Ancient Ruins

by Benjamin Medrano

  Pushing outward weakened her, but it also expanded her area of clarity. It also didn’t collapse when she stopped pushing, instead allowing her to retain her ability to more clearly sense what was in the area. Cautiously testing, she found she could also change the air inside her bubble, similar to how she was able to change the soil, though it wasn’t as easy as the soil had been. With that in mind, she turned her attention to the pool of water, examining it hungrily. She wanted good water, not this… filth.

  Time steadily rolled on, but she didn’t pay it any mind, instead focused on her goal. She slowly extended her bubble toward the water, but found that unfortunately, it had to remain roughly a sphere around her, which dramatically slowed her efforts. It took her a long time, pushing outward inch by inch. She wasn’t certain how long it took, but eventually, she managed to envelop the edge of the pool as the periods of light grew shorter yet again. The first time she managed to purify the water, she was elated in spite of her utter exhaustion. But the elation quickly turned sour as she watched the pure, clean water flow downstream, quickly replaced by the foul water once more. With a mental growl of annoyance, she glowered at the water, digging in her mental heels. She wouldn’t be defeated by a mere pond!

  Through sheer, dogged determination, she expanded her bubble toward the pool’s source. She found all sorts of things that intrigued her within the pond, from jewelry to rusted metal plates, but most of the foul mud simply disgusted her. Cool wind came in, the reverse of the warmth from before yet again, and light slowly cycled between long and slow periods. A part of her whispered that each of these periods must be a day, a rising and setting of the sun, and the warm and cool winds must be a side effect of the seasons changing. But when she realized what they were, she spent a few months idle, contemplating this sun that she’d never seen before, and the seasons that she knew existed outside of this cavern. She’d never seen any of them, and yet she knew about it. It struck her as odd.

  She mentally frowned at the odd sensation of the unknown knowledge. It was like the information had always been in the back of her mind, but she hadn’t been able to recall it until something reminded her of it. It was strange and aggravating, and yet exciting at the same time. But eventually, she shook off her contemplation and went back the most important thing in her life. Destroying her archnemesis, the source of the foul water in the pond.

  Eventually, she encompassed not only the entire pond, but she was delving into the earth beneath it, still trying to find the source of the foulness. Only a few feet below the pool on the opposite side of the pond, she paused in surprise as she found an uneven, cracked ring of stone. The ring was inscribed with runes which flowed with a dark warmth, similar to her own warmth, but different. She paused on seeing it, since the ring seemed to be the source of the foulness, the water coming from the other side relatively pure by comparison. A tingling seeped through the back of her mind—there was something familiar about the inscriptions. She paused, looking at the odd device, trying to work out why it seemed so familiar.

  Weeks passed, and she managed to piece together fragments of knowledge. One by one, realizations slowly fell into place. The warmth, the green-gold light… it was all mana. Mana was the source of magic, and all things generated mana to some degree. The glow which her roots had tapped into was an earth node, one of the places where rivers of earth mana converged and caused an upwelling of power, a power that was sustaining her.

  But none of that helped with the inscription, which took still more time to decipher. Slowly, it dawned on her that the inscription was an enchantment. Instinctively, she knew it was designed to purify the water, but the ring was damaged, the runes misaligned. Instead of purifying the water, the runes were causing it to corrupt the water. But it wouldn’t be too hard to fix from what she could tell, so she gently began to ‘push’ the stone back into alignment, to make it whole once more.

  It was actually harder than she’d initially expected to fix the inscription. It took a lot of energy to push the stone back into place, since she was using mana to force it into position. By the time she finally fixed the inscription, she was exhausted again, and knew it would take her a while to recover. But the moment the inscription was fixed, the ring began to cleanse the water once more, allowing it to flow pure and clear again. It took a few more weeks to recover, and then a couple more to clean the pond, but finally, it was free of filth and she felt her body quickening at the better sustenance. And yet… there was something about the water. Some hint of power to it that was strange.

  As time passed, she began to spread her bubble of clarity, or as she thought of it, her domain. This time she didn’t have a specific goal, though, so she just slowly spread out. After judging time for a while, she decided that the air moved in response to spring and fall. They were about six months apart, and those seemed the most likely seasons to her.

  But when her domain enveloped the entrance of the tomb, she stopped moving for a long, long time as sudden grief overwhelmed her. Carved into the broken, ancient stone was a name. She couldn’t read it—she couldn’t focus that much—but she knew the name. Sistina Constella. And that name overwhelmed her with grief and longing.

  If a tree could have cried, she would have. And for more than a year she did nothing, simply grieving, internally weeping, like the weeping willow she was.

  * * *

  She repaired the tomb. Remade it like new with her power, ignoring the drain on her energy. It took months, almost a full year, to fully restore the tomb with the breaks her recovery required. The sarcophagus was repaired of the damage when it was forced open and Sistina’s corpse made anew. She even carefully restored Sistina to the vague memories of when she’d been alive, making her appear as though she were simply sleeping, and placed a new keepsake box in her hands. The keepsake box was filled with copies of most of the items that had originally been within. Finally, she sealed the tomb once more, anguished still, but at least somewhat satisfied.

