The firelight dancing across the pages of her book casts moving shadows, and Nara has been staring at the same drawing for what feels like forever. A slime, rendered as a circular blob with a glowing point in the center. Below it, a description: Weak point: The core. Habitat: Plains, ruins, occasionally forest edges. Danger level: Low. Two pages further on is a goblin, drawn in more detail with a note about pack tactics. Danger level: Moderate, dangerous in groups.
Nara has read the goblin page three times. Everything she should have learned three nights ago. Everything that would do her no good now, because she has learned it through experience instead.
She does not turn the page. The book lies open on her lap and her thoughts wander.
Ten guards in a barracks they have only just cleaned. Supplies that will not last nearly as long as the twelve people here would like. An encrypted letter in her pocket, one that might take years to decode. A voice that spoke to her and that she apparently did not imagine, though she would prefer to believe she had.
A crash from behind the bar jolts her from her reverie. One of the guards has opened the kitchen door and struck his head on the crossbeam that has hung in the frame since Nara arrived, one she has not bothered to remove in all these weeks. He rubs his forehead while cursing.
“I’m sorry,” Nara calls from the fireplace. “I haven’t managed to get the kitchen in order yet. It wasn’t high on my list.”
The guard looks around the kitchen, sees the state of it, and turns back to Nara. “No matter, Your Highness. Would it bother you if I prepared dinner for everyone here by the fire? The kitchen needs at least a day’s work before we could cook anything in it.”
“Of course, help yourself.”
He begins pulling ingredients from the supplies they brought, cutting vegetables and distributing strips of meat into the kettle, all with a routine that Nara immediately notices. He has clearly done this more than once.
“Did you cook for the guard all the time?” she asks.
“When we were on patrol, yes.” He peels a potato in a single long strip. “Everyone in the guard does what they do best. One cooks, one checks the equipment, one understands logistics. You have no choice when you are on the road for weeks at a time.”
“And who decides who does what?”
“The captain, but usually it just works out. One person is better at it than another.” He tosses the potato pieces into the kettle and wipes his hands on his trousers. “When I started, I wanted to do everything myself. Stand watch, cook, repair equipment, take care of the horses. After three days I was so exhausted I could barely do anything right.” He glances at her. “My captain at the time took me aside and said: Your job is not to be able to do everything. Your job is to know who can help you.”
Nara looks at him and says nothing. The guard turns back to the kettle and stirs steadily, as if he has said nothing remarkable.
To know the people who can do it. Nara sets the bestiary on the table and stares at its cover. For three weeks she has tried to do everything herself. Filter water, start a garden, explore the city and fight slimes. Not because she thought she was good at it, but because no one else was here. But now someone is. Eleven people who know their jobs. And she treats them like spectators to whom she must prove that she has the situation under control.
But she does not. She never did.
She stands and begins pushing the tables to the center of the room. One next to another until they have one long, patchwork table that wobbles and does not quite fit at the seams, but can seat everyone. She arranges the chairs around it, counts them, adjusts one into place.
When the guards gather in the tavern that evening, the table is set. Set is a generous word for the wooden bowls and spoons Nara has scavenged from the ruins, but it will do. The guards sit and some of them move as if their limbs are functioning only out of habit. Exhaustion is written across their faces: dark circles under their eyes, heavy lids, shoulders sagging forward. They have been on their feet for nearly twenty-four hours, and in between they cleaned out a barracks from top to bottom. Now, at the table, fatigue catches up with them.
Cerena sits beside Nara, Aldric across from her. The stew is better than anything Nara has put together in recent weeks, and she makes a mental note to give the kitchen higher priority.
When the bowls are empty, she clears her throat.
“We need to explore the city systematically. We need shelter for the people who will come after us. We also need a sustainable food source.” She looks around. “I propose we split into two groups. One explores the forest and hunts. The other explores the city and looks for usable buildings.”
“How many per group?” Aldric asks.
“Six each. Cerena leads the hunting group. I go with the city group.”
