Dawn rose bright as ever over the makeshift camp as the travellers stowed their tents. Eyn and Brehen were stooped under the weight of their weariness as they put their gear in the wagon.
“How was your sleep?” Sojo asked them. Brehen only grunted and shuffled to the horses, but Eyn was awake enough.
“Unbroken,” she answered. “Did you and Brehen take shifts?”
“He did wake up and talk for a bit after sunset, but I took the rest. I haven’t actually slept yet,” Sojo said with a smile. “He pointed out how tired you two were getting, I figured I could handle it.”
The small scout blinked at her, sharp eyes tracing from foot to face. “Aren’t you tired, though?”
Sojo scratched the back of her head, grinning sheepishly. “No, actually. You see, Brehen was telling me about the blisters you’ve both been getting, and pointed out how I’m not. Once he mentioned it, I realized that I wasn’t getting tired anymore. It’s like he opened the shutters and the light’s pouring in; I haven’t stifled a yawn in hours.”
Eyn heaved a tired sigh and turned to the wagon, but looked back for a moment. “Hopefully it lasts.”
Sojo took her normal place ahead of the wagon, feeling no worse for her night shift. The sound of footsteps crunched behind her under the creaks of the wagon axles. Eyn had been worried the sand would get into the joints, but it was holding up fine so far.
The horses were another matter. Every day they slowed a little more, even as their load of food and water lightened, and Brehen had been talking about a day of rest for them since they’d entered the desert sands. She was hoping they’d hold out until the centre, when they’d have a better idea for planning the trip back; it would only be a few days more, after all.
There was a chill in the air of their campsite in the trough of a great dune, and every step up its spine brought them further into the heat and sun. When the light finally crested over the dune peak, it struck down the lingering coolness and warmed her bones, bringing with it the renewed fervour of a day’s work. She closed her eyes and walked forward, letting it bake the heat into her skin, and under her feet she felt the ground level and fall. Another dune, another step forward, another tiny piece closer to-
“Teph’s light, what is that?”
-
They stopped the cart next to the half-sunken building, a grand dome of carved stone rising in the shadow of the sandy slope beside. The dune they’d crested had started to envelop it, sand rising up the north walls as if pushed by a frozen tide, but the other half was clear of obstruction. There was a doorway visible on the west of the building, with sand encroaching but not yet covered, and they led the horses there before settling them down.
Sojo was bouncing on her toes as they marched. She traced her hands over the façade, feeling remnants of inscriptions and imagery worn from the stone. The sun’s shadow threw these minor etchings into relief on a small stretch of the dome, light and darkness revealing transient images of giant figures and bowing masses. As the sun shifted, these bloomed and wilted on the rock face.
The others seemed just as amazed, gazing up the arching walls, but when she met Brehen’s eyes and smirked, his expression was more worried than happy. “What’s wrong?” she asked, throwing her arms wide and smiling madly. “We found a temple, just like I told you!”
Brehen rolled his eyes, brushing Fallow’s side automatically as they walked. “It’s certainly something,” he replied, “but we’ll have to see the inside before we can judge your instincts to be true. For all we know, this is just a small domicile, fit only for housing a few labourers.”
Sojo looked up at the fifty-foot tall, arching dome, and then back to his deadpan face. “I suppose it could be nothing of import,” she lied in return. “What do you think, Eyn?”
The scout looked between the two and shook her head. “I think it’s a tragedy,” she said, and went back to ogling the carved walls as they walked the last paces to the doorway.
Brehen unhitched the horses, offering them water and oats and giving them a cursory brushing down before turning back to the others. “This is timely for giving them a rest, at least.”
Sojo murmured an agreement from the entranceway, a dark stone door sadly without any unbroken seal for her to deface. There were no visible hinges, just a break in the stone panels running down the centre. She pressed her hands to it and pushed, the rock tipping slowly backwards into the temple. She pressed harder and the slab passed its tipping point, toppling onto the floor behind with a shattering thud. A few bits of stone skittered across the floor, throwing echoes in the vast space. She stepped inside, squinting to see in the gloom of the cavernous room.
The floor had no mosaic as it had in her visions. There were patterns carved onto it as decoration, but no colourful depictions of a land’s history or artwork with any meaning. Six scarred altars stood around them on the walls, spaced at intervals around the room with gaps like missing teeth where the doorway stood and opposite it in the hall. The far wall, lying between them and the desert centre they’d been marching towards, held no altar. Instead, black stone fragments lay on the floor where some stone furnishing had been smashed.
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She stepped to her left, starting a slow circuit of the room as the others walked inside. The lingering echoes of the fallen door mingled with the sound of their footsteps in the hush. She felt the quiet dissipate like mist under the day’s sun, its grasp on the room fading, and let herself breathe easier. There were no enemies here, no traps left for them to stumble into or threats in the dark. She removed the stones from window-alcoves as she passed them, and the room brightened by shades.
She met the first altar under half-light, an affair of carved branches and travelling figures. She could trace the paths of characters across the carved span, children aging, changing, growing old, and dying to pass along the final path leading off the altar’s edge. The branches, though, she couldn’t follow. She winced at her earlier thought of defacing the room’s seal: despite being closed and preserved, there were patches of stone where claw-marks had been carved in, shredding the myriad pathways and branches and striking down aging figures. It was clear the altar hadn’t truly been attacked, as no animal could claw through solid rock, but the markings had exquisitely mimicked it.
