Chapter 799: Ashfall Basin

They crossed forty miles in under an hour, and none of it was easy ground.

Jian took the lead because Galewrought made him the fastest over broken terrain, wind carrying him across ravine mouths that would have cost anyone else a twenty-minute detour. Kira followed close behind, her own Gale Fang matching his pace without much strain. Emma kept up by simply refusing to fall behind, and by the twentieth mile she’d stopped pretending it wasn’t costing her.

"How far?" she asked, breathing hard.

"Close," Jian said. "You can smell it."

She could. The air had changed somewhere in the last five miles, gone thick and grey and gritty, and by the time the Ashfall Basin finally opened up beneath them, the reason was obvious.

Ash fell across the whole basin like snow. Not from fire. From the breaches themselves, three of them hanging open and unguarded at the basin’s far end, each one venting a steady grey fall that had already buried the lower half of the valley knee-deep.

And through that ash, moving in unhurried columns toward a town at the basin’s center, came the monsters nobody had stopped.

"That’s not a collapsed line," Kira said quietly. "That’s no line at all."

She was right. Whatever Veruhn had built to hold this basin had already been overrun. Broken barricades stood scattered across the middle distance, abandoned, and a scattering of Veruhn soldiers still fought in small isolated knots with no coordination between any of them.

Jian found the closest knot and dropped into it without slowing, Graniteguard hardening across his shoulders a half second before he hit the flank of the creature they’d been losing to.

"Ananta Regalon," he said, to a Veruhn captain who looked too exhausted to be properly surprised. "Where’s your evacuation?"

"Town center," the captain said, hoarse. "Maybe two hundred still inside. We couldn’t hold the eastern road long enough to move them."

"Then we hold it," Jian said. "Get your people to the town. Stop fighting out here, there’s nothing out here worth dying over."

The captain hesitated only a moment before nodding.

Emma took the eastern road, because Emma’s light carried further than anything else the three of them owned.

She climbed the only intact structure still standing along it, a stone granary half-buried in ash, and looked out at a road that needed to stay clear for as long as two hundred people took to walk it.

Then she started burning.

Starfall came first, a steady rain of small burning points falling across the road’s whole length, and where the light touched grey monster hide, it stuck and kept burning. Nova’s Crown followed whenever anything came close enough to matter, blinding bursts that staggered whole clusters back into the ash.

"Road’s clear," she called through the link. "For now. I can hold this maybe forty minutes before I’m running on nothing."

"Then we finish in thirty," Jian said.

Kira went for the breaches.

It was the harder call, and she made it alone in the space of about four seconds, standing at the basin’s edge and doing the math nobody had time to discuss.

Three open gates venting monsters continuously meant the road would never actually be clear. Emma could hold what was already through. She couldn’t hold what kept arriving.

"I’m going for the gates," she said into the link.

"You can’t close them," Jian said immediately. "Nobody can close a breach."

"I don’t need to close them. I need to choke them."

Eternal Frost had grown considerably since the Bloodroot Wilds, and Kira spent nearly all of it in one long, deliberate effort, ice climbing the mouth of the first breach in a spreading white lattice that narrowed the opening from something a creature could walk through to something it had to squeeze through.

The first monster that tried it got stuck. The second got stuck behind it. Within two minutes, the entire first breach had jammed itself shut with its own bodies, the whole thing writhing and grinding and utterly unable to advance.

"One," she said, already moving to the second.

The second went faster, because she’d learned the shape of the trick, and because whatever was coming through it was smaller and less able to force the narrowing gap.

The third breach fought her.

Something on the other side of it burned hot enough to melt her lattice as fast as she built it, ice hissing into steam the instant it formed, and Kira spent three full minutes losing. Her hands had gone numb somewhere in the second minute. Her reserves were running visibly low and she could feel exactly how much she had left, which was not much.

So she stopped trying to freeze the opening at all.

