Of Bone and Ruin

by T. A. White

  “Well you missed something,” Gabriella said with a hint of a growl in her voice.

  Josef sidestepped, keeping his back to the wall and Gabriella in view. His face was pale and his hands shaking.

  Jost stepped between the two. “This isn’t helping. We don’t know enough to be pointing fingers.”

  “We know,” she said. “We both know the only ones to gain by disposing of my brethren in a manner so at odds with the customs of any people of the Aurelian Empire are the Academics and their sort. Had their bones been found in the tunnels leading to the mosaic room, you would have immediately found in our favor. This isn’t the first time the Academy has tried to manipulate a discovery by wiping away traces of Silva presence.”

  “Maybe if your people weren’t so stubborn and would let other people study sites touched by the Silva, my cohorts wouldn’t be so quick to tamper with discoveries like this,” Josef shot back.

  “So you admit your people did this.”

  Josef looked horrified and angry at her accusation. “No, of course not, but your people have made no secret that you’re willing to bury such things any time remains are discovered.”

  “Our ancestors gave everything to break us away from the Creators so that they could be free from slavery; so their children would not be raised as monsters. They deserve to rest in peace and be treated with a little dignity—something the Academy has shown time and again they are incapable of.”

  One of the odd shapes in the middle of the room caught Tate’s attention. She drifted closer, listening to their argument with half of her attention.

  “You act like my people go out of their way to disrespect the ancestors. We have our own stories and our own ancestors who fought to protect us from the Creators’ madness.” Josef’s voice was passionate. “If your people were just willing to work with us, I’m sure much could be learned.”

  Gabriella barked out a laugh. Even Tate could admit his argument fell on deaf ears when taking into account where they stood.

  “You can’t look around this place and tell me about the respect your people show for the dead,” Gabriella sneered.

  Blood dripped down Tate’s arm, leaving little drops on the stone beneath her. She grimaced and adjusted the rag. She needed something better to stop the bleeding.

  There was a clicking sound and the stone under Tate’s foot pulsed.

  “Um, everyone.”

  “This was not done by us.” Josef’s voice rose to a shout.

  “It was.”

  “I don’t think that’s important right now.” Tate’s voice was strained. She was afraid to move her foot. There was a blue light flashing under it.

  “It wasn’t.”

  The blue light was flashing faster. Like a countdown.

  “Enough,” Tate yelled.

  Jost stepped toward her and she held out one hand, palm facing him. He came to a stop, his gaze falling to the blue radiating from Tate’s foot.

  “I think I stepped on a trap.” Her voice had an eerie calmness to it.

  “I told you not to venture into the room,” Josef said, his face was determined and on the edge of panic.

  “I kind of wish I’d listened to you.” Tate edged back but froze when the light’s glow snaked out and started to rise.

  Dewdrop made an inarticulate sound and started to step towards her. Tate shook her head.

  “Go back to the ladder.”

  “No.”

  “Dewdrop.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  The blue, whatever it was, covered her boot and was steadily making its way up her pant leg.

  “Dewdrop, get over here now,” Jost ordered. His voice brooked no argument. Tate breathed a sigh of relief when Dewdrop complied. Guess ordering pirates around on a ship had given Jost the ability to order stubborn youths to do his bidding without question.

  “What do we do?” Jost asked, tension in his voice. “Will the shirt stop the magic?”

  Tate felt a spurt of hope. She’d forgotten that it was supposed to protect her from some of these traps.

  Gabriella stepped closer, stopping well outside of the reach of the blue light creeping up Tate’s body. Josef was right behind her.

  “I don’t think so. She’s beginning to turn to stone.”

  Tate looked down, not seeing what they did. To her, her foot looked like it always did. Just covered in the blue light.

  “Can we pull her away from it?” Jost asked.

  Gabriella shook her head. “We’ll just get caught too. Once the process is finished, the stone breaks, dissolving, and the person disappears.”

