The hawk glided over the desert, starlight flashing on the tips of its golden wings.

  Below was a sunken depression in the earth where broken walls and doorways of loose brick hung their shadows over the sand, remnants of an earlier age. The basements and tunnels below provided cool shelter from the heat and a place for water to pool, and burrowing insects made their home here, the sand anchored around by the ruins. Where elsewhere the dunes would slowly migrate, sweeping across the waste towards places unknown, here there was stillness, silence.

  The earth was marbled with red and white laid out like the swirls of a marble, combed into lines that twisted and swerved across the waste. Yellowish vines pressed between the bricks and flowered out into thorned blossoms.

  We landed on a half-intact rooftop, and the sand below shifted slightly.

  The predators here were small. Antlions and trapdoor spiders lurked on the ground, hunting for the birds who came to pick the fruits from the bushes. The largest were things like the flatworm I had possessed to fight the mandril and on the whole the area was unimpressive. Of the seven locales of interest I’d scouted, I rated this least important.

  But still. There was something.

  In the sand a faint glow of Mana, a thin wisp tracing up from beneath.

  We hopped closer. The hawk was growing insolent as it thought of all the time it was missing with its mates, and I found the constant need to sooth its preening ego tiresome. The little war developing between us almost became a disaster as our foothold crumbled.

  The falling bricks carried us towards the ground in a landslide and our wings struggled to catch the air and lift us up.

  Something shifted.

  I felt Mana surge as the ground collapsed inwards, sand rushing through holes that yawned open and tumbled into a chamber below. A glint of crystal shone in the dark.

  And then the elemental came up. It’s body was still forming as it climbed towards us. Rocks rolled across the ground and snapped into place, forming a crude and simple body of earth with a faceless head and three-fingered hands. It crawled forward, furious, as we beat a hasty retreat into the sky, the hawk calling out defiantly- once he was safely out of range.

  An elemental.

  The form most people associated with elementals, this kind of crude humanoid formed from their base material, was really only the war-form. The shape they assumed when threatened or injured. Most elementals would wander the earth and slowly take on the shape of what they most admired. The ones who bonded with humans slowly became more human themselves, until they took the form of djinn. Others would latch on to a specific valley or lake or hill, falling in love with the land itself, and begin to call more of their fellow elementals together, until an entire colony would join together in fusing with the earth to form a Genius Loci - a sentience imbued into the land itself.

  Unfortunately, Genius Loci were fed by the leylines below the earth and extremely sensitive to the kind of wild, unfocused Mana the destruction of the world had released. I sincerely doubted there was a single one left alive.

  This elemental was clearly in the barely sentient stages, and stared up at us for a long moment before retreating back into its den. I slid from the hawk’s mind to watch it more fully, taking in the exposed pit, which had once been a basement library. The scrolls had long turned to rot in their racks but the gem remained, fused into an amulet of brass.

  Ah. That spelled things out with an unfortunate clarity. A love story that had gone wrong.

  An ancient thing guarding a grave.

  I would pass this place over for now.

  ---

  Two of the remaining points of interest lay in a low, depressed valley with steep walls where the rock was shorn smooth to reveal veins of dark grey-brown flint and white faults of sedimentary chalks, red and ochre banded down in everchanging shades.

  Flowers bloomed everywhere. A few had vibrant yellow colors, but the rest were completely white. In fact, they were stone.

  A single massive colony of interlocked flowers covered the western wall where the dawn’s light washed over the rocks. At a distance they looked like individual blooms, but their roots wove through solid stone to knot together, forming a great colony of bulbs like organs and feeling thin veins of green matter that sprouted out into the fragrant blossoms. This singular lifeform reminded me of coral colonies, how polyps would calcify into bony matter as they died to form an enormous reef on which the next generation grew. In the same way, these flowers would petrify into thin, fragile combs of stone that served to collect water. Slowly, very slowly, the colony would drink the condensation its dead ‘limbs’ collected.

  And in the meantime, a host of animals came to feast on the living flowers. Small, scrawny goats with hooves adapted to climb would scramble along the sheer edges, chasing away birds to chew on petals and drink nectar. They were likely the most disgusting things I’d ever seen; their chief defensive strategy was to vomit empty bile on themselves so they stinked of gastric juices, a scent almost every living thing found repulsive.

  More… aesthetically acceptable… were the spiders that hid among the flower colonies, spinning colored webs into the shape of a pseudo-blossom. As soon as a bird came near the whole trumpet of fine-spun silk would collapse into a brutal snare.

  Below, in the valley proper, the kings were thin-built lions with manes of bright red feathers and a sharpened ridge of bone along their head that served a similar focus to an axe-blade. They would grind against the walls to keep their blade sharp, and spent most of the hours along the shore of the little lake in the valley’s heart, flicking away gnats with their tails.

  The only animals that seemed to be able to keep their company were blue-scaled serpents with long doubled sets of diaphanous wings, similar to a dragonfly’s. Luminous glowspots tipped each wing, and while the beast couldn’t fly, it could make them buzz about in rapid motions that blurred the light out into stunning displays of color. For a moment the illusion of a predator’s staring eyes would form in the flickering glow, and even the lions would retreat in flight.

  On the other side, where a second lake gathered prey animals who weren’t willing to brave the lion’s company, I found equally strange company. Among thorn-headed lizards who drank the waters with flickering tongues and the like was a species of tortoise. Relatively unimpressive offensively, with a single beak-like tooth and a powerful jaw but little ability to finish off prey, the beast had simply insane regenerative powers. It had lost the ability to fully retreat into its shell, but as long as the precious organs stored within were intact, the head and limbs could regenerate. This same strength made it nearly immune to disease, and it cultivated septic poison on its long claws - they were simply so filthy with bacterial crops that its scratches would develop into festering wounds.

  The description brought me up short. It wasn't merely a rather stubborn old tortoise. In fact, it was neither old, nor a tortoise.

  Basking happily on the heat of a flat rock slab, chewing at leaves, was a hydra-spawn.