Dean, Eyrin, Virigard, and Clarissa stepped single-file across the gate. Virigard was the first of COTD to enter Fiendstrom, her whiskers twitching furiously as she scented the new world. The smell reminded her of Virginia...home. Or at least the closest thing to it; she'd never stayed in one place for more than a month. At the very least, it's the place where I was created.

"It's...fresh," Eyrin remarked. "Somewhat humid, like a temperate forest in late Spring."

Virigard sniffed, resisting the urge to point out that half of the current group had only ever experienced--at least over an extended period of time--Autumn.

Clarissa exhaled, expression inscrutable. "Reminds me of Greece," she murmured.

Virigard's ears pricked up. "Greece? You've been to Greece?" Virigard's eyes grew round with jealousy. I've only been to the United States, Africa and the Middle East. Europe was still one region she had yet to check off of her bucket list.

"Greece?" Eyrin echoed, cocking his head. "As in, the ancient civilization?"

Dean raised an eyebrow. "You know about ancient Greece?"

Eyrin snorted dismissively, though his eyes flashed with intensity. "Your Church has taken the time to learn about the ancient history of the verdora," he replied. "She even asked me one or two questions regarding passages in the encyclopedia."

"So you've been studying Earth's history in return?" Dean asked.

"I've been studying its religions," Eyrin clarified. "I've been trying to get a better grasp on religion as a concept separate from myth and legend."

"Well," cut in Clarissa. "I was talking about modern Greece, anyway."

Virigard rocked on her legs as she hopped forward, nose ceaselessly twitching. Even as the other two-hundred or so vanguard members streamed through the gate onto Fiendstrom, she continued to prowl over the rocky, sparse terrain.

"Viri," Dean called out from fifty feet or so up the incline, "something wrong?"

Virigard swished her tail. "No," she replied.

"Viri..." He inclined his head, trailing off. "Nevermind."

Virigard filtered out the rest of the world as proceeded onward. There's something here, something familiar, that I haven't scented since Earth.

She suddenly stopped, her paw draping lightly over a section of taupe-colored rock.

Concrete. Virigard smiled, then used a claw to carve out a section of the weather-beaten slab. She popped it into her mouth, then began to crunch. Beaming, cheeks puffing, she turned around and headed back up the hill to the overlook where Dean, Eyrin and Clarissa watched the gate.

Eyrin gave her a searching look. "What exactly did you find over there?"

Clarissa shook her hair, then addressed the verdora prince. "It's clearly just a chunk of rock, right?"

Virigard shook her head as she continued to chew.

Clarissa rolled her eyes. "You picked up a rough, blocky object...put it in your mouth...and came back over."

Virigard nodded, then finished swallowing. "Mhm!"

Dean sighed in exasperation. "It's obviously not just a normal rock. What is it?"

Virigard twitched her tail. "It's concrete." She looked at everyone expectantly. Dean was the first to realize the implications of her statement, his brow furrowing. Actually, he's probably the only one who will understand why this is important, besides me, of course, Virigard thought smugly. She had never seen concrete on Illudis, so Eyrin wouldn't be familiar with it; additionally, she doubted that Clarissa, who spent most of her time flying above ground, would recognize it.

She pointed with a finger. "There's concrete over there. That means that something on this planet was intelligent enough to mix and pour concrete!"

Dean flashed over to the side of the mountain to take a look. "There's so little of it," he called out.

Eyrin and Clarissa gave each other confused looks. "Concrete?" Eyrin murmured.

"Concrete," Virigard repeated. "It's a building material."

"What's it used for?" Clarissa asked.

Virigard stood up straight, one hand on her hip. "Concrete," she began, "is used for many things."

The two gave Virigard blank looks. "...Like?" Clarissa probed.

"Sidewalks," the jerboa replied.

Clarissa's face screwed up, her snout wrinkling. "Oh. Wait, so concrete isn't just..." She halted her line of thought. "When was it invented?"