She froze the ground in front of it instead, a wide sheet of it running out from the breach mouth to the ravine edge fifty feet beyond, smooth and thick and completely without grip.

Monsters came through onto ice they couldn’t stand on, slid helplessly across it, and went straight over the ravine edge, one after another, the third breach becoming functionally a hole that emptied directly into a pit.

"Three," Kira reported, and her voice had gone thin with the effort. "Not closed. Choked. It’ll hold an hour, maybe less."

"An hour’s enough," Jian said.

The evacuation took thirty-eight minutes.

Two hundred and fourteen people walked the eastern road under Emma’s failing light, and it was not an orderly thing. Half of them were carrying someone. A quarter of them had nothing but the clothes they’d been wearing when their town’s defenses failed. Three of them were children small enough that Jian ended up carrying two at once for the middle stretch, which slowed him considerably and which he never once complained about.

He walked the column’s flank the entire way, Skyfather’s Judgment answering anything that came close enough to be a problem, lightning splitting the falling ash in bright forks every few minutes.

Twice, something big enough to matter broke through Emma’s covering fire.

The first was a low, four-legged thing that came out of the ash at a dead run, and Jian met it with Graniteguard already hardening, stone shoulder against charging bulk. The impact drove him back six feet through ash and gravel, but the creature stopped, and that was the whole point.

The second one cost him.

It came from above, something with a tail like a fallen tree, and Jian saw it a half second too late because he’d been watching the column instead of the sky. The tail caught him across the chest and threw him into a barricade hard enough to crack stone.

"Jian!" Emma’s voice cracked across the link.

He got up. His ribs, still tender from the Devourer four days earlier, screamed at him about it in a way that suggested at least one of them had gone from cracked to something worse.

"Keep the light on the road," he said. "I’m fine."

He wasn’t, entirely. Kira knew it from forty feet away just by the way he was holding his left side. Emma knew it from the sound of his voice.

Neither of them said anything about it, because saying something about it would have meant stopping, and stopping was not currently an option any of them had.

He kept walking. The column kept moving. Emma’s light held for eleven more minutes than she’d said it could, and when it finally guttered out, the last of the column was already close enough to the rim that the remaining distance could be run.

The last of the column cleared the basin’s rim at the thirty-eighth minute, and the Veruhn captain found the three of them afterward, standing in ash up to their ankles, all three visibly spent.

"Two hundred and fourteen," he said. "We’d written off most of them."

"They’re your people," Jian said. "You’d have gotten them out."

"No," the captain said, plainly. "We wouldn’t have. I know exactly what we’d have managed, and it wasn’t this."

He looked at the three of them a moment longer, taking in how few of them there actually were.

"Your kingdom sent three?"

"Our kingdom’s holding seven gates," Kira said. "Three is what we could spare without losing our own line."

The captain absorbed that, and something complicated crossed his face.

"Veruhn won’t forget it," he said.

[Emergency Task Complete: Ashfall Basin evacuation secured.]

[Contribution awarded: Ananta Regalon.]

[Note: Breach points in Sector 14 remain active. Sector considered stabilized, not held.]

"Stabilized, not held," Emma read, slumped against the granary wall with her light finally, completely out. "That’s the most honest thing this event has said all day."

"It’s enough," Jian said. "It was never going to be more than that."

Kira was already looking back the way they’d come, toward forty miles of broken ground and seven gates still pouring out everything they had.

"How long have we been gone?"

Emma checked. "Just over two hours."

"Then we’ve been gone too long."

Nobody disagreed. They gave themselves four more minutes, which was as much rest as any of them could justify, and then all three of them stood up and started running back.

Behind them, the Ashfall Basin kept falling ash across three choked and jammed gates that would, in an hour or so, become somebody’s problem all over again.

Ahead of them, the Gutwrack Span had been holding seven gates with three fewer people for two hours and eleven minutes, and none of the three of them said out loud what all of them were thinking.

Please let everyone still be standing when we get there.