Book One – Chapter 1

It was past midnight when they reached the first stone within the field of monoliths. A black slab leaned half-buried in the glass, at an angle that suggested long abandonment and gradual subsidence rather than instant collapse. It might once have belonged to a fortress, or a tower. Centuries of storms had scoured its surface to a mottled grey, burying the original darkness of the stone beneath layers of accumulated dust, mineral decay, and the fine residue of pulverised glass. Heat had softened its edges and eaten through its engravings. What remained were strange scorches and half-erased symbols, unreadable yet still dense with implication. Whatever they had once been meant to convey had not endured.

The slab was only the first evidence of a broken civilisation. Ahead, the ruins spread across : a rise of burned stone and fused shards that loomed within the monolith field like a wave arrested at the instant before breaking. Its crest rose several metres high, and it was so wide, Yves could  not see the end of it on either side. Massive slabs were caught within it; the remains of grand structures that were now half-swallowed by glass and ash. Some lay flat, dispersing the dark debris with their weight. Some jutted upward at violent angles. Others had sunk so deeply that only their edges remained visible, like the blackened vertebrae of something too large to be buried whole.

Between them rose grotesque formations. They were charred, twisted shapes, drawn upwards and arrested in their gestures. Yves’ imagination, creative as ever when presented with catastrophe, completed them into figures caught at the threshold of escape; bodies reaching for the sky, hands stretched towards the pale moons above, mouths torn open and silenced at the exact instant of burning. Some leaned into one another desperately. Some stood apart, solitary and rigid. Some had no anthropoid shape at all, which did absolutely nothing to make them less unsettling.