There were no markers here, no headstones or monuments or mausoleums to the hundreds of machines that lay dead in the heather and grass. Their hollowed carcasses almost covered the ground entirely, starting from a hundred steps down the hilltop from where the observers stood, sweeping into the craterlike valley and then climbing the slopes on all sides, here and there actually lying dead on the hills surrounding the hollow. Some looked as if they had been consumed by fire in their last moments, stony protrusions burned black and melted smooth by the heat. Others had died and rotted down slowly, settling into their final resting places as the living tissues that supported them slowly returned to dust. The smallest machine was as large as a man, its spindly iron legs rusted centuries ago into its final stance, and now almost rotted through by the trials of time and climate. Its shell held only air now, where before its workings had merged in metallic and biologic symphony. There were constructs the size of a horse, others even larger, and one, in the low center of the valley, that must have shaken the very ground it once rolled across. It was as large as a dozen farm wagons, its smooth stone shell curved and notched like the carapace of a giant beetle. Its back bore holes at regular intervals, and a few of them were surrounded by the bony stumps of what may once have been legs, or other less obvious limbs.

The land had continued to grow around this place of death and decay. Grasses grew strangely long and lush on the valley floor, fed perhaps by the water that must gather there from the rains. Bushes and small trees had forced their way between and through the dead machines, protruding from gaps in the constructs’ bony skeletons and metal cages, pressing through cracks where perhaps there should be none, doing their best to subsume these echoes from the past into this stranger, less happy present. Several large trees had sprouted here since the Cataclysmic War, their roots set deep, their boughs and trunks grown around or through dead things. One trunk had split in two and joined again, trapping within itself the rusting metal limb of a large handling device. It clasped the iron like a wound holds an arrow, and though sickened by the rusting metal its growth still seemed a success.

The shades of old machines—the grays of stone, blackened fire-stained limbs, the dark orange of rusting things—were complemented by the brave greenery of the plants trying to hide them from sight. Giant red poppies speckled the solidified hide of one machine like recent wounds. Yet the dead could never be truly hidden. They were too many, too large, and now a permanent part of the landscape.

“They came here to die,” Hope said.