by Eric Vall
Drew and Doc looked to one another with worried expressions, and Drew hung his head as he sighed. Then he glanced back to us with his arms crossed.
“We hoped she was with you,” he replied.
My heart sank, and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a bunch of rocks.
“She didn’t come back here?” I asked incredulously.
“Sure hasn’t.” Doc hung his head with a frown. “We haven’t heard from her since she left with Layla.”
“That was weeks ago,” I said as I laid out the facts. “She stayed with us in an underground tunnel in the Hartmire Enclave after it collapsed, but then she said she was coming back to you guys here.”
Drew shook his head and pursed his lips.
This was bad, really bad. If Ashla wasn’t here, then where could she possibly be?
“We heard about the fall of Hartmire, but news doesn’t travel fast out here, especially when all trade is shut down while the town is rebuilt,” Doc told us. “Was there anything even left of it?”
“Hardly,” I replied tersely. “Two thirds of the Enclave was completely leveled. They were still finding bodies beneath piles of debris when we returned to Varle a few days ago.”
I launched into the tale of everything that had happened since I last saw Drew, when we went our separate ways in the Shadowscape. I told him about the battle with Phi and rescuing Nia. I told him about the council arresting us as soon as we returned to Varle the first time and the details leading up to the giant rift in the Hartmire Enclave. I told him the trying adventures in the Narufey and how we’d rescued Varleth and Braden from the animadu bounty hunters. And finally, I told him about the events of the previous night, and how Gawain and I squared off against Antoine in a sky fight after he attempted to take Sleet’s life under the direction of Councilwoman Miriam Sharpay.
“This is a lot to unpack,” Drew exhaled deeply, and he scrunched up his features like he was having an internal debate with himself.
“Something wrong?” I asked with my hands on my hips.
Drew shook his head again, then stared at the ground for a moment before he met me eye to eye. His expression was riddled with concern, and he looked almost as if he were in pain.
“There may be some place else you can find Ashla before you consider her missing in action,” he blurted out finally. “There’s a small village about a days ride from Bedima. It’s completely surrounded by small forest, but I imagine it would be easy to spot from an airship.”
“What makes you think she’d be there?” Erin asked, and she quirked her brow in question.
“The place is called the Village of Gol,” Drew divulged with a frown. “It’s what remains of Ashla’s home.”
I stood in stunned silence for a moment. Of course Ashla had a home. That wasn’t shocking to me. I suppose what took me by surprise was I hadn’t once considered she had a family or home to go to because she was always wandering. I knew there were men in the Wild Reds who had mouths to feed other than their own, though. Maybe she also had a family to care for?
“I don’t give you that information lightly, Gryff,” Drew told me. “I’m worried about her. If she isn’t there, then we have to find her.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied without hesitation. “We’ll go there. We’ll find her.”
I felt Varleth’s and Erin’s eyes on me as I made my declaration. I knew they were worried about our own mission, and they should have been. In that moment, though, I was ready to drop everything to find Ashla. I just had to hope it didn’t come to that.
Either way, we couldn’t do this mission without Ashla, so we needed to find her.
“Before you leave again,” Doc butted in and held out his arm, “take this.”
In his wrinkled palm he held a dark metal ball that looked to be comprised of several scrapped pieces and carefully crafted together with something blue swirling within the cracks.
I looked at it closely and poked it with the tip of my finger.
“What is that?” Varleth asked as he, too, leaned in closer.
“An ice bomb,” Doc replied gleefully.
I glanced at him with skepticism. “Come again?”
“An invention of my own making,” he boasted. “Merely push your mana through it, smash it to the ground, and boom! An ice spell of epic proportions!”
I chuckled at his enthusiasm and gripped the apple sized orb in my hand. It had a bit of weight to it, but no more than the fruit it was sized like, which was shocking due to all of the metal involved.
“You had time to create something like this during the restoration?” I asked jokingly.
“On the contrary, Gryff,” he replied with a short laugh, “I put my abilities to use whilst the rift was closed at night.”
I grinned and slipped the ice bomb into the pouch at my side. That would certainly come in handy when facing a volcano, assuming we found Ashla, of course.
“You’d best be off,” Drew said. “If everything you’ve said is true, and I believe it is, then time is of the essence.”
“Thanks for understanding,” I told them. “I know all of this is a little maddening.”
“The world is a bit mad, my boy,” Doc laughed. “So long as you keep your head about you, you’ll make it out just fine.”
“Be safe,” Drew cautioned, “and if you do find Ashla, bring her back to us, would you?”
“You bet.” I nodded, and we waved farewell before we headed off to our next destination, the Village of Gol.
As Drew had said, it was nearly impossible to miss from the sky. The small forest he’d described was more like a moderately thick ring of trees around an even smaller village. There were maybe only eight standing structures amongst what looked to be almost triple the amount of burned and charred debris. Just to the north of the village was another small clearing that was very obviously a cemetery, and I had a feeling I knew exactly what happened here.
