Aqueel the inventor, probably born around 700 b.f., is certain to have been one of the greatest minds of pre-Ceraviehlian times. An unparalleled genius among his kind, Aqueel raised a whole city in the middle of the desert, with means unknown to us even over a millennium after its demise. His inventions and insights have not only revolutionalized the use of the Arts but also brought an era of prosperity to the Endless Desert and beyond.

The sudden disappearance of both the fabled city and Aqueel himself is a tragedy for Ceraviehlians and Drakhonians alike and likely to be the main reason for the following dark age that affected the whole continent.

Excerpt by Tahmina Saidova, Drakhonian historian

Their steps barely made any sound as the group stalked one of the narrow passageways. The ceiling hung low, the Magelight playing with their shadows. The wall to their left opened up into a door-shaped hole. Inside, a crude resemblance of a bed stood in the corner, its surface shrouded from the darkness.

Silas took a step inside. It was a small space, hardly enough for anyone to live in. He stopped as the ball of Magelight reached the end of the room. A heap of bones lay discarded in the corner. Silas counted at least three human skulls.

Involuntarily taking a step back, he bumped into Zaya, who just shoved him back. Nurana seemed to be the only one unfazed.

“Those have been lying here for a long, long time. They seem too small for human bones, though.” She scratched her chin with her index finger.

Silas threw her a disturbed glance. “Why do you know that kind of stuff?”

“A healer has to deal with both the living and the dead.”

“You think bones be from other race?”

“No.” Nurana kneeled in front of the bones, inspecting one of the skulls. “They were Drakhonians, without a doubt. But they were…malnourished, to say the least.”

The passages twisted and turned, stairs and slopes leading them up and down without any apparent order. New ways opened up after every corner, each one indistinguishable from the other.

They had to rest in one of the caves for the night, rationing what little food they had left. Nothing changed as the group continued its way through the dark passages, deciding to go with the fool-proof formula to always turn left.

That was before they noticed they had been going in circles.

Zaya shot a spike into the stone, specks of dust flaked from the wall. Silas and Nurana threw her an odd look. “To mark passage,” she explained.

Silas waved his arms. “This district, or whatever this is, can only be so large. We should reach the end of it sooner or later.”

“Probably.”

“What do you mean?” Silas asked Nurana.

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd, how all of this is built?” she responded, only getting a blank expression from Silas. “This is part of some city, people have been living here.”

“So?”

Nurana sighed. “Why would they build the passages without any order to them? Each house looks the exact same, there are no landmarks or anything of the like. This is more than a living district—It’s a maze.”

“But why would they purposefully build their homes like that?” Silas asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Nurana mumbled.

They passed around a corner, stopping to rest and sleep in one of the houses that was relatively clean. Moving the crumbling remains of the dead left the group in a somber mood. Trapped in an unknown maze somewhere below the Crimson Dunes and with little supplies left, neither of them wanted to speak the obvious.

Silas had trouble falling asleep. Something itched beneath his skin, and when the dreams finally came, they were filled with disturbing, violent images. Eventually giving up on sleep, he decided to relieve Zaya of her watch. She sat near the entrance of the cave, her empty stare lost somewhere on the arkose wall.

“Are you ok?” he asked as he sat down beside her.

Zaya flinched, sending an annoyed glare towards Silas. “Yes.” She didn’t move to sleep, however. Silas didn’t break the silence. Sometimes, it was all someone needed. “Think about my family,” she said.

Silas clenched his jaw, gulping down the lump that began to form in his throat. “You could have gotten a worse one.”

A nod came from Zaya. She seemed too lost in her thoughts to say more. Sometimes, Silas wondered about her past. The two interlocking circles of thick scar tissue stuck out in the weak light, and Silas tried not to stare. It seemed grotesque and out of place on her face, a stark contrast to her high cheekbones, thin eyebrows and narrow eyes. The sheer agony must have been unbearable.

“Can I ask you something?”

Zaya hesitated for a moment. “What you want to know, little boy?”

