The few ruins of the ancient, nameless city that are public knowledge delve beneath Floria's western bank, where the hills of gypsum, quartz, and limestone were once mined out in a webwork of tunnels, many of which exist to this day. Some have found new life as the city's sewage system and others as catacombs, underground tunnels, and secret storerooms. I now know of enough intact tunnels that I can get within a few blocks of most places in west Floria without stepping foot outside. The tunnels are sparser on the east bank, where the earth turns to chalky clay that collapses within a few decades of excavation. But tunnels do exist - ancient tunnels buttressed and ramified with stronger material and occasionally earthen magic to avoid degradation.

That's exactly what we'd found - a marble-lined passageway down into the ground. Somebody had excavated the place and then covered it with about six inches of soil on top of an old tin sledge. Mrs. Delina's root spell had pulled and bent the tin sheet - probably part of the siding of a Mendiant's Canton shack - away from the stairs like opening a tin of saltfish, revealing a dark channel into the earth. We all gathered around it eagerly, my own little feet shuffling and ready to go down. Mrs. Delina shot each of us a meaningful look.

"I'm not leaving any of you alone…"

"But we should probably have a lookout…" Sharp Lia objected.

"She's afraid of the dark," Po explained.

"I'm not!" Her voice was tinged with uncertainty.

"If you think for a second that I'm leaving one of you up here?" Mrs. Delina grumbled. "You're out of your damn mind, child! We're all going down there… and if I say run, you run right back out as fast as you can. Do you understand?" She waited for us to reply, which we mostly did by nodding and shuffling our feet. That wasn't definitive enough for her. "Well?"

"Yes, Mrs. Delina!"

"Good." She took a step into the dark and looked back expectantly. "Well, Lia? Don't dally, you've got my globe, girl!"

"R-right!" With a gulp and a deep breath, Lia shuffled ahead, holding the little casing of the glowglobe over her head as she and Mrs. Delina proceeded into the dark.

Mailyn and I were next, and Aldo and Po brought up the rear. I traced my fingers along the marble of the passageway - I'd expected it to be rough, like the quarry-hewn stones that made up the base of the Sun's End Bridge. But the walls were cool and smooth and just a bit damp in parts. The air down there was chilly, too - certainly cooler than the muggy evening we'd just descended from.

The pungent smell of the earth filled my nostrils, the not-altogether-unpleasant scent of soil pervading like a root cellar. The floor was solid marble, but the tunnel's recent disturbances had allowed entry to mud and water, and now the floor was neatly-coated with a centimeter or two of silty mud. It caked the bottom of my shoes until I felt like I was walking on inch-high stilts.

"What's that writing?" Mailyn asked, bringing the glowglobe close to the wall. I could feel the contours of the script beneath my fingers as they traced along, characters chiseled half a centimeter into the stone of the wall. In the modest ochre suffusion of the glowglobe light, I could barely make out the characters of an alphabet I did not recognize. Some of the letters were pigmented in a dark blue faded to almost nothing over the centuries, while other characters were so worn and devoid of pigmentation you would have needed to make an etching to make heads or tails of their shape. And, all around us pulsed the vague remnants of ancient magics.

"Whoever lived here before our people wrote in that script," Mrs. Delina said. By 'our people', she probably meant the native Perditans. Her last name, 'Delina', was Durechine, but most families that have been in Perdita for more than a generation or two have some native blood in them. From her sun-tanned skin to the curly poof of her iron-gray hair, I'd guess she had more than a little.

"What does it say?" I asked.

"Don't nobody knows what it says, child. That art's been lost."

The strange thing was that, even as a partially-awakened eight-year-old, I felt that I could make sense of some of the symbols, not in a way that I could explain, but on some deeply intuitive level. The vaguely spiral symbol denoted obfuscation; the lattice sheet was sealing; and so on. They were symbols that I could never quite trace or draw on paper, the memory of their shape a nebulous, fleeting thing soon reduced to a vague summary. But the same ineffable mystery that made them impossible to replicate conveyed some fragment of meaning: timelessness… resolve… sacrifice… enduring… the ideas flitted into my mind like sparks leaping from a doorknob on a dry winter morning. Where they came from and where they went, I couldn't say.

