BEYOND THE WALLS

CHAPTER 2: THE WRONG TURN

The air in the muster yard was thick with the smell of oil, leather, and cold sweat. Three days after my meeting with Valerius, I stood with my assigned patrol team. We were five: Roric, a veteran with a permanent scowl and eyes that missed nothing; Lyra, a sharp-eyed scout whose lightness with the gear was legendary; Bren, a hulking man who carried the heavy signal launcher; and Finn, the youngest, whose nervous energy was barely contained.

Roric’s gaze swept over us, lingering on me. “Route Seven. A simple sweep. We map the canyon fissures, note any Behemoth sign, and return before sundown. No heroics.” His eyes drilled into me, a silent acknowledgment of our unspoken mission. “The Wall is our only landmark. You get lost out there, you’re dead. Move out.”

The Southern Gate groaned open, a sliver of the desolate grey world beyond widening before us. Stepping out was like entering a different realm every time. The air was thinner, colder, tasting of metal and dust. The Scarred Lands stretched out, a vast, broken plain of rock and dead earth under a perpetual twilight sky. The only color was the immense, curving grey stone of the Wall at our backs.

We moved in formation, the hiss of our gear the only sound besides the crunch of gravel. Roric led, his movements economical and precise. Lyra flitted ahead, a silent shadow scanning the horizon. I kept to the middle, my senses screaming, every nerve alive. This wasn’t a training run. This was the real prison yard.

For the first few hours, we followed the protocol. We mapped the fissures, deep scars in the earth that could swallow a man whole. We found the footprint of a Class Three Behemoth, days old, the crater large enough to stable a dozen horses. It was all textbook.

Then, we reached the marker for Route Seven’s turn-back point—a lone, jagged spire of rock.

Roric called a halt. He looked at the spire, then at the sun, then back at his map. He didn’t look at me. “The light’s wrong. Clouds are rolling in. I can’t get a clear bearing for the return leg from here.”

It was our signal. The pretense was beginning.

Bren frowned. “The protocol is to return now, Sergeant.”

“The protocol is to complete the mission,” Roric countered, his voice flat. “And my mission is to map the fissures. They run deeper west. We push on for another hour. We’ll use the canyon’s edge as our guide back.”

A tense silence fell. Bren and Finn exchanged uneasy glances, but they were soldiers. They obeyed.

We pushed west, beyond the sanctioned map. The landscape grew more severe, the rock formations more twisted. The air grew colder. Lyra, who had been silent, dropped back beside me.

“The sergeant is navigating by a different star today,” she murmured, her voice so low only I could hear. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Hero?”

I met her gaze. “The only star I follow is dead.”

She studied me for a long moment, then gave a curt nod. “Good enough for me.”

An hour stretched into two. The canyon we followed veered sharply north, taking us even further from our official route. The light began to leach from the sky, the twilight deepening into a foreboding dusk.

“Roric, this is far enough,” Bren insisted, his voice tight. “We’re off the map. We need to signal our position and loop back.”

“Soon,” Roric grunted, his eyes fixed on something ahead.

That’s when we saw it. Not a Behemoth, but something almost as alien. A structure. It was low to the ground, made of the same smooth, grey stone as the Wall, but overgrown with a strange, phosphorescent moss. It was a bunker, or a pillbox, ancient and weathered, its purpose utterly inscrutable.

“By the Makers…” Finn whispered, his earlier nervousness replaced by awe.

“Don’t,” I snapped, the word coming out harsher than I intended. “Don’t invoke them.”

We approached cautiously. There was no door, only a collapsed section of the roof. Roric gestured for silence. Lyra scaled the wall and peered inside, then dropped down, her face pale.

“It’s empty. But… you need to see this.”

We climbed in. The interior was a single, circular chamber. Dust motes danced in the beams of our hand-lamps. And on the walls, carved into the stone, were diagrams. They weren’t of geology or beasts. They were schematics. Lines of power. Conduits. And in the center of the main wall, a large, circular carving of a core, identical to the one in the Obsidian Behemoth, from which all the lines radiated like a spider’s web.

My heart stopped. This was it. Proof. This was a piece of the system.

“What in the world…” Bren breathed, his defiance forgotten.

“It’s a relay,” I said, my voice echoing in the dead space. I pointed to the lines connecting the core carving to smaller nodes. “A way station. For the signal that controls them.”

“Controls what?” Finn asked, his voice trembling.

“Everything,” I said, turning to face them. “The Behemoths. The Wall. This is how they’re managed. This is the machinery of our prison.”

A deep, resonant hum suddenly vibrated through the stone beneath our feet. It was the same hum I’d felt from the Obsidian Behemoth, but this was deeper, more pervasive, coming from the earth itself.

Lyra rushed back to the opening. Her report was a single, choked word. “Behemoth.”

We scrambled out. Cresting a ridge a mile away was a Common Behemoth, a Class Four, a shambling mountain of granite. But it wasn’t shambling. Its head was tilted, as if listening. Its glowing eyes were fixed directly on our position. It had not been patrolling. It had been summoned.

The hum from the relay station intensified.

“It’s the structure!” I yelled. “We triggered an alarm!”

The Behemoth let out a ground-shaking roar and began to move toward us, its pace deliberate, fast.

“Back to the canyon! Now!” Roric roared, all pretense of a mapping mission gone.

We ran, launching our anchors, swinging in desperate, frantic arcs. The Wrong Turn was over. We had found what we were looking for. And now, the prison was awake, and it knew we were loose. The hunt had begun.