  But while she was restoring the tomb one day, she paused in shock as something unusual happened. A small shoot of a simple weed poked through the surface of the soil she’d restored at the edge of the pond. It wasn’t anything impressive, but she could feel it, almost as though it were a part of her. The tiny plant was growing quickly and happily in spite of the lack of sunlight. And it had grown from a seed she could have sworn had dried out and died long before. And its connection to her was almost total, joyfully sending her the faintest stream of its mana as an offering.

  She’d already realized that expanding her domain took vastly more mana the larger the area grew. As she expanded, the cost was growing so much that she’d determined that it was unlikely her domain would ever reach more than a hundred feet in every direction from her trunk, but this changed things dramatically. She could grow more plants to add to her mana, and she might be able to expand enormously if she were given enough time.

  So she began to cultivate plants in her spare time. It was fascinating to realize that she could revitalize even ancient, dead seeds with her mana. Even those plants that she knew shouldn’t be able to grow in the same climates as one another were somehow able to not just grow here, but thrive in spite of the darkness.

  It was several years later that she found what felt so odd about the water. Deep below the pond, nearly two hundred feet down, she discovered a glowing blue orb like her earth node. The water node was potent, surging with power that almost matched her earth node, and she eagerly began to draw upon its power, causing her emerald mana to grow still more vibrant, and her domain to grow still faster.

  The cavern was almost two miles long, and a half-mile across with a slight curve to it. Spreading her domain through the entire cavern took decades, and since she was near the rear half of the chamber, it meant that her domain encompassed large portions of stone. When she had time, she slowly expanded the cavern, carefully ensuring that the ceiling wouldn’t come crashing down on her while she added to the area that she could grow plants. Eve
ntually she found that rarer, more beautiful plants and trees produced more mana for her. So she carefully cultivated the cavern within her domain with the rarest plants she could, creating large gardens and places of beauty. She could have cultivated them at random, but she didn’t want to do that. Besides, she found that making the gardens correctly, with proper paths and the like, allowed mana to flow more easily, and actually increased the flow of mana she could absorb.

  As she expanded, she removed most of the ruins of homes and graves by the simple expedient of sinking them into the ground until they were fully out of the way. Her work took little concentration, and she slowly grew taller and taller, almost brushing the ceiling two hundred feet above. She improved the clarity of the crystal in the ceiling, allowing brighter light to pass through it. When she found a damaged but faintly functional elven glow-globe, she studied it for a decade to determine how it worked, then created new ones on the ceiling, ones that would provide ‘sunlight’ during the day to the cavern, and aid her thriving gardens. It wasn’t easy to make them, but she persevered despite that. She reinforced the walls of the cavern after an earthquake caused a small collapse in a corner, making the stone both stronger and more flexible.

  The day she found an axe-head, she recoiled in horrified realization of what it was, and that it could be used to cut down a tree like herself. But it was metal, she reasoned, and her roots had found ore down below, so she began to reinforce her trunk and branches with some of the metal she’d found. It would strengthen her body against attacks and make her more durable. She could only use the lighter metals, like mithral, since otherwise she feared she’d grow too heavy and her branches might break under their own weight. Integrating it into her trunk and branches wasn’t easy, and took years in its own right.

  Eventually, she claimed not only the entire cavern, but also parts of each of the tunnels exiting the chamber. She was faintly bemused to find the decayed campsite of the tomb raider whose actions had led to her sprouting. She considered it for a while before burying everything and continuing her expansion, though she was forced to cease expanding her main cavern for fear of collapse. A few hundred feet beyond the entrance, she found that a cave-in had prevented anyone else from following in the tomb robber’s footsteps and getting into the cavern. There was a gap near the ceiling that still allowed a hint of wind inside.

  She melded the collapse into the walls before continuing her slow, steady expansion through the cavern tunnels, happily expanding her domain and adding scattered small caverns with their own glow-globes and pockets of vegetation. Along the way, she found other sections of what had once been the elven city, which she ignored due to them being buried in solid earth and stone.

  When the first bear appeared, following the scent of her plants in search of berries, she was bemused. Bemused, but not displeased, as after a few days, it also linked to her, granting a bit more power than the plants did. It also seemed to obey her desires to some extent. It was shortly followed by more bears, and then a group of deer, which took a bit more firm of a hand to keep from destroying her gardens. Fortunately, the deer were quickly followed by a pack of wolves. She slowly managed to link to them, and found that like the ground, she could likely modify them somewhat. Not that she intended to, just yet. Instead, she tried to separate the three species into different caverns from her main one, ones less perfectly organized, and kept her original, primary cavern more private.

  She was alone, but she found that she was actually quite content.

  Chapter 2

  Lily gasped heavily as she clambered over another rock, her breathing labored as she glanced back down the hillside, afraid she’d see a sign of the orcs, or even worse, the Enforcer himself. She didn’t see any of them at the moment, but that just heightened her anxiety. Not knowing where they were was worse in some ways than seeing them bearing down on her. Even the threats in the mountains weren’t enough to make her slow down.

