Keep moving!” Ember growled the words through her fangs as she forged through the darkness of the mountainside and into the vast valley of Ascalon below. “If one of those patrols catches sight of us, we’re finished.” The moon was filling out now, and even behind its shroud of pallid clouds, its light made travel easy.

The charr led the way through the shattered landscape, and Dougal chased right after her, with Riona nipping at his heels. Killeen came next, moving her shorter legs faster just so she could keep up. In the rear, Gullik had given up trying to hustle the even shorter Kranxx along and had scooped up the asura and set him to ride on the norn’s broad shoulders.

“Wolf’s teeth!” said Gullik, a little too loud. “We should turn this hunt around and kill them all instead!”

“Shush!” Riona said. “They can find us as easily by sound as sight.”

“Bring them on!” Gullik said, louder than ever. “I will bathe in their blood!”

Kranxx rapped the norn in the ear. “This is simple math,” Kranxx said. “There are six of us. Each warband has up to twenty members. Ember? How many warbands are there in southern Ascalon?”

The charr answered without looking back. “The Iron Legion has centered here since being charged with the siege of Ebonhawke. They and the Blood Legion both have responsibility for the patrols. Count in some Ash Legion detachments as scouts. Probably hundreds of warbands roam the region.”

“Right. That makes for thousands of charr wandering these lands. What happens when one of them finds us?”

“And they say the asura are as smart as Raven!” Gullik laughed. “We kill them, of course!”

“I’m sure we will, but what will they do first?” asked Kranxx.

“Quiver before our might!”

“And?”

“Quake too?”

Frustrated, Kranxx spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “They’ll make noise. They’ll sound the alarm. They’ll bring more of their kind.”

“Raven’s eye! I do believe you’re right!” Gullik tried to keep a straight face.

“So,” Kranxx said ignoring the norn’s bemused expresion, “discretion is the better part of … ?”

“Battle!”

“Valor,” corrected the asura.

“And why might that be?”

Kranxx grabbed his head with his hands and nearly fell off of Gullik’s shoulders. “It means that it’s better to understand what you are up against before you get into a fight. It involves gathering intelligence, thinking broadly, and figuring the odds.”

“Fine, friend Kranxx!” Gullik twisted his neck to grin up in the asura’s direction. “I shall permit you to do the figuring and to tell me when a battle is too odd!”

Kranxx clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from cursing.

Dougal chuckled as he strove to keep up with Ember. The charr was as fast and nimble as a mountain cat, and she had a longer gait, so keeping pace with her, even in the darkness, took some sweat.

The ground was fairly open, dotted by small copses of trees and the foundations of ancient habitations. Occasionally there would be a weathered crater, a remnant of a centuries-old battle between the humans and charr. Sometimes the center of the crater was empty, and sometimes the water that had gathered in the hollow winked like a crystal in the wan light. The grass reached up to Dougal’s calves and in the daytime probably sported a host of wildflower blossoms.

They kept to moonlit sides of the hills, risking detection to keep from spilling into unseen pitfalls and gullies.

The six moved silently through the dusk and into the night, now not speaking unless necessary. The blue-white shades of the shrouded moon were only interrupted by the towers of flame erupting from the distant charr camps. These lit the undersides of the clouds, and the reflection of that light washed everything in a faint, fiery orange.

Sometime after midnight, Ember signaled for a halt. The others froze, then followed her to hunker down in the shadows of a skeletal charr war wagon, its frame long since scavenged for parts and left rusting in the moonlight. Silently she pointed toward a torch she had seen burning in the night. As they remained hidden, it wound closer.

Dougal glanced over to see Gullik fingering his axe, ready to leap into action at the slightest hint that they had been spotted. Killeen put her hand on the norn’s wrist—which looked like a child reaching out to hold her father’s hand—and he stopped.

As the torch drew closer, Dougal heard a number of charr voices growling and snarling at each other. The voices grew louder for a while and then tapered off as the torchlight faded in the distance. When it seemed safe, Dougal tapped Ember on the elbow, and she nodded and stood up. They spoke in whispers.

“That was a patrol from the Iron Legion,” she said.

“Were they looking for us?” asked Dougal.