“My name is Silas, and you know that.”

“Mmhmm.” The trace of a smile tugged at her lips.

Silas pinched the bridge of his nose. The girl would never learn. “Why did your family flee from the war?”

“Because I not can control Iana’tor. Kill worker with stone. Now I have this,” she pointed to the brand on her forehead, “so everyone can see I am Hanguhn, one without tribe. Like animal.”

“So your family fled with you?”

“Yes. No. Family fled for me.” Zaya took a deep breath. “Now they be with Kila’tor, without crystals to pay for stay. Don’t know when I see them again. Only because we attack Mages in Kuzant.”

Silas knew. She didn’t have to say it. He had been the first to run towards the screams and point his drawn bow at the Guild’s Mage. If it hadn’t been for him, she’d probably have gotten back to her parents and they would have been able to take refuge among the Kila’tor.

“I’m sorry.”

Zaya shook her head. “Not be your fault. I truly be Hanguhn. First lose tribe, now lose family,” she said bitterly. “Have no one.”

“That makes us two.”

Zaya turned to look at Silas. “Why you travel alone?”

Thoughts warred in Silas’ head. Images of his family, happy, sitting by the campfire, his father telling one of his stories. His mother’s singing. The mutilated corpse of Edgar, staring back at him. The once so pretty dress of Hannah, tainted red with blood. Now he sat next to a barbarian, trying to explain why he traveled alone.

How could he tell her it had been her people who had butchered his parents? But even though he searched for it, when he met Zaya’s gaze, he could find nothing of the hate and cruelty he had witnessed over a year ago. The only thing he could see was loss and the stubborn frustration of someone who had lost it all, yet refused back down nonetheless, something Silas understood more than he cared to admit. In that split moment, with their faces a mere foot apart, the words almost tumbled out of his mouth.

“Perhaps another time.” Silas returned his gaze to the wall. He just couldn’t.

Zaya nodded and didn’t prod any further. It would have been so much easier to be angry at her if she insisted. Letting out a sigh, they let the comfortable silence linger between them, each one lost in their own thoughts. It took a while before Silas spoke up again.

“You should go to sleep.”

Standing up, Zaya headed for the bedrolls. “Good watch, little boy.”

“Not my name,” he replied absently.

For a long time, Silas wondered what would have happened if he had told her. Now, he sat alone, not a sound disturbing the eerie silence of the maze. For over a year, he had continued to feed the scorching rage bubbling in his chest. He had come to enjoy the stinging pain it brought, the self-loathing at his own helplessness that accompanied it.

He told himself he had wanted to become an Artist to help others, but deep down, he knew it for the lie it was. Silas wanted justice; he wanted revenge. He trained to stop feeling weak, and helpless. Yet, the more time he spent with Zaya, the more he could feel his resolve weakening, the walls of his self-imposed prison crumbling around him. The doubt crept through him, spreading through his veins like cold water that froze his breath. He could feel the rage in him beginning to leak, slipping through his fingers as it escaped from his grasp.

Silas held on to it with everything he could.

Because what scared him the most was not the prospect of him being wrong about Zaya and her family or that he would have to let go of the comforting presence of anger that he had clung onto for so long, but rather that without it, he would have nothing left.

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Nurana had to tap his shoulder a few times to shake him out of his thoughts as she relieved him of his watch. They resumed their trek the next day in silence, Zaya continuing with her method to mark their passage by hitting the walls.

The shaking that followed took everyone by surprise. A deep sound came from the stone, not what one would expect after hitting a solid wall of sandstone. Zaya and Nurana’s eyes met, each one thinking the same.

“Go back,” Zaya ordered as she formed two stone drills. “What are you going to…” Silas began, the sound of stone crumbling drowning out everything else. The wall collapsed, revealing an intersection of three passages, a massive metal chalice standing in the middle. Strange letters were drawn into the chalice, most of them indecipherable with rust.

“How is anyone supposed to get here without breaking the wall?”

