A few minutes later they finally left the city, reaching the vast expanse of grassland that covered millions of square miles between the Copper and Silver Mountains. Pars showed them how to move through the waist high yellow grass without leaving any trail, and when they spotted patrols of Shadowsoldiers in the distance they simply dropped to the ground, hiding in the grass until they were gone. Once, they spotted another flying wizard, and other times they saw Shadowsoldiers mounted on wyverns and griffins searching the ground, but none of them came close enough to trouble them. The Endless Plains were simply too vast to search effectively, and most of the enemy were still west of the city, chasing after Resalintas, who was leading them a merry chase.

     The next day, however, the number of searchers increased, and they deduced that the remains of the zombies and the bodies of Tilus and Rivan had been found, telling them that the spies had fled south. By now, though, the Beltharans had gotten too much of a headstart, and there was simply too much ground to cover. They had effectively escaped.

     For five days they continued south, and as they went the feeling of oppression and evil gradually diminished, telling them that they were approaching the edge of the Shadow. They had become almost used to the effect of the Shadow by then, becoming so accustomed to it that they hardly noticed it any more, but as it began to recede they realised how badly it had been affecting them, how it had been colouring their attitudes and personalities, making them more pessimistic, more prone to hopelessness and despair, more ready to just give up, lie down and wait to be found. Their minds had been trying to compensate for these effects by generating unusually strong feelings of optimism and hope, and as the effects of the Shadow began to recede, these feelings began to well up in their minds, making them light headed and happy. Almost drunk with renewed hope, in fact.

     Around early afternoon, they saw a line of brightness ahead of them and to their right, stretching halfway around the horizon. Faint at first, but getting steadily brighter as they approached until it blazed like fire. At first they thought that it was a grass fire sweeping towards them, but soon realised, with a surge of joy and relief, that it was the edge of the Shadow. The blazing brilliance was, in fact, only normal sunlight, appearing so bright because their eyes had become accustomed to the darkness.

     They hurried towards it, reaching it after another hour, and then stopped before it, staring at the wall of brilliance ahead of them, hardly able to believe that they had actually made it. Gallit stepped slowly forward, reaching out his hand to touch the light. He felt the very merest, barely tangible barrier separating the light from the darkness, which clung to him as he stepped through, followed by the others, only finally pulling free when he was several feet beyond it.

     "We made it!" cried Cheston joyfully. "Thank the Gods, we made it! We’re free!" He gazed thankfully up at the dazzlingly bright blue sky and the friendly yellow sun, shading his eyes against the light. The blue of the sky and the green of the grass seemed more bright and vivid than they'd ever been before.

     "Yes, we have much to thank the Gods for, particularly Lord Samnos," said Drake. "I suggest you join me in offering prayer to Him, in return for His help and the help you will very probably need from Him in the future." Gallit nodded, and the five of them stood with their heads bowed while the priest prayed out loud, leading a brief service of praise and thanksgiving to mark their delivery from the darkness and their return to the lands of the living.

     "There's just one more thing I want to do before we leave," said Drake when he'd finished. He went back to the edge of the Shadow and knelt down in the grass facing it. He selected a tall blade of grass that started just inside the Shadow, emerged from it about halfway up its length, and rose just outside it for the remainder of its length. It was almost perfectly upright, deviating by no more than a few degrees from being perfectly vertical.

     "What are you doing?" asked Gallit, joining him. The ranger also came up close behind to look, the grikon chirping curiously.

     "Look," said the young priest. He indicated the point at which the blade of grass emerged from the shadow. They stared at it, trying to see what he meant, and gasped in sudden surprise when they finally saw it. The darkness was creeping up the blade of grass, slowly but perceptibly.

     "You can actually see it growing," whispered Pars. Drake nodded. They had known that the Shadow was growing, but to actually see it was something else altogether. They felt a cold chill despite the warm sun at the thought of it slowly getting closer to their homes and families, taking decades and centuries, but growing so steadily and relentlessly that the final end was inevitable. One day, the whole world would be in Shadow, and if its growth accelerated with the outbreak of war, as they suspected it would, then the day when the last island of light and hope succumbed might not be so far away.

     "I want to measure it," said Drake. He plucked a grass stem, made two marks on it an inch apart, and laid it on the ground so that the first mark was at the very edge of the Shadow. "Let’s see how long it takes to reach the second mark," he said.

     He counted slowly and precisely, and by the time he'd reached three hundred the Shadow had almost reached the second mark. "Say about five minutes," he said, getting up. "The Shadow is growing at the rate of about an inch every five minutes. This fact will be of interest to our leaders. They'll want to be able to predict its progress, so they can make contingency plans."

