For two weeks, they pushed through land that shouldn't have been there; mountains arose where valleys used to be, rivers carved new paths through old fields. It was a mess. Reidar and Lena kept moving despite everything felt so alien, marching hard by day and camping at night.
Then Loden, or what remained of it, appeared on the horizon.
The small city sprawled across a hillside that had been split down the middle by the catastrophic force of the apocalypse. Buildings had been severed, their interiors exposed like dollhouses with the front walls torn away.
Roads ended in drops where new cliffs had formed. Massive boulders, each the size of a house, sat buried in streets and rooftops, crushing whatever lay beneath.
Vines snaked across storefronts and houses, threading through shattered windows and broken walls. Nature had taken the city back with wild, almost angry energy, like a garden gone completely mad.
