Sadness, sorrow and such incredible loss. The city was smashed, the great buildings were in ruins and its people were all killed or taken as slaves, Images came and went, scenes of dead bodies and fallen buildings. Even the great monuments had been torn down.
There was pain but it didn’t seem to matter, nothing mattered anymore. There was a final image of a dead woman lying on the ground, her equally lifeless daughter lying not far away, reaching for her mother. This image brought with it a sense of light-headedness and a gut-wrenching cry of purest despair.
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Ethan shook Nicola as she lay on the deck sobbing. She had found a quiet place on a bench at the stern of the ship and had lay down to look at the stars. She had fallen asleep there and was having a nightmare that Ethan was desperately trying to wake her from.
“Nicola! Nicola, it’s just a dream, wake up!” he said gently but firmly. “Nicola!” With a wail of sorrow that nearly brought tears to Ethan’s own eyes Nicola finally woke up, looking straight at him.
“It’s a dream Nicola, you’re alright, you’re safe.”
At these words the little girl reached out and hugged him fiercely, crying against his shoulder. Ethan sat down next to her and rocked her gently, making quiet reassuring noises in her ear. It took the better part of an hour for the sobs to fade away, when the girl’s arms loosened, Ethan gently lowered her back to the bench. He was about to ask her what her dream had been about but as he looked down at her he saw that she was asleep again.
Without a word Ethan gently picked up the sleeping girl and carried her to her cabin.
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The next day, Ethan asked Nicola if she was all right, if she wanted to talk about her dream. She told him she didn’t remember the dream, but did remember waking up very upset and couldn’t stop thanking him for calming her down. Eventually Ethan gave up just to escape, though he did feel slightly touched that she appreciated his presence there so deeply.
They continued to sail southwards uneventfully after that night. Nicola still helped out as much as she could and continued to silently accept the first officer’s punishments whenever he found her in the rigging. No amount of punishment stopped her from going up there though.
Nicola didn’t seem to mind Ranon’s punishments and she put a great deal of effort into helping sail the ship. By the time the Warrior tied up at the Ehleria City docks after four weeks at sea, Nicola had been affectionately nicknamed ‘Squirrel’ by the crew.
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When they arrived in Ehleria, Nicola was resting in her cabin. Ethan made his way there and knocked.
“Yes?” came the immediate response.
“Nicola, we’ve arrived in Ehleria, we need to leave now.” Ethan said through her door.
“Already?” Nicola called in a slightly panicked voice. Ethan just chuckled to himself, for several moments he could hear banging and muttering from the cabin before Nicola opened the door.
“Were you asleep?”
“Yes, I was up last night watching the stars.”
“Ok, but we do need to go now, have you got everything?”
“Just give me a minute!” With that her head disappeared behind the door again, there were more bumping sounds and he assumed she was re-packing her belongings. A moment later the door opened again to reveal her ready to go, even though she still looked as if she were not properly awake.
Ethan led her onto the deck where they were met by Captain Lewis who, without any ceremony, knelt down and hugged the little girl.
“We didn’t know you for long Squirrel, but we’re going to miss you,” he said, smiling at her.
“I’ll miss you too,” she replied.
Captain Lewis laughed at her.
“Oh no you won’t, if I know the dragons – and I do – when you get to that Castle of theirs you won’t have enough time to miss us.”
“I can miss you if I want to – so there!” Nicola said a little indignantly. Captain Lewis just grinned wider and tweaked her nose, making her giggle before escorting her to the gangplank and saluting her off his ship like royalty.
Ethan looked at Nicola as she went ashore. From the expression on her face she wasn’t joking, she was going to miss this ship and its crew. He shook the captain’s hand as he came to the gangplank.
“Until next time Lewis?”
“That’s Captain to you landlubber!”
“I’ll just have to make up for that, won’t I? Maybe that bottle of special reserve rum I’ve got at home? Or maybe not,” Ethan teased his friend who laughed uproariously.