  “Do something,” Dewdrop shouted. “You’re the experts, aren’t you?”

  “You don’t understand. Once a trap has been triggered the only thing we can do is wait it out. The ancients designed these to destroy their enemies.” Josef looked at Tate. “I’m sorry but there is nothing I can do.”

  Tate exhaled shakily.

  “How long does she have until whatever is happening is done?” Jost looked like he might explode at any second. His emotions contained, but barely.

  “Minutes, I’d say.” Gabriella stood up, giving Tate an apologetic look.

  “Since there’s nothing you can do, it’s best that you go back upstairs. We don’t know if this will trigger other traps. No need for anyone else to die unnecessarily.” Tate felt little fear. Just an odd kind of resignation. She would have thought the fear would be all-consuming. Instead, all she felt was calm. Her mind felt clear.

  Josef nodded and headed back to the ladder.

  Jost gave her a sharp nod and grabbed Dewdrop, dragging him behind him.

  “No, I’m not going. Let me go.” Dewdrop flailed, trying to escape Jost’s grip.

  Tate was grateful that Jost was getting Dewdrop out of danger. By now the light was to her waist. What the end result was, Tate didn’t know, but she didn’t want him witnessing it.

  Gabriella was the last to head for the ladder, her face showing regret and guilt. Then she too was gone.

  Tate took a deep breath. The light was to her chest. Energy was beginning to build in the room. Very like what Tate had felt when she tried to summon the fire elemental. Her hair crackled, lifting from her shoulders.

  Ilith was crouched between Tate’s shoulder blades, her claws digging in. Tate felt the dragon’s fascination with the light. Oddly, she didn’t seem to fear it.

  “Dewdrop, stop. Come back here,” Jost yelled.

  Dewdrop pelted away from the ladder and across the room. His face filled with determination.

  “No, go back.” Tate didn’t want to drag him down with her. Finally, the fear that had been missing before came. Not at the thought of her death but instead his.

  Gabriella gave chase, her stride eating up ground as she darted after the younger boy.

  She wasn’t going to be fast enough. Dewdrop was too close.

  The light crept up to Tate’s shoulders; Ilith wrapped herself into an approximation of a necklace around Tate’s neck.

  Dewdrop reached her just as the light finished consuming her. Gabriella reached out, grabbing Dewdrop just as he grabbed Tate’s arm.

  A roaring filled the room—the energy cresting to a painful sensation that bit along Tate’s skin. Screams rose around her. The world jolted and then popped—blue filling everything and noise buzzing in her mind.

  *

  Tate hurt. A bone-deep ache. The kind that you got after a hard life when a storm rolls in and sets every injury you’ve ever had to twanging. That didn’t even include the headache that was currently pounding like a drum inside her skull.

  She was standing. She blinked at the white room she found herself in.

  The room glowed with a bluish white light and there were symbols in varying shades etched into the walls. Objects were hung in alcoves all along the walls and there were altar-like tables similar to those in the mosaic room.

  She wasn’t alone.

  Dewdrop, with Gabriella holding on to hi
m, stood next to her, blank expressions on their faces.

  Tate disengaged Dewdrop’s grip from her arm. She waved one hand in front of his eyes. No response. She did the same to Gabriella. Nothing there either.

  They seemed to be fine otherwise. Tate decided to let them come out of their fugue on their own. If they came out of it.

  She shook her head, forcing that thought away. No, she’d come out of it. No reason to assume they wouldn’t too. In the meantime, she could work on discovering a way out of here. They needed to rendezvous with Jost and the others.

  She had a feeling that those they had left behind would be only too happy to use this incident to further their own agendas.

  Her visual examination of the room yielded no apparent exit. The light the room cast was plenty to see by, which was a good thing considering all of the glow lamps had been left in that other room.

  She ventured over to the walls, pressing against them every few feet in case one of them wasn’t completely solid. There were several white altar-like tables interspersed throughout the room, a couple had items on them. Tate ignored them for now, wanting to concentrate on finding a way out.

