Emeston was not a bastion city, one of the gleaming pillars of the Realm, founded for the sole purpose of defending its people from the endless tide of outsiders that spawned within the Wastes. Still, just like its sibling trade cities, Alvanny and Correntry, it boasted a high wall, manned by a city guard paid by the Golden Council and led by the city’s wardens. While the wealthy merchants that comprised Emeston’s governing body would claim that this wall's purpose was, first and foremost, a defensive measure against any monsters that might spawn nearby, everyone within the city knew its real reason for being so heavily manned.

  Emeston relied on the cheap and plentiful labor that dwelled in the slums of Lowrun, but few and far between were those citizens who would willingly subject themselves to the horrifying conditions that abounded in the crowded, reeking, crime-riddled low city. The city wall, while supposedly built to address outward threats, was designed, first and foremost, to prevent those inside from easily leaving.

  The wall boasted five gates, each of which was open from dawn to dusk each day. Three, the Gold, Silver, and Copper gates, admitted traffic inside. They were named for their convenience–Gold Gate led directly into the heights of Highwalk, Silver Gate had the shortest path to the harbors, and Copper Gate led into the worst parts of Lowrun.

  The remaining two gates were opened for those leaving the city. Iron Gate was the more convenient, located in the middle of the wall, where it was easily accessed by both Highwalk and Lowrun merchants who needed to depart on their trade routes. However, only those with formal authorization were allowed to pass through the Iron Gate. Authorizations, purchased from the Golden Council, were limited to those who were recognized as having legitimate business reasons for leaving the city.

  For anyone lacking one of those critical licenses, the only remaining option was Wood Gate. Located in the worst and most dangerous part of Lowrun, far from the harbors and various districts and close to the Copper Gate, any citizen was allowed to leave through the Wood Gate, provided they subjected themselves to the scrutiny and searches of the city guard–in order to ensure that neither thieves nor smugglers were attempting to take contraband or ill-gotten gains from the city, of course.

  As a result, Wood Gate had an eternal line of over a thousand people, ranging from poor traders attempting to break even to desperate citizens fleeing the abuses of Lowrun, but less than a hundred were admitted through the gate each day, with twice that number being turned away. The line was also dispersed each night at sundown, and the city guard ensured that it did not begin to form again until the next dawn.

  If one lacked the license to use the Iron Gate or the patience to brave the Wood Gate, then their only other option was the harbor itself. Of course, the ships were subject to a similar level of scrutiny, with each and every crew member of each ship needing to be registered with the Harbormaster’s Office. For those without the connections and skillset to get hired as a sailor, they were left with the expensive, and often fraught, option of purchasing the services of a smuggler, an exchange as likely to end with the smugglee arrested or even killed by their supposed benefactor as it was to actually get the person who had paid out of the city.

  In short, it was a system designed from the ground up to use Emeston’s bureaucracy to prevent any potential workers from leaving the city.

  “I hate this place,” Allana confided in Tenebres. “If I ever come back, it’ll be too soon.”

  Tenebres couldn’t blame the girl. As an outsider to the trade city, Tenebres had been stunned by the squalor of Lowrun when he had first arrived in Emeston, and his horror had only grown when he had learned of the lengths the city’s affluent went to preserve their abused workforce. However, Allana had expressed the opinion more and more since they had made the decision to leave.

  Although Allana hadn’t shared her feelings, and might not even be fully aware of them herself, Tenebres suspected that her sudden disdain for the slums after a lifetime of weary acceptance was a coping mechanism, a way to diminish her fear of the future by recognizing how terrible her present and past were.

  And since it meant Tenebres himself getting a chance to leave the city at last, he certainly wasn’t going to argue.

  “At least we don’t have to deal with Wood Gate,” he pointed out. In addition to the bulging pack each of them carried, stuffed with everything Tenebres could think of them needing on the road, Alleghy had produced an Iron Gate authorization for them. Apparently, the healer was Council recognized, and it was not unheard of for him to send assistants out of the city to fetch reagents and supplies from the nearby towns.

  Allana cast a look down the street behind them, her face displaying a mingled look of loss, guilt, excitement, anxiety, and pain, but eventually, she nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”

  #

  According to Allana, their departure from the city went as smoothly as they could’ve hoped for. Alleghy’s paperwork had been questioned, but Allana paid the guards what she had called their “customary bribe” and the pair had passed through the Iron Gate easily enough.

  And just like that, Tenebres was outside of Emeston’s walls for the first time in nearly three months.He couldn’t help but take a deep breath, a smile spreading over his face. They were still too close to the reeking city and its dirty harbor for the air to be clean, but he still fancied that he could already smell the difference.

  Next to him, Allana stood stunned, staring into the distance. Emeston spanned a pair of large hills that rapidly dropped to meet the bay, and the Iron Gate sat halfway up those heights, offering a commanding view. To their right, the east, the coastal cliffs rose up into jagged, intimidating walls of stone. Tenebres knew that, if they continued in that direction, the Cliff Road would eventually bring them to many fishing villages that dotted the Realm’s southern coast, each taking advantage of one of the few routes down the cliffs to the water, as many of them man-made as natural.

  They wouldn’t be going that way, though. Culles lay to the north and west, and that was their goal. Still… One day, Tenebres would like to see the splendor of the Cliff Road,

  “It’s so big…” Allana whispered, seeming awed.

  “What is?” Tenebres asked, turning back to the girl. Her eyes were still wide, and she couldn’t seem to choose where to look, from the forests to the north to the cliffs and sea to east and south, to the city wall blocking their western view.

  “Everything,” she said simply. Tenebres was shocked to hear a note of uncertainty, almost fear, creep into her voice, and some of her behavior for the past days finally clicked into place.

