Carnag vs town

Ahead of the autocoach, the road disappeared into a bowl-shaped pit that resembled a crater from a meteor strike. Two wagons lay upside down on the roof of a local inn. Several trees were white as snow—leaf, limb, and trunk. One home had no walls or roof, but the floor, chimney, and furniture remained neatly in place.

“What happened here?” Twitch moaned.

“You only get one guess,” Jace said.

“I know it was Carnag,” Twitch said. “But what did it do?”

“Those trees aren’t supposed to be white, are they?” Cole asked.

“No, it’s unnatural,” Mira said. “I also can’t imagine it’s easy to strip away the walls of a house without knocking over any furniture. We better take a good look. We might find some clues about what we’re dealing with.”

She started down the main street of the town. They passed a large tree propped against a sagging building, soil-clotted roots in the air, leafy limbs on the road. A section of the town was a smoldering field of charred rubble. One side of the tallest building still standing was crusted with pink coral. A granite boulder lay in the middle of a shop, having apparently crashed through the wall. For one stretch the street undulated, like a stormy sea that had paused, leaving an abnormal pattern of swells and troughs. Half of one house was gone, sheared off cleanly so as to reveal a perfect cross section of the inside, like a full-size dollhouse.

The street ended at a reedy lake. Drowned buildings poked out of the foul water for another hundred yards.

“The town is totaled,” Cole said. “How big is this thing? It looks like a giant had a temper tantrum. What can’t Carnag do?”

“Some of this might have been done physically,” Mira said. “But a lot of it had to be shaping—the lumps in the road, the coral, the house neatly sliced in half. Maybe all of it was shaping.”

Chapter 31