and turned to face the oncoming onslaught. “If we’re gonna fight a bunch of Dust Soldiers, we might as well practice on these idiots first.”
We turned to face them, weapons out, my hands hovering close to my components belt. Beside me, I could feel Asa’s strange, daemonic power growing as he prepared something devastating.
“Steady…” Olivia said. “Let’s let them get a little closer.…”
The Laredo Boys charged onward toward us in a V with Samson at their head, leaving a massive cloud of dust in their wake. They were screaming out, voices nearly inhuman with bloodlust mixing with the shrieks of their beasts.
“A little closer…” Olivia said, squinting into the dust. They were a little over a half mile away now.
Zo cocked her pistol and raised it.
But she would not get the chance to shoot. There was a rumbling as though the earth wanted to rend itself in two. Asa’s face and arm went daemon. We fell back. Then the desert went suddenly silent as their battle cry was cut short. Suddenly, the Laredo Boys and their chariots and the land they were standing on were just… gone. Clipped out of existence, leaving only a glaring, brain-bending nothingness where they had been. A hole in a disintegrating world, so close to us we could nearly touch it, if there had been anything to touch.
We sat there on our mechanical horses, staring into it, hardly daring to believe what we had seen, what we were seeing, this nothing that had once been the land our enemies stood on. After all the terror they had caused, all the pain, they were just gone, as though they had never been.
“Wh-what happened?” said Judith, squinting. “And what’s that?”
“It isn’t an illusion.” Cassandra’s voice quavered. “I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s nothing,” Asa said darkly. “Like Zo saw earlier.”
The nothingness seemed to yawn and expand in front of us. It wasn’t a hole or a tear or darkness. It wasn’t heaven or hell or even death. It was simply nothing, like I hadn’t known nothing could be. An indescribable void that seemed to pull at my very blood even as it terrified me.
“This is what happens as the game board decays,” Asa said. “More and more of the desert will fall away until all that is left is the land just around Elysium. And then, depending on what happens, the land will either be restored, or Elysium too will become this.”
I stared into that emptiness, that nothing, disturbed by its stillness, its unspoken, booming promise of erasure, of the one, true kind of end: becoming nothing. The blood in my veins turned to ice water, and I tore my eyes away from it.
“Let’s keep moving,” Olivia said finally. And with shaky hands and shaky nerves, we turned our horses and rode until we could no longer feel the pull of the hungry void behind us.
When we reached Elysium, the sun was setting. I had only seen it from the outside at night, or been retreating from it, and the sight of it sent a strange thrill through me. It looked huge and imposing, like the fortress it always had been. Unforgiving, even in the sunset light. It felt strange to be voluntarily going back to unwantedness. Without realizing it, Asa and I stopped our horse and looked up at it, hesitating.
“Don’t worry, it only looks bigger in the daytime,” Olivia said.
We approached, moving together, our eyes on the walls. Soon the guards saw us and began to assemble, their rifles trained on us. When we got about twenty yards from the gates, one of them shouted, “Stop where you are!”
“We need to speak to Mother Morevna!” I shouted.
“Y-you’re exiled!” The guard looked from me to Olivia. “Holy… Is that…?”
“Olivia Rosales, in the flesh.” Olivia smiled wickedly. “Get Morevna. Jameson too, if you want. We’ve got something to offer Elysium. Something that could save your asses from certain destruction, and they need to hear it from us. Unless you want to get hacked up by a Dust Soldier next week.”
The guards looked from one to the other, deliberating, then the one who had spoken to us disappeared.
“Do the walls look a little taller, or is it just me?” Asa whispered.
They were definitely taller now in places, the mud brick still drying here and there. New graves. A lot of them. My heart dropped to my stomach. What has happened since we left? But aside from Rosa’s grave, none of the names had been carved on the outside