Tales of the Arcane - 1215
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The Arcane Light’s
TALES OF THE ARCANE
Contributions by:
Teeko
LC Schwartz
Cover art by: LC Schwartz
The Arcane Light’s
TALES OF THE ARCANE
Copyright © 2015 by LC Schwartz
Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by these authors. Thank you for your support.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters are productions of the
authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Casefile: The Butterfly (Chapter 4) - by LC Schwartz
The Organizers- by Teeko
Silken Whispers
CASEFILE: THE BUTTERFLY
by LC Schwartz
Chapter IV
The Cave
Interviewer: It doesn’t sound like all was well in paradise.
Welsh: Nah, it was fine. Silk just gets in a snot when things donnae go her way.
Interviewer: And I am certain you do not make any efforts to elaborate on her errors.
Welsh: Well, ya. It is sort of required, you know. If she gets to thinkin’ she’s always right and perfect, she’d be impossible to live with. It’s, like, hard enough as it is.
Interviewer: Of course.
Welsh: Well, I dinnae want to roast her too much, ya know? She was pretty proud of herself on that Kanji business.
Interviewer: And I would imagine you were as well. To crack such a code could not have been easy.
Welsh: Ya, well, she had help — like a cryptography program the NSA even used.
Interviewer: Quite...
Welsh: Okay, fine. Maybe I was a little bit impressed. But donnae you go tellin’ her nothin’...
Tuesday, 4 March – 16:48
Tetepare Island, Solomon Islands
Under the seasonal deluge, the pair run through the brush to the offered protection of the ridgeline. The thick foliage hugging in around their flight made them even wetter than anything the clouds could do. They didn’t as much for themselves, but for the sensitive equipment and papers they had with them.
As the islands lies just to the south of the Equator, the Solomons are heading into the winter months — turning the rains are a little cooler than comfortable.
It took only seconds for the skies to open up over their heads. The humid air is quickly saturated with water. The ridge line is a steep wall of volcanic rock — jutting up vertically from the land around it in a strange series of terraced shelves choked thick with vegetation.
Welsh catches sight of some nearby cover under a lip of rock deep enough to hide herself and Sylvia, though the cover is only barely adequate. The pair ducks behind some over-hanging foliage dripping with the tumbling rain water.
The overhang is just enough to keep most of the rain off them and give them a momentary break from the deluge.
“Well, this is just bullshit,” Welsh grumbles, fussing with the cool water dripping off her.
Sylvia ignores her complaints. She busies herself with trying to get their boat pilot on radio.
“Forget it, Syl,” Welsh says after Sylvia’s third attempt. “Buddy has probably run off after dumpin’ us here. There’s likely a tribe of cannibals around here lookin’ for their monthly sacrifice of idiot tourists...”
Sylvia snorts. She tries once more to raise their pilot. But with no response other than static, she tucks away the radio.
“You are such a pessimist,” Sylvia says. “You always think the moment something doesn’t go quite as planned that somebody just set us up to die.”
Welsh nods. “Yeah. Because that is, like, always the case...”
Sylvia huffs. “Not always.”
“Uh huh.” Welsh gives her partner a glance.
“Well... perhaps it could be more often than reasonably expected...”
Welsh just waves her off, peering through the rain and foliage for anything else of interest beyond their barely adequate rain shelter.
“Besides,” Sylvia adds. “There hasn’t been any hints of cannibalism in these islands in... at least twenty years.”
“Yeah. Comfortin’ that ain’t.”
Welsh’s eyes narrow as she looks through the trees off to her left. The ridgeline comes around the jungle-saturated plateau they found themselves on, forming a half crescent rise around the eastern and northern edges of the flatter ground, leaving the rest to fall away into rocky cliffs and steep ravines that plummet down to the ocean below.
Under the dripping boughs, Welsh notices a faint line of black against the dark shadows of the trees. It seems to follow a more or less horizontal path a couple dozen feet at least, and bulges up in vaguely the middle.
