CHAPTER XIV - The In-Between

The land ahead had no name.

Only distance.

A flat and endless plain stretched between horizons that no longer met, their edges burned and torn apart beneath layers of pale atmospheric haze drifting endlessly across the wounded surface of Earth. The ground was dark beneath the survivors’ feet, hardened by ancient thermal strikes whose scars remained etched across the landscape like the memory of violence too vast for time to erase completely.

Everywhere lay evidence of impact.

The fractured remains of old structures protruded from the plains in blackened fragments half-swallowed by dust. Metallic skeletons rose briefly from the earth before disappearing again beneath layers of ash carried slowly by the stagnant wind. Entire regions of the terrain had melted once under impossible heat, cooling afterward into smooth fields of dark glass that reflected the gray sky above in broken distorted patterns.