"I don't like it down here," Mailyn whispered, the flecks in her eyes sparkling with her inner worry. She reached out and squeezed my hand - and I immediately felt a bit better. We would protect one another.

The passageway went on for thirty meters or so before making a right turn and continuing its shallow descent. The mud and moisture had stopped, and all that remained were dry, symbol-etched walls, the passageway narrowing such that Mrs. Delina's broad frame could barely fit through without turning sideways. As we proceeded down into the cool dark, a feeling of wrongness rose up in my belly, my breath catching in my chest.

Honestly, it was incredibly irresponsible of the old herbalist to drag five kids down into the dark, but there we were. I suppose she wanted to find Lucan as much as we did…

"What's that smell?" Sharp Lia asked.

A moment later, I smelled it, too. Mailyn's hand clamped down on mine. It was a smell that anybody who's spent much time in major conflict comes to identify in a soul-shriveling instant: the pungent, metallic smell that tells you bloody work has been afoot - and quite recently. Back then, though, I only knew it was deeply unpleasant. I covered my nose with my sleeve, which didn't improve things much.

Finally, the passageway opened into a vaulted room, a vaguely oval chamber perhaps six by eight meters with a great stone table in the center. The smell was overpowering, and dark fluid was liberally spattered about the place, nearly covering the table and the nearby floor. Mrs. Delina held her divination bone aloft on a flat palm and waited. After a moment, the bone trembled like a shivering animal and then leapt from her hand so suddenly that Sharp Lia yelped and Mailyn squeezed down on my hand even more (and I did likewise). The bone jerked to a stop, settling right in the middle of the stone table with a clack that echoed against the ancient stone.

"No…" Mrs. Delina muttered. She sank to her knees, weeping into her weathered hands. "Oh, sweet child, no…"

"Mrs. Delina… what is it?" I asked… but part of me already knew. This was the spot where Lucan had been sacrificed in the name of something horrible and dark. "He… he was just a babe…"

And Mrs. Delina wept and wept… and pretty soon, the rest of us figured out what had happened there, and we were pretty upset, too. We all spent a good few minutes crying around an ancient sacrificial altar smelling of blood and offal.

"Why would anybody do this," I siffled.

"People got reasons," Aldo said through gritted teeth. He gripped his little blade in his fist, as if he expected to use it at any moment. "They got reasons, none of 'em good."

Mrs. Delina struggled to her feet, grunting as she pulled herself up with her staff. She walked over to the sacrificial table and regarded the divination bone at its center before muttering a prayer in Old Perditan, a prayer that predates the diaspora and the faiths of the Avatar:

We are born alone and die alone,

so let my days be light;

let me spend them with my father and mother,

my sister and brother, my son and my daughter, my cousin, my lover.

And for those who die in the dark places,

may they return again to the land

trod before they were born into this world,

to sit by your great fire

until their time comes once again.

With that, she raised her staff and smashed the little divination bone. It shot apart with a fury of sparks and light, little bits ricocheting against the walls and the floor like sparks of molten iron. I felt the magic dissipate and, however slightly, the ominous and oppressive atmosphere lifted, for Mrs. Delina's fury had pushed some part of the evil in that place back. But that didn't change in the least what had happened.

"You'll tell them about what you saw here at your school," Mrs. Delina said through clenched teeth. "You'll tell 'em, and they damn well better make whoever done it pay."

"We can't let 'em get away with it," Po growled.

"But… why?" Lia sniffled.

"There are evil people in this world, child, and there's no justice for them if we don't make it."

"H-how?"

Mrs. Delina placed her hand on the girl's shoulder. "That burden isn't yours to bear, child. Come on - we'd best go. We're not doing a damn bit of good staying down in this place."

Lia didn't understand, and neither did I - why would anybody kill a child like that? After all, there are plenty of poor excuses for adults out in the world, and some of them even deserve to be killed slowly and in terror as their life is taken by a sharp blade. Or a dull one. The duller the better.