Among the destroyed buildings, under the gentle light of the sunset, two young women walked slowly, as if on a stroll. One directly along the road, or at least it was once such - only pieces of molten bricks and broken asphalt remained from it. Although she walked barefoot, she did not even look at her feet, somehow managing to avoid stumbling. The second one walked at a distance, not wanting to deal with the path that looked like it came out from someone's sadistic imagination. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she stopped, peering into something in the distance.

  “Hey,” the first one called out to her in an unexpectedly deep voice.

  Whoever you asked, no one would call her an adult, so petite she looked. But this was not only unusual. She was Asian girl with dazzling white hair barely covered shoulders, and her only visible right eye was navy blue, while the left one was hidden behind a bandage, as dirty as her dress. Probably both were once white, but their current shade was like something between gray and brown.

  “Karina!” she raised her voice only a little, but it still echoed.

  In Karina however, if anything was special, it was only that there was nothing special at all, in contrast to her companion. Medium height, although against white-haired she seemed pretty tall, a light-brown bob, gray eyes, T-shirt with sort of baggy pants and a sneakers - clothes clearly chosen out of comfort, without the slightest claim to beauty.

  “Huh?” she replied lazily.

  “We're not walking in the park after all. What's in there?”

  “That cloud,” she pointed with a finger, “Looks exactly like a whale copulating with a kitten.”

  The white-haired girl clicked her tongue.

  “Suppress your instincts even more, then one day you’ll definitely begin to see nonexistent stuff” she said in a displeased tone. “It's just a cloud. And it looks like a cloud. And in general its shape is round. Such beauty is everywhere, but she examines only clouds.”

  “You have strange concept of beauty,” Karina replied and kicked a skull lying in the way, so it rolled away. “Devastation and bones, almost sure human, everywhere.”

  “That’s not me, who turned most of the planet into this,” the girl said sarcastically. “It’s even not fair of you to ignore the consequences of your own actions.”

  “Round and round,” she sighed, “If I remembered at least something of what you ascribe to me, maybe it would make sense. Whatever. My legs are aching already - we wander all day, and see no one. Are you even sure the wizard is here? After all, this town doesn’t look like as if anyone can live in it.”

  “But all you need is to look around,” the other one sighed this time. “We have already arrived.”

  Although Karina became uncomfortable from her absent-mindedness, she did not show it, instead began to intensively explore the surroundings.

  A building, bones, a building, a mountain of bones, another mountain of bones. And nothing instead of that.

  “I don’t want to admit it, but I don’t see him. Nowhere.”

  “It would be strange if you seen,” the white-haired laughed, “At least, you finally focused on why we are here.”

  Karina looked at her, tilted head doomily, but decided not to answer anything else, fairly judging that this will only waste much more time. So, having resigned herself, she just continued to walk, following the girl.

  When the sun had completely disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving behind only a reddish line in the sky, they finally stopped near a decent size of a pile of bones, enough to hide a small house under it. The girl immediately began to rake the bones with her hands, while Karina decided to just wait. Well, she wanted, but it would be strange if the second did not notice.

  “Wouldn’t you like to join?” she asked. “Only you complained that we spent all day here.”

  “Somehow it is not very hygienic,” Karina answered, “These are bones, it’s not clear whose and where from. What if they’re even contagious?”

  “Oh, really, how could I not have thought about it,” she said, demonstratively plopping down on the ground and crossing her legs. “Fine, let's wait until these remains turn to dust on their own.”

  “Sometimes you are unbearable,” Karina grimaced, but instead of engaging in an obviously senseless skirmish, she came up and carefully, almost with her fingertips, began to pull out the bones.

  White-haired girl, either out of naughtiness or for some other reason, remained sitting. As a result, Karina raked the pile herself. However, only about five minutes were a limit for her patience - not a trace of disgust remained, and she was already scooping out the bones to the full length of her arms.

  In the end, someone's head appeared, and the two of them stretched out the body, which turned out to be a man of, who knows, how many years old, so emaciated that if it were not for the presence of hair, it might not have been noticed among the remains at all. Karina shuddered.

  “Is he even alive?”

  “Almost. The domain hasn’t yet been destroyed, although it doesn’t extend beyond the body.” the girl answered. “But if it bothers you – feel free to check his breathe.”

  She shuddered again.

  “No thanks.”

  “She herself wants to know, but she expects the answers would fall from the sky”, she gazed at Karina. “Come in. We've really been here too long, it'll be a shame if we're late.”

  Karina, continuing to struggle unsuccessfully with disgust, sat down next to a man and carefully touched the forehead of a lying body, which vaguely resembled a human, with a finger. She closed her eyes and began to dive into the fluid darkness. After a few seconds, when she felt the hover, she tried to see something through the darkness, but it remained unchanged.

  “Belyana,” she called in a muffled voice, as if heard through the water column. “There's nothing here.”

  “Every time I’m surprised how little patience you have, but how long do you able to tolerate anything, when you don’t need to do it at all”, Belyana’s voice answered in a monotonous sound right in her head, even when it was clear from the phrase itself, that her real tone was, at least, not neutral. “You yourself saw that he was barely alive. Obviously, there is almost nothing left on the surface.”

  “If everything is so obvious to you, maybe you want to dive instead of me?” she waited for an answer, preparing the most stinging arguments that only came to her mind, but there was only silence. And the feeling of annoyance that constantly, as soon as she actually can talk back, Belyana begins to simply ignore her.

  The darkness pressed more and more. The deeper she sank, the stronger the pain became, started from the eyes and eardrums, now spreading throughout the whole body. She began to feel what a little more, and she would simply be flattened into a meat ball. But as soon as she surrendered and was about to emerge, with a loud painful pop and a bright flash, the pressure disappeared so abruptly, that it even seemed to her for a moment as if she had exploded.

  The night sky, full of stars of all colors of the rainbow, was the first thing she saw while stood on it. Or not. Fragments of land of all sizes floated in space in random positions. On some of them, quite familiar flowers and trees grew, on some - an unimaginable something, which was also flowers, judging by the petals and leaves. But unlike plants, they marched and snapped jaws full of teeth, similar to those of a bear, either saying something silently, or frightening someone.

  “Hey!” Karina shouted, listening to the echo and unnaturally twirling her head, like a locator, trying to find a direction from which it would not return.

  The marching flowers stopped, turning towards the source of the sound, and immediately jumped in her direction. She hesitated, but quickly came to her senses, took a piece of land about a size of a small island, hovered nearby, as if it weighed nothing, and threw it into a kind of army. The island remained where it was, while Karina herself, with a completely unimaginable speed, was thrown to the opposite direction. She flew, however, only an instant, after which she fell to the ground of the planet that was in the way, leaving a giant crater with her landing.