The Edge of a World, page 2
They set out early on the next turn. The sky was deep gray, but the village was already bustling with life. Marit was still half-asleep, unusually quiet and yawning every few steps.
The morning air was crisp; summer was turning into fall, taking the balmy nights with it.
They made good progress. From time to time, Otar would consult his folded-up map, but even with his state of exhaustion, Marit led him sure-footed, around the village, over the river, behind a waterfall, down a small cave, through a tight crevasse, and then back out into the open, before they descended another slope.
“We’re going down again?” Otar observed with a frown. To him, that made no sense. They needed to go up.
Marit looked at him, puzzled.
“The walls can’t be climbed. There are no paths that lead up.”
Otar suddenly felt very dumb.
“Is that what you did?” Marit asked, mirth dancing in his eyes. His body shook. Otar was sure he was suppressing laughter.
He tried not to bristle, but it was futile, if the sudden broad smile on Marit’s face was any sign. Best to change the topic.
“Where are you leading me, then?”
Marit accepted the change of topic with grace and pointed down the new chasm. It was tight, almost a cave. High above them, Otar made out a sliver of the blue sky.
“These holes lead to a cave system that stretches through the surrounding mountains. We’ll start at the easiest entry point and see how far we’ve come, then we track back and choose a different one, until we have found what you have been searching for.” He looked back at Otar. “No one has ever mapped these caves in their entirety, so we need to be careful.” Marit turned to the crack and frowned.
Otar stepped up beside him and peered into the darkness, trying to find what Marit must have seen. “What is it?” he asked when he found nothing strange.
“There were once ways which led to too smooth walls that we always thought to be man-made. Maybe from settlers before us. It’s a shame that those have caved in.” Marit rolled his shoulders back in a half shrug. “The snow melts bring floods, and over time …” He trailed off, but it was clear what he meant.
Otar studied the path, his mind working. This was the tidbit of information he had been searching for, but no one had told him. He wondered what the reason could be. “Can we go parallel to the old way?”
First Marit shook his head, but then he paused, considering. “If we’re lucky.”
For most of the turn, they weren’t. After they passed the crevasse and emerged into the cave system, the terrain became difficult to cross with uneven ground and stones loosening under their feet while the way led up. The air was cold and moist and often hard to breathe. Otar made notes when they came to an intersection, while Marit marked their way with colorful scraps of cloth.
When Otar asked for an explanation, Marit turned pink. “It’s safer than chalk, water drips down here and may wash any symbol away, so fabric holds better.” He took out a yellow scrap of fabric with colored blotches and embroidered symbols on it and tied it around a rock spire extruding from the wall. Marit’s blush deepened when Otar pointed them out. “I made them last night,” Marit mumbled and moved on.
When Marit was scouting out a path, Otar stepped closer to a scrap and examined it. It was a row of three signs Otar hadn’t seen before. He sketched them with fast strokes and then hurried after Marit, who was calling for him.
After what must have been many small-turns, they found their way back out into the open. A grassy patch hidden between walls of rock opened before them. Otar tried to check the sun to gauge how late it was, but the high stones obscured most of the sky.
They settled down to take a short rest, and Marit handed him a flask with the local ale. Otar took it with a nod, and, after a swig, studied Marit.
“Why did you offer me help?” Otar paused and then added, “Besides the obvious reasons.”
Marit’s cheeks colored once more, and yet he didn’t shy away from the embarrassment. “You have seen so much of the world. And I want to know about it so badly.” Marit looked at a point over Otar’s shoulder, his eyes flicking around. “The books and the tales the merchants bring—they’re not the same. I wanted to go out by myself but Father says I have a duty to the people of the village, and he won’t let me leave.”
Otar thought back to his mother, who had said close to the same thing—the world outside was too dangerous, too unpredictable, too everything else. Otar knew where she was coming from. She feared she would be losing him as she had lost her husband. One turn, his father had gone out and had never returned.
And yet, she hadn’t been able to stop him. He had packed his bag and had said goodbye.
At times, he sent her and his sisters letters, sometimes with money, often with stories.
Otar took another swig from the flask. “You know, you can just leave.” As he had.
Marit turned his gaze to him, a flicker of hope dancing in it. “But where would I start?”
“At the first step.”
Marit spluttered, but Otar said nothing else. Everyone needed their own beginning to decide for themselves if it was worth it.
Otar screwed the canteen tight and put his things together again. After a few moments, Marit mirrored him, but his mind seemed to be somewhere else.
While he waited for Marit to be ready, Otar hoped the other wouldn’t insist on coming with him when he left the village. Taking him on would send mixed signals, and while Marit was attractive in a charming, boyish kind of way, Otar wasn’t in the habit of having a bed warmer to stroke his own ego. He needed something different: a spark, a connection, something to hold on to. He needed …
He swallowed and shouldered his pack.
