by Kim Wedlock
"That one fight, two hundred and thirty five crowns. And I usually win."
His surprise faltered. "Usually?"
"I can't always, can I? Sometimes I have to throw it to keep other people thinking they could win. And other times I just have a bad day, get a bad read on opponents, get unlucky - sometimes they cheat. The list goes on."
"Cheating shouldn't be allowed," Aria injected as she passed them, heading back to her father with her stick-sword now securely fastened to her waist by a few knotted branchlings.
Petra both frowned and smiled at her in bemusement. "It isn't."
"And neither are the duels," Garon equally added from the edge of the camp.
"I didn't see you stepping in to stop it, Inquisitor," Anthis poked as Petra sighed in irritation.
"I didn't want to draw any attention to us."
Anthis rolled his eyes despite his amusement, then pardoned himself and hurried towards Kienza as she returned to camp from the opposite direction she'd left.
"Excuse me," he started politely as he fell in beside her, then stumbled as she smiled in return - another beautiful smile. She chuckled, quite aware of his reaction, but she didn't pause her stride to chat.
"Is, uh," he continued uncertainly, dropping his voice lower, "is the...all that...likely to happen again?" He watched her closely, hoping she might answer favourably, but she simply shrugged as easily as if he'd asked her where his left boot was.
"Who knows. It could. The longest he's gone between bouts is two years, and the shortest...a few hours."
Anthis faltered to a stop as she walked on ahead to rejoin Rathen, and he turned a doubtful gaze upon the pale mage once again.
"Well," Garon began in declaration as he turned back towards the camp, "thank you for your help once again, ma'am, but we had better be off."
Kienza turned and her eyes slighted at him thoughtfully. "Time is of the essence, is it?" She asked him mildly.
"There's no sense leaving a problem be if it can be corrected, is there?" He replied in kind.
She nodded slowly as he held her gaze, though her eyes didn't soften right away. "I suppose not. Well," suddenly a fifth horse, one unnecessarily white and with unnecessarily long tusks, appeared beside her. "Let's be off then."
"You're coming with us?" Anthis asked as she hoisted herself easily up into its side saddle, unsure if he was pleased by the idea or simply relieved.
"For the moment. I can't leave Rathen so soon."
"I'm fine," the mage protested as Aria hurriedly led their own horse over and handed him the reins, "you don't need--"
"Oh do shut up, Rathen. Even you know that isn't true."
Aria giggled as a small breeze lifted her from the ground and set her down in the front of the saddle, and a box appeared beside the horse before Rathen could begin to struggle himself. He sent her an unappreciative look, but they both knew he was grateful that at least some of his dignity had been spared.
"And anyway," she continued as the others climbed into their own saddles without such help, "apparently we're in a rush, and there's something you all need to know."
"Which would be?"
Her lips parted, but then she turned towards Garon and smiled quite politely, waving her hand in the forward direction. "After you, Inquisitor."
He looked at her suspiciously, but took the lead all the same.
"The earthquake outside Carenna."
"What earthquake?"
"You wouldn't remember it, dearest, you were quite suddenly incapacitated at the time. It was a minor tremor, but the ground has been rent, and magic was to blame." A troubled shadow fell over their brows, but she continued, disconnected, as if reading from someone else's notes. "The site was unremarkable, and there were no apparent magical effects on the surrounding elements, until now."
"Is it linked at all to...Rathen's...?" Petra let it hang, and Kienza turned her a quick and bemused frown.
"No, of course not. That was just an unfortunate coincidence. But it does mean that this 'loose magic' is becoming more abundant and concentrated. We knew this already, of course, but the pressure of so much magic is finally reaching breaking point and becoming a serious threat to Turunda. Chasms in the north are growing wider, deeper, longer, and a few are starting to join up. Voiland has very recently been split into three pieces and one of those divides is creeping south through Ivaea and straight towards us. I expect it'll join up with the one that just formed outside of Carenna, given time."
