."
"They are," Kael said. He pointed to a distant ridge. "See the glint? Sensor towers. But they aren't firing."
"Why?"
"Because we aren't Void-spawn," Valerius muttered, riding a refurbished Strider beside them. "And we aren't Spire. We're designated 'Non-Combatants' by the old logic. Or maybe they just think we're dead men walking."
Kael looked at his army. They were blinking, stumbling. The sun was terrifying to men who had lived in the dark.
"Keep moving!" Kael shouted, his voice cracking the silence. "Don't look at the light! Watch the ground! One step after another!"
They marched.
The heat was worse than the cold. Insight began to murmur. They saw mirages—cities of gold, lakes of water.
"It's a test," Kael told them at night, when the temperature plummeted. "The Spire thinks the Ashlands broke us. They think we are weak. But the Ash didn't break us. It hardened us."
He held up his hand. The Ring glowed softly.
"We walked the Void," Kael said. "We can walk a sunny field."
On the seventh day, they saw it.
On the horizon. A white line stretching from east to west. Massive. Imposing.
The Great Wall of Silas.
"There," Kael whispered. "The end of the world."
"Or the beginning," Valerius said, drawing his sword.
Kael looked at the Wall. It was supposed to keep monsters out.
"Let's see if it can keep the truth out," Kael said.