Erin landed the airship just on the outskirts of the trees a few hours after we left Baalvan. If there was ever a path that led into the village, it had been overrun with ferns and flowers, and we were left to navigate around the tree trunks while being mindful not to step on the flowers.
“Do you think Ashla even wants to be found?” Erin questioned as she took a high step over a patch of wildflowers. “I mean, I know if I were running away, I would do it with the purpose of not being found.”
Varleth and I both snorted with laughter, because she had a point. No one ran away with the intention of anyone following them.
“Probably not,” I answered honestly as I ducked under some moss, “but whether she wants to be found or not is irrelevant when the world is in danger by the hands of demonic monster angels and a dried up turd of a councilwoman.”
“Geez, tell us how you really feel,” Varleth teased, and I heard Erin stifle a giggle.
I grinned as we continued through the small thicket of trees and almost immediately after came out the other side into the village. To say it had seen better times was an understatement. The village looked like it hadn’t seen an ounce of joy in years, and I felt heavier just walking into it.
The houses, at least what was left of them, were all run down wood with faded cloth coverings over their windows. Rock and weeds overran the terrain in some places, mostly on the piles of what I could only assume used to be more houses.
I stopped in front of one of the piles and knelt down to examine a small carved placard mounted to a cement pedestal.
“The Bergen Family: Kritso, Meril, Kimmy, and Bo,” the placard read.
“This must have been the people who lived here,” I mused.
“I think that’s a safe deduction,” Varleth commented solemnly. “They’re in front of all of them.”
I stood up and looked around again. Sure enough, Varleth was right. There were pedestals in front of all the destroyed homes in the village, and I was starting to think this whole place was one giant cemetery. Was anyone even here? No one entered the stre
ets upon our arrival, which was weird, given how small the community was. In towns and villages like this, when there weren’t many visitors, everyone always came out to greet the newcomers. They were always curious, though wary of new faces, but there was none of that here.
“Gryff, look.” Erin pointed to a rubble pile at the other end of the village.
In front of it was a figure cloaked in midnight blue.
“Hello?” I called out to them, but I didn’t receive any kind of response. I motioned for Erin and Varleth to follow me, and we stalked closer. I couldn’t make out any visible features, if there were any, but the closer we got to them, the more I thought the figure was a woman due to her shorter stature. Was this person …
“Ashla?” I asked carefully.
This time, there was a response. The cloaked figure looked at me, I thought, though I couldn’t see their eyes under the shadow of their hood.
When we stopped, however, they took a step back and allowed me to stand where they had been before. I took their spot tentatively and looked over the ruins of yet another destroyed house with a placard.
“The Praxis Family,” I read aloud. “Dex, Thessa, Mar, Erol, and … ”
I faltered. Of course this was her house.
“Ashla,” the figure beside me finished in a near whisper.
Varleth and Erin looked up at her, and I turned to face her fully. A strong gust of wind pushed her hood back and revealed Ashla’s gorgeous face. She looked tired, her eyes sunken in, as though the light from them had been completely taken away.
“What happened?” I asked, even though I had a pretty good guess.
Ashla took a long, shuddering breath, and she looked back at what used to be her home.
“I was thirteen when a rift opened outside of the village,” she began. “You saw our numbers as you came in. We didn’t have a chance to defend ourselves. They were only small game, some imps, a few chatteroshi, but it was enough for this town to take a devastating hit.”
I nodded. I knew very well how small towns and villages such as this didn’t have the same kind of defenses in place that larger ones did. Hell, even Balvaan suffered massive losses, and they were at least ten times the size of this village, if not twenty thanks to the amount of imports and exports they produced.
“Everyone who survived moved on and left the village,” Ashla continued. “They moved on to bigger towns and cities better equipped to handle monster attacks. All that remains is this, a stamp in time, a forgotten village turned cemetery.”
“What about your family?” I asked cautiously. I knew this couldn’t be an easy thing for her to talk about.
“My parents were burned alive by the fires,” Ashla told us slowly. “Mar, my eldest brother, got Erol and I out of the village, but we were being stalked by a particularly nasty herd of chatteroshi. I had just come into my magic. I didn’t know how to use it … ”
I winced. I knew where this story was going.
“Mar was fighting them off with his earth magic, but it wasn’t enough.” She exhaled and crossed her arms. “I stepped in to help him, even though Erol told me not to, and I put an icicle the size of a train car through his chest. I managed to kill the remaining chatteroshi with the ice particles as the icicle shattered, but in the process, I killed my brother, too.”
“Ashla … ” I frowned deeply and hung my head. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s not even the worst of it,” she laughed humorlessly. “Erol never forgave me. He abandoned me in the woods. I was alone and crying for what felt like days when Drew and his father came and rescued me. I later found out Erol had found a job in the Hartmire Enclave.”
No … no no. I hated this. I knew what she was going to say, and I wasn’t going to let her. I wasn’t going to let her tell me she had also lost a brother to the fall of Hartmire.
I couldn’t, wouldn’t hear it.
I closed the gap between us, and I wrapped my arms around her so tightly I thought I might have actually hurt her. To my surprise, though, she hugged me back just as fiercely as she finally let go and sobbed. My own eyes watered as I held her, and I ran my fingers through her braids.
