Laz looked out over the noiseless mess and couldn’t help but feel a chill. Where once was a large, prosperous village now lay a land of grey death, ash and silence. Laz spread out his sense as far as he could, but he sensed no life, of any sort. Neither animal, human or plant life remained within.

As devastated as everyone was at this, Blake looked like he was going to break down.

"No... It can’t be..." He said, mumbling to himself. He was about to jump down and run somewhere, but Laz put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

"We move as one. Let’s get the gate open before we check things out. Is there a central area, maybe a gathering spot where people would go in the case of an attack or some such?" Laz asked, thinking that the young man’s reaction didn’t match his earlier statements about the place.

"Yeah. Yeah. In the center of town... there was an old fort... a really old fort. It became the home of the mayor but the fort itself was from a much earlier time and the town was built around it... We should... go there first," Blake finally said, clearing his eyes.

Laz nodded then gestured to the numbers and the two women with them. With one final look, they jumped from the top of the wall and ran quickly to the gate. The mechanism to open it had been smashed, but Blake directed them to a smaller entrance usually reserved for when things needed to be moved that shouldn’t be seen.

Laz didn’t ask what he meant.

Once the door was opened, the rest of the legion quickly entered, their eyes going wide at the devastation.

"This... doesn’t look like the work of beasts..." one of the men said, giving voice to the words in everyone’s mind.

"No.. It does not. Beasts only seek prey and food. But whatever attacked here was after nothing but destruction..." Number two said, his voice as steady as could be considering the circumstances.

"Beasts huh? Sadly it might just be the beasts who did this. Remember after the battle? What became of the dead? Considering the destruction here, there should be quite a few bodies strewn everywhere. And yet... I see nothing. No bodies, barely and blood. And even if they were taken by surprised, there should have been enough guards to have at least killed some of the beasts themselves but yet again... there is nothing. So... the only conclusion I can come to... The shadow dragon’s army has already been here. As for what happened to the people? I wish I knew."

"But the shadow dragon’s army hasn’t arrived in the area yet! How could they have been here already? And the guards of this town were more like a small army than just guards. The mayor had always been obsessed with having his own army and despite the taxes being higher because of this, the army has always kept the crime rate here quite low. If not for the poor sometimes causing problems... there would be almost no crime at all... So how... how could this happen?" Blake asked, his eyes barely holding back the tears.

Laz had no answer as it didn’t make sense. The random beasts that had haunted the outskirts when they first made their way into the fort wouldn’t have been able to cross the wall on their own, especially if there was an actual army here. And the only large force they had seen was the advanced force that they had encountered at the fort. AS for the main army of the shadow dragon, it hadn’t arrived yet. But despite all of that, this village had been hit and it’s people taken. And considering the wreckage and the still smoldering fires that marked the area, it seemed like it was hit only the day before the fort was.

But they had never noticed a force passing them by.

’No... they never mentioned a force passing them by. But would it be so difficult to imagine that they would only care about protecting themselves while every town around them burned?’ Laz thought, feeling that this might actually be the case.

"Fucking imperial dogs..." one of the women said as she kicked away a bloodstained door that had fallen in her path.

Clearly Laz wasn’t the only one with this view.

"Close line formation. Keep it tight. I don’t sense anything in the area, but that doesn’t mean their isn’t anything..." just then, Laz saw a straw doll in front of him, it’s body ripped in half. Laz had seen that kind of sight before in movies and games when he was younger, but he never expected to experience it himself.

Laz cold only sigh and move forward, his heart as heavy as it had ever been.

They made their way through the ruined town which to Laz, seemed like a small city. While it wasn’t what he was used to in a modern context, it was still massive despite being called a town and for a brief moment, made Laz wonder what they considered a city in this Empire.

After almost an hour of walking, they finally reached the town center which was dominated by a massive black stone castle. The fort, as Blake had called it, seemed like it was taken out of some gothic novel and planted in the middle of a roman village which really made no sense. While it was just a castle itself, it wasn’t big in the same way the other fortress they had just retreated from was big. Instead, it was tall with high, pointed towers and spanning stone archways.

"This is where the mayor lived?" Laz asked, pointing to the structure.

"Yes. All mayors of this town have lived in this fort since the town was founded. It has always been a marvel of the Empire for as long as it existed, but no one knows who built it, why or how. Back at the town’s founding, or so the stories go, the Emperor and Empress came themselves to inspect the fort but never found anything wrong or unusual about it except for it’s strange structure and the black stones that it’s made out of. The Emperor himself felt it was an eyesore and tried to destroy it, but even when using half his strength, he failed to break even a brick with such a blow. While it made him angry, it also made him interested and he didn’t bother trying to destroy it again. While the mayor was permitted to live here, scholars were sent to go even further over every brick of the structure and examine it for research purposes. After hundred of years of finding nothing, they gave up and just left it alone as a weird landmark in the Empire.

"Heh... the Emperor doesn’t strike me as a man of thought and science. Instead, I would guess he was powerless to do anything about it and had to make it seem like he had changed his mind. After the novelty wore off, people would just forget about it, like he did. But still, that’s a good sign. If even the Emperor was at a loss, than this thing could definitely protect the people of the town," Laz said and Blake smiled a bit, slightly reassured.

AS they made their way up the bridge, Laz looked over the side and couldn’t help but say,

"Whoa..."

The castle sat on a natural outcropping while the town spread out around it. If someone wanted to visit the town on the other side of the castle, it would require a long walk downhill and around as the castle itself was situated right above the rock face which was hundreds of feet down. If it wasn’t for the massive bridge spanning the distance, then the castle would be unreachable, standing alone on a massive chunk of rock.

"There is no way corrosion wouldn’t have made this place collapse after such a long period of time," Laz said, knowing that after thousands of years the rock would have worn away no matter how well cared for. And yet, the castle still stood tall, firm on it’s supports upon the rock.

"It truly is one of the great miracles of the Empire," Number seven said as he looked both up and down.

Laz then looked out at the town they had just walked through and noticed that from this vantage point, he could see the wall all the way back from the way they had come. And yet.... when he was on the wall, he was unable to see the castle.

’How the hell does that make sense?’ Laz asked himself before turning to ask Blake, only to find him staring at the entrance to the castle. The massive iron doors where huge, somewhere between twenty to thirty feet high which meant the doors themselves must weigh a massive amount. Once they were blocked, there was no way they could have been damaged from the outside without an effort on the scale that was difficult for Laz to determine. Upon the doors themselves were carvings of odd runes and sculptures of creatures that he didn’t recognize at first, until he discovered that all of the human like things had fangs while the non-human like things seemed to be everything from multiheaded dogs to tentacled beasts that towered over the human shapes, in the same way an elephant towers over an ant. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

But the part that caused Laz to pause was something else.

The doors were opened.