“Volunteers?” Cerena asks, looking around.
Hands go up, some reluctantly because arms are heavy, but they go up. The division happens without discussion. Five guards volunteer for the forest, including the cook, who apparently can hunt as well. The other five stay with Nara. Aldric volunteers for the city group.
“We start at sunrise tomorrow,” Nara says. “Cerena, take what you need. Be careful, we do not know what is out there.”
“Understood,” Cerena says.
“And now sleep,” Nara says. “You have earned it.”
No one needs to be told twice. The guards stand and some of them sway slightly on their way to the door. One leans on his neighbor’s shoulder. Their voices fade across the marketplace, quieter than in the afternoon, more tired.
Cerena lingers for a moment longer and looks at Nara as if she wants to say something. Then she climbs the stairs. Nara hears the door to the adjoining room, the creaking floorboards, and then silence.
Nara clears the bowls and sets them behind the bar. She adds one last piece of wood to the fire and goes upstairs as well. When she lies down, her bed creaks as always. She pulls the blanket over herself and closes her eyes.
In her dream, she stands at her usual place on the city wall. Nothing is as Nara knows it. The streets are paved and clean. The houses have roofs and windows with glass, smoke rises from chimneys and the marketplace is full of stalls, voices calling over each other and the smell of fresh bread in the air. The city wall is undamaged, no cracks, no breaches, and the towers manned by guards.
And beyond it, where in Nara’s reality there are only floor plans and rubble piles, a castle rises. Massive, with towers reaching toward the sky and walls so thick they appear solid even from this distance. Flags flutter from the battlements and windows glow warm in the evening sun.
Then the sky darkens.
Nara turns and sees an army stretching across the plain toward the city as far as the eye can see. Orcs, thousands of them, endless on the horizon. Their armor shimmers dark and the ground trembles beneath their steps. Siege machines are pushed before them, towers of black wood and rams reinforced with iron.
And above them, in the darkening sky, small dragons. Three, four, five, Nara cannot count them all. Their wings blot out the sun and when the first one lowers its head and breathes fire, the beam strikes the city wall and the stone melts like wax. The breaches were not made by battering rams then, but were burned into the wall, one after another.
The castle is hit last. The dragons circle over it like birds of prey and their fire rains down until the towers collapse and the walls crumble inward. The flames are so hot that the stone itself catches fire and the air above the ruins shimmers.
Then Nara is underground. The heat is gone and it is cool and dry around her. She stands in a room, not enormous, but high enough that the vaulted ceiling disappears into the darkness above her. Shelves line the walls, tightly packed, filled with books and scrolls. In the center of the room stands a table with open folios and blue lights burn in iron brackets on the walls, bathing everything in cold, even light. A library. It must be beneath the castle, for above her she hears the muffled sound of stone breaking and the roar of dragons.
Nara walks through the shelves and lets her fingers trail over the spines of the books. The titles are in a script she cannot read, but some of the books bear symbols she recognizes. Runes, similar to those on her sword. She pulls one out and opens it, but the pages blur before her eyes and the letters dance before they can form.
She knows she is beneath the castle. But how deep, she cannot say. And where the entrance lies, she does not know either. Then the image fades and Nara wakes.
She lies still in her bed and stares at the ceiling. Her heart beats fast, but not from fear. From something else. It felt too real to be a dream, more like a vision, or a memory.
The next morning, the groups divide up on the marketplace. Cerena checks her group’s equipment and her guards stand ready, some with an anticipation in their eyes that Nara cannot quite understand. The forest is a threat and for the guards apparently an adventure.
“We do not go deeper than an hour’s walk,” Cerena says to her group. “And we stay together. No going off alone.” Then she turns to Nara. “We will be back by evening.”
Nara nods. Cerena leads her group across the marketplace, past the barracks and through the city gate on the forest side. Nara watches them until they cross the meadow and disappear between the trees at the forest’s edge.