  “Allana,” Tenebres asked, trying as hard as he could to keep his voice level. “Have you never left the city before?”

  Stolen story; please report.

  Apparently he had failed to completely isolate the mirth from his words, because Allana shot him a positively acidic glare. “I–I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” Tenebres repeated. “You’re not sure?”

  “Telik told me my parents weren’t from Emeston originally,” she explained. The glare faded as she turned another anxious look to the north, her eyes seeming to be fixed on the road that disappeared into the distant trees. “I don’t know if I was born outside the city or not, but…”

  “You don’t have any memories of it, either way.”

  Allana nodded wordlessly. After a moment, she cleared her throat, clearly searching for a way to change the topic. “So that’s where we’re going, right?” she asked, pointing at the northern road.

  Tenebres accepted her attempt to change the topic with little more than a smirk. “Yep. Through the deadlands, as they’re called.”

  Allana turned an arch look on him. “The deadlands? Seriously?”

  Tenebres shrugged. “I didn’t come up with the name. Back in the day, when the trade cities were first founded, I guess a bunch of villages tried to crop up in that area, but most of them died out decades ago.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of reasons. The soil was rocky, the trees didn’t produce good lumber, what few other natural resources were out there dried up quickly. The storms were bad too, I guess.”

  “Weird,” Allana said. Tenebres couldn’t blame her–to someone who had spent their entire life in a city like Emeston, the vagaries of pioneering settlers must be strange indeed.

  “If you go north long enough, you hit the Jellis Valley, this scattering of farming villages that all ship goods to a town called, Jellis, on the Flax Road. We’re not going that far though. Once we make it far enough into the deadlands, we’ll cut off to the west. There’s a little village out there, Geltis, that is kind of in the deadlands but trades with Jellis. We can restock there, then it’ll be a few more days to Culles.”

  “Okay…” Allana nodded firmly, seeming determined to ignore her own misgivings. “Geltis, then Culles. How long should that be?”

  “We’ll see. It took me less than a week to get from Geltis to Emeston, but that was in a caravan. If we manage two weeks to Culles, I think we’d be making good time.”

  “Two weeks.” Allana seemed a little intimidated by the number, and Tenebres couldn’t blame her. He had spent a lot more time in the wilds of the deadlands than Allana, but he was still far from an experienced traveler. This would be three times or more the distance he had gone to get from Kellen’s compound to Geltis, and that had already been the longest journey he had made by himself.

  “Only one way to get started,” he told her.

  And then they started walking.

  #

  As the sun set, Tenebres slowed his pace. His feet hurt, and his legs were sore, but he estimated they had made a bit over eight miles, maybe as many as ten. It was fairly good time, even with the occasional breaks they had taken. As the day went on, their early conversation, and even Allana’s nervousness, had begun to fade, their energy sapped in the way only an hours-long walk could. Even their breaks had become silent, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

  But if they went on much longer, it would be too dark to continue, and Tenebres felt no need to rush. Sebastian’s letter hadn’t implied any special need for haste, and an easier pace would pay off by their second week on the road.

  “Why did you stop?” Allana asked.

  “I think it’s around time we stopped for the night,” Tenebres told her, confused. He would’ve thought that was obvious.

  The girl looked around, her own confusion becoming increasingly obvious. “Uhm. Okay. Is there an inn somewhere around here?”

  “An inn?’ Tenebres asked incredulously. “We’re in the deadlands, Allana, why would there be an inn?”

  “Because… you said we were stopping for the night? So I figured there was an inn nearby.”

  Tenebres blinked, unsure of how to respond. In the distance, a bird chirped mournfully.

  “Allana… There are no inns along this road. There isn’t enough traffic for it.” There had been, across the entire day, only a single wagon that had passed them heading north. Relatively little traffic moved between Jellis and Emeston, and what little did appear tended to be the larger company caravans making their annual trips to Correntry. “We won’t get to sleep in a bed again until we hit Geltis.”

  “WHAT!?”

  A small flock of sparrows took flight from a nearby tree, provoked by Allana’s shout. A couple showed the larger size and faint glow characteristic of magical animals, old enough to have consumed enough life magic to be transformed by it.

  “Well, yeah,” Tenebres said sheepishly. “What did you think we were going to do?”

  “Like I said! I thought there would be inns to stop at!”

  “Oh.” Tenebres looked around lamely. There was only the road and the scraggly woods to either side. “Nope.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I am very much not.” Tenebres gestured at the large packs they each wore on their backs. “Allana, what did you think all these supplies were for?”

  “I don’t know! I left the packing to you, I’ve never done this before!”

  Tenebres couldn’t help it. Despite his aching feet and tired legs, he felt a smile spreading across his face, laughter bubbling in his gut.

  “Shut up!” Allana pointed threateningly at him, embarrassment and frustration equally obvious on her face. “None of that!”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Still! Stop it!”

  Tenebres tried to force the smile off of his face, but he failed. “C’mon, Lana,” he told her. “I think I see some firs a little out that way. That should be as good a place as any to bed down for the night.”

  Tenebres started walking, waiting for the astonished girl to follow after him. After a moment, she did, her normally-enviable stealth skills unable to muffle the sound of the overstuffed pack bumping against her back.

  “Oh,” he called back at her. “Keep an eye out for any good tinder. Little twigs and stuff like that. We’ll need that for the fire.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Once we find a good place to sleep for the night, I’ll show you how to tie a snare.”

  “...Why do we need a snare, Seo?”

  “To catch dinner, duh.”

  “...I want to go back to Emeston.”

  “No you don’t.”

  Allana replied with a wistful sigh. “No, I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I want to do this either.”

  “It’ll be fun,” he reassured her. “When I was little, my dad used to take me out to camp overnight in woods like these!”

  “Why?”

  “For fun!”

  “I hate you.”