  The room reminded her of the first time she met Ai. That room had walls capable of turning translucent and allowing people to venture through. How it worked, Tate had no idea. To her mind, solid matter was not something that could be turned on and off.

  No luck this time. Every wall was as solid as a rock.

  She looked back at Dewdrop and Gabriella. They remained motionless.

  She moved on to the items tucked into the alcoves in the wall. Some of them looked similar to each other, while others varied in size and coloring. Some were metal. Others looked like wood or leather. Still others were made of a material Tate didn’t know how to classify.

  Tate reached out and pulled a gray and white oblong cylinder off the wall. It lit up at her touch, glowing white lines eating away at the gray in geometric patterns. The cracks reminded Tate of an egg when a chick was trying to peck its way out. It was beautiful and odd.

  Tate held onto it as she ventured to the next alcove. This one was different, made up of shelves filled with little trinkets.

  On the bottom shelf there was a puddle of silver cloth. It looked like someone had taken molten metal and poured it into a pile. Tate’s hand hovered over it, drawn to it, yet she had the oddest feeling it was extremely dangerous.

  A woman’s scream startled Tate and her hand dipped to touch the cloth.

  Gabriella gasped for breath, her chest heaving frantically. Dewdrop’s banshee scream echoed in the room, a thunderclap of pain against Tate’s ears.

  The cloth sparked and then slithered up Tate’s hand, wrapping itself around her arm, its appearance changing to that of metal chains. Tate yanked at it while she ran back to Dewdrop, but it refused to budge.

  “Saviors’ curse it.” Tate gave up on the metal cloth. She clapped her hand over Dewdrop’s mouth, his scream vibrating against her hand. It cramped, the pain excruciating. “Dewdrop, calm down.”

  Gabriella was hyperventilating next to her, but Tate couldn’t spare her any attention. Dewdrop and his scream that could kill—or at least seriously injure them—had to take precedence.

  She shook him, using the hand over his mouth. “Enough. You’re safe. Stop screaming or I’m going to have to knock you out.”

  Tate wasn’t even sure if she was yelling or speaking normally at this point. She was pretty sure his wail had done serious damage to her eardrums.

  His eyes popped open. The sound stopped, leaving a ringing behind.

  His words were muffled, but she thought she heard the word “Tate” in there.

  She took her hand away slowly, prepared to clap it back over his mouth if he tried to scream again.

  He looked at her for a moment. His face crumpled and he lunged at her, his arms squeezing her in a tight hug. His shoulders shook and her shirt grew wet. She patted him on the back, grateful he was alive.

  Next to them, Gabriella seemed to get a hold of her breathing. Instead of great gasping intakes, her breaths were merely fast and punctuated with the occasional whine, like that of a dog scared of what came next.

  “You’re both fine. We’re all fine.” Tate needed to believe it. Even if it wasn’t quite true.

  “What happened? Where are we? Are we dead? How did we get here?” The questions came lightning fast, punctuated by Gabriella’s panting.

  “No idea. To all of those questions.”

  Gabriella finally calmed enough to look around—her eyes widening as she took in the room.

  “What is this? I’ve never seen anything like it. Not in any of the sites currently being explored.”

  “I have,” Tate said, her words grim. “Once.”

  “Where?”

  “Under Aurelia. We discovered it by accident.” At least it was an accident on her part. She suspected Ai, the little girl she had met in that room, had somehow orchestrated the whole thing for reasons only obvious to her.

  “And this is similar?”

  “Almost identical.”

  Dewdrop drew back, his eyes worried. He knew the story of that room and that girl. Knew that Ai was dangerous. It couldn’t be a coincidence that this room was so similar to that one. That only left the question of whether it had a denizen like Ai.

  Tate really hoped not. One creepy girl with no facial expressions was enough for her.

  “I still don’t understand how we got here.”

  Tate shrugged. Neither did she, but she chalked it up to magic or some invention by the Saviors.