“Hey, Syl. What’s that?” Welsh asks, peering at the strange shadow.
“Honestly, there are no cannibals here...” Sylvia sighs with some exasperation, shaking out her platinum hair. She tries to eke out some good behaviour from her pale locks.
“No, not that. Seriously,” Welsh groans. “Look.” She points out the vague shadow.
Sylvia follows the point of her companion’s finger, her sharper eyes lighting on the form and shape of the darkened shadow.
“I... don’t know?”
Welsh is about to suggest they brave the dousing rain in the hopes of better shelter— but Sylvia is already on her way, her explorer’s curiosity piqued by the hidden mystery.
Welsh grumbles and follows in her companion’s wake. She tries with futile vanity to keep as dry as she can, but there’s no point. What the cloudburst doesn’t drench, the soaked foliage saturates her through to the skin. She follows in Sylvia’s steps, grumbling as she ducks under the swaying branches and leaves of her friend’s leading passage.
The forest envelopes them once more, the thin leafy canopy provides little shelter from the storm. The ridgeline forms a natural barrier against the Pacific winds that also entraps moisture and soil enough for the forest to grow thick in this eastern half of the bluff.
With only a few meager steps into the dubious shelter of the trees, Sylvia stops up sharply in her footfalls. Her eyes turn upwards along the ridge.
Something has tripped her attuned senses — a vague notion of something out of place amidst the rain and wind.
She lifts a silencing hand when Welsh starts muttering at her, complaining about the rain. Sylvia’s sharp blue eyes scan the foliage, looking for any hints of what caught her attention; a branch moving against the motion of the wind, a shadow shifting where there should be none.
But whatever it was has vanished. Or was never there in the first place.
“I thought I saw something,” Sylvia says to the redhead’s cussing.
“Seriously? That ain’t funny no more.”
Sylvia ignores her companion’s complaints. She shoves aside the nagging pickles on the back of her neck, before moving to lead the way under the sparse canopy to the base of the ridgeline.
Tall grass and hanging flora curtains down the rocky wall, covering the stone underneath — or the absence of such solid foundation — behind a leafy veil. Up closer, Sylvia finds that the darkness that Welsh spotted is a deep depression in the rocky face. Intrigued, with a mind more consumed by the idea of discovery than whether this could be some creature’s home, she pulls aside the foliage to look beyond.
A shallow cave lies hidden by the overgrowth. The mouth is wide, narrow at the edges, but opening to a height of about five feet a bit left of center.
Noticing that the local animals haven’t marred up the shelter with their messy livelihoods intrigues Sylvia to look further inside. Still, mindful of the uneven ground, she pulls a flashlight from her duffle bag, and carefully steps under the lip.
Welsh follows on her heels, eager to be out of the rain.
The pair glance around the dark shelter, the rain outside echoing off solid walls with moisture-ladened reverberations.
“Well, at least it’s drier,” Welsh grumbles, kicking over a rock.
Sylvia shines the lamp around entombed space, but it looks like nothing more than a natural fissure in the ridgeside — though still better shelter than their first find. The lack of animal-sign continues to nag at the taller woman. Why any of the island’s indigenous species would avoid such exceptional cover makes little sense to her. And yet there is no indication of any other recent habitation either.
The cave itself is not deep, at least initially. It is merely a wide cleft in the side of this rocky ridge; and at most a dozen feet deep with a jaggy back wall thick with shadow.
However, a closer examination at what looked to be only a fracture in the back wall turns out to be a natural gap in the rock. This gap leads into the cave’s deeper penetration further back into the ridge. The deep, hidden fissure enflames Sylvia’s curiosity into a bonfire.
She passes the duffle bag back to Welsh and tries to climb inside — with some difficulty due to the tight gap and low ceiling.
“Oi,” Welsh says, yanking on her. “Stop it.