From the second day onward, the majesty of the forest had begun to wane. Sera and Tiriana spotted little of note beyond more trees, more rocks, and the very occasional animal, well-camouflaged for the environment. Humans on Earth can typically identify animals in the wild because their camouflage is designed to hide from dichromatic and monochromatic eyes, but doesn’t blend in quite so well when viewed by the trichromatic eyes of humans.
By contrast, the animals of this strange new place were evolved for the latter. Both women had trouble locating them even in motion, as their bodies blended into the multi-colored stones on the ground and the red leaves in the trees. This mean that although they could hear animals at all times, they only rarely spotted any. This did get a bit unnerving, particularly when silence passed between them, so Tiriana began teaching Sera the Sylvan language to pass the time.
Sera hated every single minute of it.
Sylvan was by far the most confusing language she had ever heard of. On Earth, she knew that languages might have different sentence structures and grammar, but one commonality was that each and every one she’d ever heard of had verbs. Sylvan did not. Sylvan had participles. It had a lot of participles. It had approximately as many participles as most languages had verbs, in fact.
The concept was simple in theory. Each action was represented by a participle, affixed directly to a noun to signify action. It was a prefix if it was past tense, a suffix if it was future, and both at the same time for present tense. In Sylvan, saying ‘Tiriana spoke’ would be ‘Futiriana.’ Saying Tiriana will speak would be ‘Tirianafu.’
On paper- literally, on paper, as in, reading- that was easy to understand. In practice, language is spoken so quickly that the gap between words is hard to discern without an understanding of the lexicon. So if two nouns both had participles and appeared side by side in a spoken sentence, the listener had to somehow determine which word those participles belonged to. That was easy when a prefixed word followed a suffixed word; not so much when a prefixed word was followed by a word bearing both prefix and suffix, meaning either could be present tense.
Sera’s brain was fried by the end of the first hour, but she had nothing better to do except bang her head against this particular wall, so that’s what she did. The most progress she made was extracting a promise from Tiriana to find her something, anything, to take notes on.
So it was that on the third day, when they emerged from the forest around noon, Sera cheered out loud in sheer joy, garnering looks of confusion from Tiriana that were ignored. Now they were on an open plain, covered in inch-high red-leafed grass. It was almost desolate, really, if not for the continued calls of insects hiding beneath the surface. Tiriana took a moment to plant a magical tool- apparently one that determined the distance between it and its partner on the other side of the forest- and then they continued into the empty plains.
Fortunately, though, they soon came upon something else worthy of note.
“Strange,” Tiriana said slowly, abruptly ending her lecture. She was staring off into the distance, but her eyes seemed to be better than Sera’s, who saw nothing but grass.
“What is?”
“There are divots in the ground. Craters, even. I’ve never seen so many in such a small area.”
It took a couple minutes more for them to draw close enough for Sera to lay eyes on the craters as well, but when she finally had, it was no mystery what she was looking at. A scattering of craters as far as the eye could see, irregularly placed and partially overgrown with grass, and lacking meteors to account for them?
“Those are artillery craters,” she said, comparing the sight to images of World War-era battlefields. There were no bodies, and no sign of any leftover materiel, so these craters were a mere memory of a war long ended and a battlefield already cleaned up. Still, she stopped short of the closest craters and motioned for Tiriana to do so as well. A battlefield could never be truly called clean.
“Maybe…but what were they firing at? I don’t see the remains of a road or any buildings. Just a creek,” Tiriana replied, looking at something still too distant to see.
“That could be a trench. These might could have been left by shells that overshot the target.”
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“I’m still not sure I understand. Why would anyone bomb a trench any more than they would a creek?”
“On Earth, there’s a type of fighting called ‘trench warfare’. It’s where one or both sides dig lines of trenches for cover from guns and artillery, because only shells that land inside or directly above the trench are likely to do any damage,” Sera explained. “Do you not…do that here?”
“No, that wouldn’t provide much protection against certain types of magic. It would even be exploitable. We employ barriers projected by mages instead.”
Sera understood what she meant- if the enemy can remotely shift the earth itself, digging trenches was akin to digging your own grave. It might be possible to flood them, as well, or lift the floor of the trench back up to ground level along with anyone inside it.