Ember shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

Dougal had to agree. There was no tension among the Iron Legion charr. They moved like night watchmen making their regular rounds, neither expecting trouble nor encountering any.

They waited another ten minutes before Ember gave the signal to head out.

As a gray dawn threatened to break over the mountains far to the east, Ember steered them to higher ground and found a cave for them to hide in.

“Wolf’s haunches, I do not care for burrowing into a dredge-hole!” Gullik said.

Riona nodded. “If a patrol finds us here, we’ll have no place to run.”

“This is Ascalon,” said Ember. “We charr own every bit of it but the place we came from and the place we’re going to. There are no places for us to run.”

“At least it will be cool,” said Kranxx. “My next research project must include methods for capturing the incredible heat that norn give off when exerting themselves.”

“And the cave mouth faces south, so I can see the sun,” Killeen said with a smile.

“And there’s a great view,” said Dougal. He gazed back over where they’d been. Far to the south, he could still see the peaks of the mountains in which Ebonhawke nestled. The mountains had given way to gentler foothills, like the one they were holed up in now. Once there had been forests here, but the war had ravaged the earth, and now verdant grasses had covered these rolling lands.

Dougal had not come this way out to Ascalon City the first time around—five years earlier, he and his friends had crossed through the Shiverpeaks instead—but he had studied maps of Ascalon for much of his life. On the other side of the hill, he knew, the land would become even easier until he and the others would find themselves racing across wide, open plains. Then they would be at the most vulnerable, with few places to hide; but if they stuck to moving at night, he thought they might be able to manage it.

“Get as much rest as you can,” said Ember. “We will move out at noon.”

“What? Why?” asked Dougal. Before he could say more, Gullik cut him off with a tremendous snore that echoed through the cave.

Riona nodded and spoke up to be heard over the rumbling. “I thought you said that traveling during the day would be dangerous.”

“Yes, but we are close to the Dragonbrand,” Ember said. “We would be better off not attempting to cross it at night.”

Riona caught Dougal’s eye and signaled that she would take the first shift today, along with Ember. He was too tired to realize that there wouldn’t be a second, and he leaned against the back of the cave and tried to ignore the norn’s snoring.

The time passed so fast that when Dougal woke up, he felt as if he’d not slept at all. He felt a hand covering his mouth, and his eyes flew wide open to see Riona hunched before him, a finger pressed to her lips. After Dougal nodded that he understood, Riona removed her hand from his face, and he sat up. She stood up and beckoned him to follow her. They crept past Ember, who watched them silently with her large eyes, then rose to follow them.

Riona led Dougal to the mouth of the cave, where she knelt down and pointed at a pair of pale figures meandering up the hill in the light of the breaking dawn. Dougal rubbed the sleep from his eyes and squinted down at the figures: an old shepherd and his young apprentice. For a heartbeat he wondered how such people could have possibly brought their flock this deep into Ascalon, and he even gazed around, looking for the sheep. Then he realized what the shepherds really were.

Dougal signaled for Riona to follow him back into the cave. When they reached Ember, they spoke in whispers.

“They’re ghosts,” Dougal said. “They must have been working the fields around here when Adelbern brought down the Foefire.”

Riona rasped. “And their spirits have been trapped out here for over two centuries. Horrible.”

“They seem harmless,” said Ember.

Dougal shook his head. “Anything but. I run into a lot of ghosts in my line of work. Most restless spirits have some sort of reason for hanging around a place: an unfinished task, a wrong that needs righting, and so on. They’re often coherent, and you can hold a reasonable conversation with them. They can be obsessive, or angry, but they’re sane—sane for ghosts, at least.”

“And those two are not?” asked Riona.

“The spirits created by the Foefire are frozen in time. To them, it’s still the day of the Foefire, Adelbern is still their king, and the charr are still threatening at the gates.”

“Like in Ebonhawke today,” said Riona softly, but both Dougal and Ember ignored her.

Dougal continued. “When they run into someone still alive, they see that person as charr, or at best an ally of the charr. It doesn’t matter who or what the person really is. It could be Queen Jennah herself, or a sylvari. To them, every person who invades their space is charr.”

“The Foefire killed every human in the entire country,” Ember said. “The Sorcerer-King’s atrocity extended far beyond his city’s walls.”

