We trekked for days and days, and days, more.  Heading in one orientation, southeast.  I tried my best to save faith; assured the conclusion would be better.  A thought, since I gave up the Almighter, glided into my skull, extending a bitter poison to rush through my body.  I doubted what exactly was I working towards.  Am I actually going to destroy Azergile.  Me, I don’t even know what he looks like, but I roam in this filth and for what?  What was this nightmare I insisted on myself?

The desert ruins shifted to a further sharp landscape.  Lines of metal spears stood out of the ground, and now we settled before a bizarre sight. That meaty flesh that flourished everywhere had overwhelmed this place as well.  Its fibrous turmored grip upon all that it felt.  Bodies laid about, as still as they were in an alarm.  Tangled as muscle fiber.  Twitching and wailing and in misery.  It startled me and I remained close to Velora, who didn’t seem troubled at all by them.

I couldn’t stand it any longer, I had to ask.  Their mouths etched in dismay.  They looked as though they were watching… like they were the living dead. “Velora, are they still alive?”

“Yes.” she replied in such a matter-of-fact expression.

On the drudgery, as if buried there, I glanced upon a man reaching out at me.  All he created was a beast like whine, calling out, and he moved towards me.  Held in the meat mass, I felt sorrowful for him.  His frame, weak, atrophied by degeneration; a withered skeleton, barely competent to grasp for me.  At the same moment, I was glad he was in that wicked dungeon.  Sadly, his mind faded into nothing further than a monster’s.  Chips with programmed responses.  I mistrust he was sentient… then again… maybe I was just comforting myself.

We happened upon an enormous pit.  It could devour the world.  In its depth a tone was erupting, howling, cruelty.  Whatever was down inside the gloom of the fleshy chasm, I did not want to know.  

“This is a horrible place.” I spoke.

“Its a former battlefield.” Velora commented.  “Long dead things wander.  This is the nano machines seeking to repair the world.”

I peered around at the arbitrary land of death around me.  “Repair, this is cruel.  Why would they produce this?”

“They are puzzled. Shredded flesh, blood and guts.  All that was in the soil here.  So they make flesh were there should be nothing.”

“You mean, where they find blood they think its supposed to be a body.”

“Not just anyone.  The person who spilled it.  However, there was so much blood spilled here it carried out this.”  Velora turns towards me.  “Or perhaps maybe its there sick joke.” Yeah right, a sick joke, she added.  Sure, why not?  The world was already wiped out. Why not make it worse?  Still, that did nothing to reassure my concern of what was in those pits. I settled against asking Velora.  She went on, “Its a battle field… what horrors do you consider the machine is working to revitalize.  Its a memory.  A vision of war and it illustrates the aspirations of everyone here.  To execute the enemy.  Its as if time had ceased for them.  They are now the specters of a land they ravaged.  Every breathing inch of this place will eternally be the misery they have enshrined themselves in.”

As we crossed through the alien flesh wilderness, I saw strange fauna like timbers.  Though there were more like split nerves standing tall; leafless.  Blood dripped off them like sap. They moved slightly when you walked near them.  Shrunk down as if in agony.  A red, black sky greeted us.  It must be morning, I thought.  Its rusty haze gleaming down.

I was struck on the rear with a blow as I come stumbling to the ground.  A considerable weight crushed me into the bloodstained soil as I let out a shriek.  Immediately my mouth enclosed by a firm restraint.  “Prina, quiet.” Velora whispers in my ear.  My blood went cold as she delivered the words.  My face against the gory flesh as Velora held me to the ground.  I can hardly see what is directly in front of my eyes, meat that stretched for miles, the base of one of those terrors that simulates a tree, and nothing more.

A light comes over the scenery, radiating down.  Drifting, gradually, over everything.  It swings as though swimming with lazy tail fin like motions.  Velora’s hoove on my back lifts as the light passes by.  When I picked up myself, my mouth fell.  Something in the open flying.  Hard shells and slither silky tentacles, an exceedingly large female human face, floating overhead.  It is… spectacular.  I peered at Velora with my feeble jawed and bewildered.  “Avoid it.  That is one of the watchers.”

“Watchers?” I asked.

“The watchers are Azergile’s henchmen.  They observe everything, and report to him.”

“Then we must be close.”

Velora laughs.  “No. They are all over the world.  They deliver to him through the air.  You are no closer to Azergile than you are to the moon.”

My heart plunged.  My journey was not showing up to its end, but rather just beginning.  A quick fear clutched me.  If I had to, no, I cannot think about such matters. “Then what is it searching for.” Velora turns aside, walking with her four mighty limbs.  “Velora… what is it looking for.”

“You.” she answered so plainly.  “And I don’t want to be here if it finds you.”