Naomi, Ashley, and Mayra crept slowly towards the edge of the cliff.
"This seems unwise," Naomi swallowed her fear as she followed behind the others.
"The others will watch our children for a short time," Mayra assured her, "I just need to know what's happening!"
"And if we let her go off alone, she'll get into terrible trouble," Ashley winked at Naomi to diffuse a bit of the tension.
"It's just unfair we're left behind. Finn got to go!" Mayra said over her shoulder.
"Finn's children were all old enough to fight, in their ways," Ashley glanced back towards the camp of children and the women left behind to keep them. Her eldest son, at nine years old, resented being left behind.
"You're angry about being left out of a war?" Naomi struggled to clarify what was going on in Mayra's head. She knew some women's minds underwent enormous strain after having a child, but that was beyond what would be expected from a seasoned mother like Mayra.
"Not angry, per se," Mayra frowned, "but intensely curious."
Curiosity was an aspect of her friend's personality that Naomi had never fully grown used to, but she wanted to make sure her friend didn't get hurt!
"Don't go too close to the edge," She warned quietly. Ashley snickered.
"You won't make Mayra be any more careful by telling her to be careful," She warned. "She's stubborn as anyone ever has been."
"Steadfast. Stalwart. Not stubborn," Mayra chided teasingly, but her voice fell quiet as she finally topped the rise.
"Oh."
The single syllable fell flat in the face of what they could see below. Naomi gasped and held a hand to her mouth.
At such a height, the details of the carnage were blurred and indistinct, but their severity was absolutely undeniable.
The city was desolation. It looked as if not a building remained standing. Enormous corpses of various creatures lay broken and bleeding, humans interspersed amongst them. A Leviathan lay on the shore of the vast lake, mortally wounded. Naomi's heart was frozen with fear. The sight was made all the more eerie by the strange combination of light and shadows flooding across hilly Klain.
"There," Ashley pointed at the ground where a monster with several heads wailed and thrashed, demolishing everything in its vicinity. A motionless giant lay next to him, bleeding a veritable river of blood that seeped towards the water around the city.
The lake seemed diluted with blood. The sky flashed with lightning and dark shadow, and Something above caught the attention of the women.
"Look!" Ashley grabbed their hands and held them as the three ladies watched overhead.
A dragon–for that is all such a monster could be called–soared in the sky, spurting great swaths of black flames from its mouth in between vicious attacks against a figure of light all three of them recognized from his appearance in the mountains.
"Will he win?" Naomi asked fearfully.
"The Sorcerer cannot lose," Mayra asserted. "That would be impossible. If he made all things, he can certainly defeat something that lives in his worlds."
"Then why is he having such trouble?" Ashley whispered.
None of them could look directly at the conflict, so cosmic and unthinkable was its battle, but Naomi looked another direction before she ducked. "Gargoyles! Get down!!"
She flattened her belly to the ground, and Mayra and Ashley followed suit. Thankfully, there was such an outpouring of blood upon the earth that the creatures didn't seem to notice the women high above.
"This is terrible," Naomi felt tears streaming down her face, but could do nothing to stop them. Everyone except the young children and some of the women were down below. All of humanity's survival depended on this battle, for if the forces of good lost, there would be no fleeing for the rest.
"Should we move the children further from the conflict?" Ashley pursed her lips, as if calculating the distance.
"That will not matter," Mayra shook her head, echoing Naomi's thoughts. "If we win, we need not flee. If we lose, fleeing will do little good. The Sorcerer keeps us safe, and we must trust."
"We should go back, the children will need us," Naomi tugged at Ashley's sleeve. The General's wife nodded vaguely, but her eyes searched below.
"I can't see him," She whispered. "I can't see Riley."
"It's impossible to recognize someone from so far, in such darkness," Naomi tried to reassure her. "I can't make out any of the individuals."
"There," Mayra pointed back towards the main conflict. "I had Peter tie my yellow handkerchief to his belt. I saw a flash of yellow…"
Naomi frowned. That had to be wishful thinking on Mayra's part. There was no way to see so far.
"We should go back…"
"The forces are consolidating," Ashley's voice rose with excitement, "I think they're regrouping to kill that monster. It must be Beast."
Naomi settled back down beside them, incredibly uneasy. It was clear they weren't moving, and she wasn't going to be able to convince them to come until they had seen something more definitive or caught sight of a loved one still living.
Surely, some of them were still living.
Naomi didn't try to search for Caspian. There would be no way to spot him from here. At least, that's what she told herself as she caught her eyes trying to scan the broken city streets for some sign of the one-eyed Cetoan man.
She closed her own eyes for a moment to pull up an image of his beloved face. Now, just when they had finally gotten a houseful of children, she might lose him… another tear escaped at the thought, but she pushed it away.
There would be time for mourning if and when she learned of his death, and not a second before.
Still, looking at the ground was a fruitless task, in her opinion, so she turned her eyes to the sky.
The dragon's sharp claws slashed at the lighted figure, and a wave of black rolled outward. The world seemed colder for a moment. Was the Sorcerer hurt?
She would give anything for a flash of sunlight, a single beam to break through the darkness and give light to everything. It was too much to watch the Darkness try to consume the world.
The figure of light wielded a sword too bright to look at directly, and Naomi's eyes protested her efforts to look, but she felt she had to try.
The battle was fierce and daunting, and Naomi involuntarily scooted away from it.
"I don't think we are meant to see all this," She said nervously. Normally a woman of few words, she was prompted again and again to try to get the women to leave this dire sight. "The images will not be easily forgotten."
"I never want to forget this," Mayra turned to eye her. "This is too important to ever let die or fade from memory. Our great-grandchildren must know the story of this day."
Ashley nodded. "Mayra's right. As gruesome as it is… some things need to be remembered forever."
Naomi swallowed and looked at her hands. The one clutching Ashley's was white as she gripped it too tightly, yet she could not relax her grip. She concentrated for a moment on breathing, in and out. These past months had been a whirlwind.
She thought back to that day on the beach. Peaceful, charming, washing clothes and wriggling her toes in the sand, until an enormous rock fell from the sky and ruined everything.
Her home, destroyed. Her way of life, demolished. The water, poisoned, and her entire culture thrust into a state of barefoot refuge-seeking that had resulted in moving in with Finn and Roland.
Then, that home, too, was threatened. They fled again, towards the mountains, pausing long enough to collect a ragtag family of orphans that had enriched her life more than she could say, before going higher into the mountains.
Another home, destroyed, as she now saw below. It was as if not a single stone was left to rest upon another. The coalescing forces smashed into one another, a mysterious group of white-clad soldiers she didn't remember seeing before spearheading into the forces of Darkness.
And there was much Darkness. She shivered, wondering if any of these creatures had ever been in that world without sound or light, lurking and waiting for the Void's commands to attack, or whether all these had been gathered from other places as this world absorbed the others.
As Naomi watched above and below, a paralyzing fear and awe kept her from suggesting again that they leave. If Caspian found out she had been so close to danger, he would be upset, but suddenly, as if Mayra's curiosity was contagious, she needed to know the fate of their world, for good or for ill.
The sky suddenly split in a shocking array of light and shadows as the figure of light plunged his sword deep into the dragon's chest.
Naomi gasped. Was it over? Was this the end?
The dragon's horrifying screech of rage made the hope die in her throat.