Chapter 12

Eleonora Acantha woke up to a wolf licking her face. She laughed and cuddled with it before suddenly shooting up and running down the tunnel. ‘Am I insane...how stupid am I??’ she told herself as she reached Tommy’s arena. She quietly made her way towards the corridor and noticed that the dust in it wasn’t disturbed. At least not by a four legged abomination. Sighing she stood there and saw the beast’s head in her mind, remembering something Mike had told her once, about fear being the real enemy. The frail looking girl knew then, that if she didn’t walk through that corridor right now, she would never have the courage again to do so.

After ten minutes of standing there a clunk could be heard as the girl’s pack fell to the ground. Red energy started to surround her as tattoos came to life all over her body. Her expression turned resolute as her green eyes glowed in the dim room. And then she walked. “The night is dark...” she said as she entered the tunnel. “...yet here I stand.” she finished the old saying as she emerged from the corridor.

No further words were spoken by her as she rushed to the center of the marble city. She moved as quietly as she could and as soon as she felt herself close enough she started to throw stones. Closer and closer she got to the pyramid before she found what she was looking for. An abomination similar to the one she had killed before attacked the spot where her stone landed. Then she moved, the beast following close behind her. As soon as she reached a big roof she threw what she held in her free hand into the air.

Dozens of small stones fell in a radius of five meters as she silently moved to a different spot. The beast landed and attacked. ‘I was right...’ she thought but no smile spread on her face, the fear too recent. A clean cut slashed right through one of the monster’s front arms and this time the fight only continued for twenty minutes before it lay dead before her. “Let the hunt begin then...” she said, as the trace of a smile grew on her face. In the next five hours Eleonora slaughtered twenty of the beasts. On the twenty first one the beast managed to slash her. Her arm nearly came off as she used the opportunity to stab through its whole torso, killing it instantly.

‘It’s not healing.’ she looked at her arm, her red energy seemingly fighting against something else, burning it slowly. This continued for a couple minutes before her arm started healing again. It was back to normal in a couple minutes. ‘Is it poison?’ she wasn’t sure but swore to herself to be even more cautious when fighting them.

When she returned to Tommy’s room she found a happy surprise. The three wolves had moved and nearly jumped her as she came out of the corridor. “Oh my god, I love you guys...” she said as she drowned in a charge of fluffiness. She slept for a couple hours before going back in there, fairly sure that the abominations wouldn’t leave the pyramid on their own and if it came to that she now had three alarm dogs around her.

After that day Eleonora fell into a rhythm. She would explore the city for four hours, trying to find and move anything interesting to Tommy’s room before killing abominations for six hours. There was no higher reward in her mind and the beasts were no direct threat to her, she confirmed that they wouldn’t move further out after only a couple days, but there was something wrong with letting them exist. She HAD to kill them, all of them. There was something she felt was wrong with those beings, something that disturbed her greatly but she couldn’t quite explain what it was.

The days went by as she continued her routine, weirdly feeling stronger every day. Progress was normal, especially for an Awakened but she sometimes thought she literally felt much stronger after a couple days. She also could more and more easily deal with the corrupted, as she came to call the abominations, and sometimes even fought two or three at a time now. After a couple months of this Tommy’s room was nearly full of things she was slightly interested in. Books mostly, and things she hadn’t ever seen before. After two weeks she didn’t even have to hunt for food anymore as her three companions took care of that for her. The critters they brought weren’t much but they hunted more and more to feed their new alpha, or Queen as she liked to think of it. Plus she rewarded them with cuddles so it was fine.

Eleonora tried to learn the foreign language but was unable to grasp any of it, even after over half a year in the city. She was fairly sure the city itself was called Isindur and it was part of an empire or kingdom called Usir, or the other way around. Some of the letters were similar to the common language that at least most of Trinesfall, Karith and the southern kingdoms spoke but there was too much she didn’t understand. Her lack of education earlier in life didn’t allow her to grasp a foreign language, at least not this fast. She found some maps along the way, which helped her prioritize places to search. Searching all of the city would take one person more than a lifetime she thought. It was massive, Duneswatch with its nearly hundred thousand citizens couldn’t come close to what Isindur had once been.

The more she learned about the city the more she formed some theories about what might have happened. How could so many people live here, so far below the earth in the icy climate of the north? How could they get food and energy? And most importantly where had they gone? Eleonora realized that the only answer to their disappearance lay in the abominations she was slaying day after day. They must have once been citizens of this city. She wasn’t sure how it happened and what it caused but her best guess was that there were answers in the central pyramid of Isindur.

Two years passed like this as she started to decipher the language of Usir and her collection of documents, books, artifacts and art reached far into the cave system she had come to call home. She still fought and killed the corrupted, a need that she could never quite shake off. She could at that point fight countless corrupted at the same time and slaughtered her way through the streets of Isindur which she now knew nearly as well as her old home in Dunewatch, at least parts of it around the center. Her search only included important historical or government buildings that were marked on the maps and her fighting was limited to the center of the city. Tens of thousands had fallen to her blade but her task would not end soon. The city had once held over five hundred thousand and although she thought it impossible for the center to hold that many, she knew it would take a long time to even just reach the pyramid. Eleonora would doubtlessly have given up or would have broken under the loneliness of the new purpose she found in this city of old, were it not for the wolves that now came closer to family than her mother ever could. They had cubs along the way and with her help became the dominant species of the cave system. Eleonora improved every day and neither the fighting nor scavenging became any less interesting to her. Quite the opposite, as she got stronger the fights got more exciting and with her starting to understand the language all of what she collected held more and more meaning.

The core of her resilience in a situation like this was something that she didn’t expect in the beginning though. It was the corrupted. She didn’t have hard evidence yet but she was sure that they were once human. In that she felt like with every corrupted she slew another soul was freed.

In the summer the harsh temperatures would became less extreme and it became possible to leave the cave, even for the wolves. Whatever they managed to hunt she stored for the other parts of the year. Eleonora didn’t limit her scavenging to the city itself but explored the cave system as well. It wasn’t as big as she expected and after the first year she had mapped it out completely. There were several species living in it. She killed everything stronger than her wolves, allowing them to thrive. Nothing was comparably strong to the corrupted.

In the lowest parts of the caves mushrooms grew, which brought some direly needed variety to her diet. Not that her body needed it but what she missed most about her old life was the food and the seasonings.

“Now let’s see where we’ll go today...” talking to herself Eleonora was studying the map before her that showed parts of the north east side of the city. A map with all of Isindur on it wouldn’t help her find much, perhaps as a wall carpet but she wasn’t lucky enough to find one yet. Countless marks were all over the map before her, some were already on it and some she had added. “Now where have I seen you before...” the wolf beside her cuddled up to her side as she scratched him behind his ear and inspected a symbol on the map. She got up and opened a piece of parchment after looking for it in a closed shelf.

“Here it is….that’s...” she looked towards the corridor “here.” she finished. “Another passage then?” she hadn’t found a single one in her two years in Isindur. No big doors or massive gates that lead towards an outside world. It seemed the people of this city lived in complete isolation, which didn’t make much sense to her. With the first target of the exploration set she got up and walked through her home, enjoying the feeling of the carpet on her bare feet. Eleonora dressed herself in light and easy to move in Usir clothing which consisted of black pants and a long sleeved dark shirt, covered by a black jacket and light armor. She didn’t know the material but it seemed comparable to steel, much lighter though and it could withstand a direct hit from a corrupted.