by Eric Guindon
I swear it, Papa. I will avenge your death. I will save mother. I will make them pay.
To her own grave Kyria said:
“Rest well, little girl. You had your time. Now I’ll do what must be done. This world is no place for a sweet thing like you.”
Haylem was strangely silent in the girl’s head, though she gave it no thought.
Next, the girl steeled herself and approached the decomposing bandits. The smell from them was horrid and she gagged for a moment before she could go on.
Do what needs to be done! She told herself.
Bending down, shooing away some birds picking at the rotting flesh, Kyria searched the bodies. She found some coins, which she put into a pocket at her belt, but more unusually, each of the bandits carried a small hexagonal piece of metal with a star carved upon it. She pocketed these as well, keeping them separate from the money. On one of the men, Kyria found a letter. She took it out and began reading it, but soon stopped when she realized it was from the man’s mother, enquiring after his health.
Even evil men like these have mothers who love them. Kyria shook her head and threw away the letter. She found nothing else of interest. A small, perhaps foolish, part of her had hoped to find a map or some other useful clue as to where her mother was taken. Of course, she had the compass but, having no idea how reliable the magical device would prove, she would have liked something more mundane to rely upon as well.
Forcing herself to be thorough, the girl went to where Hexel had saved her from the bandit. It was no easier searching this fourth body than the other three, but it yielded nothing more than some additional coins and another of the strange hexagonal pieces each man carried.
Kyria walked some distance upwind from the corpse and took out the compass from a pouch at her belt. She realized she’d been delaying this part. This was the true beginning of her journey to find her mother. From here on out, everything would be strange and likely dangerous. Kyria realized she was afraid to leave this safe, familiar place.
This is not like the stories at all, she sighed. The heroine is always so adventurous. Me, I just want my mother back. She stopped herself from crying then by reciting in her head the mantra she had made up while digging the graves:
I will find the bandits.
They will pay.
I will find their leader.
He will suffer.
I will find my mother.
I will free her.
Holding on to her resolve, Kyria looked at the compass, keeping it flat in her hand so that her palm was touching the runes engraved on the bottom of the small circular device.
“Haylem?” she asked aloud.
“I am with you, always, Kyria.”
“You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“I respect your privacy. This seemed like something you needed to do by yourself,” Haylem said.
“I’m ready now,” she told the rune-mind. “Do I just think of my mother to get the compass to point toward where she is?”
“A bit more is required: you have to provide the link to your mother. In your case, your own blood is best for this, because of your relationship. Simply prick your finger and let a drop fall onto the top of the compass.”
Kyria did as Haylem directed. The instant the drop of blood fell onto the surface of the compass, it dried and disappeared. A second later, the needle began spinning quickly, stopping moments later to point eastward. Once it stopped, Kyria tested the compass’ heading by spinning herself around; no matter which direction she turned, the needle kept pointing unerringly to the east.
“They came from the east, it only makes sense that their base would be in that direction, I guess,” Kyria reasoned out loud.
Resolute, the girl took a step up into the air, using the power of the Skyrunners, and took a running start. Once she had built some speed, she simply slid along the surface of the air, some thirty centimetres above the ground.
Kyria headed east.
With her knowledge of local geography as scant as it was, Kyria was not sure what she would find to the east of the Rune Yard. No road ran directly in that direction and she knew of nothing that lay to the east. In fact, what little she did know about the area consisted of the nearby village, which was to the south, and the city of Groandel, where her mother’s family hailed from, to the south-east.
“Do you know what I’m likely to find in this direction?” Kyria asked Haylem.
“I’m afraid my knowledge of the area is far out of date, Kyria,” he answered. “In my time there was a major city in this direction, a place called Argantel.”
“You’d think I’d have heard of this place if it still existed,” Kyria dismissed the idea.
“None of the old cities are still inhabited, as far as I know, Kyria. That does not mean they stopped existing,” Haylem corrected her.
“So you think it’s still there?” she asked.
“Undoubtedly, something of it must still stand. I doubt our descendants managed to completely wreck it after the fall of the Golden Age.”
“About that,” Kyria decided to plunge into the subject, since Haylem had already brought it up himself. “Why do people blame the rune-magic for the end of the Time Before if it wasn’t the actual cause, as you claim?”
Through the bond, Kyria could sense that Haylem was trying to pick the best way to say what he needed to say. Gliding along on her Skyrunners, she was in no rush and did not push the rune-mind to answer any faster than he chose to.
“The confusion stems from how the invaders came into our world. Today, people have only a vague sense of why the Golden Age ended. You believe that there were monsters that came from nowhere to punish the rune-mages for their hubris, but this is mostly wrong. The truth is much more complicated. The invaders were definitely monsters, but they were not on any righteous mission; they were simply hungry. They came from another layer of the world, another dimension, I guess you could say. Every so often, thousands of years apart, our two worlds line up in such a way that weakened places in both layers line up just right and there is free passage between them. Such an event was exactly what happened at the end of the Golden Age.”
