They descended from the Bone Ridge at dawn and walked into the grey.
The wasteland began where the labyrinth ended, a gradual transition from crimson walls to dead coral the color of old ash. The coral here was brittle and lifeless, crumbling at the touch, and the further west they went the lower the walls became until they were walking through nothing but grey sand under a grey sky. The silence was the most unsettling part. The labyrinth had always been full of sound, scavengers moving through passages and the wet noise of mud under chitin feet. The wasteland held nothing.
Sunny's shadow sense swept the terrain ahead and found only empty shadows cast by the dead coral stumps that dotted the landscape. The absence of life should have been reassuring. Instead it made the hair on his arms stand up.
If the monsters avoided this place, something here was worse than they were.
They moved in formation, Nephis on point and Sunny at the rear with the Echo carrying Cassie between them. The sand was fine and grey, crunching softly under their feet, and it covered everything in a uniform layer that erased any feature the terrain might have had. Walking through it felt like walking through the aftermath of a fire.
The Ashen Barrow grew as they approached. What had looked like a large hill from the Bone Ridge revealed itself as something closer to a small mountain, its slopes rising steeply from the flat wasteland. The giant tree on its summit was visible long before the hill's base came into focus, its black trunk cutting the grey sky like a crack in the world and its canopy spreading wide enough to shade the entire island. The leaves were crimson, the only color in the wasteland, vivid against the grey the way blood was vivid against snow.
Sunny studied the tree as they walked and tried to estimate its height. The trunk alone was wider than any structure he'd seen in Bastion, and the lowest branches hung high enough above the hilltop that a building could have fit beneath them. He'd seen ancient trees in the Dream Realm during training exercises near Bastion's outer walls, but nothing approached this.
They were halfway across the wasteland when Sunny's foot caught on something beneath the sand. He looked down and brushed the grey layer away with his boot, expecting dead coral or bone.
The surface beneath was black and smooth, with the deep gloss of polished stone. He knelt and cleared more sand, exposing a curved surface that ran in both directions and disappeared beneath the grey.
"What is it?" Nephis asked.
Sunny followed the curve with his eyes. It ran toward the Ashen Barrow in a gentle arc, thickening as it went, and the shape of it clicked into place with a chill that settled behind his ribs.
"A root," he said. "From the tree."
Nephis looked at the exposed surface, then at the Ashen Barrow, then back at the root. The distance between where they stood and the base of the hill was substantial. If this root extended this far from the trunk, the tree's root system stretched beneath the entire wasteland.
The tree had drained the life from the labyrinth, and its roots were growing beneath their feet.
They kept moving, faster now.
They reached the base of the Ashen Barrow in the early afternoon and found cover behind a low ridge of dead coral that the sand hadn't fully buried. Sunny's shadow sense reached up the slope and mapped what it could. The hill was steep and bare, covered in grey sand and fallen crimson leaves, and the tree's trunk dominated the summit. His shadow sense could feel the tree's shadow, vast and dense, heavier than anything organic had a right to be.
He couldn't see the summit clearly from this angle. The slope blocked his line of sight to whatever waited at the top.
"I need to get closer," he said.
Nephis looked at him. "How close?"
"Close enough to see what's up there. If I circle the base, there might be a sightline from the southern slope."
"I'll come with you."
"No. If something goes wrong, Cassie needs you here."
Nephis looked slightly reluctant but accepted without argument.
Sunny moved out alone, keeping low, using the scattered coral ridges for concealment as he circled the base of the hill. The southern slope was gentler than the eastern face, and from a position behind a half-buried slab of dead coral, he could see the summit.
The tree filled his vision. Up close, the scale of it was almost oppressive. The trunk was the color of the dark sea, black and glossy, and the bark had a texture that looked almost organic, as though the wood beneath it was still breathing. The canopy spread overhead in a vast umbrella of crimson leaves, casting a shadow so deep that the ground beneath the tree looked almost like nightfall.
Fallen leaves carpeted the hilltop in red. After weeks of grey, the red was almost painful to look at.
Something glinted beneath the branches. A bright flash, like sunlight off polished metal, that appeared and disappeared at irregular intervals. Sunny watched for it and counted the pattern. The flash came from the same location each time, near the base of the trunk, and it moved slightly between appearances.
Then his shadow sense detected something on the slope below him, approaching from the east.
