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Chapter 593: The Blackstone Forest

Once the scouts confirmed no trace of demon presence in the camp, a reconnaissance platoon was organized.

Maggie carried Agatha into Devil’s Town while Lightning flew point. Soraya and Summer — neither of them suited for a fighting retreat — were escorted by fifty soldiers of the First Army. Roland had ordered the protection assignment himself.

“Landing in thirty seconds. Get ready!” Lightning called out, gesturing to Maggie.

“Awh!”

Agatha pulled herself upright and found Rocky Beach materializing below her. The Red Mist was gone — fully, unambiguously gone — and in its absence the dark brown earth looked almost raw, as if someone had stripped a layer of skin from the ground. No trees. No growth. Only the scarred landscape the mist had been covering for years.

First time. Agatha recognized the sensation: a Quest Society member’s excitement, the specific electricity of approaching something no one from the Union had ever stood inside.

“Lightning is landing. Repeat — Lightning is landing.”

“Be careful.” Roland’s voice through the Sigil was controlled but thin at the edges. “If there’s any sign of danger, leave immediately.”

“Lightning understands.”

Maggie folded her wings and dropped. The horizon tilted — blue ocean, then white cliff face, then the damp brown soil rushing up — and then the Devilbeast’s feet struck the ground with a jolt that rattled Agatha’s back teeth.

“This place looked normal from the sky,” Lightning said, stepping off and turning a slow circle. “Now it looks wrong.”

Agatha agreed with the assessment and said nothing, because she was already looking at the towers.

They stood everywhere — black stone columns in no visible order, ranging from taller than a three-story building to just above head height. Their density exceeded anything she had seen in a forward battalion. They rose from the bare earth the way a forest might have grown, if forests grew according to some private geometry. Blackstone Pagodas. She had seen the term in Union records without ever imagining what they looked like in practice.

They serve a function beyond Red Mist storage, she thought. What function, I don’t yet know.

“Whatever happened to them happened recently,” she said.

“How can you tell?” Lightning asked.

“Look at the surface.” She pointed to the nearest tower. “Dimmed, yes — but not rough, not crumbling. The towers the Union reclaimed in the frontline were brittle by the time we got to them, the stone practically powder. These are intact. The demons either didn’t intend to withdraw—” She paused. “—or they had no time to make an orderly one.”

She studied the configuration of the towers against what she remembered from Union survey reports. “Let’s go to the center of the camp. Highest tower, where the Eye Demon stationed. That’s where we’ll find what we need.”

Lightning started forward. Then the ground claimed her.

She plunged into a concealed pit without any warning. Maggie instantly shrank to pigeon-size and took to the air. Agatha conjured an ice barrier and held it.

Lightning came up out of the hole under her own power, shaking dirt from her hair, looking more offended than hurt. “Who dug a trap here?!”

Agatha let the ice barrier dissolve and told herself to breathe normally. The girl was fine. She was fine.

“There’s a demon,” Lightning said.

“It’s dead, though,” Maggie added from her perch on Lightning’s shoulder. “The coo kind of dead.”

“Otherwise I’d be in real trouble,” Lightning patted her own chest, still catching up to the fact of her survival.

Agatha came over with an ice spear still in hand. The pit held a single Mad Demon, head drooping, the exposed skin dried to a curl along its flanks — like salted fish left in direct sun. She had read descriptions of demons expiring underground when the Red Mist supply cut off. Reading about it and seeing it were different experiences.

“Sylvie mentioned they shelter underground,” she said. “Whatever happened here happened without warning. These demons didn’t exhaust the mist in their pits because of new orders. They died waiting for orders that never came.”

“I vote for flying the rest of the way,” Lightning said. “I don’t want to fall in another trap.”

They flew low and slow, threading the columns. And then the towers ended.

The open space before them was too large to have been left accidentally — the footprint of an entire town square. At its center was a cavern. An enormous one, ringed with fragments of shattered stone tower, its mouth wide as Border Town’s main square and its depth, when they all approached the edge and peered down, beyond measuring.

“This looks like the place where we found you.” Lightning stared into the darkness and clicked her tongue. “Want me to go first?”

“No.” Agatha’s voice came out harder than she intended.

“Absolutely not, coo.” Maggie’s was equally firm.

“Fine.” Lightning sighed with the full weight of her fourteen years. “We walk the perimeter, then.”

The rest of the camp yielded smaller discoveries. Maggie found a flat-roofed tower with a narrow opening at the top — an air duct, almost certainly one of the channels through which the Red Mist had been circulated — and inside it, scattered Magic Stones and the withered husk of a Chaos Beast. She had not been searching. She had simply wanted a place to perch.

Two days later, the First Army reached Rocky Beach.

Lotus split a path through the cliff face — barely wide enough for one person, fathomless on either side — and Maggie handled the heavy equipment in her Devilbeast form: machine guns, crates, supply packs. Getting fifty soldiers and their witches through took the better part of a day.

The soldiers who emerged on the far side were First Army veterans, and still the sight of the Blackstone towers stopped them. Roland had anticipated this. He had issued the order before departure: camp near the passage entrance, no extended exploration until camp was established. He would not exhaust men with their nerves already pulled tight.

As for Summer’s retrospective work, the First Army were not permitted to watch. Some imagery was not useful for unit morale.

Summer could trace back approximately two weeks without notable difficulty. Beyond three weeks, her magic power drained faster and the reconstruction thinned. Events from a month ago could be attempted only once per day, with one attempt being the full expenditure. Under those conditions there was no shortcut — only patience and repetition.

Among the Magic Stones Maggie had retrieved from the flat-roofed tower, several proved workable. Not the quality of Fearsome Demon cores, but the Spellcaster Tower under construction lacked only one thing now: a living demon. The stones would do until that problem was solved.

While Summer worked through her daily retrospections, Roland returned to engineering problems. The second secret letter from the Fjords arrived. It reported that Princess Tilly Wimbledon had departed Sleeping Island and was bound for Shallow Beach on the Western Region coast.

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