“Get off my ship!” Lewis shouted, still laughing as he mimed a blow at Ethan, who skipped down the gangplank, chuckling to himself.
He had only gone a few steps when he nearly fell over Nicola, she was stood on the quay, rooted to the spot and staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the view before her.
Ehleria City was unlike anything she had ever seen in her entire life before, it was built on a vast open plane, or rather it seemed as though a plane had been cleared for it to be built. The ground was completely flat, paved over with massive stone slabs that were fitted together so closely the cracks between them were barely visible. There were huge open plazas and several huge public parks between the buildings. The entire place was massive, built on a scale that dwarfed the imagination. This was probably due to the buildings of the city more than anything else.
There weren’t that many of them, perhaps twenty at the most, but every one was colossal, not one less than a thousand feet tall and each covering acres at the base. They were so huge that they could probably be called large towns in themselves. It was a mind-blowing and extraordinary sight, made more so by the bizarre shapes of the buildings themselves; cones, blocks with curved roofs, one rose straight up like a monolith with concave sides and corners that looked as if they would have splayed out if they had not been truncated, at its top those corners reached to the sky like flying buttresses facing outwards, each coming to a sharp point.
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The overall effect was quite extraordinary. Everything seemed to be made out of white stone, combined with the amazing shapes of the buildings this gave the whole place a kind of ethereal beauty unseen anywhere else.
“Oh, my,” Nicola whispered to no one in particular, speechless at the sight.
“Come on, let’s see some more shall we?” Ethan asked as he took her by the hand and led her between two of the buildings.
After some time they passed one of the buildings and started walking across a plaza towards a mind-bogglingly tall cone shaped building, Nicola finally found her voice, if only enough of it to manage one question.
“How in the world was this place built?” she asked breathlessly. It was several seconds before Ethan answered.
“In the days before the cataclysm a great many people came to serve the dragons, so many in fact that they were running out of room in Dragon Valley, even the Castle couldn’t accommodate them. So Dravadon built this place for the humans who served the dragons, but didn’t need to live in the valley. I told you once that he built the Castle with his thoughts, he built this city in the same way.” Ethan had seen the dragons perform wonders first hand but even now he felt awe whenever he thought of the way Dravadon had created this place.
“A dragon built all of this? For humans?” Nicola asked, she sounded even more amazed than before.
Ethan nodded.
“Apparently the whole place was built and finished in less than a day, it has some sort of power source no human has ever fully understood, heating and waste management for the buildings, running water, everything. When the first humans came to live here it’s said all they needed to do was bring in furniture, tables and chairs and things,” he explained.
“A day?” Nicola sounded stunned.
“A day.”
Ethan suddenly grinned down at her. “If you think this is good, wait till you see the Castle, that’s impressive.”
Nicola didn’t reply, she just turned her wide eyes back to the city as if she still didn’t believe what they were seeing.
As they walked, Nicola saw other people walking between the buildings. Some of them were taking their time, as if they had all the time in the world. Others were walking purposefully, but none were rushing. She also noticed that there were more people than she had originally thought, they were just spread out so widely that they didn’t look like a crowd. It was another testament to the sheer size of the place.
Eventually they reached and entered the unfeasibly tall conical tower and walked to a desk, passing a group of warriors going the other way. They were obviously different from soldiers who wore uniform and sometimes combat gear, both of which Nicola had seen pictures of. These people were in battle-harnesses and carried heavy weaponry. Nicola had only ever read about the warriors and she stared after the group as they passed. There were humans, a couple of human-like beings and two artificials whose bare metal was scored and worn, showing the signs of previous battle damage. These artificials had been built in a vaguely humanoid shape, they had arms and legs anyway, but Nicola wasn’t sure that the vaguely brick-like part on top quite classified as a head.
“Nicola!” It was Ethan, he had been speaking to a man behind another reception desk. Nicola walked quickly over to Ethan who was already leading her to a set of elevators in the centre of the building, they were a long way off though and it was another reminder of how huge this building was.