The atmosphere had grown surprisingly thick in the space of less than a minute.
"Where was it?"
She cast Anthis a regretful look. "Halen."
He blanched. "That's not a ruin, that's a village."
"Was," she corrected with even greater regret, but as the atmosphere thickened further, a shared guilt adding its weight, she frowned at them all in disapproval. "This was far from the first settlement to be destroyed by this magic," she reminded them firmly.
"And you don't think time is of the essence?"
"Isn't it a bit bigoted to only discover a sense of urgency when it's your own people being affected, Inquisitor?" She sighed. "It's been going on for months beyond these borders. And anyway, you won't succeed in stopping this before more lives are lost - you still have to find the artefact, figure out how it works, work out how to use it for your intended purpose and then do so, quite likely one place at a time. I'm sorry to break it to you so bluntly, but it's a truth you need to hear if you're going to continue along this quest of yours." She brushed a passing glance over each of them, noting the varying degrees of guilt they openly carried. Even Petra, which she felt was curious, but evidently the young woman had formed enough of a bond with the others to share in their stake. "You can't put the weight of the matter on your own shoulders. This magic is not your fault. Your responsibility to try to do something about it is self-imposed, and while incredibly noble, that doesn't mean that you have to take responsibility for every single aspect of it. If you were to find a stranger wounded in the street and you rushed him straight to a medic, would it be your fault if he died before you got him there?"
No one answered.
She sighed wearily. "Taking it upon yourselves to try to fix this matter is already more than anyone could ask of you all," she said softly, "but you can't blame yourselves for what happens to others along the way. It'll only slow you down. So you had all better get your heads around the fact that it's only going to get worse from here on out so it doesn't trip you up. And perhaps you should try to avoid settlements - distancing yourself from people will improve your concentration. And given recent events..."
"It may not be a bad idea," Garon agreed.
Kienza looked over them again. She saw Anthis sigh doubtfully, but he didn't protest though it was clear he wished to, while Petra and Garon shared each other's resolve. It was Rathen who seemed the most troubled, but the greatest expectations were hanging from his coat. She smiled sadly and rode closer beside him. He returned her smile, his eyes softening, and the two began sharing quiet words.
Anthis watched them as subtly as he could, but soon felt Petra's eyes boring into him and turned his gaze away again. But he frowned when it fell upon a dead tree standing among countless living, its boughs bare while its grey trunk was split down its length by a force only nature could conjure. "How are we here already?!" He all but cried in astonishment.
"What point would there be in just teleporting you ten minutes away from where you were?"
Petra frowned as the trees began to thin and a glinting mixture of onyx, silver and gold began to take shape ahead. "Where are we?"
"Tarun..." His eyes narrowed, but he smiled, suspecting already that she would give him a vague answer to his next question: "How did you know where we were going?"
True to form, the sorceress simply shrugged. "Lucky guess."
Tarun, the grandest of all the elven cities ever constructed by hand or by magic, rolled out before of them as even the trees bowed away in a
we. Majestic, enchanting, even by the standards of the imperious elves of its time; it stole the heart of all whose sight it graced, inspiring any number of songs, poems and romantic comparisons.
Exquisite buildings of gold, silver and ebon caught and reflected the sunlight, filling the city with softly twinkling stars in the winter and fireflies in the summer, while their shapely structures, some towering and twisting, others slanting and flowing, created an intriguing skyline that seemed from afar to blend into the clouds themselves.
The finest public gardens blossomed amongst them, filled with countless lattice-trunked trees and many flowering and fruiting plants of abnormal beauty, attracting equally unlikely birds. Benches were concealed within the lush foliage, offering privacy for those who pretended to want it, while in the open, statues of pure silver men and women rose from equally elaborate fountains, their enviously perfect forms populating the gardens and certainly changing position to frolic with one another when no one was looking.
