The evening wind, which had been moderate in strength an hour ago, had now grown considerably stronger. The warmth of the rays that had served Overmore all day could no longer reach the earth’s surface. Clouds had gathered and darkened from all directions, itching with precipitation. They formed a chilly barrier between the sun and the ground, just as the road cut a barrier through the landscape of Catsroes.

On that road, two young people walked, exhausted by recent events. An uneasy silence hung between them. Neither could believe what they had just witnessed. Irgos still didn’t understand how it had happened so quickly. Usually, the warning horn only sounded when the jelly monsters approached from the north. Then, there was never any real danger, but people were required to stay indoors just in case. Maybe these people are worse monsters than the ones we’ve always known.

Irgos glanced to his left at his sister, who was two years older than him. Her red hair was whipped about in every direction by the howling wind, making it almost unnoticeable that her bright blue eyes were still ringed red from tears.

Arada hadn’t said anything since she’d suggested they continue down this road. She must still be in shock, as she seemed withdrawn and clearly didn’t feel like talking. Yet Irgos decided to break the uncomfortable silence.

“You okay?”

Immediately after asking this, he felt a biting guilt.

As if I don’t already know the answer.

He wasn’t exactly good at starting easy conversations. All his question did was make the moment even more awkward.

Arada didn’t look up and kept walking, her head slightly bowed. When there was no response, Irgos tried again.

“Is it...”

She sighed heavily, choking on a sob. More tears washed over her freckled cheeks, and with great effort, she finally decided to say something.

“You saw it, didn’t you? He slit his throat.”

Irgos’s stomach turned to stone. He had known that Cura would never survive the invasion, but he’d been so overwhelmed by all the chaos that he hadn’t noticed how the Master had ended his life. Arada had never been so upset.

“He did it so, so fast. I wanted to help, but...” Her voice caught. After a few sobs, she tried again. “I don’t understand... What did Dad ever do wrong? He didn’t deserve this!”

Irgos tried to nod sympathetically. He felt his sister’s despair, even though he wasn’t great at expressing emotions.

“Your father didn’t do anything wrong,” he assured her. “And no, he definitely didn’t deserve this.”

Arada’s voice broke even more. “What are we supposed to do now? A mad gang of b-baldies destroys your home. Led by a m-maniac in a clown suit, targeting Dad.” Her breathing quickened in short bursts. “And I don’t see them leaving us a-alone now.”

Arada couldn’t hold it in anymore. She burst into tears, her face flooding with emotion. It was a chilling sight in the brewing storm.

Irgos couldn’t think of anything else to say. He didn’t know what had shocked him more: that their hometown had been leveled to the ground or that they were forced to enter the territories of the Old World.

After Arada had calmed down a bit and it had been silent for a while, she spoke again.

“I still can’t get over what we’ve escaped from. It’s a real miracle that we both got out. But they’ll probably come after us, so we need to keep moving.” She paused. “Let’s see if we can find a shelter before it all breaks loose and try to spend the night there.”

They exchanged a look. Her tear-streaked face was sad, but her eyes showed determination. Something Irgos was a bit envious of.

“Let’s hope that shelter appears soon,” he said. “Do you know how terrified I am of being overtaken by them in this weather, in the dark?”

Arada looked away again.

“Tell me about it.”

* * *

A little later, a building appeared alongside the road in the distance. Irgos noticed it first.

“There,” he pointed.

They hadn’t spoken for an hour. Apparently, the silence was a way to process the day. The clouds had darkened so much it seemed like night, even though the sun hadn’t yet set. The building slowly but surely came closer, until they reached a point where the road split. On the right side, a small branch led to the building.

They took this split and soon had a better view. It was nothing more than a gray square block with shattered glass in the windows and a doorway without a door. In front of it stood something resembling a gigantic table with reinforced white legs, the legs paired together with a sort of box connecting them.

Ribbed black hoses with handles hung from the wall on this structure. Scattered around the building stood strange...

Well, what on earth are these things?

The objects, made of an unfamiliar material, stood on four separate wheels. They looked like iron but were much shinier. They had many dark windows and peculiar markings on the front and back. Inside each of these were something like seats and benches in two rows, with a panel full of complicated buttons at the front row.

Irgos guessed these ‘four-wheelers’ from the Old World were about five feet high and twelve feet long. There was also a muchlarger, more massive type of four-wheeler. They were taller and longer and had rectangular containers with many more wheels attached behind them.

More like a twelve-wheeler.

Some were covered in overgrowth and signs of decay. It was obvious that no one had been here in a long time. The first raindrops began to fall.

“Inside,” Arada called, pointing to the square building.

They broke into a jog, running under the table and into the building. Just in time. In moments, the few drops turned into a deluge. To make matters worse, distant thunder rumbled.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“What kind of place have we ended up in?” Arada wondered aloud.

“Maybe this was how people traveled back in the Old World,” Irgos suggested. “Along this smooth stone road with those strange four-wheeled carts.” He gestured to the open area outside and the road leading to the building.

“Well, give me horses any day,” she said curtly, taking a deep breath. “It smells awful here, by the way.”

The building was filled with empty, white shelves stretched from left to right. In the back corner, there was a slightly lower, wider cabinet. Flat discs, surrounded by a white casing, hung from the ceiling. The walls were covered in massive posters full of strange symbols and colorful images.

She stared at one of the posters. Irgos stood beside her. It showed a large picture, a combination of blue and red-yellow patches. There was also text alongside it.

“Tortilla chips, extra salted,” Arada read aloud. “Any idea what that is?”

“Salted probably means food,” Irgos guessed. “But I’ve never heard of it before.”

“And that next to it,” she said. “One point sixty?”

“It’s not a whole number,” he explained. “It’s somewhere between one and two. A bit closer to two than one, though.”