“Well then,” she says, turning to her five guards. “We are heading in the other direction. There is a castle ruin at the other end of the city that I want to look at. On the way there and back we keep our eyes open for buildings suitable as shelter. That is our actual task.”
“And the castle ruin?” Aldric asks.
“From the city wall I saw that almost nothing is left standing there. But if it was a castle, it would have had a cellar, perhaps even extensive catacombs. With some luck there are still things underground that survived the fire and time.”
Aldric nods. The explanation is enough for him.
The path to the castle ruin leads through parts of the city that Nara has only seen from the wall. Wider streets here, with the remains of houses that must once have been larger and grander than those by the marketplace. The farther they move from their base, the stronger the destruction becomes. Collapsed facades, streets blocked by rubble, entire rows of houses of which only the foundation walls remain.
After half an hour the street opens onto a broad elevated area and the group stops.
Nothing is left of the castle. Nara knew it from the dream, but seeing it with her own eyes is something different. Where towers once reached toward the sky and flags waved in the wind, there are now only rubble heaps or foundation walls. Stones, some as large as a wagon, lie scattered across the entire area. The foundation walls trace the outline of the castle, an enormous area, larger than the entire marketplace and all the surrounding buildings combined.
“Was that the castle?” Aldric asks, his voice losing its matter-of-fact tone.
“Yes, I believe so,” Nara says. She looks out over the ruins and tries to lay the images from the dream on top of what she sees.
The group begins to explore the ruin. Nara goes first and the guards spread out in a fan behind her. The stones beneath their feet are melted in many places, hardened into smooth dark surfaces. Aldric crouches and runs his hand over one.
“That was no ordinary fire,” he says. “I have never seen anything like it. Stone does not simply melt.”
Nara says nothing. She thinks of the dragons from the dream and the fire that melted the wall like wax. But she keeps that to herself.
They work their way through the rubble heaps, climb over stone blocks and search for entrances, stairs, cellar doors, anything leading downward. The foundation walls are still waist-high in places and form a maze of former rooms and corridors, some of which still have remains of stone floors. But everything that once lay above has collapsed and blocks every possible entrance.
One of the guards calls out near the eastern foundation. “Over here, I found something.”
Nara climbs over to him. In the foundation wall, half covered by rubble, sits a door. Solid wood, reinforced with iron fittings, surprisingly well preserved compared to everything else. The guard has already cleared away the rubble in front of it.
“Can we open it?” Nara asks.
Aldric steps forward, pushes the handle down and throws his shoulder against it. The door gives way, heavy and reluctant, with a screech that echoes across the ruin. Darkness yawns beyond it.
Nara steps closer and looks inside. Three stone steps lead downward and then it stops. The ceiling of the corridor beyond has collapsed, stone blocks and melted rock have fused into a massive barrier. No way through.
“We cannot get through that,” Aldric says and taps against the fused stone. The sound is dull and deep. “That is solid. Without heavy equipment there is no chance, if anything is even still intact behind it.”
“Let us keep looking,” Nara says. “Maybe there is another entrance.”
They spend the rest of the morning searching every corner of the castle ruin. They find two other possible entrances, both equally buried and sealed. At one location the fused stone has formed an almost perfect seal, as if someone deliberately welded the entrances shut.
The sun is high when Aldric steps beside her and wipes the sweat from his brow.
“Your Highness, we should think about heading back. On the way here I saw some buildings that would deserve a closer look. Finding usable shelters for newcomers is more urgent right now.”
Nara stands on a rubble heap and looks out over the ruins. The floor plans stretch before her like a map and somewhere beneath them lies a library full of books in a script she does not know, behind entrances she cannot open.
But she does not climb down from the rubble. Instead she crouches and begins moving stones aside with her bare hands, small ones first, then larger ones she has to grab with both hands. Her fingers scrape over sharp edges and dust swirls up.
Nara pauses. Her hands rest on a stone block that will not move no matter how hard she pulls. Dust clings to her fingers and gets under her nails.