Virigard held up her off hand, projecting the encyclopedia page for concrete. "Concrete has existed since the dawn of civilization," she proclaimed, summarizing the page's contents. "No fancy technologies are needed. Any civilization that has mastered the use of fire should be sufficient."

Eyrin was next to catch on to the significance of discovering concrete. "So there was sapient life on this planet," he stated. "Or at the very least, proto-sapient life." He frowned. "We didn't find any evidence of civilization when we visited this planet in the past..."

After having Eyrin spell the situation out, Clarissa grunted in understanding before walking off toward Dean. Virigard and Eyrin followed behind until all four were before the concrete deposit.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Noting the three's arrival, Dean began to delegate tasks. "Clarissa, take Eyrin and see if you can find evidence of sapient life," Dean commanded. "Virigard, I want you to explore the underside of this mountain and see if some structure lies buried under the rock."

Dean turned toward the gate, noting the congregating mass of two-hundred-or-so vanguard members. "I'll lead the others on to the exit gate; we'll establish the city-seed there. The exit gate is marked on your chip reader holo map: set a timer for six hours. Be back by then."

Virigard and the others felt the air swirl in response to Dean's rapid departure toward the waiting vanguard members. Clarissa gave Eyrin an exhausted look, shaking out her mane.

"Might as well get on with it," Clarissa muttered. She narrowed her eyes at the prince. "Seriously, don't get yourself killed. You can't rely on me to catch you."

A moment later, the two were off. Virigard sniffed the air, then began to pat her foot nervously against the ground. The encyclopedia says that this planet never developed sapient life. Virigard's fur bristled. And when has it been wrong? Virigard didn't count Earth: the encyclopedia contributors obviously wouldn't have been able to foresee the emergence of Bath.

Soon, the chatter of the vanguard disappeared along with Dean, leaving Virigard all alone on the mountain. The inclement clouds to bore down on her as she rocked on her legs, leaving her with an uneasy feeling.

Virigard reached down, picked up a chunk of concrete, and fed it into her mouth. She reminisced about Earth, remembering the time that Dean--no, not Dean, not back then...it would have been Lepochim--passed down an ordinance that jerboa were absolutely forbidden from eating concrete sidewalks and infrastructure.

Not that the ordinance stopped the jerboa...it had just made concrete that much more desirable. I'm actually surprised I didn't recognize its scent. While the scent had felt familiar, it hadn't immediately drudged up memories of pilfering chunks of sidewalk.

Virigard leaned down over the small patch of concrete, nose twitching as she sniffed. It's...probably because it's made out of a different kind of concrete than I'm familiar with.

She scratched a claw against the gray material. Why am I so apprehensive to dig down? She'd been standing in place for at least a solid minute--in other words, for a small eternity. Shaking her head, she stepped off to the side and began to dig down into the mountain, taking care to leave the concrete untouched. This is an excavation, she told herself. Five minutes ago I was an explorer. Now, I'm an archaeologist. She would have smiled if her teeth weren't fully engaged in the art of tunneling. The best archaeologist, of course.

...And then she tunneled a bit too far, ripping into a solid foot of concrete about twenty feet underground. She paused, then shrugged. Even the best archaeologists make mistakes! And so she continued, burrowing down until, at around a hundred feet down, the concrete completely disappeared.

Virigard then went to work stripping the land around the concrete structure, disregarding the mountain. She reveled in the mind-numbing work, her ability to follow the contours of the buried concrete structure improving as she went along.

In her frenzy, she barely noted the passage of time. About an hour later, she stood, huffing, on a precipice carved out of the former-mountain. Well, she thought. This is cool!

---

"Now that you have your wingsuit, I don't even know why I'm here," Clarissa grumbled.

"Because," Eyrin replied, his words minced by the whipping wind. "Flying by wingsuit is slow."

"You're making me slow," Clarissa retorted, giving her torso a shake. Eyrin swayed, the ten-rod dragonleaf rope connecting his body to Clarissa tensing up. "I'm literally towing your un-aerodynamic body through a stormy, near-hurricane-weather sky."

"Exactly. Gives me a better vantage point...you see the world in front, I see the world in back."

