A Realm of Shadows by Morgan Rice

she had been young, been a place of legend, a place of such evil,
so off limits, that no one would ever entertain the idea of visiting it. It was,
on the contrary, a place to be sealed off from the world, to be protected from,
a place that her people thanked the universe every day was shielded by the
Flames. Now, unbelievably, a place she was seeking out.
    On the one hand,
it was madness. Yet on the other, Kyra’s mother had sent her here, and she
sensed deep down that the mission was true. She sensed that Marda was where she
was needed, where her ultimate test lay. Where the Staff of Truth lay, that only
she could retrieve. It was crazy, but she could already feel the staff, deep in
her gut, summoning her, luring her to it like an old friend.
    Still, Kyra, for
the first time in as long as she could remember, felt a wave of self-doubt
overwhelm her. Was she really strong enough to do this? To go to Marda, a place
even her father’s men feared to venture? She felt a battle raging within her
own soul. Everything inside her screamed that to go to Marda would be to go to
her death. And she did not want to die.
    Kyra tried to
force herself to be strong, not to veer from the path. She knew this was a
journey she had to take, and she knew she could not shy away from what was
demanded of her. She tried to push from her mind the horrors that awaited her
on the far side of the Flames. A nation of trolls. Volcanoes, lava, ash. A
nation of evil, of sorcery. Unimaginable creatures and monsters. She tried not
to recall the stories she had heard as a child. A place where people tore each
other apart for fun, led by the demonic leader Vesuvius. A nation that lived
for blood, for cruelty.
    They dipped down
beneath the clouds for a moment, and Kyra glanced down and saw, far below, that
they were passing over the northeastern corner of Escalon. Her heart leapt as
she began to recognize the countryside: Volis. There were the hills of her
hometown, once so beautiful, now a scab of what it once was. Her heart fell at
the sight. There in the distance lay her father’s stronghold, the fort, all now
in ruins. It was a great heap of rubble, scattered with untended corpses
sprawled in unnatural positions, visible even from here, looking up at the sky
as if to ask Kyra how she could have let this happen to them.
    Kyra shut her
eyes and tried to push the image from her mind—yet she could not. It was too
hard to just fly over this place that had once meant so much to her. She looked
up toward the horizon, toward Marda, and she knew she should continue on, but something
inside her could not bring herself to just pass over her hometown. She had to
stop and see it for herself before she left Escalon, on what might be her final
journey.
    Kyra directed
Theon to dive down, and she could feel him resisting—as if he, too, felt driven
to stick with their mission and head to Marda. Reluctantly, though, he gave in.
    They dove and landed
in the center of what was once Volis, once a bustling stronghold filled with
life—children, dance, song, smells of food, her father’s proud warriors
strutting to and fro. Kyra’s breath caught as she dismounted and walked. She
let out an involuntary cry. There was nothing here now. Just rubble and
oppressive silence, broken only by the sound of Theon’s heavy breathing, of his
scraping the ground with his talons, as if he himself were enraged, as if eager
to leave. She could not blame him: this town was now a tomb.
    Gravel crunched
beneath Kyra’s boots as she slowly walked through the place, a gust of wind
ripping through from the scorched plains surrounding the fort. She looked
everywhere, needing to see, yet also needing to look away: it was like a
nightmare. There was Shopkeepers Row, now nothing but a long pile of charred
rubble; on her other side was the armory, now completely destroyed, a heap of
stone, its front gate caved in. Before her, the great, towering fort, where her
father had held so many feasts, where