X

The band spent a further week in the fort. Everyone absolutely agreed that they would not go anywhere until Aroha was back up to full strength. Rylan had discovered a small brook about a half hour’s hike away from their camp that he had been utilizing to retrieve fresh water for the party, and Penelope’s diligence in foraging edible foods from the forest meant that they still had a decent stock reserved. They were in no pressing danger of running out of supplies and could thus afford the leisurely rest period that Aroha needed to heal. Further exploration of the depths of the fort, however, was expressly forbidden and had been since the whole incident. Rylan was very insistent on this point. The band complied with this, although somewhat tentatively.

For her part, Aroha tried her best to heal quickly. She got plenty of rest, ate amply and did some light exercise to get her body used to movement again. She did some light labour in the camp such as cooking and gathering firewood, and was allowed to do the absolute bare minimum in exercising with Rylan when he kept up with his training regime during the twilight, but the others refused to have her do any real heavy-lifting or anything too intensive. She grew quite irritated at their coddling, but she realized it was probably for the best.

She still had regular migraines and there were periods where she experienced the same out-of-body weightlessness, dizziness and loss of coordination she had felt when she had first woken up after the accident. She thought this would subside with time, but they happened quite frequently. She tried to hide them from the others as best she could, but someone was always with her and watching over her to make sure she was alright.

Penelope had taken out the sutures she had made on the actual cut on Aroha’s head after she had been awake for three days. According to Penelope, it was healing up nicely, but Aroha had no way to know this for sure. She knew that it was itchy and the skin was weird and sensitive to touch. She also knew that Penelope chastised her whenever she got caught touching it or scratching at the scabs absent-mindedly.

She became increasingly self-conscious about the bald patch on the back of her head, feeling like everyone was always staring at it, even if she tried to hide it. She enlisted Penelope’s help to cut and shave the rest of the hair along the sides and back to be even with the patch – an undercut as she was informed. It was apparently quite a popular hairstyle with Namarian women, according to Damien, who liked to keep their hair cropped short or braided out of the way. She was quite happy with the way it turned out.

Once Aroha’s strength started to properly return and Penelope had deemed her suitably recuperated, Rylan was eager for the band to leave the fort and continue onwards out of the Wood. It was on the eve of what was to be their final twilight camping inside the fort, sat around the campfire while Rylan had gone to restock their water supplies one last time, that Aroha approached Damien and Penelope with one last proposition.

‘I want to explore the rest of the fort before we leave,’ she informed them. She shifted awkwardly, unsure if she had said something taboo or unreasonable.

Damien and Penelope shared a concerned look, then Penelope sighed and said, ‘You know Rylan would have a fit. It’s best if we just leave quietly. Damien says we’ll make coin just from reporting the location of the site, so there’s no need for us to risk our necks any more than we already have.’

‘I know you guys are worried about me, but I’m doing much better now!’ Aroha whined. She got down on all fours to grab Penelope’s hand. ‘We can’t possibly get caught in another trap like that now that we know what it looks like. It’ll be a quick look! Just the rest of this floor!’

‘Aroha—’ Damien began.

‘I know you feel guilty, but don’t!’ Aroha exclaimed, directing her attention to him while still keeping Penelope’s hands firmly in her clutches. ‘It was my own fault for not saying something. I knew something was off, but I kept quiet about it because you were so excited!’

‘We both know that ain’t true,’ Damien sighed. He looked at Penelope as he confessed to her, ‘I didn’t say this because Rylan woulda decked me one again – an’ rightly so – but… I was the one who forced us to go on. She wanted to run back an’ get ye, but I— I was blinded by me own greed at the time.’

Aroha shook her head firmly. ‘None of that matters now. What’s done is done, right? And I don’t blame you for any of it! But please… guys… when will we get another chance like this?’

She sighed and let Penelope’s hand go. She placed a hand in the middle of her chest and looked at her friends, sincere and earnest, on the verge of tears. ‘I have this feeling – right here in my chest – that I’ll regret not knowing. Not exploring all the options. I don’t want to leave this place with nothing but a scar to show for it. I need to know what else this place has, what else it was. You all saw that skeleton in the library, right? I want to know who they were, what they did, what their life was like. I want to know why there was a magical gemstone stored here! Actually magic! I’ll never forgive myself if I just walk away from this place. This is a real, honest to the gods, piece of civilization from before history. We’ve never even heard stories of this type of stuff before! We’re in a real place from the seasons of myth and we just want to walk away? I just can’t… It’s too much to ask me to do that…’ She shook her head sadly. ‘My injury shouldn’t rob us of a chance to experience and explore something like this. It’s my fault we’ve been sitting on this for two weeks and done nothing about it. Please, guys… I can’t do this alone. I don’t want to.’

