It didn't take much longer for the beast to come into view. The grey behemoth was nothing like what he had expected when he had heard the stories. In his mind, a drake was akin to a dragon, and he expected one like out of the stories.
Instead, it looked like a huge salamander, covered in grey scales and moss. The rumbling came from its tail, which dragged across the ground in arcs behind it, flattening whatever escaped being crushed underneath its body.
Crouched behind a treeline, Rowan would guess the beast was nearly 50 metres long, though he wasn't close enough to be sure. His muscles twitched with a desire to pull his sword from his side, but he knew it would do him no good. What could he possibly do against something like that? He had better chances swinging his sword at a landslide than the stone drake.
Luckily, it seemed to be only passing by, moving towards the rising sun, across Rowan's path. The beast was slow, and Rowan begged it to move faster, but he knew it would not. The stone drake was in no hurry, it had nowhere to be and nothing to fear. It was undoubtedly one of the apex predators of this region, if not all of Ireland.
There was a reason that anyone who knew anything about Hells knew about the stone drakes. They had first started appearing 8 years ago, and had almost immediately begun a siege on Cork, tearing down the walls from all sides.
It had taken days just to drive them off when they first appeared from whatever Hell they crawled out of, and in the following years, guards on duty still had to be wary of their presence. Rowan watched as it slowly half slid half crawled away, and breathed a sigh of relief. With the beast no longer obstructing his path, he could continue, though Rowan decided to wait a few more minutes before crossing the open field.
He had no intentions of risking that thing seeing him. It wouldn't be like the ravens, where he could endure the attacks and run till he found shelter, one blow from the drake would likely drain all of his aether in regeneration, if it did not kill him outright. And from how much damage they had caused in the past, Rowan was expecting the latter.
Rowan waited until the vibrations were faint enough to forget about if he didn't focus, and continued on across the field. He kept a much more wary attitude from that point onward, having been reminded of how dangerous the beasts could actually get.
Not all of them would be survivable, there was a reason entire cities now lay in ruin.
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When the sun reached its highest peak, Rowan decided to take a break. He had been travelling for the better part of the day, as well as the early hours of the morning, and was beginning to feel the strain on his body.
His regeneration was fighting a continuous battle with his body, as it kept healing the many small pains that had accumulated, but even it could do nothing against fatigue. He sat now on the side of another main road he had just found, this one continuing south. He had yet to find any signage, but it seemed promising from what he could tell.
It appeared to be slightly directed to the south-east, which meant it likely would take him straight to Cork as long as he followed it.
'Truly, without this map, there would be no chance of me ever getting home. They should really give these out to everyone.'
Though commodities like paper and ink were scarce, Rowan truly believed that the number of awakeners that survived would be worth the resources. Speaking of, they should have a training course specifically for it! Why should only the family of existing awakened be the ones to get training?
'Maybe they just don't care? Maybe the resources invested in the complex aren't expected to make any big returns... But still. Kids die every month, and they just do nothing about it? I mean, they let me in, and I would have been dead than dead had I not been paired with the others.'
The thoughts were clouding his mind, so he decided to shake them off, but Rowan felt the number of things he was growing dissatisfied with was only continuing to grow. The lack of training, of preparation, of basic knowledge about the Hells. Why couldn't people know?
As he continued on the southward road, the signs of destroyed buildings steadily increased, until Rowan was certain that a town was growing near. Surprisingly, there had been no signage up until this point, just long roads, with no way to tell where he was.
Eventually, he stumbled across a town that shocked Rowan slightly. Many of the buildings were still intact, though a thick grey mist seemed to be covering the entire area.
He also failed to see any of the flashes of movement, or hear any of the cries he had come to expect from dense areas such as this. It was as though there was no one living in the town, human or beast.
The soft fall of his shoes against the ground was the only thing Rowan heard, amid the beating of his heart, which had rocketed with unease. He knew that it wouldn't be that simple. There was no way that the town was empty. Surely, there was something here that was driving away everything else.
And as he got closer to the town, the unsettling feeling of wrongness continued to grow within him, until he felt an almost overwhelming desire to flee from whatever it was inhabiting this town. He felt his steps faltering, and it was only through grim curiosity that he managed to continue closer.
It was only when he was within 20 metres of the edge of the mist, that he began to see what it really was. It wasn't a low-hanging cloud, or fog rising off the ocean. It was millions upon millions of strands of silk, so fine and densely packed that it enveloped the entire town.