Dougal nodded. “It affected every bit of the nation except for Ebonhawke.”

“What should we do about them?” Riona asked.

“Nothing, unless they come into the cave,” Dougal said. “We don’t need a fight with them.”

“That’s too bad,” Ember said. She moved back into the cave and picked up Bladebreaker’s sword. The two humans followed her.

“You can’t tell me you’re going to go hunt those ghosts down,” Riona said, shocked.

“I don’t need to,” Ember said, pointing her snout over Dougal’s shoulder. “They’re already here.”

As Dougal spun about, the two spirits entered the cave and froze there in its mouth. They looked much as Dougal supposed they had in their breathing days, but with every ounce of life drained out of them. They were pale reflections of their former selves, and they trailed wisps of pale bluish ectoplasm behind them as if blasted by a wind only they could feel. It made them look as if they were constantly burning, and the way their faces contorted with rage and pain only added to that impression.

“Charr!” the old shepherd’s ghost said. He brought his crooked staff forward and unleashed an inhuman screech.

“Kill them!” The young shepherd drew the sword at his hip and charged forward, matching the other ghost’s cry in a horrible harmony that Dougal feared might make his ears bleed.

The others in the cave awoke in an instant. None of them, including Dougal and Riona, could do a thing before Ember threw herself between the two ghosts and began slashing about, her blade and claws cutting clean through their spectral forms as if they were no more than mist.

The ghosts’ twinned screeches rose higher and higher in pitch until Dougal felt his eyes start to roll back in their sockets. Ember’s snarls and growls added to the cacophony.

Ember yelped as the ghosts’ pale weapons passed through her, not breaking her skin but harming her just the same. The ghosts screamed as her claws and sword cut through them. Her strikes drew no blood, but with every swipe they dragged away more of the glowing ectoplasm that made up the ghostly figures, diminishing them more each time.

Riona grabbed her own sword, but Dougal held the others back with a raised hand. “If we try to help her, she’ll wind up slashing us too,” he said. To the others he shouted, “Gather your things and get ready to move!” When Kranxx, Killeen, and Gullik hesitated, he turned toward them and barked, “Now!”

Ember spun about like a wolf, flailing all around her and doing her best to ignore the pain when the ghosts struck her back. Soon the older ghost dissipated entirely.

The younger ghost howled in the grip of his insane fury and redoubled his attacks. With only a single foe now, Ember concentrated on taking the ghost apart. Dougal realized that if the shepherds had been living, Ember would have killed them each several times over by now. As it was, the others were ready to leave by the time she managed to dispatch the second apparition.

Dougal scooped up Ember’s pack. “Are you all right?” he asked her as she staggered over to him.

“I’ll be fine,” she said as she took her pack from him. “It only hurts when I breathe.”

“I think I have something in my pack to help,” said Kranxx, unlimbering his satchel.

The charr just waved him away. “Ghosts hurt the soul more than the flesh, though they are no less deadly.”

“Well done!” Gullik said. “You made quick work of those spirits. I only wish I’d been allowed to destroy them myself !”

“You’ll get your chance if we don’t get out of here fast,” said Dougal. “It is difficult to really kill a ghost.” He pointed to the swirling gray mists that still moved about the cave’s entrance. “They’ll re-form in a matter of minutes. Maybe less.”

“Let’s not be here when that happens,” Kranxx said as he crawled up onto the norn’s shoulders again.

“I’d love to be able to remain here and study them for a while,” Killeen said. “They probably used this cave as a resting place when they were tending their sheep.”

“We have our mission to think of first,” Riona said as she headed for the cave’s mouth.

Moving fast in the growing, muddy dawn, Ember led the group around from the cave’s entrance to the crest of the hill. As they topped the hill, the sun cleared the horizon, and Dougal saw the Dragonbrand for the first time.

He felt as if he’d been stabbed. If the arrival of the ghosts had disturbed him, witnessing the damage done to Ascalon shook him to the bone. While the hilltop they were on stood in sunshine, to the north a ribbon of storm stretched from one side of the sky to the other. Dougal thought he could see a bit of daylight peeking out on the far side of the storm, but to the north and the west the darkness stretched out to the horizons. The storm seemed like a river that flowed from the north to the west. The thunderheads scudding over it ignored the prevailing winds in the rest of the region and raced along the same path like logs being pulled downstream through a set of rapids.