Penelope groaned loudly, wiping her face with her hands. Damien chuckled and scratched his head, ‘Well, when ye put it like that, it’s really hard to say no.’

‘Penelope?’ Aroha enquired softly.

Penelope looked at her friend through a gap in her fingers and said, muffled and slightly irritated, ‘You know I’m saying yes already, you… you… you queen of manipulation!’

She scowled at Aroha when she lowered her hands, but then her gaze softened and she smirked, ‘You know I can’t say no to you. But we have to do this before Rylan gets back. That’s an hour or so. That’s all the time you get, okay? And we have to all stick together as a group, nobody goes off on their own!’

Aroha nodded eagerly, a huge, dumb grin on her face.

‘He’s going to be so angry at us…’ Penelope mused out loud.

‘Too late for that,’ Damien conceded. ‘Let’s gather the lanterns an’, Aroha, you can carry a bag. Penelope’ll take the bow, an’ I’ll take me sword with as well. Just in case.’

*

The trio set off down the right first, through the unexplored second door on that side of the foyer. Damien informed them that he hadn’t been able to find another doorway out of the library so it must be a dead-end room and therefore pointless to explore again. The doorway they started with led them into a long hallway, with a handful of other doors set along the left side of the wall leading into various rooms.

The first door they entered seemed to have been study or office of some kind. There was not much in it save for crumbled furniture and dust. The ghost of a desk sat near the far wall and long-dead shelves lined the two side walls. A tattered, moth-devoured tapestry hung on the far wall. In the dim light of the lanterns, the tapestry looked like it might have once been a bright red, but was now only the vague shade of such. It was damaged beyond repair, but Aroha could make out some sort of crest on it, still relatively untouched considering how old it must have been. The crest was the same one she had seen on the coins: some kind of fox or wolf – or perhaps even a bear – woven in black. Damien cut the crest out of the tapestry at her behest, discarding the rest of the useless material while she stuffed the salvaged piece in their treasure bag.

Penelope investigated the bookshelves. Besides the rotting, crumbling, unreadable books she found not much of worth on them. Damien stripped the desk bare, pulling it apart and prying drawers free, but this also proved to be largely fruitless. He did discover a handful more coin in the absolutely destroyed remnants of a pouch, but all the documents and other contents of the drawers had long since been turned to dust and bits of tarnished metal by the ages.

‘Ye know,’ he mused as the group left the room with their meagre haul and continued down the hallway, ‘this furniture must be thousands o’ years old, right? Thinkin’ about it proper, this belonged to a people that we’ve never even heard of, so they have to be pre-Kingdom. That’s – what? – three thousan’ years, at least? Aye, the wood has been rotted an’ eaten away by the moss an’ the years, but can ye imagine? How does wood last for over three thousan’ years like that?’

‘That’s what I’m saying!’ Aroha exclaimed, her voice echoing down the barren hallway. ‘This place is a wonderland! I want to know what these people were like! What was their civilization? Everything we’ve seen so far is just stuff we have already in our lives now. How is that even possible?’

‘It is intriguing,’ Penelope said, mulling the information over carefully. ‘If we’re supposing it’s at least three thousand years old… Yet they seem to be at the same level of civilization we are? It just doesn’t make sense. Could this be not as old as we think it is? Maybe it’s actually fairly recent?’

‘But you saw that skeleton, didn’t you? There’s no way! There are only three races on Thiara: the humans, the Aurelians and the Carnelians. Why have we never heard of these other people? From that skeleton, they seem almost like animals!’

‘We’re all animals at the end of the day,’ Damien said evenly.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. Here’s the next door. Let’s see what we can find.’

The second doorway held another office, much like the first. They did not find much in this second office save for a small stone insignia or stamp in one of the drawers. It was the size of a coin, once again holding the same animal image that was on the gold coins and tapestry. They took this with them, just because it was one of the only intact items they had found so far. Continuing on, the third doorway held a staircase leading up to the second floor, but Penelope expressly forbid them from investigating it.

‘I don’t want us falling through the floor or something. Rylan would definitely kill us if that happened.’

The fourth doorway led them into a much bigger room than any they had previously been in. At first glance, Aroha was not quite sure what to make of it, but Damien pointed out that this had to be a church or chapel of some kind. There were two rows of what must have been crumbled pews, with a small walkway in the centre of them leading up to what must be an altar of some kind, somewhere further in the darkness.

‘The Maiden’s churches look similar to this,’ Damien told the Zeshani women, who had never seen a chapel like this before.