Clarissa groaned. "If the rope snaps I'm going to have to dive after you. Again." The worst part was, Clarissa was fairly certain that was the point. How else would Eyrin get his danger fix? "Besides, I don't need your damned eyes. You're here to sense sapients with your kursi powers. I'm here because of my echolocation."

"But it's hopelessly boring," he lamented. "All the lifeforms I've sensed are all hopelessly simple."

Clarissa blinked. Then she spoke, voice elevated above a particularly fierce gust of wind: "So you're sensing sapients?"

Eyrin laughed dryly. "There's life on this planet," he explained. "Intelligent life. Not sapient life. At least, none that we've flown over."

"There's something below us," Eyrin said after a time.

Clarissa snorted. "Nothing but ocean, Eyrin."

Eyrin squinted. "Seriously," he said. An instant later, he severed the dragonleaf connecting him to Clarissa.

I can't believe I'm already desensitized to free falling off a moving object, Eyrin thought, disgruntled. I barely feel any sense of danger at all. Eyrin knew this was particularly due to the fact that he severed the rope himself: if the dragonleaf line had randomly snapped, the disorientation and uncertainty of the moment would have ratcheted his danger senses into high gear.

A few seconds, later he exhaled a sharp oof as Clarissa swooped in underneath him. He wrapped his arms around her neck in a practiced motion, manipulating two strands of dragonleaf to secure his attachment.

"Don't pull my hair," Clarissa snarled. She pumped her wings above the water, looking down. "And fine, I admit you were right."

Eyrin's eye ridges rose. "Really?"

Clarissa groaned. "Echolocation usually works," she argued.

"Good thing I was hanging behind you."

"Whatever," Clarissa sighed. She flew them down to the water's surface. "You up for a dive?"

---

Dean hated to criticize the verdora who originally explored Fiendstrom: they'd had a near-impossible task, at least for normal, unenhanced sapients. Dean couldn't fathom trying to explore Fiendstrom as a normal human: the weather was fickle, transitioning from calm to devastating in minutes. Moreover, the craggy terrain lacked any clear paths and was difficult to navigate by foot.

The verdora mapping out this place would have only had a rented interplanetary vessel--like Juserin's voyager. Based on what Dean had seen of verdora technology, their transportation relied extensively on established infrastructure. For instance, the high-speed pods skeeted exclusively along established routes. Some vessels, such as the giant dirigibles of the verdoran elite, floated aimlessly over the planet's surface, but Dean considered them more as floating cities than as means of transportation. Dean certainly hadn't seen any vehicles like cars on Illudis.

While it's been a few thousand years since the last expedition here, I'm under the impression that Illudis has undergone very few changes over that time. It wouldn't surprise him if the expedition team had wholly lacked the means to navigate Fiendstrom in any capacity. Especially if they didn't know what to expect. Which, considering that the expedition was intended to collect information and map out the planets connected to Illudis' gate...

Dean sighed. Whatever the reasons, the information in the encyclopedia on Fiendstrom seemed completely wrong...as the vanguard members he was leading took every opportunity to point out. He couldn't blame them: at least ten percent of them were cartographers.

Dean tapped his foot on the rock as the group halted...again. Five people were arguing heatedly over whether the ground they were standing on had ever been a mountain. The map clearly indicated that a mountain had once been where they all now stood. Dean disagreed with one of the cartographers, a woman named Valia, that a series of vicious storms had somehow destroyed the mountain over the past few millennia. He found the proposition of another woman, Angelica, much more likely: the verdora had marked the mountain's position wrong.

A few minutes later, everyone agreed to simply mark down the discrepancy and continue on. Ad so, Dean led the group out again...only to stop not thirty seconds later.

"Not again," Dean sighed quietly, pivoting mid-stride. He had completely missed whatever it was that had caught everyone else's attention. He fell to the ground, impacting the grass softly. His eyes widened as they fell on the source of the group's attention. There, hollowed into the side of an oppressive mountain, was a cracked and weathered door.

Well, that's definitely something the verdora missed.