Chapter 22: Fortresses
Nobody slept well....
Twenty four people scattered across the ruins of a camp that had cost them so much in a day found little comfort in bedrolls laid too close to fresh graves and by the time the morning light crept over the treeline, most of them were already awake, moving through the motions of grief and preparation with the numbness of people who hadn’t been given the luxury of processing anything yet.
They burned the dead at first light....
It took most of the morning... Bodies gathered, wrapped as respectfully and as best as they could, laid together in a long row before Lucas called [Ignition] to the pyre himself because he thought he felt wrong to let anyone else carry that weight. Colt’s body lay among them, no different in death than any other and Lucas stood before the flames longer than the rest of the people watching smoke climb towards the sky.
"He’d have hated all this ceremony," an older woman murmured beside him, watching the same fire. "In the short time we knew him, he cared more about getting things done than being mourned for him."
"Maybe," Lucas said. "Doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve it."
Nobody argued with that logic.
They gathered what supplies the ruined camp could still offer once the fire burned low: rations, water, weapons scavenged from the dead bodies of the beasts and Lucas found himself standing at the edge of the group as twenty three exhausted faces turned toward him, waiting for direction he wasn’t entirely sure he had the right to give.
A young man near the back, one of Colt’s former guards, spoke first. "Can you actually get us somewhere safer? Honestly. Not the speech version. The truth."
Lucas held his gaze and replied. He didn’t reach for comfortable words. "I don’t know.... I think so.... But I have a reason to believe there’s something better out there and I intend to find it. But I won’t promise you certainty I don’t actually have."
The guard studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly, like the honesty itself had bought something sugarcoating couldn’t.
They left soon after, Lucas at the front, Iris, Bertram, Callum, and Lora falling into step just behind him, the rest of the survivors trailing in a loose column that stretched back through the trees.
They walked a full day, the forest thinning gradually into rougher, steeper terrain, crawling with scattered Bora that had wandered clear of whatever territory the horde had once belonged to, nothing on the scale of what they’d survived...
Three here, two there, killed by a group that had, even though unwillingly, become disturbingly efficient at this particular kind of thing.
By the time the sun began sinking toward the horizon on the second evening, something rose ahead of them through the trees that made the entire group slow to a stop.
It wasn’t a camp. It wasn’t even a Faction Zone in the loose, sprawling sense Colt’s had been.
What stood at the edge of the tree line was something closer to an actual fortress — walls built from reinforced stone and metal, easily twice the height of anything Colt’s people had managed. Watchtowers rising at intervals along a perimeter that stretched further than Lucas could fully take in at a glance.
Banners hung from the towers, caught in the evening wind, and the sheer scale of the construction spoke of resources and manpower Lucas hadn’t imagined any single Faction could gather this early.
"What the fuck—?" Came Iris’ voice in bewilderment.
Hope...thin and stubborn lit in Lucas’s chest at the sight of it, the kind of hope he’d been carefully rationing since Lora had first mentioned a rumor about two powerful leaders, refusing to let himself believe too hard in case belief was all it ever turned out to be.
’If anyone could have built something like this,’ he thought, heart thumping, ’it’s them.’
They approached the gate slowly, hands visibly empty, and were stopped well before they reached it by two armed men stepping into their path with the same practiced authority Colt’s guards had once shown.
"Hold there." The taller of the two studied their group, the exhaustion and old bloodstains still marking most of them. "State your business."
’Again with that old timey fantasy tone...’
Despite the irritation, Lucas answered
"Passing survivors," Lucas said. "We lost our own faction a day ago and came looking for shelter, and possibly answers about the people running this one."
The two guards exchanged a glance. "Wait here," the shorter one said. "We’ll bring someone who can decide that."
They disappeared through the gate, leaving Lucas and the others standing in the taunting shadow of a wall that dwarfed anything they’d yet encountered. Hope and exhaustion sitting side by side in his chest as he was about to find out whether this had all been worth the walk.
***
Inside the fortress, in a room built from salvaged timber and reinforced with more care than most people out here could spare, Eleanor sat in a carved wooden chair that had, somewhere in the last two weeks, become something closer to a throne than either of them had ever intended it to be.
She wasn’t looking at the reports stacked on the table in front of her...
Her thoughts were elsewhere...
’Lucas.’
His name still surfaced like this sometimes... in quiet moments between crises, cutting through whatever she was supposed to be focused on.
It had been like this since the moment she and Mark had hit the ground without him, since the first frantic hour of searching that had turned up nothing, since the slow, grinding acceptance that finding him wasn’t something she could simply wish for....
They’d built all of this — the walls, the towers, the growing collection of survivors who now called this place something closer to home every since it was first discovered that players could now form factions.
It had started with barely a dozen people and a scavenged perimeter of fallen logs, back when Eleanor’s control over earth had been clumsy, half-formed, more likely to backfire than build.
Mark’s [Bastion’s Oath] had kept them alive during those first desperate weeks, absorbing hits that would have ended smaller less stubborn groups, while Eleanor slowly learned to shape her four elements into something that actually held.
They’d fought off three separate beasts in the building of this place. Lost people, though not many, but enough that every wall now standing carried the memory of someone who hadn’t lived to see it finished.
Mark had grown into the role of protector with an ease that still sometimes surprised her, standing at the front of every fight, gauntlets raised and absorbing blows meant for people who had nowhere else to turn.
Eleanor herself had grown into something else entirely — a leader, a queen.... A Goddess.... Someone survivors looked to for decisions she’d never once trained to make.
Neither of them had ever stopped looking for Lucas.
Every scrap of news from other camps got chased down, cross-referenced, hoped over and then, as usual, discarded.
’Wherever you are,’ she thought, ’please be alive....Please be safe. Or at the very least... just be somewhere I can actually find you.’
The door opened without a knock, causing her to look towards the doorway
"Elle." Mark’s voice, and something in the tight restrained excitement of it pulled her attention up immediately. "What is it?"
Mark stood in the doorway for a moment.
Then he let it show...
A wide smug grin... something Mark was known for back in their colleg
e days found itself on his face.
"Someone’s here to see you," he said....
"It’s Princess."
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