Lightning arced through the storm clouds, and thunder rolled along the ribbon and out across the surrounding lands. Now that he saw this, Dougal knew that he had heard the noise while he’d been trying to sleep but had simply chalked it off to Gullik’s snoring. Rain fell in patches in some sections of the wide ribbon but not in others, and the lightning paid it no mind, zapping down from the sky wherever it liked.

The terrain below the clouds disturbed Dougal the most. The land had turned entirely to sharp-angled crystals that appeared to glow with power, although Dougal could not tell if that light was simply reflected from the sun or actually came from within. Bent and twisted amethyst trees stood by the side of a frozen cobalt stream that rolled through a landscape covered with scattered scrub brush and patches of grass all transformed into crystals both fragile and sharp. Where the ground was bare, it was twisted upon itself in gray lava-like swirls and dotted with half-shattered bubbles that looked like hatched ebony eggs clustered at the base of the glittering trees.

Lightning smashed down into one of those trees, and it exploded into uncountable fragments of amethyst. The crystal shards tinkled against the glassy landscape as they cascaded to the ground and shattered again and again until they formed a gray-violet dust that coated everything near where the tree had once been.

Ember elbowed Dougal. “I thought you had been here before.”

“We came through the Shiverpeaks,” he replied. “In any case, that was before all this.”

Killeen goggled at the scene. “How terrifying,” she said softly, “and yet starkly beautiful.” When she saw the others staring at her, she asked, “A dragon did this?”

“Yes,” Kranxx said, once more perched atop Gullik’s shoulders, “and without any effort at all. Its name was Kralkatorrik. The creature is such an aberration that this is what happened to the land it simply flew over. It didn’t even have to touch it.”

“Bear, Snow Leopard, Raven, and Wolf,” said Gullik. He spoke quietly, as if his voice might invite more destruction.

“It’s horrific,” said Riona, aghast. “A crime against nature.”

Dougal nodded. “This is why we’re doing this, right? If we don’t find a way to work together, we don’t stand a chance against the creatures that did this.”

“Statistically, we don’t have much of a chance no matter what we do,” said Kranxx. When Riona scowled at him he added, “But uniting the peoples against the dragons would elevate us from ‘No chance at all’ to ‘Very little chance’ instead.”

Without a word, Ember did the one thing that every fiber of Dougal’s body screamed at him not to do. She launched herself down the hill and toward that raw, crystal-packed wound in the world. A moment later he found himself loping after her, along with the rest of the group.

The path to the Dragonbrand was wide and easy, the smoothest going since the team had left Ebonhawke behind. The sun shone down on their heads, and the grasses around them swayed in the gentle wind like waves in the sea. It felt good to be out in the open air and sunshine again.

Dougal glanced at Killeen. She had seemed a bit off after having had to spend so much time in the darkness of the night and then in the shade of the cave. Now, though, she grinned from ear to ear, seemingly one with the nature through which she passed. Looking at her, Dougal couldn’t help but smile himself.

It did not take long to reach the Dragonbrand. It seemed as if the corrupted landscape sensed they were coming and gathered itself closer to be able to entrap them faster. Or maybe it was just how Dougal tried to treasure his last few moments in the untouched land that made that time slip by so fast.

Ember came to a halt on the edge of the Dragonbrand, just before she reached the border of the purplish, crystalline obscenity. The others fell into rank alongside her, each of them staring out across the twisted atrocity to wonder what horrors it might hide from them.

Then, after drawing a deep breath, Ember stepped into the weird landscape, and the others followed.

The glassy grass crunched to dust under their feet, and soon the shards of it became deep enough to cover their ankles. The air crackled with electricity that made Dougal’s hair lift up. Although he could see no threats, he sensed danger from every angle. He drew his sword and saw the others ready their weapons too.

“This is fascinating,” said Killeen. “It’s as if all these plants have been frozen in this state between life and death. Do you think they still grow?”

“Not after we step on them,” said Kranxx.

“I wonder how this works,” the sylvari said. “It’s so curious.” She picked a sapphire bloom from an amethyst bush and watched it slowly crumble in her hand.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Dougal. “The sooner we’re through this place, the better.”

