The brown fields had burned. As Raya, Benn, and Dondar trekked out of the ruins of Ellakar and the flattened forest around it, they found a haunted land, covered in embers. They stumbled on a dead oryx buck one day, laying amidst the uprooted or flattened grasses. It had no wounds and did not appear starved. Dondar said it had been poisoned by the ash.
They followed the Eremes again, winding across the savannah toward Vagren, but there was no end to the smoke-strewn skies and littered earth.
More than once, they had to loop south, away from the guiding river, to avoid the brigands that prowled these lands. The wealthy could afford boats—though none were travelling toward Ellakar now—and the poor could not, so even before Mount Lukar burned these lands there had been bandits. With the influx of homeless and displaced people fleeing the ruins, that number had only grown. Thankfully, Raya and her friends had no trouble avoiding them; it was due to her skill at reading the signs in the earth and dead grass and Dondar recommendations that they were so fortunate.
They were only stopped once, when, along the river, a boat lay anchored. The men on board wore chainmail and proper armaments, with a fish and hook sigil. One of them called down to Raya and her friends on behalf of his master, and asked, “Have you seen, in the ruins, if the Eremes still reaches the Dell?”
Raya shook her head. “There was no flooding, if that helps,” she said. She would imagine that if Mount Lukar had blocked the river, that the ruins would have flooded in addition to the current blight.
The guard nodded, and looked back at his master; a man with long, braided blonde hair. “If we continue on the river, without stopping, we will avoid the bandits.”
The master cursed and muttered and all Raya could make out was: “…trade out of Vagren cannot be so withheld…”
Raya and her friends warned the merchant that many people in Ellakar were deaf or hard of hearing, wounded, and were being hunted often by bandits and thieves. The guards nodded gravely, hands on their spears, and the ship set sail before the foot travellers left sight of it.
As the days passed, they gradually found less and less damage: the occasional tree still standing or a field that had not been flattened or scorched. Raya once spotted a boulder as tall as her, which had crashed against the ground, uprooting an old cedar and furrowing through the dirt. And only once, the sun punctured the clouds like a spear and lit up a circle a few miles west of them. It was so bright that Raya suddenly felt as though she was living in a world of night, under the shadows of the black clouds. It had been more than a month since Mount Lukar exploded.
Dondar estimated they would reach the city sometime the next day.