Stepping onto the grey ash felt like walking onto solid air. There was no crunch, no resistance, just a soft, unsettling give beneath his worn shoes. The silence here was profound, a heavy blanket that seemed to absorb all sound. Even Verwel's panting seemed muted. The air wasn't just still; it felt empty, stripped of any scent, any life force. It was the absence of a city, rendered absolute.
They walked for what felt like miles across the featureless expanse. The ash was consistent, an unbroken carpet stretching to a hazy horizon under the indifferent sky. There were no landmarks, no higher piles of dust, nothing to indicate where streets, buildings, or even familiar corners of Qwent might have been. It was a perfect, horrifying slate wiped clean. Alex searched, his eyes straining, hoping to see something – a piece of twisted metal, a fragment of concrete, anything that hinted at the vibrant life that had existed here. There was nothing. The sacrifice had been total, consuming not just flesh and blood, but stone, glass, steel, memories etched into architecture.
A wave of profound grief washed over him, heavier than the strange power settled in his gut. This wasn't just the death of a city; it was the erasure of the last place he had called home, however temporary or lonely it had sometimes felt. His small apartment, the familiar university buildings, the park where he walked Verwel – all reduced to this silent, sterile dust. There was no grave to mourn at, no ruin to bear witness to the magnitude of the loss. Just this grey void.
Verwel stopped suddenly, letting out a low, mournful whine that seemed swallowed by the silence. He pawed at the ash, then looked up at Alex, his dark eyes troubled. Was he remembering? Did the dust still hold some echo of the life that had been here, an echo only his changed senses could perceive? Alex knelt beside him, running a hand over Verwel's head, feeling the smooth, ordinary fur that hid something extraordinary.
As Alex knelt, the ash around his hand felt marginally warmer, and a faint, almost imperceptible pulse seemed to vibrate in the ground beneath him. It wasn't the thrumming resonance he felt near the forest barrier, but something weaker, like residual energy bleeding from the earth itself. Was this where Xerark's power had been anchored? The epicenter of the 'burst'? He scooped up a handful of the ash. It felt inert, dead, yet the faint warmth and pulse lingered. He wondered if his own body, now housing a piece of that power, was sensitive to these lingering traces.
They continued deeper into the scar. The featureless landscape offered no clues about the nature of the threat Xerark had fought. There were no footprints other than their own, no signs of struggle, no remnants of monstrous forms. The barrier had simply erupted and wiped the slate clean, protecting what lay beyond the forest edge by destroying everything within the city's bounds.
As the sun began to arc higher, casting no shadows on the flat ground, Alex faced a new uncertainty. He had come back here seeking answers, seeking the remnants of his life, seeking a direction. But the city was gone. Utterly, absolutely gone. There was nothing here to anchor him, nothing to guide him. The knowledge of Xerark, the power in his core, the changed Verwel – these were his only constants in a world that had just rewritten its own geography in dust.
Where to now? Back to the forest? Try to find another city, if others still existed? Or seek out the source of the threat, the reason for Xerark's sacrifice? He looked down at Verwel, who nudged his hand, a silent question in his dark eyes. The path forward was unclear, stretching out across the endless grey. His old life was dust. His new one began here, in the silence of the scar, with only a mysteriously changed dog and a borrowed, dangerous power for company. He had survived the last stand, but the fight, he knew with chilling certainty, was far from over.