1,078,131 days since …?
Nicole cursed as Percy took the 4x4 far faster than she would have liked over the bump in the sandy road yet again. The only sweet mercy in that moment was the shitty music tape cutting out.
“God damnit!” Percy cursed as he smacked the dash, his terrible, terrible disco filling the cab once again, “I thought I lost you darling…”
Nicole snorted, “Didn’t you think to bring more than one tape with us?”
“They only had one at the shop, remember? And I was not going to say no to Billy Partridge!”
“I wouldn’t have said no to him either three days ago either! But you’ve had this one album of his on repeat for so fucking long now that the endless cycles of drum beats are driving me crazy!”
Percy sighed, with both his mouth and his pale blue eyes. “I’ll cut it off for a bit then…”
He moved to turn the tape player off, but another sudden jolt did the job for him, cutting Billy off right in the middle of a synthesiser solo.
Nicole finally sighed in relief as she pushed her brown hair out of her sweaty face and readjusted her sunglasses. The blazing sun of the Kushian desert was certainly unrivalled in its intensity and she still hadn’t gotten used to it, but at least she hadn’t gotten burnt by it. Yet.
The old truck was keeping together at least, even as you could hear every going on as it rumbled along the sand track. Every creak of its suspension, its growling engine, and its rattling bodywork. Yet it kept soldiering on with no complaints, carrying all their camping gear and research equipment, well, apart from the speedo which had given out even before they left civilisation.
She let the relative tranquillity of the noises of the ride fill the air for a bit and studied the landscape around them. The dunes outside the windows stretched out for seemingly forever, a featureless rolling mass of sand and dust. She’d read that there might have been a river out here long ago, but that had long since shifted. That was why they were out here as, according to her theory, Aquila Ancus had diverted the flow to the east to siege down the towns and forts along the river. Only a few fragments of his life had survived the years yet it intrigued her, especially the one she found referencing it. But it was clear it was only a tiny part of a much larger document detailing his campaigns in the region.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Percy, her friend and college, even if the trip was straining that relationship, was the expert on the flow of rivers and the technical expert, while she was the historical one. The two working together to uncover a mystery over a thousand years old. Oh, it'd be sure to rock the journals once she published her results!
“So,” Percy mumbled, grabbing Nicole from her thoughts, “It’s meant to be somewhere around here then?”
She nodded, “Should be. The riverbed will have long since filled up with sand so it might just be a—”
Nicole shot forwards in her seat as the car slid to a halt, Percy slamming the brakes, but forgetting to pump them in the sudden panic.
Right there in front of them was a sudden lip down into a sand-filled channel.
“How did you know!?”
Nicole raised a device with a small LCD screen displaying a set of coordinates. “Global navigation satellite system. I put the antenna on the back when we set off, remember? Welcome to the future.”
“Oh…” he said weakly, looking very sorry for himself before suddenly perking up.
“What is it?”
“Do you see those stones over there?”
She peered over to where he was pointing and spied a large dune where a field of stones indeed seemed to be planted in the sand.
She grinned, “Let's investigate.”
----------------------------------------
The dune had been far steeper than it first looked, and they’d had to ditch the 4x4 at the bottom of the hill. So, in the torturous heat and sun, they’d climbed and found themselves with a perfect view of the surrounding area. But what was far more interesting were the stones.
Though at the top of the hill, it was clear that they weren’t just stones, but instead pieces of debris from some sort of great structure, fallen from a great plinth at the centre of the ruin. There was a base with two vast and trunkless legs of stone, harried by the long march of time and the biting winds of the desert. The pieces around it had similarly been mistreated and were at various points of being consumed and swallowed under the sands. Even what might have been engravings on the stone base had been eroded by the dusty winds and smoothed into featureless bumps. It wouldn’t matter if either of them spoke the language that was once written on it, for the characters had long since been made illegible.
“Did you read about this in your documents!?” Percy called over, bent over a titanic stone that might have once been a lip.
“No, the script cuts off before then. The rest of it was lost to mites and mould.”
“A shame,” He sighed, “I would have liked to know what this was…”
Nothing beside remained, just a bare and endless desert around a colossal and decaying wreak.
She’d probably make a note of it in her diary, just to remember the curiosity, but now, they needed to stop looking at rotten stones and get to work. She wasn’t here to research an unknown and unmarked ruin…