But the miniature paradises and urban marvels did not vie for superiority over one another; they were in perfect harmony, melding into one another, stitched together by the small streams that meandered through the city like veins beneath glass walkways. They connected every district, be it gold and silver or green and blue, to the perfectly oval lake that stood at its heart and the great tower that rose and twisted from its glittering surface.
Truly, it would have been the pinnacle of beauty in its time - but now, the city was even less than a shadow of its former glory; miserable and eerie, the bright and beautiful morning light was reflected back from the city's tangled bones not as stars or fireflies, but as blinding shards of shattered glass.
The group followed the fractured road, silent but for the clop of the horses' shoes, and looked ahead and around themselves at the time-worn ruin.
The twisting structures were falling apart. Their decay was far worse than even Mokhan's neglected towers, and that detail alone revealed to those with the mind to comprehend it just how much magic had been woven into their construction. Without the spells, there was nothing to hold them together but wishful thinking and crossed fingers. And it would be far worse inside. The city was a veritable death trap.
The gardens, too, were overgrown, more tangled than the Wildlands, no doubt also tended and cultivated by magic. The streams were either dried up or clogged with algae, and the glass was certainly no longer clear - in many places it was shattered, and they each held their breath every time the horses crossed over one, expecting a crack, a sudden downward jolt and an equine cry of pain - and the enchants that would have accentuated and intensified every once-spectacular detail had unravelled and long since vanished.
The statues were also defaced, but rather than a result of the rigours of time, they had been the victims of human hands. While most chose to leave what they considered the imprisonment of the cities when their elven masters vanished, others turned to anarchy and destroyed whatever they could, seizing their chance to claim the world as their own before the elves' throne had even grown cold.
"Daddy," Aria whispered from the front of the saddle as she looked around them with an uneasy wrinkle in her brow.
He nodded, wearing much the same expression. "I know, little one." He encouraged the grey horse, which Aria had named Fog The Second, to drop back alongside Anthis. "Where do we need to go?"
"To the archival tower at the centre of the city," he replied quietly. He seemed to have steeled himself against the haunting sight of these ruins. In fact he barely looked about himself at all, as if he didn't wish to see it.
Rathen, however, found himself unable to keep his eyes from roving, and they soon fell upon precisely what Anthis must have sought to avoid. He quickly covered Aria's eyes before she could notice the skeleton half-concealed beneath a broken ebon spire. "Are you sure?" He asked with greater urgency.
"Quite. I've been here countless times. I know where to look."
Garon allowed him the lead, and after half an hour of silence and imaginary blinders, they couldn't reach the tower soon enough. Unfortunately, when they drew up to the building, which seemed so tattered and stripped by the elements that it might just teeter over in the slightest breeze, the door was entirely hidden by a great jumble of wall, floor and jagged metals.
"Can you move it?" Petra asked hopefully, looking between Rathen and Kienza, but neither looked optimistic.
"The city has crumbled in the absence of magic," Kienza explained. "Suddenly reintroducing it to interfere with this mangled mess could destabilise it further."
"Then how are we going to get in?"
"Through the crypts."
Increasingly reluctant gazes shifted heavily towards Anthis, who had raised the suggestion with just as little enthusiasm. He nodded towards one of the rounded stone mounds that rose from the edge of the dried up lake, the single architectural detail that linked these long post-magic elves to their pre-magic ancestors. "They were carved from stone by human hands. They're the most solid structures here."
"And they'll lead us into the tower?"
"The tower was the most secure area of the city; it housed a lot that the elves considered important, and social status was included in that. Higher statuses demanded guarding even in death, so the highest in the social hierarchy were buried beneath it - along with the valuables and secrets they decided to take with them."
"Secrets?" Rathen repeated carefully. "Do you think...?"
"It's extremely unlikely," he replied, "but not impossible." He slipped out of his saddle and Kienza was close behind him. The others followed their lead. "We should keep our eyes open for that sign of anarchy, too. I'd say that was even less likely, but if we found it in the Wildlands, of all places, I don't see why it couldn't be here, too."