They skirted the outside of the pews first, hugging the wall along the left side of the room. They were sticking close together while investigating at Penelope’s insistence so that nobody got lost in the darkness. The walls were lined with faded, damaged carvings, chiselled right into the walls themselves. They had to be some sort of cosmology or mythology, but they were now weathered and damaged beyond recognition. Completely indecipherable. Lost to time.

What did they worship? What were the gods of these people like? Aroha wondered. She so badly wished she could have seen the carvings for herself. Her curiosity felt like a physical thing, eating away at the inside of her body.

There was a small portion of the mosaic wall that had come loose and had shattered on the ground. Aroha bent down and investigated the pieces. These were still incredibly worn, but she could just barely make out some images. They were crude and rudimentary; not at all like the paintings that adorned Temples of the Mother. She could make out what must be people with pointed ears like animals, but that was about all. She tried to place the pieces together like a puzzle, but some of the pieces were minuscule and others had probably been ground to dust by now so it would always be incomplete. She placed some of the bigger pieces of the mosaic she could find in her bag.

They eventually reached the far side of the room and it was a sight to behold. The walkway between the pews led up to a small altar or lectern, long-since destroyed. What was not destroyed, however, was the statue behind it.

It was a hulking behemoth, reaching all the way up to the second floor of the fort. It depicted some kind of beast – at a glance Aroha guessed it to be a bull. But it was not a bull. Not completely. It stood on its hind legs, but it had the wrong proportions to be a human. It was also not quite an animal. It was stark naked, complete with genitalia, but it held a fierce claymore in its left hand and a great shield in its right. The marble work was so intricate and ornate that every vein and sinew in the beefy legs and gemstone in the sword was still visible. It seemed as if the statue could spring to life at any second and it wouldn’t even be surprising, but rather expected. It was hard to make out the facial features from the group’s elevation, save for the bull-like snout and the shadow of horns atop its head. There were what looked to be the remnants of a garden at the base of the statue, with its cloven hooves already overgrown with moss. The long-dead plants of the garden had already turned to fertilizer for some pallid, waxy mushrooms that looked dangerous just to the eye.

‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ Aroha asked her companions, stunned and in awe of the majesty of the statue.

‘This must have been their god,’ Penelope replied. ‘I’ve never even heard of something like this. A bull god? No, I don’t know what it is. Who it is.’

‘It’s a shame we can’t take this with us,’ Damien chuckled. ‘This is a good find. So well-crafted too. I say it would rival effigies in the Kingdoms right now. We got to make sure to report this. An unknown civilization that worshipped an unknown god? This is history in the makin’, lasses.’

‘Do you think you could shoot a flaming arrow up there, Penelope? Give us some light to see his face?’ Aroha asked in excitement.

Penelope shivered and turned to Aroha. ‘No way in all the hells, honey. I don’t like this one bit. I feel like we’re defiling this place with our very presence and that is not a god I want mad at me. I’m not going to do anything to make him angry.’

‘Relax,’ Damien said. ‘Ye two are worried about ghosts an’ shadows. There’s nothing alive in this place. Certainly not some ancient god.’

‘What if he’s the one who gave these people magic, Damien?’ Penelope countered. ‘I don’t want to take any chances. Let’s get out of here. Aroha got some pieces of the wall mosaic. That should be enough evidence for now.’

‘Hang on a second,’ Aroha said, spying something at the base of the statue.

On a small plinth before the statue stood two stone tablets. They were incredibly worn and hard to decipher, but Aroha could make out what looked to be the same type of ruins that she had noticed elsewhere in the fort.

‘I don’t know what these say but they have to be important, right? Maybe some kind of religious text?’ she asked Damien.

‘Aye, could be. Better take ‘em.’

‘Are you insane?’ Penelope hissed at them. ‘Leave the religious texts alone! Do you want to be smited?’

‘Relax,’ Aroha cooed. ‘I’m sure the god won’t mind. These might help us find out who he is. I’m sure he’s not happy about being forgotten either. If you look at it, we’re helping him out, right?’

‘You’re threading on thin ice, Aroha Marivaldi,’ Penelope warned. ‘You might be a heathen, but I, for one, respect the possibility of the divine.’

‘Don’t say my full name like that, you sound like my Ma… Anyway, I’m taking them.’

She placed the tablets carefully, but defiantly, into the bag. It was starting to become quite heavy with this new addition.

Penelope turned to the statue and said, ‘Just let it be known I had no part in this.’

‘I think we can move on now,’ Damien said. ‘Don’t think we’ll find anythin’ else of worth in here.’

‘There might be another hidden treasure room or something.’ Aroha pondered. ‘Seems like a good place to put one, under the protection of their god?’