The shadow was dense. Denser than a scavenger's, denser than even the Centurion's had been. Sunny pressed himself flat against the coral and waited.
A bone-scythe creature crested the eastern slope and climbed toward the summit. It was one of the large variants, the same kind they'd watched from the coral island weeks ago, and it carried a soul shard between its pincers. The cold blue light of the crystal stood out against the grey and red of the hilltop.
The creature reached the summit and knelt.
Kneeling implied servitude, which meant whatever the Centurion was presenting the shard to hadn't appeared yet.
From beneath the tree's canopy, where the shadow was deepest, a shape emerged that made the bone-scythe creature look small. Sunny's shadow sense registered the new shadow before his eyes fully resolved the creature casting it, and the density of that shadow was so far beyond anything he'd felt that his perception stuttered.
The creature that emerged was easily twice the height of the kneeling one. Its carapace was not chitin. It was metal, dark and gleaming, encasing the creature's body in armor that looked forged rather than grown. Spikes erupted from the joints and the ridges of its back, and its head was crowned with long, curved horns that caught the light as it moved. The face beneath the horns was almost human and heavy-featured, with eyes that glowed the color of dying embers and carried an intelligence that didn't belong on a Nightmare Creature.
It had four arms. Two ending in pincers large enough to crush his Echo like an insect, and two ending in bone scythes that were longer than Sunny was tall. Each step it took pressed deep prints into the sandy hilltop, and the ground trembled faintly with its weight.
The creature descended to where the Centurion knelt and took the soul shard from its pincers. Then it turned and walked back beneath the tree without hurry.
The Centurion rose and began its descent. Sunny pressed himself deeper into the coral and controlled his breathing as the creature passed within forty meters of his position, its bone scythes scraping shallow furrows in the sand. It didn't look in his direction. It reached the base of the hill and continued east, back toward the labyrinth.
Sunny waited until he could no longer feel it in his shadow sense, then he waited a little longer.
When he finally moved, it was to circle back to where Nephis and Cassie waited behind the coral ridge. He moved carefully and without speed, hurrying across open ground was how people got killed.
He told them everything back at the Bone Ridge.
The fire crackled between them and the smell of roasting scavenger meat filled the spine's interior, but nobody was eating yet. Cassie sat with her staff across her knees and her face turned toward the sound of Sunny's voice. Nephis sat with her sword across hers, expressionless.
"It's at least twice the size of the Centurion we killed," Sunny said. "Its carapace looks like metal, not chitin. I don't think a blade can get through it. The joints are armored too, no gaps that I could see."
Nephis was quiet.
"Four arms, two pincers and two scythes, both bigger than anything we've faced. And its eyes looked intelligent. Not just beast-level cunning, but actual thought."
"Did it see you?" Nephis asked.
"No."
"The soul shard," she said. "The Centurion brought it as tribute."
"Yes. The same pattern we watched from the coral island. They collect shards and deliver them to the hill."
"To the creature, or to the tree?"
Sunny hadn't considered that distinction. The creature had taken the shard and carried it back beneath the tree, but he hadn't watched what happened next. The shard could have been for the creature itself, or for the tree, or for something else entirely.
"I don't know," he said.
Cassie spoke for the first time. "We have to get past it."
"Yes."
"Can we go around?"
Sunny shook his head, then remembered she couldn't see the gesture. "The wasteland stretches in every direction as far as I could see from the Bone Ridge. The Barrow sits at its center. Going around would add weeks, maybe more, and there's no high ground to shelter on during the floods. We'd drown before we cleared it."
The fire popped. Cassie's hands tightened on her staff.
"Then we go through," Nephis said.
Sunny looked at her. The white armor caught the firelight and held it the way it always did, steady and bright.
"That thing is not something we can fight," he said.
"I know."
"If we engage it directly, we die."
"I know that too."
She looked at the fire for a moment, then looked at him with the flat, evaluating gaze she always wore.
"We don't fight it. We find a way past it."
"I have an idea," he said. "Give me time to work it out."
Nephis nodded once.
They ate in silence, and Sunny let his mind work the way Anvil had taught him to. Break the problem into components and identify the variables you can control, find the weakness the target doesn't know it has, and dismantle it.
He fell asleep with the problem still turning in his mind, and the shape of a solution beginning to form at its edges.