IV
We came upon it in the night. Great fallen towers overgrown with weeds, twisted with vines and grasses and moss, tall and terrible and gray. Rusted. Ruined. A dead city. A cursed city. Sizzling pockets of foul air that burnt at my eyes and brought bile up in my throat. Smoke, and simmering, and shadows that lingered just out of sight, their edges unfinished and shifting—spirits or natives, I don’t know. Afiona had not wanted to leave the Imperial Road. She was frightened of natives lurking in the woods. But brigands had descended upon our travel caravan the week before, leaving us empty-handed and alone. We were desperate enough for food that I might have handled any natives that gave us trouble, had we not gotten so lost. But there, in that decaying and warped place we stumbled upon in the deepest, quietest wilds, we were undone.
—EXCERPT FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH XENIA WILDEN, CONDUCTED BY DR. SORREL NAEVIUS OF PAXENOS UNIVERSITAS. DATED 338 PQ.
Editor’s note: Xenia and Afiona Wilden were eventually found and recovered to Paxenos, where the story caught the public’s interest and popular imagination. A series of expeditions were launched along the north Fornian coast in the late 330s and throughout the 340s to find their “dead city.” Each was unsuccessful, and the sisters’ claims have since been largely discounted as a hoax. Afiona Wilden died of smoking fever in 339 PQ.