They crossed the grass field and slipped once more into the damp and cavernous darkness. Marit dutifully tied scrap after scrap around rock fixtures and anything they would be sure to find at every intersection they came to pass. After a particularly steep incline, the path leveled out, and they entered an enormous cavern filled with an underground lake. The water stretched dark and glossy before them. Nothing rippled on the surface; it was an endless mirror. Their small witch light barely illuminated the area beyond the shore.
Marit frowned at the lake. “This is new.”
They walked down the waterfront then hit a dead end. Neither of them was inclined to find out how deep the lake was.
After a brief discussion about their next steps, they tracked back to the previous intersection and chose a different route, which this time ended after two twist and turns blocked by what looked like a cave in.
Otar tried hard to hide his impatience at the wasted time.
“Our luck seems to have run out,” he remarked as he inspected the rubble and found no way through.
Marit sighed. “That wasn’t the plan.”
“And yet I’ve gone further than I have ever gone before,” Otar said with a grin, and after a moment Marit grinned back.
Back at the intersection, they chose the third option that led them into a smaller cavern, this time with an exit at the other end. The ceiling hung low and at one point, they needed to crawl to pass through. Thankfully, it opened up into a round shaped underground chamber.
After brushing off the dirt from his clothing, Otar looked around. The place seemed too symmetric to have formed naturally. Neither stalagmites nor stalactites grew. The ground was even with a layer of fine dark dust, and the air dry. The opening they had come through appeared as if something had caved in or broken through.
Otar crouched down and wiped the dirt with his hands. The ground was stony, with no patterns or carvings or tiles.
“Found anything?” Marit kneeled beside him, the witch light throwing their shadows onto the wall.
“Not really. But it is odd.”
Otar sat back on his feet and looked around. Confused, Marit did the same, unsure what Otar was getting at.
Otar pointed to the surrounding stone. “The cavern is too regular. There are no heaps of dislodged stones, and the walls don’t have the same textures as the others. And the air is too dry.” Otar scratched his chin in thought. “And yet, if this had been made by the Ancients, I expect the ground laid with tiles, or at least some markings. The other ruins never had bare floors like this here.”
Otar put his pack down. He fished out his notebook and scribbled down a few lines of his observations before making some hasty sketches. Any anomaly was an additional step closer to uncovering the secrets the Ancients had left behind.
Marit rose and turned around himself. “So, another dead end?” There was no other way out.
It was, wasn’t it? The hovering witch light was strong enough to illuminate the small cave. There were no shadows hiding anything.
“Master Otar?”
“When is your family expecting you back?”
Marit colored and scratched his neck. “They told me to enjoy myself.”
Otar raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment further. The less said about any of it, the better.
“We’ll rest here and then decide what to do when we aren’t so exhausted. This place is dry and not much can creep up on us.”
They made a cold meal and then curled up in their bedrolls. Otar had gotten used to the bed in the hut, so sleeping once more on the hard ground was uncomfortable. At least it was not as freezing as Otar had feared. With the air being as dry as it was, no dampness settled into his bones. Still, he was restless through the night.
He woke early—or, he assumed it to be early. A glance at Marit showed him that the other was snoring away; turned to the side, the bedroll pulled up to his ears. The witch light hovered between them. It wouldn’t take much to reach over and let himself forget everything for a few small-turns, let himself forget about the monster he was, the monster he carried with him …
Otar scrubbed a hand over his face to lose the dangerous thoughts, peeled himself out of his bed roll, and got up. After stretching his stiff muscles, he went to work. There should be another way out of the cavern. If this was part of an Ancients ruin, there must be a hidden mechanism. With Marit not hanging over his shoulders, he could try a less orthodox method that would generate too many questions if witnessed.
But first, he checked his notebook to find if there had been anything similar he had come across before. He cursed himself for sending the older notebooks away, the writing in this one didn’t go back very far and as expected revealed nothing important.
Otar swallowed. He had one option left—but it came with a risk and always with a price.
There were legends surrounding magic.
In the south, the people held the belief that all had not just magic but that it was powerful enough to perform miracles, commune with the world around them, shape a mere thought born in their mind into existence—until they couldn’t anymore.
In the north, the tribes described great monsters that consumed magic, and so our ancestors hid what they could until they had forgotten all about it.
In the west, they believed the gods took magic away as a punishment for an unspeakable crime.
And to the east, they assumed that everyone in the world never had much more magic than they had now, and that all that talk about past grandeur was only myth and nothing more.
There was a tiny spark of magic in everyone—not enough for creation magic—but they all felt a connection to the mysterious energy that lay beneath the ground, a steady hum that some called aether and others magic.
Those who have a stronger spark powered witch lights, knew that winter would come early, and could hear the trees whisper—but there was never enough to create something, as the old legends described.
Whatever happened in the past was unclear, but Otar was sure that at one point that kind of magic must have existed, maybe as a distinct form from what remained in these times, because only magic could activate the ruins.
He walked over to the stone wall and checked every inch. After a few small-turns, he heard his companion shuffle. At the sound he whirled around, overbalanced and caught himself on the stone wall. There was a tingle in his palm, and then the whole cave rumbled, the ground vibrating.