“But why would people assume this had anything to do with rune-magic?” Kyria pressed.
“Because rune-magic was used at the height of the Golden Age to create passage-ways between distant places, quick transportation portals allowing people from all over our world to move from one part of it to another, almost instantly. These gateways and passages used runic-magic, of course, but they created additional weak points in our dimension. Alone, they were harmless depressions in the fabric of our world, but in combination with the upcoming alignment, they provided the monsters from the other side of reality entry into our world a year before they normally would have gained it regardless. But most knew nothing of this detail. To the general populace, it seemed as though our runic gates had served to let the monsters in. This was not the case.”
“But the runic gates did let the monsters in early,” Kyria pointed out.
“And since they all came through the transportation gates for the first year, it appeared that rune-magic was to blame for the invasion.”
“But, the rune-magic was to blame for the invasion happening early,” Kyria insisted.
“Yes. The rune-smiths were to blame for that. In fact, at the time, rune-smiths in the service of the central government had been working on how to deal with the upcoming problem and failed us all further by not realizing the gates would cause such an effect.”
“The government knew of the upcoming invasion?” Kyria was surprised.
“Yes. I was built to tackle the problem, in fact, as was the facility you saw.”
“But you weren’t able to come up with a solution in time,” Kyria said it without meaning any rebuke, but she felt Haylem’s reaction: the rune-mind was ashamed of his failure to avert the fall of the Golden Age.
“I did all I could. I ran out of time. I don’t know if another year woul
d have even made enough of a difference,” Haylem said slowly, his voice was somber and full of self-reproach.
“You can’t go back and change the past, Haylem,” she told him, trying to comfort him. “Thankfully, there can’t be another time like the one that caused the end of the Golden Age for another few millennia, right?”
Haylem was oddly silent through their bond and Kyria realized the rune-mind was blocking her out.
“Haylem?” she asked aloud to prompt his return to the conversation.
“Sorry, Kyria. I think I’ve talked enough about the Golden Age for now. Is it okay if we change the subject?”
“Um, yeah. Of course.”
But they did not speak of anything else. For the next few hours they continued in silence, both friends lost in their own thoughts. Their contemplations were brought to an end near sunset when, over the horizon, spires reaching high into the sky became visible.
“Argantel,” Haylem said.
“How tall are those spires?” Kyria wondered.
“The tallest were a bit shy of a kilometre, but those might have fallen by now. These might be only some five hundred metres tall.”
Kyria closed her mouth, which she had suddenly found open.
“Really? How? How can something be made so tall? Wouldn’t it fall over?”
“Rune-magic. The wonders of the Golden Age are all owed to it, Kyria. In that age we thought nothing was impossible.”
“Surely even then some things were impossible,” the girl scoffed.
“All too true,” Haylem said and through their bond, Kyria saw an image of a nightmarish creature emerging from a large metallic gate covered with runes.
“Right,” she said in a whisper to herself.
The girl decided to camp where she was, within sight of the spires of the ancient city, but still kilometres away from it. She did not want to come any closer to Argantel at night.
Landing, she found a soft grassy area under a tree and curled up snuggly in her cloak, directly on the ground. Images of the monster from the brief glimpse Kyria had received through her link with Haylem haunted her dreams.
Haylem woke Kyria early the next morning. She had not slept enough and was slow to react to his mental prodding.
“What?” She could tell the sun was up.
“I heard voices,” the rune-mind said.
“You?” Kyria could not understand how Haylem could have heard anything.
“Using your ears,” he clarified.
“Oh.” The girl hadn’t known he could do that. It stood to reason that he could, but she hadn’t thought of it. “Where?”
“It was faint, toward the city.”
Kyria stowed her gear, foregoing breakfast for the moment, and got herself ready for the day’s trek.
“Were the voices coming this way?” She asked the rune-mind.
“I don’t know. It sounded like they might have been echoing inside the city.”
“How could you possibly hear that?” Kyria certainly couldn’t hear anything of the sort now and doubted she ever could.
“I process audio signals much better than your brain does, Kyria. Your hearing is better when I do the listening.”
Kyria wasn’t sure if she should be insulted for a moment. It sounded like Haylem was calling her lazy of hearing!
“Even I do not hear the voices any longer,” the rune-mind admitted. “Either they have quieted or they have moved such that the sounds are not carrying as well as they were.”
The two decided to proceed as per the original plan, to travel following the direction of the needle. This meant ignoring the voices Haylem had heard from the city, but neither the girl nor the rune-mind had any interest in going to investigate the sounds.
Kyria did not get far along the previous heading before she started to notice the needle shifting.
“No,” the word escaped her when it became clear the compass was pointing directly at Argantel.
The girl altered her course, watching the sway of the compass needle to get an idea of how far away the destination was. If it varied a lot with only a little bit of lateral movement, she would know that the destination was close. If it did not, it would be far.