“I’m surprised you’ve never encountered a frontier where it was used given that they’re so common,” Sera remarked. “Especially since you’re familiar with artillery.”
“It could be that there hasn’t been one, or that we merely haven’t found it. We might even have found a civilization that used them, but not records of it, or if we did find records, they may have been overlooked in favor of those of cultural history. There’s little sense fixating on a military tactic we can’t use.”
“That makes sense. We need to be careful though. If we’re seeing signs of artillery and trenches, there could also be landmines left over. Or shells that didn’t detonate,” Sera pointed out. That was the main reason she’d stopped Tiriana; she had heard of people stepping on landmines even decades after a conflict, and this battle looked much more recent.
“Good point. One moment.” With that, Tiriana closed her eyes and held out a hand. After a few moments she clenched her fist, and all the grass in a wide area stretching out to dozens of meters ahead of them was abruptly flattened by an unseen force. “If there was anything there, I think it would have exploded. We should be safe if we keep to the path. I’ll just have to keep doing that until we’re through.”
With that accounted for, they resumed their march. Sera still wasn’t certain what the battle lines had been drawn here for, though, considering the lack of any other signs of civilization. Perhaps the trenches they were passing through had been dug to protect whatever was on the other side of the forest, originally?
For a few miles they found nothing but craters and trenches. A landmine did go off just once, which justified Sera’s caution, but the indicator of the native civilization’s technological level was all they found. Sera did notice that some of the craters were noticeably larger than the others, by a wide margin, and she had a hard time imagining the shell that made those.
Just as suddenly as the battlefield had appeared, though, it finally ended, still with no indication of what it had been fought over. It could have simply been a convenient defensive position between the enemy and their target, but they would have to search for their answers elsewhere.
“So, what now?” Sera asked. “We definitely have proof there were people here, but we don’t really have any leads on what direction to look in.”
“We’ll continue in this direction, I think,” Tiriana replied with a shrug. Given the orientation of those trenches I would think there must be something this way, since we didn’t find anything but trees on the other side. We still have a couple of days before we need to turn back.”
“Why operate out of a basecamp instead of just exploring the area as an expedition, anyway? Seems kind of limiting,” Sera observed. It was like if Lewis and Clark had based themselves on the border of the Louisiana Purchase and scouted a few miles over the border at a time, rather than traveling through it.
“It’s because there’s nothing to eat, and we couldn’t bring enough supplies to explore the whole area,” the elf explained. “We are building up a supply of preserved food from our excess in the hopes of a more long term mission, but as you might imagine, no one is all that keen to sit tight and work on it instead of making at least some progress…”
More problems with lone wolves, then. Sera wouldn’t say it in front of Tiriana, but this whole operation seemed like a massive boondoggle. Lack of cooperation, no real direction, insufficient supplies…rather than the Lewis and Clark Expedition, these adventurers resembled some of the less than successful ones, and Sera only hoped it would at least be closer to Columbus’s success via serendipity rather than Terra Nova’s unfortunate ending.
That wasn’t necessarily a hit against Tiriana, but it did raise questions about her choice of partners. And Sera couldn’t help but notice that Tiriana was out here exploring, not working on gathering food, despite her implied disapproval of the others doing the same. A part of her wondered why these were the only people out here, but then, Omichlódis was significantly vaster than Earth. There were likely dozens if not hundreds of individual expeditions all around the rim; a few of them were bound to be worse than others.
It was likely just the luck of the draw that Sera had been dropped into the laps of a group that was underfunded and disorganized at best.
Sera didn’t really see herself as the charismatic sort, though, so attempting to take charge was out of the question. Why should anyone listen to her, after all? She could hardly claim to have more experience, and her observations had likely been brought up before only to be dismissed. Hopefully they would be able to find something interesting enough to draw in people that…well, actually knew what they were doing, for one.
And if she was really lucky, that something had just come into sight. Because on the horizon was something very, very big, unidentifiable at their current distance but reminiscent of a single mountain peak jutting out from the plains. Given there was no such thing as a mountain bereft of a mountain range, it was almost certainly manmade.