"What?" asked Ruyo, seeing Elly looking excited by the black discs.

"Let's get back down." Elly caught her breath for a moment more and gingerly climbed down while the others held the rope.

"I'm going to keep rummaging," Khulis said. "Tried the door over there already but it's warped shut."

Ruyo nodded and followed Elly down.

Elly carried her painfully won loot to the central platform. "As I thought..." She was able to remove the needle and replace it, and when the black disc still did nothing, she swapped that out for another too and moved the arm.

Now the machine groaned and warbled again, but in a steadier tone. Ruyo said, "Like a very drunken voice."

Elly said, "If it's powered by mana, can you power it? I tried sort of willing it to work but that didn't help."

"Isn't it already going?"

"It's slow, like it's sleepy."

Curious now, Ruyo joined her and touched the machine. She vaguely sensed the presence of mana in it, like handling a magic item after having someone tell her outright what to expect. She tried exerting a trickle of magic into the device without a specific spell in mind.

She frowned. "It seems a little off. I think my supposed divine status is interfering. Can you try again, Elly? We're on the right track." She tried to explain the technique.

The girl concentrated. "It's like pushing through a crowd... hey!"

The machine sped up. The distorted voice spoke now... no, there was a man singing. The melody was in an unknown tongue, but comforting, like a promise of protection. Ruyo shut her eyes for a little while and listened. The drums and low tones echoed throughout the lost garden.

Reluctantly she opened her eyes again. The machine was glowing dim red. She shouted a warning over the music and scuttled back from the machine.

"What's wrong?" said Hastro, spear at the ready.

Elly had paused too. The glow was fading along with the music player's speed. She touched it again and they returned.

"See that?" said Ruyo.

"No," said Elly, alarmed and letting go again. "What's wrong?"

"Wait a minute. This could be good or bad. Everybody back off. Girls, get ready to run. But Elly, try doing that with more energy."

She strained, and sweat beaded on her forehead. "I don't know if this is doing anything."

The device spun no faster, but the glow gradually brightened. Something rose from within the box without doing it any harm. Translucent, red, like a hovering ball of flame that wasn't quite real. Two embers appeared within it like eyes.

"Holy me," said Ruyo. She spared a glance over one shoulder and said, "There's a spirit!"

It spoke like the last crackling of a burned-out campfire. The words were like the singer's, equally unknown.

Khulis called down from the window. "You okay down there?"

"I think so." Ruyo faced the flame again and thumped her chest, saying, "Ruyo." Then "Elly", pointing to her.

"Pir."

"Is that your name? Oh, you can't understand." She sat up straighter. "Maybe I can get it to rewrite its language the way Nusina did."

Lisette called out, "Don't do it!"

"Why not?"

"Do you know anybody who can speak the ancients' language?"

She did, but that was the Unspoken One, and just listening to it was a really bad idea. She regretted not getting Nusina to talk about the exact words she'd heard and how to pronounce them. There were probably a lot of things the two of them should've talked about.

Ruyo shook her head and returned to the present. "Somebody hand me the language notes, pen and paper."

All the while, Elly kept up a tenuous spiritual connection to the music player and from there to the spirit. The forgotten singer kept up his song.

Ruyo said, "It's a fire spirit. 'Pir', I think."

Elly sounded strained. "Hello, Pir. Please don't hurt us."

If anything it seemed afraid of Ruyo, leaning away from her. Ruyo took a step back. She scribbled a few words in the Lost World writing and held them up, pointing to one at a time. Quantity. One. Two. Three.

Pir spoke. This time Elly startled, looking right at the spirit. "I heard that! And... it's like Nusina!"

"I bet she'd object to that," Ruyo said, writing down the pronunciation. She looked for more words to try.

Lisette gasped. "Elly, is it offering you anything?"

Ruyo was confused for a moment, then understood. Is this creature carrying the last ember of a fire god? She said, "If it does, think very carefully."

Elly said, "It's starved. He, I think. I'm sort of feeding the flame but just barely."

"Let's try something." She drew symbols and words in the old script, to show them off. Mana. Power. Connect. Active. Then a stylized flame.

Pir spoke one word for each pair of word and symbol except separate words for the last, suggesting a translation error. Then one more word.

Ruyo tried to speak the words in order, then pointed to Pir and looked expectantly at it. But the coal-black eyes flicked toward Elly instead, and it said something too complex to follow.

Elly said, "I have no idea what that meant. Give me a blank sheet." She accepted one from Ruyo but ignored the pen. Instead she tried feeding the paper to Pir, who drew back from it like a startled animal.

"You're trying to have it burn the paper to eat it?"

"I'm thinking it can make marks. Your Nusina doesn't get everything wet, right?"

Pir approached, and then words and pictures burned their way onto the page. An icon like feathers, a few words, then more lines below.

Hastro said, "I'm watching you gals talking to empty air and feeding it paper."

Elly said, "Not air. Fire. Recognize this?" She held the page toward him.

He looked down at his shirt. "I've got the same design, same words at the top but in fancy letters."

Hastro shivered, then approached the pillar and said, "Pick me."

Elly said, "You're welcome to try powering the little guy. It's a strain."

Ruyo told him, "Come to think of it, this isn't the same situation I had. No sign of this being a shrine, much less a fire one."

