Nightmare journey

dumb and senseless as it was-wither rapidly, as if it had no desire to flourish beside that blasphemously barren land that had long ago been consigned to the rule of the Ruiner. The trees dwindled, grew sickly and bent, changed in color from fresh green to an unhealthy brown-yellow. The undergrowth, too, developed new character, became somehow threatening, thornier, laced with ropy vines like tentacles, ugly and cold and clearly mutated far beyond Lady Nature's original design.
    Tedesco lead the way, carrying both of the antique rifles, which Jask, somewhat against his will, had shown the mutant how to use. He led them off the obvious paths and approached the entrance to the Wildlands as if he expected to find Pure sentries guarding the way.
    Jask followed.
    Shortly they came to the end of the forest, where they had to hunch over in order to remain hidden by the dwarf trees. They stared across the hundred yards of utterly bare earth to the place where the Chen Valley Blight began, and they saw all of this:
    •prisms rising up, towering overhead like the monstrously crested waves of an alien sea, jagged-edged against the comparably unspectacular blue of the sky, appearing to ebb and to flow, shift and wash as water on a beach, but in reality as stationary as the stone Jask felt he had been turned into;
    •bright sunlight dancing along the brittle edge of the waves, piquing them with what might have been seafoam but was actually as insubstantial as the air, a tangible and frothy glare;
    •color, riotous color, reds and blues and greens and yellows, burgundy and black, orange and crimson, amber, emerald, violet, sienna, countless subtle shades both bright and pale, shimmering, writhing, moving as if they were alive, color so full of activity that it appeared to be sentient;
    •tunnels in the waves, winding caverns, boring holes, shelves, culs-de-sac, some large enough to admit the two of them, others only big enough to pass Jask Zinn, channels into the heart of the bright, hard sea, which made the massive structure seem, abruptly, less like a sea than like a mammoth growth of coral…
    “Bacteria jewels,” Jask said.
    They stretched on either hand for several miles, glittering until they fell away beyond the curve of the horizon, a numbing extravaganza of explosive tint, related to the clump of bacteria jewels that served as a landmark between the enclave and the tainted village from which they had fled, but much larger than that tiny growth, inconceivably more extensive.
    “How far-” Jask inquired, pointing stupidly, his slim hand trembling before him.
    “A hundred miles,” Tedesco said.
    “That much?”
    The bruin seemed humbled by the display fully as much as Jask was. “Perhaps twice or three times that,” he said.
    “So bright.”
    “Even brighter by dark,” Tedesco said. “Likely, it is no older than the formation that stands outside my village-but has found some richness in the soil or the air, or in some other circumstance, which caused it to sprawl so.”
    “The Ruiner caused it,” Jask said, adamant.
    Tedesco said, “There is no such creature.” He turned away from the soaring wall of luminescence, looked both ways along the barren no- man's-land between the stunted woods and the Wildlands. “We seem to be alone.”
    Jask said nothing. As Tedesco stood and beckoned him to follow, as they stepped out onto the dark, dead soil, he drew his knife, looked at the blade and wondered where best to drive it into himself. He did not want to linger. He wished a swift death.
    His suicidal reverie was interrupted by a barked, military command in a voice he knew too well: the General. An instant later the sound of prewar weaponry ripped apart the stillness of the borderland as the Pure soldiers sought to get the espers properly in their sights.
    “Quickly!” Tedesco shouted.
    The earth boiled up, foamed like a mad creature, settled into slag at Jask's feet.
    Unthinking, terrified, he leaped across the molten pool and ran after the lumbering man-bear.
    The General issued another command.
    A bolt of energy caught one of the reaching tips of the wavelike upper structure of the bacteria jewels, shattered that into a fine, bright dust, like glassy snow that settled over them.
    “Here!” Tedesco called, turning, standing beside one of the larger channels between the arms of bright crystals.
    Jask ran toward him.
    Tedesco opened fire on the soldiers who had ventured out onto the baked surface of the unfertile land. One man screamed,