She stepped back from the artwork and compared the rest of the altars from a distance. All seemed to be carved from solid blocks, and none would be remotely feasible to cart back. Nor did they have the tools to remove a piece of the artwork. She resumed her walk with eyes on the shattered pieces of the far altar.
The others were quite different in depiction, but all alike in damage. Clawmarks, slashes, even puncture wounds like the bite of steel jaws adorned the relics, contrasting the beautifully carved and painstakingly detailed images. She met Brehen at the shattered black, having gone opposite ways.
“How are those three?” she asked, bending to look at the shards.
“The carving looked fine to me, but by Eyn’s random exclamations I think it’s more impressive than I know to appreciate. None too useful, though.”
“Did they have the claw-marks?”
Brehen nodded, examining a shard like a giant tooth, serrated and ugly. “All of them, with no pattern to how they were marked that I could tell.”
Sojo sighed, and sat amidst the pieces. “I don’t know that we can salvage anything from this. The only thing small enough to haul is this shattered rock… thing.”
“It’s obsidian, I think,” Eyn murmured from behind them. “Commonly used for weapon-making when metal isn’t at hand. The scouts have had to deal with it in arrowheads and the like, shatters and splinters like nothing else. Horrid wounds.”
“Well this was clearly a large sculpture at one point. Whatever shattered it couldn’t hide the detailing done.” Sojo picked up a few pieces with the most obvious ornamentation. “Do you think this would convince folk that we found something real out here?”
Eyn grimaced, fingers tracing what lines could be distinguished on the shards. “None would doubt this was worked stone, but anyone could have done this. If we could reassemble something of the original work, maybe…” She stared at the wreckage and trailed off, clearly savouring the puzzle at hand.
Brehen nodded, staring at the shards. “Anything more than four hundred pounds and we’ll be at a crawl, the horses can’t handle it in the sand. They could take a couple hundred without issue, we set off with more than that. Really, the question is whether we can make something worthwhile from assembling only that much stone.”
Sojo clapped and smiled. “Then we have a plan. I’ll take a look through the rest of the building, see if there’s anything else to be found. Brehen, you get the horses properly set up, fed and rested. Once we’re done, we come back here to help Eyn reassemble. With luck, we’ll know if there’s merit to this sculpture by tonight.”
-
“Well, this is useless.”
Sojo looked at the scattered lumps of darkness, still unmended despite hours of effort and searching. Whatever had shattered the stone had done so thoroughly, enough that they’d barely found two pieces that fit in the ensuing time. Eyn was standing, eyes flickering over the pieces desperately, while Brehen had long since gone to set up camp and lie down.
“It’s the colour, it makes it impossible to see what should fit,” Eyn groaned. “You can’t see the ridges unless you hold it right out the window.”
Sojo patted her on the back. They walked outside, where Brehen had a fire waiting for them to cook by, and sunset passed in silence. They left the next morning as the sun rose, Eyn having measured and marked out exactly where the dome was in the Sink.
As she crested the dune, Sojo shaded her eyes to the sun’s glare. The dunes seemed a touch smaller perhaps, but the view was otherwise identical to every peak behind them. She frowned, and started the walk down the other side, when she heard a soft clacking from behind her.
“Have you started those endless puzzles again, then?” she asked, looking back at Eyn’s fingers fumbling over wooden pieces.
“Just the one puzzle now,” Eyn corrected, “the other came apart a while ago. And I think I’ve almost got this one.”
“Really?” Sojo asked, pausing to let the scout catch up. “What’s the trick?”
“I’m trying a similar twisting pattern as solved the other one. They seem to almost mirror each other, so I figure I can get this to work. I just need to…”
“You know that the separate halves of each puzzle can be rejoined after, right? There’s another puzzle when you’re done.” Sojo smirked as Eyn’s eyes widened, but her fingers weren’t moving frantically any more. Her movements were deliberate, pushing the interlinked wooden rings around each other, curved edges almost seeming to pass through each other. Finally, they fell apart with a final clack, falling into her palms as distinct, unjoined sections.
“I did-”
“Whoa!” Brehen shouted, and the women turned to the sound of frantic whinnying. They jumped to the side as the cart slid by, wheels losing grip in the sliding sands. Brehen was clinging to the side of the cart, his weight the only thing keeping it from overturning, but the horses were being dragged sideways down the hill. As it passed her, Sojo watched Brehen drag himself up the cart to the horses’ leads, fingers scrabbling at the knotted cords.
One of the ropes let go, and the horse tumbled in the sand before recovering its footing on the slope. Before he could free the other, the cart overturned and dragged the frantic creature with it, rolling for several terrible seconds before coming to rest at the bottom. Sojo felt her heart sink as the horse shrieked, and she wasn’t even back on her feet before Brehen had sprinted down the slope to check it over.
She ran down to him, feet churning in the sticky sand, following the red that dotted a thin line down the dune. When she reached the bottom, she saw his hands shaking, stroking Sow’s mane above a mangled leg and uncloaked bone.
“What do we do?” She asked quietly, her hand on his shoulder.
“Only one thing to do,” he sighed. “Eyn? Pass me your knife.”