  She’d caught a glimpse of the three the night before, and she’d started running with renewed vigor ever since. The very thought of what would happen to her if she was captured made her shudder with revulsion and terror. Almost anything would be better than being captured again. If it weren’t for the inability to try to hurt herself, she might have already tried throwing herself off a cliff.

  Lily almost missed seeing the cave, but the way the shadows fell made her guess that it was deeper than it looked at first glance. Heart pounding, she glanced behind her, hesitating a moment. If there was something hostile inside the cave, she wouldn’t have much chance of survival, but she might just throw off her pursuers. So she plunged into the dark cavern without another moment of hesitation, praying that she might be able to escape this way, the soft sound of her shoes striking dirt and stone echoing through the tunnel.

  * * *

  Following the slave’s tracks over another ridge, Enforcer Gideon paused to pick out the trail again, annoyed by the time this was taking. A single foolish order from Lady Tanna and a dawn elf slave of low value, not even a highly valuable one, had managed to escape. That Lady Tanna insisting on sending him after the slave was simply a waste of time and resources when a normal group of slavers could’ve tracked the jumped up gardener and captured her in reasonable time. They were too far from the woman’s homeland for her to reach the border, and she wasn’t valuable enough to justify his time.

  But Lady Tanna had been strident, and the Adjudicator had sent him after the slave after a long, impassioned tirade by the noblewoman. He sighed in irritation, following her tracks down the hillside, then paused as he looked at the cavern her tracks led to, frowning. There were faint tracks from both bears and wolves leading into the cavern, and he reached down to examine them more closely. Deer as well? That was extremely odd. What were deer doing in a cave? After a moment, he shook his head and told his guards. “Weapons out. There might be wolves or bears inside. Remember, take the slave alive and without doing too much damage.”

  * * *

  She noticed the presence of intruders surprisingly slowly, considering that she was at least somewhat aware of everything in her domain. But she was distracted, considering new fragments of knowledge, and only found her attention drawn as the elf half-tripped over a vine in one of the tunnels.

  The sight of the woman was surprising, as she was the first non-animal that she’d seen yet aside from the fragments of bodies. The elf couldn’t be too old, no more than halfway through her first century if she judged correctly, and she had slightly golden-hued pale skin. Her ears were long and mobile, and she had soft blonde hair that must normally reach her waist, though it was currently tangled and only messily braided. She was about five and a half feet tall, which was average for an elf, and dressed in worn, simple clothing that covered a modestly attractive body. The elf’s eyes were a light blue, darting about as she rushed through the tunnels, straining to see even with her enhanced eyesight.

  What surprised the willow, though, was that she sensed something from the elf. She felt some kind of sigil or inscription on the elf’s lower abdomen, just below her navel. It was dark and twisted and yet it felt very familiar as well. It was almost jogging a memory, a tantalizing fragment that distracted her slightly. It slightly amused her that the elf had somehow avoided all of the smaller caverns.

  She also noticed another a group following the elf through the caves, occasionally pausing to follow her tracks. This group was headed by the massive, seven-foot frame of an orc, the tanned creature pig-like in appearance, with large tusks protruding from its mouth. It was wearing leather armor and wielding a large club and shield, all of modest quality. After the orc came a human in black leather armor and wearing a hood, who seemed to bear an inscription of his own on his right arm that was even darker, but not nearly as twisted as the elf’s. He had a crossbow and a pair of short blades hanging on his belt, and his short-cropped hair was dark brown, as were his eyes. Moderately handsome, he was six feet in height and muscular himself, and he was followed by a
second orc. This group moved faster than the elf, despite being more methodical in their movements. It took her a minute to realize that they were simply more efficient and the orc in front was regularly sniffing, likely following the woman’s scent.

  But looking at them, a memory stirred more heavily, and not one that the inscriptions had inspired. No, it was a memory of having a body like the intruders. And as the memory struck, her attention lapsed slightly as she fell into contemplation, trying to remember what it was like to have a body which could move around.

  * * *

  Lily was both relieved and worried when she saw the hints of light ahead, along with the pungent scent of plants. But more worrying was the handful of grunts she’d heard from behind her. That meant there was an orc in the tunnels behind her, and it was growing closer. The Enforcer couldn’t be far behind the orc, so she didn’t have time to worry about what was ahead. She just had to run and try to escape.

  But even with that in mind, she froze in shock for a moment as she came around the corner and saw the cavern ahead of her, mouth agape.

  Crystals blazed like miniature suns on the ceiling of the cavern, a large crystal emitting what appeared to be natural sunlight from above. And in a large, almost maintained garden of sorts, she saw hundreds of flowers, trees, bushes, and other beautiful plants, each with small paths winding through them. There was something odd about the plants, too, but she didn’t have time to consider them. No, this place looked like someone had deliberately groomed it, and that meant she might just be able to find help. The thought buoyed her hopes ever so slightly, and she shook herself.