They followed him uneasily towards the nearest of the projecting half-domes and down the few short steps to its recessed door. It was elaborately carved, but its weathering suggested that it, too, had been cut by hand - so rather than swinging on its hinges while magic crumbled around it, it was heavy and stiff and took the addition of Garon's weight to shove it open. But whether spells had once locked it or guards had stood in place, whatever deterrent had once protected the dead within had left them just as exposed as the decrepit city above them.
The thought disquieted the group as they peered dubiously into the silent darkness. The daylight reached barely three feet beyond the threshold, and it revealed nothing but the short stream of dust that fell through a weakness just above the doorway.
Suddenly not even Anthis was keen to continue, but as Kienza lowered Rathen's hand and conjured a light herself, he steeled his nerves and stepped inside. The others shared wary glances before following him into the constricting tunnel.
The air quickly became cold and dank, thickened by an unearthly density and tinged with a scent that could only be described as 'historic'. Their footsteps, quiet and careful, were muffled rather than intensified by the stone, as if the crypt had been designed with silence as a priority, and the passage seemed never-ending under the short, flickering reach of the flame in Kienza's palm.
The atmosphere was intensely oppressive, and though the tunnel broadened suddenly into an alcove-studded chamber, none were inclined to breathe easily. Here the air became even heavier, weighted now by an ominous presence as if they'd just walked uninvited into a stranger's home. And it seemed, in a way, that they had.
The caskets that should have lined the walls were strewn instead across the floor. Some were in one piece, though their lids were tossed aside or set skewed on top, while others were shattered, corners crushed or side panels completely torn away.
Kienza manipulated her flame. It grew enough to illuminate the small chamber from wall to wall, but the shadows that shrouded the contents of the once-elaborate coffins deepened to midnight-black. It only further drew the eye, though not one of them had any desire to look upon the dead.
"This isn't broken magic," Petra whispered in disgust as she cl
osed her eyes rather than succumb to the pull.
Anthis shook his head in agreement. "Thieves. Treasure hunters and historians alike." He picked up his pace and the others did the same, flinching at the sound of crumbling rock and the shift of dust disturbed by their presence. They readily averted their eyes from the bones that had spilled out from one of the final caskets.
The atmosphere released them as they entered the tunnel at the far end, but its clawed grip returned with a vengeance as tiptoed around a corner and into another chamber in an identical state.
"Why are they here?" Aria asked, her voice the lightest whisper yet coloured by a strange, sober interest.
"This is where they were buried," Rathen replied softly.
"They don't look buried to me..."
"Grave robbers." Rathen noticed a number of much smaller nooks set between the coffin recesses. A few were occupied by urns, some incomplete, their lids missing, while others were simply broken, but there were certainly more piles of ashes in here than jars. He jolted in fright when he felt the gentle brush of dust on his shoulder, and reminded himself silently and desperately that it was surely only stone.
"'High social status', eh?" Petra repeated doubtfully.
"Among elves," Anthis reminded her. "And to have been laid to rest here, yes. Leaders, nobles, 'artists'..."
"And the urns?"
"They would have only just qualified."
As they moved through into another tunnel, Aria dragged her thoughtful eyes away from the crypt behind them and tugged on Rathen's arm, her hand already firmly in his. "Will I be put in a place like this when I die?" She asked with that same curious tone, and the question didn't strike anyone particularly well.
But Rathen considered her, then mirrored her tone. "Would you want that?"
She looked back towards the chamber as it returned to abyssal darkness. "Mm...no. It's too dark and cold. I'd rather be outside with flowers and animals." Then she considered him. "Would you want to be down here?"
"No," he smiled. "I agree with you on all counts."
"Then why did the elves want to be down here?" She asked Anthis, twisting to face him as she walked. "Or were they forced to?"