Despite the absurdity of the situation, he chuckled inside. He hadn’t expected that his interesting conversations about decimal numbers with Alexander back in Overmore would ever come in handy.

Irgos’s stomach twisted when he thought back to his friend.

Alex... I’m so, so sorry. We were so focused on our own survival that we didn’t think about you.

He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to cry.

It was just too much. We couldn’t even have turned around to save you.

Arada looked at the sign as if it held a great mystery. “But it still doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe the number shows how good they taste?” Irgos suggested. “The higher, the better?”

They left the ‘chips’ alone and walked further through the mysterious little building. The other posters were different but similar, all depicting something, described in words and a number.

“So, these are all examples of the food people ate?” Irgos wondered aloud.

“Did this food just sit here?” Arada pointed to the empty shelves that lined the building. “There’s no way people could’ve eaten all that.”

Arada walked to the slightly lower cabinet at the very back. It was light beige, unlike the rest, with a corner fixed to the wall. Its surface had been overtaken by some kind of long-dried, lumpy mold. On it lay a few unknown items from the Old World, alongside some metal discs.

Seeing these, Arada was reminded of something.

“Irgos?”

“Hm?”

“What did Dad give you again?”

Irgos rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the half-amulet that had been given to him by Cura.“Why?”

Arada pointed to the discs. “Put it next to these.”

He did as she asked.

“They have something in common,” she muttered.

“What do you mean? These are round, mine’s only half.”

“And yet. Feel it.” She picked up one of the discs for comparison. It was silver-colored, with a ribbed edge, and bore a faint imprint of an unfamiliar face. She then turned her attention to Cura’s amulet. It was a bit larger, also silver, with a ribbed edge, though slightly less shiny than the others. It too had an imprint. It didn’t seem to depict anything specific; just a few random lines, surrounded by a semicircle and wave-like shapes.

“Wait, there’s something written here,” Arada noticed. She brought the amulet close to her eyes and studied it.

“...protected.”

Irgos stood beside her and looked with her. The word she’d just read was engraved at the top of the amulet. The text followed the curve of the edge, and it seemed like there might be more words before it.

There was moreat the bottom.

“...forever,” they both read together.

That was all. Arada turned the amulet over, but on the back was another half-face, just like on the other discs.

“Do you remember what Dad told us?” she asked, hiding the painful look that appeared on her face at the thought of her father.

Irgos hadn’t forgotten. “That there’s someone in ‘Aquinox’ who has the other half, who can help us further. That other half probably also has the rest of the text.”

“He called it an ‘amulet’. Whatever that means.”

“Maybe it’s like an omelet?” Irgos joked.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t eat it.”

She let out a slow sigh, placing one of the discs back on the table.

“Something tells me they’re connected.”

Irgos suddenly thought of something else. “Sis, where did you leave the vial?”

Arada rummaged in the right pocket of her dark purple jacket and pulled out the glass tube with the red-pink liquid, sealed with a wooden cork. Just as they had last seen it.

“It must not fall into the wrong hands, he’d said.”

Irgos noticed something thick and white around the top of the tube, just below the cork. “What’s that?”

Arada touched it and felt it wasn’t firmly attached. She picked it off with her fingernail.

“Paper?”

The thin paper was wrapped around the tube. After a few folds, the paper had grown considerably in size. Arada looked at it with a frown once it was unfolded. Irgos came to her side.

It was a colorful sheet with various patches, some areas marked with text.

image [https://d.img.vision/scribe-28112024/Map.jpg]

“Look here!” Arada pointed excitedly to the bottom right. “‘Overmore’ is written here. That’s our village. Well, it was.”

“And this is what Cura mentioned.” Irgos pointed to a large blob on the left side of the paper labeled ‘Aquinox’.

“I get it,” Arada said. “It’s a kind of representation of the world around us. And the blue must be water, I guess.”

Irgos nodded and read some of the other names on the paper. “Horwitz, Ebrotown, Sunfield. This all must come from the Old World.”

Arada brought the paper closer to her face. “I understand. This is the road we’ve been walking on.” She pointed to a gray line moving away from Overmore. “So, we must be somewhere around... here.”

Irgos took the paper so he could look as well. “If that was an hour’s walk, and if the distances align as shown, the Old World is truly vast. How will we ever get to Aquinox?”

By now, it had grown significantly darker and wetter outside. Large raindrops splattered the road around the building. Lightning flashed in the distance. They were stuck here for now.

“I’m too tired to think about that now,” she said with a loud yawn, handing the paper to her brother. “If you keep this and the amulet, I’ll hold onto the bottle. We’d best rest now. I doubt those creeps will track us in this weather. Besides, I can’t take another step.” She meant it literally, dropping down with her knees behind the beige cabinet. She took off her jacket, rolled it up, and placed the purple bundle under her head as a pillow. “No one will be able to see us from outside this way,” she said, turning onto her side.

Irgos agreed. Behind her ‘shelter,’ there was enough space for two people to lie down, so he lay next to her on the floor. He didn’t have a jacket to take off. His dark blue t-shirt was all he’d worn on this warm day, and he wasn’t keen on being seen shirtless. So, he rested his head directly on the floor.

I’ll survive for one night, he thought.

But falling asleep was impossible. While Arada drifted off within five minutes, Irgos continued to mull over the day.

What comes next?

Why is that horrible ‘Master’ after us?

What kind of place was the Old World?

That last question kept him occupied the most. Other than the jelly monsters that haunted the village, Cura had refused to tell them what lay beyond Overmore’s forests.

And from today, we’ll finally find out.

It was odd, though, that no one else was around. It didn’t exactly make the evening any more comforting. As a loud clap of thunder sounded, Irgos turned over yet again.

Are there even any people left in the Old World?