Lander awoke much later. He sat up groggily, trying to remember what had happened. Then, he saw the ground around him covered with the mangled bodies of dead dragoons. Everything came back to him. He jumped to his feet. "Where is the king?" he asked himself. "I am sworn to protect him. Have I failed in my duty?"

Lander immediately left the inn, and went out into the town in search of the king. As he searched, he thought to himself, "So this is why we were sent to the border. There were rumors of disturbances, but no one told us we were being attacked by anything like that ghost army. We didn't stand a chance against them."

Suddenly, Lander turned down an alleyway, and saw huge black scorch marks on the walls of the buildings to either side of him. The street was scorched completely, and pitted and bubbly, as if had melted and then solidified. The roof of one building was burning.

Lander didn't see what could have caused the burning here. The entire town was full of dead dragoons and dead townspeople, but nothing else in the town had been burned into oblivion like this alleyway. Then Lander saw another pile of bodies lying in the road.

Lander wasn't sure what it was that drew him toward the heavily burnt corpses; possibly morbid curiosity, or maybe something more. Anyway, he went over to the bodies and turned them over so he could see their faces.

What he saw made him sink to his knees in despair. The faces staring up at him were those of the king, his highest general, his chief advisor, and a strange sorceror the king had been friends with. There had been some rumors about the sorceror being involved with some strange things that the peaceful citizens of the realm normally would never associate themselves with. One thing that no one doubted was that this sorceror was very powerful, and came from a land very far away from (the kingdom they are in right now; someone else think of a name).

A lot of good all his power had done him, Lander thought bitterly to himself. He got back up to his feet dejectedly and was about to leave the town, when he saw a small, bloodred ruby wrapped in an intricate design made of silver wire lying on the ground at the sorceror's feet. He picked it up, curiously. He knew someone who had something just like this. He pocketed it, and decided to go see Alstin. Alstin lived in a tiny village in the mountains just outside the kingdom. He would go talk to Alstin about this. It probably didn't mean anything, but he couldn't think of anything else to do right now. The kingdom was being destroyed and he couldn't do anything about it. No one could do anything against these creatures. Anyway, Alstin had been a lot of strange places, and knew a lot ot strange things, and Lander had a strange hunch about this. He left the ruined town, and began walking quickly towards Alstin's home in the mountains.