Chapter 20
The toy soldier, Tikdat, marched through the loose dirt and sand that constituted the southern road. The toy soldier was held by the rigidity of its form, but it snapped to every order that Azure thought to give it. The girl watched it trudge along the rocky terrain of its battlefield, lunge forwards suddenly, and crush a bug beneath one of its balled wooden fists. It had to work to maneuver the crushed insect between its spherical hands in order to pick it up and deposit it among the pile that it had managed to collect over the past hour that Azure had set it to the task. Before it tossed the insect carcass into the pile, it stopped and raised the still twitching corpse to show Azure.
Azure had never seen bugs like that before they had started to travel south from Coldport,