     "Can we go now?" asked Cheston. "I hate being close to this place."

     "Yes, if our friend's finished, it's time we were getting the bloody hell out of here," said Gallit. "Have you finished?"

     Drake nodded. "Yes," he said.

     "Good. Let's get our arses off to the west then, towards the forest. No sense getting any bloody closer to the marshes."

     "I'm afraid we're just about in the marshes already," said Pars. "Notice how damp and spongy the ground is. Also, if I'm right, and I'm not often wrong, the worst part of the marsh is west of us. If you really want to go west, you'll have to go a little way north first, back into the Shadow."

     "No way!" said Cheston emphatically. "Nothing is ever going to make me go back in there!"

     "At last, a glimmer of sense from the man," said Gallit, giving him a crooked grin. He turned to the ranger. "So, which way should we go?"

     "South, I should think," said the ranger. "I've been here once before, and the part of the marshes ahead of us is one of the less dangerous parts, with plenty of firm ground and even the occasional village. We should be able to get through without too much trouble, and on the other side is the kingdom of Calmany, where we can arrange transport back to Ilandia."

     "Alright, south it is," said Gallit. "Let's get the drass out of here. I'd like to put a little distance between us and the Shadow before nightfall."

     "I second that!" said Cheston, as they started walking towards the Blackwater Marshes.

☆☆☆

     They covered another three or four miles before making camp for the night, and got the best nights sleep they'd had since entering the Shadow, seven days before. Cheston fell asleep on watch, and as a result it was midmorning before they woke up, feeling completely renewed and refreshed. He got an earful from Gallit for it, but none of the others could really blame him, knowing the strain they had all been under, and even the fearsome Sergeant didn't give him the full force of his powerful voice, satisfying himself with a few well chosen words of warning before letting it pass.

     They carried on south straight away, through grass that was gradually giving way to reeds and rushes and across ground that was increasingly damp and spongy. They kept going as long as possible, but soon found themselves sinking up to the ankles in the marshy ground.

     "How bad is this going to get?" Gallit asked the ranger.

     "In places, much worse," answered Pars. "You can sink and disappear completely into the ground in some places, and in other places there are great pools and lakes of open, salty water inhabited by all kinds of nasty creatures. We definitely want to stay away from them. However, we should be able to find one of the ridges of high ground that run through the marshes. They were made by the Agglemonians and had roads along them, and many of them are still intact even after all this time. They mostly run from north to south, so if we angle a little to the west, we should come across one sooner or later."

     "Did you say great pools and lakes of salty water?" asked Drake. "Why salty? We're nowhere near the sea."

     "No, but we're pretty close to Great Lake Megra, which is a salt lake. The sages say that it was once part of the Western Sea, but that the land between Ilandia and Pastora gradually rose over thousands of years, cutting it off. For a few centuries, all the land between the sea and the Great Lake was salty marshland, but it's gradually dried out as the land continued to rise, until now the Blackwater Marshes here and the Tzeentra Marshes along the coast of the Western Sea are all that are left, and one day they'll disappear as well. They say there'll be a mountain range here one day, millions of years from now."

     "You seem to know a great deal about this area," said Drake, impressed.

     "I'm a ranger," pointed out Pars. "I know a great deal about all the lands between the Copper Mountains and the Shadow, and quite a bit about lands further afield as well. You never know when an apparently useless fact will save your life."

     The going got steadily worse as the day wore on, until they were wading through knee high water and sinking into the mud beneath. They kept going as long as they could, but were soon forced to turn back towards firmer ground and head west, looking for one of Pars’s ridges of high ground. They failed to find one that day, but a couple of hours after sunrise the next day they were rewarded by the sight of a ridge of hard packed earth about twelve feet wide and three feet above the level of the surrounding marshes, almost completely covered by tough, shrubby growth. They clambered gratefully onto it and set off south again, along it.

     The shrubs were thick and spiny, and their clothing suffered a great deal of damage as they hacked and chopped their way through it. Here and there along the centre of the ridge they came across a tilted slab of stone, all that remained of the road that had once run there, and once they came across a milestone which, once a layer of moss had been scrubbed off, proclaimed that the town of Grannyham, which probably no longer existed, had once stood thirty two miles to the north.

     “How long until we reach Calmany?” asked Grey as they left it behind.

     “A few days,” replied the ranger. “We'll probably be there by the end of the week.”

     “Can't be too soon for me,” the Private replied, and the others agreed as they continued on their way.