The morning goes well. Breakfast occurs with no more difficulty than usual. Marcus extols the virtues and talents of his daughter. Sigh cowers near Flesyhius, whose name people still struggle to pronounce, and Flesyhius speaks loudly and mildly pompously about everything going on around him. Beethro sits in silence, eating with a mild smile on his face. Despite the gloomy weather and the bizarre events of the following evening, everything is going well.
Except for Bill.
He sits on top of a nearby dune and stares out at the horizon. That magnetic effect is stronger now. No longer faint; he can see it clearly, like strange smoke twisting in flowing paths and blooming outward along the curve of the earth. It's gotten significantly more powerful, and its not simply because they've gotten closer to it. He gets the distinct feeling that whatever it is that's causing that effect is gearing up for something. He returns his plate with the food barely touched and waits anxiously for the rest of the team to get ready.
The path towards the towering pillar of magnetic flux takes them across a great deal of empty wasteland. They travel straight for 8 hours before coming across anything more interesting than a particularly large dune or windblown garbage that has collected in the valley between two high points. What they find is a town; or whats left of one. Its not a modern town either, its a pre-wizard settlement of dozens of structures. But they are all partially submerged within the dunes, and whats more, they appear to have fossilized. What was once a general store or a two story home is now resembles a white replica poking out of stone snowbanks. Marble facsimiles of homes half buried by an avalanche or sunk into the ground. No doors open, no windows can be peered through, nothing can be interacted with anymore than you might interact with a carved statue. It is simply a remnant, evidence of whatever created this place.
And in the middle of this phantom town, laid out carefully in several lines right down mainstreet, are bodies. Children's bodies. They're in varying states of decay, and some are little more than a collection of carefully arranged bones.