  Or the Creators, Ilith whispered in her mind.

  Chills ran Tate’s back. That was a cheery thought.

  “For now, let’s focus on getting out of here and back to the surface. We can figure out the how and why later when we’re safe.” And away from things that might kill them.

  Gabriella nodded. Her panic from earlier seemed to have receded and the capable guard Tate had met was in her place.

  Tate was relieved. She didn’t know if she’d be able to handle this problem by herself and having someone to help gave her hope.

  “If we do get out of here, our names will go down in history for discovering this,” Gabriella said, looking around the room in awe. “I don’t think anyone’s ever uncovered a room with this many untouched and undamaged artifacts. People are going to be fighting over this place for centuries.”

  “Great.” Tate gave her a strained smile. She didn’t care about getting her name in the history books. All she wanted was to get her and Dewdrop back to the surface safely.

  Dewdrop shadowed her as they moved around the room, not letting her out of arm’s reach.

  “I’m fine, Dewdrop,” Tate said for what felt like the hundredth time.

  He nodded and gave her a strained smile like he did all the other times she’d made that assertion. “I know.”

  “That means you don’t have to be my shadow.”

  “I know.” Yet he didn’t waver from her side.

  Tate sighed. “You want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head and dropped his eyes. It was clear he had something to say but maybe now wasn’t the right time.

  Fine by her. She had some stuff to say too. Starting with the next time she told him to do something, he was going to do it. Not fling himself into certain danger that was almost certainly going to get him killed. He’d gotten lucky this time. It was doubtful he’d be so lucky in the future.

  That conversation could wait until they were safe. She had a feeling it was going to be loud. And long.

  “This place seems familiar.” Tate stopped and looked around. Dewdrop did the same.

  “What do you mean?” Gabriella asked. She’d wandered over to one of the alcoves and was examining the artifacts. Unlike Tate, she was being careful not to touch anything.

  “I don’t know.” Something tugged at the back of Tate’s mind. Whispering to her. It was that feeling you got when there was someth
ing so obvious sitting right in front of you. A solution to a problem that your mind just hadn’t seemed to grasp yet.

  “No, I feel it too,” Dewdrop said. “Like we’ve been here before.”

  “That’s impossible. No one has been in a place like this. Ever.” Gabriella looked concerned for their mental well-being.

  Dewdrop’s words made sense to Tate, and suddenly the thought that had been hiding was front and center in her brain. This place seemed familiar because it was. Only now, it was missing bones and dust.

  “No, look around. We were just here. Take away the lights and the cleanliness. Add in a few piles of bone and this looks exactly like the chamber we discovered under the mosaic room.”

  Gabriella scoffed. “Impossible.”

  “No, she’s right,” Dewdrop said. “That’s why it felt so familiar. The dimensions of the room look exactly like that other one. The only difference is the alcoves.”

  “We might have just missed those the first time. The light wasn’t exactly great, and we were a little distracted by the bones.”

  Gabriella looked around, as if seeing the room for the first time. “Maybe the makers just modeled this room after the other. It does seem very similar.”

  Maybe, but Tate didn’t think so. Ai had already proven an ability to manipulate space. Folding pockets so you could get from point A to point B in seconds instead of hours. Why couldn’t this place have done the same? Create a mini space slightly out of sync with the real world. Similar to that of where elementals were thought to live.

  Tate kept that thought to herself. She could examine it in more detail later.

  “If this is set up as the same type of room, there should be a tunnel right there.” Dewdrop pointed to the opposite wall. He walked over and ran his hands along it. Solid rock greeted him.

  That didn’t necessarily mean the tunnel wasn’t there. Ai had been able to manipulate walls and turn them malleable with simply a thought. No reason to think whoever had created this place hadn’t done the same.

  “Wait, does anyone hear that?” Gabriella looked around.

  Tate stopped and listened, not hearing whatever it was Gabriella had heard. Dewdrop turned away from the wall and looked around too.