It was no wonder she ran off the way she had.
She had nowhere to grieve. What was she supposed to do? Go back to Balvaan and weep over her brother when so many others lost people when the rift opened there?
“I know I didn’t talk to him for a long time, but he … ” she hiccupped, “Erol was still my brother.”
“He could be alive,” Erin piped up, and I admired her for trying to reach out and be supportive to someone she had never met before. “Maybe he was in the part of the Enclave left untouched.”
Ashla picked her head up from my shoulder and stepped back to get a better look at Erin. She stared at the orange haired girl for a long moment, and I was mildly terrified Ashla was going to lash out.
However, that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, Ashla walked toward her, and Erin stood her ground firmly while keeping that soft understanding in her posture.
Then Ashla hugged her.
“I wish that were true,” she sniffled into Erin’s hair, and Erin hugged her back with the care of someone who had been in Ashla’s shoes before.
I wondered if Erin had.
“He was helping people evacuate,” Ashla explained, and she backed away from Erin to turn her attention to all of us again. “There was a man at the airship dock who knew him. Apparently, Erol was one of the engineers for the ship I was to be riding back to Balvaan on.”
“Then he died a hero,” I told her. “He died doing what he couldn’t do before.”
Ashla nodded shakily.
“I needed some time to collect myself before I returned to Balvaan, back to the Wild Reds.” Her lip trembled, and she wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve.
“They miss you,” Erin told her. “They said we could find you here.”
“Drew,” Ashla laughed, this time with a little more mirth than before. “He’s always worried about me, but I am thankful for that. He was there for me when I had no one else. He’s a good friend, a brother in my heart.”
“I think he’d be happy to know that,” I told her.
Ashla composed herself and took a few deep breaths before she turned to me, and her eyes were back to business as usual.
“I’m sure you had a reason for seeking me out,” she said.
“Yeah, actually,” I admitted, though I felt a little bad for doing so after such a heart wrenching conversation.
“Well, out with it.” She smirked. “I could use something to pick me up.”
“I don’t know about all that,” I laughed, “but long story short, we’re going after the last cipher.”
Ashla’s eyes brightened with more excitement than I’d seen in them in months, literally, and she materialized her axe in her hands.
“I’m in,” she replied immediately. “You can fill me in on the details along the way.”
I grinned from ear to ear. This was it. The team was assembled, and we were going in.
We were ready.
Chapter 15
“Wow, you have certainly been busy,” Ashla commented after I once again recounted everything that had happened since we left the Underground in Hartmire.
“You could say that,” Varleth told her after he formally introduced himself, “but the fun is only just beginning.”
“That’s right.” Ashla smirked from her seat.
We’d taken off toward the volcano after I told Ashla about the cipher. Almasy had said his ship couldn’t get anywhere near the volcano without the engines overheating, and there was no way Erin’s would fare any better since it was significantly smaller. We were also trying to be discreet, so landing a few miles away made a bunch of sense.
“What do you know about this cipher?” Varleth asked as Erin piloted her small ship toward our destination. “You said there was some kind of poem, right?”
“It’s supposed to be a clue t
o the location,” I said. “We already know it’s inside the volcano, according to Arwyn anyway, but they couldn’t get to it without it possibly erupting.”
“Right, I was there for that conversation.” Varleth rolled his eyes. “What I’m asking is if there are any clues that might indicate how to get it.”
I nodded, but I didn’t have my notes on me. I didn’t even think to bring them since we already knew the location of it, and we had stumbled across the one in the Narufey.
Luckily for me, Ashla always carried her notebook on her. She reached into her leather travel bag and pulled out a worn, hardback book I recognized immediately. I’d spent hours over the summer pouring over it and trying to piece together the mystery of the ciphers and the story behind it all.
She plopped it open in her lap and flipped through the yellowed, fraying pages before she stopped and cleared her throat.
Boiling magma rips terra asunder
Yet in the brimstone lies a wonder.
Through the ashen clouds you’ll climb
But be quick you’ll have little time.
“Well, that sounds exactly like a volcano erupting if we touch it,” Varleth groaned.
“Yeah,” I snickered, “but how do we prevent that?”
“Don’t touch it?” Varleth quipped, and I almost laughed at his absurdity.
“We have to,” I replied. “We need the final cipher, if not for ourselves, then to simply keep it out of the hands of Miriam Sharpay.”
“Isn’t that why you sought me out in the first place?” Ashla asked as she closed the book again. “It’s obvious the volcano is going to erupt regardless, but that’s why you brought me, an ice mage.”
I nodded and looked pointedly at Varleth. “That is exactly why we brought an ice mage. And a mimic. So, we technically brough two ice mages to halt the lava as it overflows.”
“I just hope we know what we’re doing,” Varleth sighed, clearly resigned.
“Hey, I’ve gotten us out of worse situations.” I frowned as I defended my honor.
“And gotten us into worse situations,” he laughed, and then I laughed immediately after him.