Marit sprung up, looking around with wide eyes. “What is going on?”
“I might have found the hidden switch,” Otar said, forcing himself to grin while his heart was in his throat beating a fast staccato.
Marit blinked at him, almost owlishly, his mind still not there.
The room stilled; dirt trickled down from the ceiling for a bit longer. In fear of triggering anything else that might bury them under tons of rocks, they remained still as their eyes darted around the cave to assess the damage. Part of the wall had opened, right next to where Otar had pressed his hand against the stone.
Darkness awaited them.
Otar eyed it with trepidation.
“First breakfast and then we go onward.”
Marit blinked at him and then laughed. If it sounded hysterical, neither of them commented.
Chapter 3
“I tried to dig deeper into their ancestry, but it’s hard to determine where they have hailed from. Their skin is too light and their hair not the usual dark coloring you find in the southern regions. I guess they have wandered down from the north over many generations. Patterns in their weaving show similarities to the ones they have in the north-western settlements, close to the liveable line.”
(Chapter: “Piskus”, in: Scholar Otar’s Notebooks, No. 26)
They didn’t hurry through their cold meal, but they also didn’t linger. Then they packed up, and slipped into the darkness, two witch lights now trailing between them dutifully.
The air was colder and crisper, fresher than in the small room, the space was narrow hardly wide enough for them to pass through stretching into two directions. When Otar turned left he saw the faint outline of massive boulders blocking the way. They turned right Marit pointing out a faint glimmer of light at that end.
The room they slept in had been barren. A testament to that once more, nothing besides the naked stone remained. Otar pinched the bridge of his nose. Devoid of anything besides pictures on the walls and symbols that might be words, the ruins were strangely empty places. Just as empty as this hallway. Otar looked for Marit, but the other was a hazy scheme further away.
Scholars often speculated on what materials the Ancients might have used that would decay so completely. A long-forgotten craft? Or did the Ancients take everything with them when they left?
Which was another point of contention: Had they actually left?
The hallway was not built as in other ruins, here it was tunneled into the mountain stone. Otar stepped closer and studied its walls. Yes, there were minerals laced through it, and the color hues were the same as in the caves they had just walked through. Usually, the ruins were made of a much lighter stone, a light gray or brown, but never this dark and built with almost invisible seams, a technique also lost.
In these hallways, deep lines ran at roughly the height of their shoulders down the entire length. In active ruins, they’d emit a pale light not unlike the witch light.
Otar followed behind Marit at a slower pace, probing the stone from time to time, hoping for a clue, a reaction, for anything, really, while his companion moved further away.
After a few small-turns he saw Marit disappear into another room. As Otar made his way to the end of the hallway, he emerged into a circular room with a domed ceiling and saw Marit at the opposite wall. Similar to the other ruins, every one of them had a dome entirely made of stone. The size differed depending on the overall scale of the ruin. Rarer to find was a ruin with more than one dome. The biggest dome was the main building, or what the scholars dubbed as the main. Around the outside of the building, spires would be evenly placed. Impossibly slender things curving inward, they seemed to be reaching for the middle of the dome.
At least, that was another assumption. Most tips had weathered away, and only the minuscule bend in their stoney bodies led to the theory.
Otar deeply inhaled the fresh air within the room and registered the massive windows on one side. They were open, no glass holding back the mountain wind that thundered through.
Instinctively, Otar took out his notebook and wrote down his observations. Ruins never had windows. Marit, who had been inspecting the walls on the other side, came up beside him, and they both stepped closer to them. Beyond their delicate frames, the cliff edge plunged down into a deep chasm.
Excusing himself, Marit took a few hasty steps back. “I’ve never been this high up. At least not immediately confronted with such a steep fall.”
Otar nodded absentmindedly and made a few last notes. Looking around, he noticed the dome was on the smaller side, the mountains probably dictating the size. One half of the walls were still rough stonework. Otar walked closer and let his fingers drift over it. It didn’t look like the masonry work Otar had seen in Rasanell, where thin lines, almost invisible, spoke of the tools that formed the stone. These were deep gouges, as if something impossibly big had taken a swipe out of it.
Otar turned back to survey the whole room. Marit was watching him. He felt his gaze prickling his neck, but he paid him no mind.
Something piqued his interest, something besides the anomalies. He looked back at the walls that were smoother and then it came to him—the murals were missing. He looked closer and noticed in one corner the rest of a faint star-like pattern, above a stylized ruin, the lines barely there.
Every ruin, no matter how big or small, had a mural painted onto the main dome walls. It illustrated strange plants and animals no one had ever seen before, with strange black symbols scribbled close to them. Scholars concluded that they either must be names or, at the very least, descriptions.
And yet, in this ruin, Otar saw nothing was painted on or had ever been painted on. No colored remains from the white undercoat or the flowers and the colorful animal skins could be seen.
Otar made more notes and sketches, sending the witch light this and that way, taking it all in.
