As she listened to Coletta's account, Maggie raised her long neck and gazed out at the beacon installations blinking rhythmically beneath the starry sky of the polar night. The scarred Wasteland of War stretched into the darkness, cold starlight shining over wrinkled, hardened rock strata and uneven shell craters. Polar winds howled across the land, carrying the distinctive smell of a Polluting Substance leak. Yet the beacons gleamed amid those ruins. Powered by small energy modules and protected by crude shelters, they stood firm in the cold wind, forming a thin yet unbroken "frontier" across the wilderness.
The beacon lights stretched all the way to the end of her line of sight. Compared with the endless lights that had once shone across Tarlonnd, these faint glimmers were like fireflies. Yet those fireflies marked the Safe Territory the dragons had carved out through countless bloody struggles on this cruel land. Beyond the lights lay a wasteland where life could scarcely survive. Within them lay the dragons' last remaining home.
Like every dragonkin who had ever had the chance to set foot in Tarlonnd, Maggie found all her imaginings of the "dragons' homeland" gradually collapsing into reality after seeing this wasteland and the dragons' efforts to survive. That reality was far from beautiful, but at least it was something she could see and touch.
Coletta stood beside Maggie and raised one wing toward the distance. "This is the boundary of the Orange Zone. Under the current classification, the Orange Zone is also considered a Safe Zone. At least for Supernatural Beings and dragons with some ability to protect themselves, these areas are still habitable. On the other side of the lights is the Red Zone. See those brighter spots? Those are rest stations in the Red Zone. The warriors use those rest