The Rust Plains ended.
They didn't fade away or transition. They simply stopped, as if a god had taken a giant scoop out of the world.
Standing at the edge of the rim, Kael looked down into a crater three miles wide.
Inside, there was no rust. There was no metal. There was only glass.
The heat of the First Sword's impact had been so intense it had melted the layers of debris—shields, tanks, ships, bones—into a smooth, swirling bowl of obsidian and fused silicate. The surface was still smoking, sending twisting pillars of grey vapor into the dirty gold sky.
"Thermal residuals are still high," Voss said, checking his rifle. The machine-man's porcelain shell was scorched from the crash, and he walked with a slight limp, a servo in his left leg whining with every step. "The impact occurred... 410 hours ago. Give or take the time dilation."
"He hit this hard," Elric whispered, peering over the edge. "And he survived?"
"He's the First Sword," Kael said. He slid down the slope, his boots skidding on the slick glass. "He survives everything. That's his curse."
They descended into the bowl. It was silent here. The wind from the Rust Plains passed over the crater, leaving the air inside stagnant and hot. It smelled of ozone and... burnt meat.
In the center of the crater, the glass was shattered.
Great jagged spikes of fused metal jutted up from the ground, frozen in the shape of an explosion. But as they got closer, Kael realized it wasn't just an impact crater.
It was a battlefield.
There were slash marks in the glass deep enough to hide a horse. Scorch marks where white fire had burned the ground black. And something else—corruption.
Patches of the glass were festering with a black, oily substance that seemed to eat the light.
"Don't touch the black spots," Voss warned. "That is Void residue. Concentrated entropy. It will rot your finger off before you feel the pain."
Kael stepped over a pool of the oil. He walked to the epicenter.
There was no body. No sword.
But there was something.
Lying half-buried in a shatter of glass was a piece of white metal.
Kael knelt and pried it loose. It was heavy, warm to the touch. A pauldron. The shoulder plate of the First Sword's armor.
It had been torn off.
The metal was twisted, the edges serrated as if something had chewed through the Oath-hardened steel.
"He lost," Kael said softly.
He turned the pauldron over. On the inside, engraved in the metal, was a single rune. Endure.
"The analytics were correct," Voss said, scanning the area. "He was overwhelmed here. Massive trauma. But I detect no biological decomposition. No corpse."
"He was taken," Kael said. He stood up, gripping the broken armor.
"Taken where?" Elric asked, looking around nervously. "Where do you take a god-killer?"
Voss pointed.
On the far side of the crater, the glass was broken in a wide, ugly trail. It looked like something massive had been dragged—or had dragged itself—up the slope and out into the plains beyond.
"The drag pattern indicates a heavy load," Voss said. "And the direction..."
The machine paused.
"What?" Kael asked. "Where does that lead?"
"Sector Zero," Voss said, his voice dropping an octave. "The Silt."
"The Silt?"
"The Memory Silt," Voss corrected. "The place where the Void Sea remembers what it ate. It is... psycho-active. It does not just trap matter. It traps ghosts."
Kael looked at the drag marks. He could almost see it—the First Sword, broken and bleeding, being hauled away by the shadow.
"Then we go to the Silt," Kael said.
"If we go there," Voss warned, "We will see things that are not there. We will hear people who are dead. My cognitive filters can dampen it, but you..." He pointed at Kael and Elric. "You are just meat with electricity. You will break."
Kael slotted the broken pauldron onto his belt.
"I'm already broken," he said. "Let's go."