Her mother was near, she confirmed. “It really is pointing at the city,” the girl despaired.
“Or near it,” pointed out Haylem. “Even if it is pointing at the city, if the bandits are safe hiding there, surely it is safe enough for you to pursue them.”
“Yeah, that’s all good and fine when you’re not the one who has to go into the spooky abandoned city.”
“I will be with you,” Haylem assured her. “I will make sure you know of the dangers presented by any remaining rune-magic. You should be safer from the city than the bandits are.”
“You’re probably right,” Kyria agreed, but with great reluctance.
She steeled herself for the worst and slid on the air, getting closer and closer to the city. As it turned out, the needle was not pointing into Argantel, but rather beside it.
Kyria thanked her luck. Despite her newfound familiarity with rune-magic, her parents had instilled a deep fear of anything runic that still abided in her heart.
Still, she would have to go to the very edge of the city. The needle was pointing to a ramshackle wooden building propped up against Argantel’s outer wall. It seemed that the bandits had a camp right on the doorstep of the abandoned city and it was there they had taken the girl’s mother.
Afraid of the bandits but eager to free her mother, Kyria approached the building, sliding silently on air.
As she came closer, she also approached Argantel. The city was surrounded by great granite walls, reaching at least twenty metres into the air. These blocked her view of the rest of the city, save for glimpses of buildings taller than the walls, such as the few still-standing spires.
“There are no gates.” Kyria noticed.
“No, of course not,” Haylem responded.
“Why not? You’d think people would want to come and go from the city. Or did everyone fly in the Golden Age?” the girl asked.
“Oh. I see the confusion. I’m sorry, I thought you knew, Kyria: the walls were put up during the fall. The cities of the Golden Age had no walls.”
“What? People being killed by monsters took the time to erect great big walls of granite around this city as they fled?” Kyria had a hard time picturing anyone putting up such walls in a decade, much less while fighting for their lives. Then it hit her.
“Yes,” confirmed Haylem. “They were put up using fabricators: devices dependent on rune-magic.”
“But those people thought the rune-magic was the problem!” Kyria objected.
“And yet, they used it to seal off access to other, greater concentrations of rune-magic, like the cities. The same happened with your Rune Yard, Kyria.” Haylem pointed out.
“What do you mean?” Kyria asked.
“I know this first hand: after the monsters left, your ancestors made the Yard thanks to rune-magic. They used lifters to move the spread-out contaminated runic metal detritus of the Golden Age into that one heap. Then they used fabricators to make the walls around it. Only then did they abandon the rune-magic they abhorred. It makes a certain sense. How else could they manage the segregation of all the contaminated runic remnants?”
Kyria had a hard time understanding how people could preach one thing and, at the same time, take actions counter to those very beliefs.
By this time the girl was getting quite close to the building. How she wished she had approached it the night before; she could have used the cover of darkness to her advantage. Still, she did the best she could to keep out of sight from the few windows visible in the building ahead.
Using the Skyrunners, Kyria went up along the outside wall of the ramshackle house until she stood in mid-air beside one of the windows. She listened but heard nothing.
And I hear nothing either, Haylem informed the girl. Not even breathing. I think the building is empty, Kyr
ia.
Drawing her weapons, Kyria had them at the ready as she stepped in front of the window.
Nothing. The room through the window was empty. It contained a few cots and storage chests, but little else. She went in, bending to fit through the window.
Once inside, making sure to keep walking on air so as to make no noise, Kyria left through the only door, finding herself in a larger room, this one filled with bunk beds. The girl’s nose wrinkled as she caught scent of chamber pots too long unchanged.
Kyria went from room to room, searching the place as she went. Other than more storage for food and a cooking pit, she found little different from one room to the next. The only place of any interest was the one-room ground floor: it was filled with junk. Runic metal junk.
“What is it?” She asked aloud.
“Just things, nothing stands out as exceptionally valuable or useful in this pile,” Haylem told her. “That sheet of metal there is a bed, for example.”
“Doesn’t look very comfortable,” Kyria remarked.
“It creates a cushion of air for the user to sleep on,” Haylem explained.
“Oh. Kind of like my boots?”
“They use much the same runes, yes.”
Kyria took out her compass. The needle pointed into the building, into rooms she had already looked at. Her heart stopped for a moment.
“Will this point at Mother even if she’s . . .” She couldn’t finish the question.
Haylem waited before answering, giving the girl a moment to collect herself. “I’m afraid it will,” he said gravely.
Kyria took a deep breath to calm herself, and then backtracked through the building, letting the needle lead her. It brought her back to one of the rooms filled with bunk beds. It obstinately pointed at one bed in particular. It had rumpled covers on it; perhaps her mother was under those. Kyria did not want to check. Haylem had said he heard no one breathing in the building. The girl didn’t want to lift the blanket. Until she did, she could imagine the possibility that her mother still lived. If she looked and found her mother’s body, there was no going back to the time when there was still hope.