“Bear’s blood!” said Gullik. “This is all very strange, but it can’t be worse than Ascalon City itself, can it?”

There was the distant, faint sound of an explosion, and something skipped off the ground in front of the norn’s feet. Once it had been a standing pool of water, but now cracks spiderwebbed from where the bullet had shattered it.

Dougal spun about to see where the shot had been fired from, but Ember had already spotted the source. “There!” she said, pointing back the way they had come.

A charr warband stood on the edge of the Dragonbrand, ten soldiers all told, heavily armored and ready for battle. The warrior in front raised his rifle and roared, and the others echoed his call.

“Run!” Kranxx said, batting Gullik on the top of his head.

The norn laughed and pulled his axe. “If they’ve already seen us, my tiny friend, then the time for stealth is over!” He hefted his weapon in response to the challenge. “Wolf’s teeth, the time for battle has begun!”

“Hold it!” Dougal said. He cast a wary eye on the warband. “They don’t seem to be charging.”

Battle lust danced in Gullik’s eyes. “Then we shall take the battle to them!”

Ember grabbed the norn’s elbow before he could stomp off to fight. “If they meant to fight us, they would have attacked already.” The other charr of the warband were scrambling with their rifles as well.

“Oh-ho!” The norn beamed with pride. “They are wiser than they would seem if they fear to engage us in battle!”

“I don’t think it’s us they’re afraid of,” said Riona. “They just don’t want to come in here.”

“Maybe they know something we don’t,” Dougal said as he glanced around them.

“There’s another warband coming from the northeast,” said Ember.

“And that looks like one in the southwest,” said Riona.

“We need to keep moving,” Dougal said. Another distant pop and another shot puffed the earth next to him. “Right now.” The three warbands, all on the closer side of the tortured strip of land, now sounded horns to each other. Their message was clear.

Without a word, Ember turned to the northwest and started off again. The others fell into step behind her, the norn and his asura passenger last.

“By the Wolf’s whimper,” Gullik growled, “only cowards run from such a fight!”

“Don’t think of it as running away from that fight,” Kranxx said. “Think of it as running toward a bigger one.”

The norn let out a deep chuckle. “I do enjoy your wisdom!”

“I still don’t like it,” Dougal said, keeping pace with Riona and Ember. “What could be in here that would be so terrifying that it would keep three warbands of charr from coming after us?”

Riona smirked at this. “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”

The gunfire behind them intensified, but at this range they were minimal targets, and the worst it did was shatter some of the glass foliage near them. None of the shots came close to hitting anyone, but it didn’t seem as if the charr were trying very hard.

“Hold it!” Dougal said.

Ember skidded to a halt in the shattered purple grass, and the others following her all did the same. “What is it?” the charr said.

Dougal shaded his eyes and gazed to the southwest. “There,” he said. “They’re not shooting at us anymore. Look.”

The two charr warbands on the southern edge of the Brand had joined together and were busy unloading their rifles into a crystalline hill hunkered to their east. It was a larger target, Dougal noted, but had no effect on them and their flight.

“I haven’t seen anything this odd since I stumbled upon that hylek fertility ritual!” said Gullik.

Dougal knew then exactly what was happening. He’d heard tales of minions created by the Elder Dragons to execute their will—and anyone who might trespass upon their lands. Here in the Dragonbrand, they stood squarely in the Crystal Dragon’s territory. Its passage had scarred this land and claimed it as its own. It stood to reason the creatures that lived here would belong to the Crystal Dragon too.

“We need to get out of here right now!” Dougal said, grabbing Ember’s shoulder.

She shrugged him off with a growl. “We should get to the far side of that hill for cover.”

“No,” Dougal said. “We need to head in the other direction as fast as possible.”

“We can’t go back to the south,” said Riona. “Those warbands will tear us to pieces.”

Killeen put a hand on Dougal’s arm. “What’s wrong?” she said.

Dougal stabbed a finger in the direction of the hill, which had started to shudder. “That!”

As they watched, the hill continued to quiver as if shaken by an earthquake, although the land that they stood on seemed as solid as ever. A terrible noise sprang from the hill. It sounded like thousands of glasses shattering all at once.

Then the hill raised its head and opened its eyes.