Zaya pointed to a piece of crumbled sandstone. Within it, a metal device could be seen, a similar one sticking out of the wall to their right. “This be door,” she said, inspecting the strange device from up close.

“Huh.”

Nurana leaned closer to the chalice, squinting as she traced the letters with her fingers. “These letters…this is archaic Drakhonian.”

“Can you read it?”

The Drakh squinted at the chalice. “Barely, give me a moment.”

A loud screeching made both Silas and Nurana turn around. Zaya had liberated the metal mechanism from the door, putting it into one of her pockets.

“What? I like, so I take,” she said as she met their questioning looks.

Gnarly suddenly turned his head, peering into one of the passages behind them. “Creak.”

“I think we should take the path to the right, if I interpret the information on the chalice correctly.”

Faint tapping against the sandstone. “Creak,” Gnarly voiced again, his eyes staring at the darkness behind them. The noise grew louder with each heartbeat, the group standing still as they listened.

“Something’s coming.”

“Let’s get moving,” Silas hurried into the right passage, Magelight held ahead of him. Nurana sent a last glance at the chalice before following Zaya and Silas upstairs.

The noise gradually faded away after they had turned another corner. Their surroundings, however, didn’t change. The same narrow hallways twisted themselves through the rock, revealing paltry caves with broken pottery and half-crumbled bones. Zaya had a constant frown on her face. She kept smelling the air, even if it didn’t have any real scent to it.

Nurana moved to walk beside her. “You notice it too, don’t you.”

“Yes… something be wrong with air. Like smell, but different.”

Silas found himself agreeing. There was something about this place that gave him the shivers, made him look over his shoulder every once in a while, whether he heard something or not. Like an itch that didn’t go away, a spider that crawled over his skin, searching for orifices to crawl into and make his body its nest. Intrusive, malignant, and ravenous. He involuntarily scratched his ear.

“The reason why hardly anybody has ever gotten back from the Crimson Dunes is not because of the mutated creatures that roam the region, or the few natural resources. It’s because of the Taint,” Nurana explained.

“The Taint? Are the Dunes actually cursed?” Once, Edgar had told him a story about the Crimson Dunes. Supposedly, something had cursed the whole region, making it inhospitable to nothing but the vilest, most twisted creatures.

“Nobody knows for certain. The Taint is not that bad on the outskirts, supposedly. But the deeper you venture into the Dunes, the worse its influence gets. The general theory is that artificially corrupted magical energy is leaking from somewhere into the environment. I once read a book or two about it,” she added off-handedly.

“What could be so powerful it causes a whole region to change? And wouldn’t the source of the energy just dissipate over time, if it was created?” Silas asked as they rounded another corner, their conversation muffled by the walls around them.

“This region has been like that for over a millennium. Have you ever heard of Al-Talash, Silas?”

His head whipped towards Nurana as realization hit him. “That’s why you stared at the ceiling earlier. Do you really think the man depicted on the mosaic was Aqueel? But that would mean…”

“Yes,” Nurana replied with a somber voice. “It would mean we are currently in the lowest level of Al-Talash, the city generally believed to be the origin of the Taint. Let’s just hope I’m wrong.”

Zaya grunted.

***

Large letters were drawn into a wide doorway in front of them. A cracked stone basin stood in front of it, water gently flowing from a protruding pipe above it and disappearing somewhere behind the doorway.

After refilling their canteens and stilling their thirst, they decided to go through the doorway. A single corridor went straight ahead, eventually splitting up into countless smaller passages, each one parallel to the other. Their steps slowed as they picked one at random.

“This no make sense. Why order this, but not other part of city?” Zaya thought out loud.

Nurana glanced at the walls to either side. Around five feet long slabs were carved into the sandstone from top to bottom, most of them empty. The ones that weren’t held crumbled remains of bone.

“This isn’t made for the living, but the dead. It’s a mortuary.”

Silas readied his spear. He really hoped whoever had built this wouldn’t mind them trespassing. “Do you think this place will lead us anywhere?”

