Chapter 71
Overhead are more stars than we’ve ever seen. They wheel above us in an endless black sea, breathtaking and overwhelming.
“By the Soil,” Sal whispers beside me, her fierce composure cracking as she takes in the vastness. No Wall. No boundaries. Just sky forever.
We stand at the edge of a clearing. It’s ringed by thick, dry underbrush, and beyond that, trees.
They resemble our hardwoods but a click off, wide where they should be tall, their branches misshapen in the moonlight.
The way their skeleton fingers reach skyward, I can’t tell if they’re dead or alive.
The grass underfoot is wild, untamed, growing in defiant clumps between crumbling sheets of what look like stone roads.
Our footsteps sound liquid out here, both muffled and over-loud. Or maybe that’s just the blood pounding in my eardrums. I take a trembling breath. I’m not sure what to feel. Shock? Grief? Hope?
I force myself to turn around, to face the Wall that’s defined my entire existence.
In the moonlight, it’s both more and less impressive, a massive curve of stone that stretches up into the starlit sky.
And clinging to the surface, its body pulsing with an obscene, sickening rhythm, is the Verdant Beast.
On this side of the Wall, the monster is tinted completely violet.
I can see straight through parts of its translucent flesh, to where dark shapes move within its digestive chambers, their forms still recognizably human.
A hand presses against the membrane, fingers splayed like a final plea.
My body lurches forward, but Sal’s arm snaps out, stopping me cold.
She shakes her head once, her eyes two pools of sorrow. The Beast is too large, too hungry.
Something cracks open inside me then—not grief, but rage. Cold and sharp and absolute. The Verdant Beast has been built to consume. It will go on feeding, swallowing my friends and family one by one. But I will find a way to destroy it. I will save those trapped inside the Wall.
That’s when a light reflecting off the clouds catches my eye.
The others see it, too. We make our way through the ruins, following the cracked pathway up a hill.
We pass rusted hulks of ancient machines half-buried in the earth, being slowly devoured by time and creeping vines.
This greenery looks blessedly normal compared to what we’ve left behind, but still I have no love for it.
We reach a high ridge. Everything appears flat and gray under a bruised-black sky. For a second, I think there’s nothing out there, just foggy emptiness, like the land itself gave up.
Then, the wind shifts, clearing the fog.