‘Aye, could be actually… Good thinkin’.’

‘I never want to see another treasure room as long as I live,’ Penelope told them both flatly. ‘They can keep their treasure. We’re running out of time anyway, and we still have the whole left side to explore.’

‘You’re no fun,’ Aroha teased, jabbing a finger in Penelope’s side. ‘But you’re right. Let’s not mess around too much. Treasure rooms are definitely trapped and Rylan will murder us all if we get into trouble like that again.’

The trio left the church behind and returned to the hallway. The last door on the left wall of the hallway led into a small storeroom, but there was absolutely nothing that survived in it. Parchment crumbled to dust at a mere touch, metal instruments were too tarnished or broken to be of any use or worth, and half of the room was inaccessible due to a collapsed ceiling. The final door at the very end of the hallway stood on the right side and led into another passageway. Aroha reasoned that this passage must link the main building to one of the outlying buildings that they had been unable to get into from the courtyard.

They explored this side of the fort fairly quickly and found nothing of particular note. It consisted mostly of some kind of barracks or bunk room. There were the remnants of bed frames, but whatever mattresses or other sleeping tools had been used no longer remained. The chests, cupboards and drawers that still stood relatively intact were barren and useless, containing nothing save for some old, mould-ridden and decaying clothes and a few more pieces of coin. The clothes were mostly simple linen robes, but taking them along would have been senseless. Damien did, however, make sure to gather all the coins he could find. There were some eating utensils that still survived, stone bowls and the like, but these held no interest for the treasure seekers. There was one fairly pristine dagger that wasn’t too badly rusted that Damien insisted they take with. Like the swords that had been in the treasure room, this too had a curved blade and inset jewelled hilt.

They also found two more skeletons in the barracks, similar to the one in the library. This told Aroha that they were, in fact, a race of animal-like humanoids, unlike any other people they had ever seen or heard of, and she could only wonder as to why. Why had nobody told them about the existence of such a race? Did nobody know? Did the Kingdoms know? Had they stumbled onto something so unknown, so foreign and well-hidden, that no other person on the planet knew about it? A mystery that nobody even knew existed? Or, perhaps more exciting to her, a conspiracy?

One of the skeletons still lay on the remnants of a bed, arms folded across what would have been its chest. Another lay on the floor in a corner in a sitting position. They did not disturb these final resting places and decided to move on. Damien and Penelope had already collected the skull of the one in the library and that was about all the macabre they could handle.

The only other rooms on this side of the building were another simple office, like the ones they’d investigated previously, and some kind of latrine. Luckily there was no stench from the centuries’ old waste, but they still had no desire to investigate it any further.

They returned back to the campsite to find Rylan still not yet returned from his own quest, although they knew he must be on his way back by now. Hesitating only slightly, they continued to the other side of the foyer and through the corresponding doorway into a new passage.

This one was considerably less exciting than what they had seen on the right side.

There was a pantry of some kind, with nothing at all save for some black cheese that nobody wanted to touch for fear of catching some horrible disease, and another small storeroom. Next to these was an armoury full of weapons, all long-since rusted and useless. There were also no jewelled hilts this time around. Damien reasoned that taking any of the worthless equipment was a pointless endeavour as they would just be cumbersome. The final two doors on this side of the fort held a staircase leading downstairs and a passage leading to the other outlying building. Aroha knew that this one’s roof had been almost completely caved in, however. She reasoned that there couldn’t be anything of worth in that building as it was so heavily damaged, but she was intrigued by the stairs leading down.

‘It has to be some kind of cellar. Or a dungeon, right?’ she asked her companions. ‘We have to check it out.’

‘I don’t know,’ Penelope said nervously. ‘We’re running out of time as it is.’

‘Come on, Penelope,’ Aroha pleaded. ‘Just a quick peek. In and out. Five minutes.’

Penelope sighed heavily. ‘Just what has gotten into you today?’

‘Adventure!’ Aroha said with a wide grin.

‘This is your fault,’ Penelope said to Damien. He smiled awkwardly and scratched his head in response. Penelope looked at Aroha pointedly, hands on her hips. ‘Well? Lead the way then.’

They descended the worn stone steps. There was a noticeable chill in the air, as well as an unmistakable smell. Aroha couldn’t place her finger on it, but it was musty, earthy and unpleasant, much more so that the general scent of decay in the rest of the fort. They reached the bottom of the staircase and knew straight away they were in some kind of dungeon. A rusted iron greeted them at the bottom, sectioning off the staircase from the dungeon proper, but the gate was, strangely enough, wide enough.

They immediately wished they did not enter it.