"You say its name is Pir?"

"Yes."

He slapped the marble platform and said, "I claim this place in the name of Pir!"

Nothing happened, other than the spirit looking at him. Ruyo couldn't blame him for trying so long as he didn't shove Elly down.

"Come on! Why not?" he said.

Elly said, "I'm not getting much of a conversation from him. We should head back; maybe we can take him along?"

Ruyo whistled. "Averell is going to be very interested in this."

"And the monks," Lisette said. "Actually being able to speak the old words for the first time. But yeah, I could use a doctor. Hey, do we even know which one this place is? Hospital or power plant?"

"I'm guessing hospital," Ruyo said. "It's strange to have a shop in either but I'd expect a hospital to have more visitors. And maybe this room was a resting place."

Hastro said, "But where's the medicine? The beds?"

Some of the rooms they'd tried getting into had been blocked or destroyed. "Under our feet, maybe." She looked at the floor, then up toward the broken windows. "Let's go, Khulis. Need any help?"

"Coming down. Can you help grab these chairs to take back?"

Ruyo and the others wrangled some nice ancient chairs down to the garden floor. Ruyo said, "I'm not carrying those all the way back. Maybe save them for next time?"

"I'll just take one. Next time I want the table, too." Khulis made his way down the ice platforms and left the rope for later; Ruyo could make more. "I took what I could, but it wasn't much."

Ruyo wondered what else might've slipped into Khulis' pockets, but didn't much care.

He said, "So there's an invisible spirit, you say?"

Elly showed Pir the feather symbol, then pointed to the ground. "Here?"

The spirit bobbed in a way Ruyo recognized. "That's a yes," she said.

Elly pointed to her sister's splinted arm. "Can you help?"

Lisette hadn't seemed to see the creature so far, so she wasn't afraid when Pir floated close to her. "I think I feel something warm. Is it there?"

"Go on, heal her," Elly urged. But the spirit did nothing. Elly grumbled. "I don't know enough to even ask properly."

Hastro said, "Can I try... powering it?"

Elly and Ruyo explained the general idea. It looked to Ruyo like watching a dog get handed off from one person's arms to another. Elly looked relieved as the spiritual burden ended.

Hastro grunted. "Sort of heavy. Hey, I see it now! Pir, can you understand me now?"

Pir spoke, but no one understood.

Ruyo coaxed everybody back toward the entryway. "We've got a major discovery and some trinkets, and some doors to open next time. Our next goal is a doctor."

"Follow," Hastro told Pir, and waved the spirit toward him. To their relief, it started to come along.

When it hesitated, Elly said, "The music player," and grabbed the bulky box. She stopped to fiddle with it and discovered a way to make it stop spinning entirely. When she lugged it along, Pir traveled more cooperatively, glancing back and forth between her, Hastro and Ruyo.

#

Way back in the shop by the entrance, they retrieved their camping gear. "Back to base?" asked Khulis. He was still carrying his prized chair, a fancy lightweight thing with wheels on its feet. And cushioned armrests!

Hastro said, "You mentioned a quarry village west of here. Might be closer."

Ruyo said, "I don't like the risk of going to an unknown town, but we do have directions. Any objections? No? All right. Leave whatever gear you want here in the shop. I'm sure we'll be back before too long."

Pir floated passively beside them, not commenting on the destroyed rooms and vacant halls. The group headed cautiously out to the lobby.

Ruyo turned back toward the entry door. "It'd be convenient to seal this back up..." She touched the doorway and focused. The heavy door rumbled back into position, re-closing the ruin. "Good," she said. Eerily, the door gave her a faint sense of being satisfied, but it spoke no more. She patted it.

Following the directions that Brotherhood had supplied, they hiked westward by sunset. It was all hills and thickets around here, though they found the main trail. They were worn out from the hike from Wellspring and then exploring the ruins, and made slow progress. After a second dose of the pain tonic, Lisette said, "I really need to stop walking." It was getting dark anyway.

"I'm sorry about this, Lisette," said Ruyo. "We'll find help early in the morning."

They made camp. Ruyo provided food and everybody could now create water and light as needed. Ruyo spent her watch studying the cheap-looking shirts that the men had salvaged; all machine-made and printed on as though by a press.

Pir lay inside the campfire as an inert red glow, visible only to her and whoever was currently being drained of mana. They'd gotten him to say a few more words and compare them to the old notes, but had barely begun to ask the simplest of a thousand questions. It wasn't clear how much this spirit remembered.

#

Hastro woke everyone around dawn. Ruyo muttered and reluctantly got up. She cast a spell to summon food back at the Wellspring, and another to leave another gift of cloth at Brotherhood. When they were all organized, they got moving again.

"Says here the place is called Frostcrag," Ruyo said, checking the directions. "We should be there in an hour."

Soon, they spied a white cliff in shadow, and a thin smoke-trail from a chimney. They pressed on through the woods, sloping uphill. Then a gruff voice called out from hiding: "Stop, travelers. Who are you?"

Hastro said, "We're explorers looking for a healer."

"Sick?"

"No, this girl broke her arm." He nudged Lisette forward.

A scout stepped out from a different spot than Ruyo had expected. Armed with a bow, dressed in dark green and carrying a horn, he looked like a hunter. "Why are you armed?"