“What’s he?” Nicola asked Ethan, pointing to a figure with snow-white skin and flowing blonde hair as they walked across the enormous open circular chamber at the base of the tower.
“He’s a kell, they’re very much like us but as you can see there are differences.”
Nicola continued to stare at the figure who was standing and talking to a small group of humans. He was beautiful, that was the only way Nicola could describe him. He was tall, thin but not gaunt, very fine-boned and his features were perfectly formed.
As she stared, the conversation he was a part of was taken over by one of the humans. The kell turned his head to look straight at her and gave her a smile that seemed to enhance his beauty to a breathtaking level.
Nicola knew she was being rude but she still couldn’t take her eyes off him until it became painful to crane her neck around and look.
It took several more minutes to reach the elevators, the room at the base of the tower must have been two miles across! When they eventually reached them Nicola had another surprise, they were made of a completely clear material that was not glass. Every surface was completely transparent, including the floor and ceiling.
There was no key panel in this elevator and Nicola was surprised again when, just as the doors slid silently closed, Ethan called out in a strong voice “Level one hundred and twenty two.”
The elevator rose swiftly, with almost no sensation of movement and Nicola was completely at a loss to figure out how it moved. Eventually she asked.
“There are lodestones in the runners, they use magnetism to move the elevator up and down.”
Nicola didn’t understand, but decided not to ask anyway, she could see the runners that the elevator was moving between at each corner, but couldn’t see any lodestones, whatever they were. She looked up.
“How many levels are there?” she asked as the elevator began to slow down.
“In this building, more than four hundred.”
Nicola just looked at him, her mouth a round ‘O’.
When the lift stopped, the doors opened and Ethan led Nicola out onto a platform and along a bridge. There was a huge open cylindrical space running the entire height of the building, the elevators ran up and down the centre of this. Besides three bridges at every level coming from the elevator platforms like spokes on a wheel, there was nothing but open air between them and the edges of the central space.
As they reached the end of the bridge, Nicola decided that she had been correct when she had first seen these buildings, each one was a town or even a city in its own right. Running the circumference of the open core of the building was a pathway as wide as a street with several people walking along it. From the looks of the levels above and below, Nicola could see they were laid out in the same way.
Ethan led Nicola off this street and down another, he led her between interior walls of the building that could have belonged to entire buildings themselves. A few more turns down several more wide ‘streets’ and Ethan stopped at a large door not unlike a hundred others they had already passed. He produced a key, which he used to unlock the door and stepped inside, motioning for Nicola to follow.
What she found when she stepped through the door was almost unbelievable, it appeared to be a sitting room with what looked like brown leather couches and armchairs arranged facing one another over a low table made from a very dark wood. There was a thick maroon carpet on the floor, complementing the deep red and brown coloured walls and dark wooden furniture.
Nicola stuck her head outside to see if she was hallucinating. No, they were still in that tower, further on down the ‘street’ she could see daylight. She stepped back into the room and closed the door behind her.
Nicola saw that Ethan had taken his shoes and socks off and did the same. She was astonished when she did at the softness of the carpet; it was gloriously comfortable to walk on, and she liked the way it tickled between her toes.
“Do you like my brother’s home?” Ethan asked her.
“Your brother?”
“Yes, Pearce, he works here so I thought we might pay him a little visit. I’ve let him know we’re here and as we’re going to be in the city for a couple of days anyway he’s offered to let us stay with him.”
“Why are we waiting in this city before carrying on?”
“Because we need to rest, even if it’s only for one day and even if you don’t, I do. I could never get a good nights sleep on board any ship, feeling the bed moving under me keeps me awake.”
And so they stayed in the city of Ehleria. Nicola found that Pearce’s home was a complete one-storey apartment with four bedrooms, bathroom, dining room and kitchen besides the sitting room.
That evening Nicola met Pearce, he was a slightly older man and somewhat shorter than his brother. He had several unnerving habits, a whining nasal voice and although Nicola couldn’t say she liked the stocky man he was hospitable and generous about sharing his home and the contents of his larder.