The sight before their eyes was something straight out of a nightmare. Cells lined both walls of the dungeon and, in the centre of them, was what can only be described as a funeral pyre. A pile of bodies – skeletons all – scorched beyond recognition or discernment. The bottom layer of the pile was a thick black soot, with the charred remains of the rest of the skeletons sitting atop. Charred hands reached out of the top as if trying to escape their fate. It was impossible to tell how many bodies had been massacred here. Hundreds? More? It was too dreadful for Aroha to even fathom. The corpse pile took up all of the space in the dungeon. The unpleasant odour could only be from this horrific ancient slaughter and as soon as Aroha realized that, she became violently ill.

She ran back to the gate and retched, clinging for dear life to the rusted iron bars as her illness racked her entire body and threatened to bring her to her knees. She was completely unable to look back. To try and see if her friends were still okay. Her body would not allow to do it. She could not face all those corpses again. She would not.

She heard Damien whisper, ‘Gods above…’, then ‘Let’s get out of here,’ his voice wavering in terror.

She felt hands grab her around the stomach and pull her away from the gate. They pushed her back up the staircase and she obliged numbly. Her mind couldn’t even begin to process what she had seen down in the dungeon. It was too much. It was too evil. Just what had happened in this place?

She became aware of entering back into the foyer. Someone had been dragging her along the entire way back to their base. She realized it had been Penelope. She led Aroha all the way back to the fire and forced her to sit down by it before dropping down next to her, visibly shaken and stone-faced. Aroha realized how scared her friend must be and hugged her tightly.

‘It’s okay,’ she whispered in Penelope’s ear. ‘It’s okay.’ Over and over again, trying to convince herself as much as trying to comfort her friend.

She could hear Damien muttering vehement curses to himself as he stalked the campfire in lazy circles, the sailor in him shining through. She shut her eyes and tried to block him out as she concentrated on Penelope’s warmth around her.

Then came a voice from the doorway, grating and angry. All it growled out was, ‘What happened?’

Everyone stopped what they were doing to turn and look at the newly returned Rylan. He stood in the doorway, his face emotionless and his hands full with water containers. When nobody replied to him, he repeated, very slowly, emphasizing the words, ‘What. Happened?’

Aroha stood up shakily and declared, ‘It was my fault Rylan—’

‘Oh, I know that,’ he hissed suddenly, like a snake ready to strike. ‘I thought we had agreed? I thought it was clear? No. More. Exploring!’

He set the water containers down and stalked towards them, ‘What happened this time? Did anyone get hurt?’

‘No, no,’ Aroha appealed. She walked towards him but he just brushed past her to see to his sister. ‘Nobody got hurt. We just— there’s something horrible in the dungeon. A massacre. But— but, we found some more relics! And nobody got hurt. We were careful! We stayed together!’

Rylan hugged his sister after confirming she was physically unhurt, then turned towards Aroha. She could see the anger in his eyes start to dissipate. It was replaced by something else. A weariness, a sadness.

He hung his head and whispered, ‘Okay, I’m glad…’

‘Rylan…?’ Aroha ventured softly, thrown off-guard by his sudden shift in mood.

‘It’s fine. You’re all fine. It’s fine.’

There was no fire in his voice. No warmth. She could tell he didn’t really mean it. The iciness was somehow worse than if he had been full of anger at her.

‘No, Rylan…’ she came over to him and sank to her knees. ‘Please be angry at me. Shout and scream and be angry.’

‘I’m not angry,’ he exhaled. ‘I knew one of you would do something like this. I’m just glad nobody got hurt this time…’

‘I don’t like this, Rylan. I did a bad thing. I’m sorry.’

‘I said it's fine… Don’t apologize.’

He stood up and walked away. All Aroha could do was nod sadly. Nobody else said a word.

Rylan didn’t really speak to any of them for the rest of the twilight. Penelope just described it as “a mood” and told Aroha and Damien to just leave him alone for a while. Aroha slept next to her again, forever grateful for her friend’s warmth and presence. She was supposed to be the one comforting Penelope, but she ended up the most comforted by simply being near her.

She felt guilty and saddened by the situation with Rylan, finding herself incapable of sleep. She didn’t know how she could make it up to him or make him open up about it. It was like a dead weight in the pit of her stomach. She just wanted everything to be okay. She hadn’t thought anything through, hadn’t taken his feelings into consideration in her own selfish desire to explore and wander. She wished she knew what he was feeling so she could comfort him as well.

The band left the fort on the dawn to continue on their journey. The mood was awkward and uncomfortable as they departed. It seemed as if everyone had taken a collective breath inwards but nobody had the courage to be the first to let it out.