Chapter 1225 — Beneath the Night Sky of Tarlond
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Listening to Colleta's account, Maggie lifted her slender neck and gazed out at the beacon devices on the distant wilderness, their lights pulsing in steady rhythm beneath the starry sky of the polar night—the war-scarred wasteland stretched away into the darkness, and the cold starlight fell upon wrinkled slabs of compacted rock and the uneven pockmarks of craters. A polar wind howled across the land, carrying the distinctive smell of some leaking contaminant, and there the beacons shone amid the ruins, sustained by small power modules and crude shielding, standing firm in the freezing wind and forming across the wilderness a thin, unbroken "border."
The beacon lights extended all the way to the end of sight, and compared with the endless lamps that had once blazed across the land of Tarlond, this faint glow was like so many fireflies—yet these fireflies were the safe territory the dragons had "gnawed" out of this cruel land through battle after battle. Beyond the lights lay a dead end where life could scarcely take root; within them lay the dragons' last remaining home.
As with every dragonborn who had ever had the chance to set foot on Tarlond, once Maggie saw this wasteland and the efforts the dragons had made to survive, all her imaginings of a "dragon homeland" crumbled bit by bit into reality—a reality that was none too lovely, but at least visible and tangible.
Colleta stood beside Maggie and raised one wing toward the distance. "This is the edge of the Orange Zone—under the current division, the Orange Zone also counts as part of the 'safe zone.' At least for extraordinaries and dragons with some ability to defend themselves, these areas are still survivable. On the other side of the lights is the Red Zone. See those brighter spots? Those are rest stations in the Red Zone. The warriors use those stations as nodes and are clearing the pollution and rifts from the Red Zone step by step..."
"And beyond the Red Zone?" Maggie asked suddenly. "Is there anything beyond the Red Zone?"
"There is—the Black Zone, the collective name for all areas of unknown status, including those that have been explored but are extremely dangerous and beyond our present means to handle. In fact, the Black Zone is most of what Tarlond is now—the explored areas, the Red Zone included, make up less than a tenth of the whole continent," Colleta said slowly. "Exploring the Black Zone is a tremendous risk. Only the most elite professional combat dragons can take on that duty, but we must explore those places. There are resources there we desperately need, factories that may still be running or worth repairing, and perhaps even dragon eggs—or kin trapped in the dark, waiting to be rescued..."
Maggie listened carefully to Colleta's account, a thoughtful expression on her face. After Colleta finished, she was silent for a moment, then said abruptly, "This material about advancing and rebuilding in the wasteland... could it be made public?"
"Public?" Colleta blinked, but quickly fell to thinking and gave a slight nod. "There's nothing secret about it. The council is even considering compiling this material into a booklet and distributing it to the reconstruction teams and adventurers from Loren as a reference—why, are you interested in this sort of thing?"
"Not me—our sovereign. I mean Emperor Cecil," Maggie said at once. "We're planning a counteroffensive into the Gondor Wasteland. You must know the place—a land ravaged by the magic tide, roamed by aberrations and other dangerous mutant creatures. The circumstances differ from Tarlond's, but the challenges we face are much the same—your experience on this land could be a great help to us."