“They wrote here, that they found a place that controls the defenses of the city. There they attached this message to the self-moving wheels they found inside. They made the wheels as safe as possible and hoped it will be enough. The wheels feel the intruders within the borders of the city, so they through it will be easiest way to ensure that the message reaches me or,” Ealas lips twitched for a moment before continuing: “my companions. It also includes the direction towards the place where they left some items before they had to leave this world. And it seems, that they were constantly attacked by something without solid bodies that they could not recognize. That’s it, Lord.”
“And, how to we get to the mentioned stash?”, I asked Eala, meanwhile wedging the tip of my weapon into the slit behind the cover of the wheel and twisted as if opening an oyster. With a crack, something broke, twisted and clicked and when I could finally see the insides, everything there had warped into an unrecognizable mess of shards, coils and cogs.
Eala looked at me and my actions and replied: “They mentioned, that these wheels return to the storage after each activation. So I think they wanted us to follow it, as I don’t think they expected somebody to be able to completely break the wheel, Lord.”
That was one of the moments when I was glad for being unable to blush.
---
Instead, under the pretense of practice, I had Eala to follow the tracks the wheel had left behind. I also used it as a chance to learn some basics about tracking.
Not that I could learn much, as the heavy, hewn from stone and fitted with metal wheel had left deep tracks into the slowly decomposing layer of dead leaves and rubble that covered the streets.
As we went deeper and the buildings became more robust and larger, we began to encounter signs of the old war. Crushed corners, exploded walls, smashed statues and monuments, deep gashes covering the multi-ton stone blocks. And these signs became increasingly obvious as we moved on.
Also numerous remains of all sorts of weaponry and magical war implements were seen. Some huge bones showed signs of augmentation using unknown magical technologies, some broken pieces of crumpled metal crackled at our approach, with occasional neon-colored sparks jumping across the surfaces of the ruined artifacts.
And many, many ordinary human bones were pulverized, cut, smashed and burned, left to be slowly buried under the accumulating detritus alongside the broken and whole swords, spears, axes, clubs, shields and armors. Most had rusted and decayed into dust, but some had somehow managed to stay on the very surface of the ground.
But as much as I wished, I could not reconstruct the events that had passed here. I had never studied such things, because my family had not agreed to let me pick the history as my major back in the day.
I looked around and could only make some wild guesses. Who was the attacker and who was the defender? If that was Bial, then where were the supposed “manmade creatures of stone, bronze and iron, inhabited by enslaved souls” I had read about back in the pyramid?
I had felt no souls in any of the artificial creatures I had met yet, and all I could see were some mechanisms and weird frankenstein-style moving bodies. If mechanisms were a part of the city’s defence system as their style resembled the wheel that we had met before, then the enchanted bodies could belong with equal chance to either attackers or defenders. Or both.
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Occasionally, we passed around twenty meters tall but only half a meter thick pillars made of dark crystal that seemed to work as energy converters. Pillars drew my attention as I could clearly see the sudden drop of temperature near them. They also hummed with power, and the magic power was sent somewhere down below the surface. The heat absorption process resembled inferior replica of the Beating Iceheart, perhaps the Iceheart I had found was the original and had inspired the attempts to copy it? And as far as I could tell, that the direction the power was sent towards, was coinciding with our aim.
---
The city defense control building that we finally reached, turned out to be a massive installation made of huge stone blocks, each being several meters high, wide and deep. The monumental construction had an arched first floor with numerous dark passages leading inside, while several floors above formed a terrace high enough to overlook most of the city.
Lying around under the glare of the never-changing red sun, here were several wheels similar to the one I had broken. Their stone parts were cracked and crushed, while metal parts were deformed, but some of them still managed to whir and clank in a threatening fashion. The ominous look was further enhanced by having the wheels covered in all sorts of chipped, bent and twisted spikes, blades and razors, all uniformly stained by something dark and viscous.
On the wall of the building, an enchanted skeleton wearing scraps of armor was rattling in an attempt to get free of the javelin that nailed it to the wall through its ribcage. Eala looked at the skeleton with the feeling of disgust clear on her face and sent a thin jet of water through the skull of the skeleton.
Having its main focus point destroyed, the energy that had animated the skeleton dispersed like the fog under the bright sun. That was a new trick with water Eala had recently managed to come up with during our discussions, and it worked surprisingly well despite that being her first attempt.
---
When we entered the building, we could see many signs of disturbance. Clearly, Taistealaithe had spent here quite a while. Pieces of logs and vines were assembled into barricades, simple traps using piled up tree trunks fixed with rope still remained near the corridors and occasionally, scraps of cloth and piles of ashes could be seen on the floor.
Eala pointed at the intricate line of small dots on the wall, drawn a bit higher than her height.
“It tells the way to the storage.”, she told me. The dusty corridors held no danger and no signs of invaders. Seems that the defence held its own at least in the headquarters.
I followed Eala’s lead and soon we found some stairs that led us towards the higher floors. Soon, we reached our destination, which was a big room behind the double metal doors.
Inside the storage, we found several chests made of roughly hewn wood, their thick planks showing the passage of significant amount of time.
---
Eala carefully checked them, before opening the first one. It was filled with neatly arranged small packages made of dark, smooth material. “Preserved food.”, Eala explained. The next trunk contained small boxes made of something similar to paper. “Medicine.”, Eala nodded.
The last and biggest trunk contained an assortment of objects, also carefully wrapped up. Few quivers of arrows, several sets of flint and steel and other consumables. But what drew my attention, was a fairly big ring with many markings along its edges. It was big enough that it could be worn as a belt by some dedicated fast food lover.
As soon as Eala saw the ring, she grabbed it. I could clearly see how her hands trembled as she held it in front of her. She then touched a circular mark etched into the edge of the ring. With a soft “ping”, lights of different colors began to light up around the ring. Red, orange, yellow, green and finally blue lit up. And as the red kept blinking rapidly, the others pulsed slower, with blue remaining constant. As Eala observed the lights, she almost dropped the ring from her shaking hands, and shock was visible in her eyes as she sagged down onto the floor.
“S-s-s-sé... six, hundred?”, she mumbled, her sight directed somewhere only she could see: “I was sealed for six hundred summers?”