“I don’t know, but we should at least look for a way upwards,” Nurana whispered.

Rows upon rows of graves were carved into the walls. Silas saw more than one skull looking back at him, some of them oddly deformed. This place was way larger than he’d imagined it would be. Zaya suddenly halted, cocking her head as if listening to something. Silas and Nurana waited for her to say something, but she simply shook her head before continuing. They stopped again a few steps later, each one straining their ears.

Whispers.

Hushed voices reached them from far away, sounding oddly distorted. There was a sense of wrongness to them that was difficult to describe. Too throaty, as if someone grated two pieces of stone against each other. Silas gripped his spear tighter. Zaya held two small spears of stone in each hand, ready to act at a moment’s notice. They stopped, the whispers slowly growing louder.

“Let’s not go further.”

They walked back in silent agreement, the whispers accompanying their every step, slithering through the hallways and creeping into their ears. First low and far away, then from right behind them, the distorted sounds coming from each direction at once. The voices dripped with ecstatic anticipation, each one speaking over the other. Their hurried walk turned into a jog, the Magelight casting taunting shadows over the empty graves.

“Left, then second to the right,” Nurana ordered.

Spear held in front of him, Silas hurried along the hallways. Zaya made up the back with Nurana in the middle. Raspy laughter in the dark. Something spoke directly into his ear. Silas whipped his head around. Nothing. Throaty cackles accompanied his cursing. The crypt was empty, only shadows filling its corridors. Rounding another corner, Silas abruptly stopped.

Something stood there, right in front of him, motionless.

The Magelight cluttered to the ground. From one heartbeat to the other, the whispers went silent. The ball slowly rolled towards the creature, the light shining through the white, paper-thin skin that made up its legs. Long, lanky arms dangled all the way down to its ankles, hands ending in three taloned claws. Leathery skin stretched itself over a black skull. The creature raised its head, revealing bright, yellow eyes. The Magelight flickered.

Almost reflexively, Silas stabbed the creature in its heart. Meeting his eyes, it smiled, revealing rows of sharpened teeth. A long tongue flicked out of its mouth, tasting the air. Deep, gurgling sounds came out of its throat as its too-long jaw unhinged itself with a sharp crack.

The creature lunged at him, uncaring for the spear still sticking out of its chest. Silas tried to pull the weapon back out to defend himself, but he was too late. Stumbling backwards, a spike of stone tore through the creature’s neck, almost separating the head from the rest of its body. The flesh reknit itself within moments. Two long arms hooked themselves into the sandstone as the creature pulled itself back up. Another spike of stone broke one of its knees, but it hardly reacted.

“Ok, so how do we kill this?” Silas said, spear held in front of him. Zaya had joined his side, Nurana staying behind them in case they got injured.

“First break arms, then squash head.”

“Got it,” Silas nodded, waiting for the creature to make the next move.

Which turned out to be a mistake. Like worms crawling beneath its chest, the creature’s skin parted, showing clean, white ribs that went open like the bud of a flower in spring. Instead of a heart, a writhing, black orb pulsed in the middle of its chest. Although Silas had no idea what it was, so much as looking at it made the breath leave his lungs.

His heart stuttered, the life inside him revolting against the sight. It was just wrong. Guttural sounds escaped from the creature’s lungs, tendrils of darkness creeping into the graves as bones began to rattle all around them.

Skeletons crawled out of the graves, many of them missing a head, arm, or more. Limbs climbed along the walls, closing in on them and blocking their way back. Silas swung his spear as one of them got too close, its bones cluttering to the ground, only to draw themselves back together as if on unseen strings.

Stones and pebbles shot in all directions, reducing bones to dust. There were just too many. The creature stood behind a wall of skeletons, more and more energy flowing into the other hallways. The orb in its chest grew with every heartbeat, enveloping the creature in a flimsy sheen of darkness.

“Push through bones and kill heart of thing,” Zaya said, stomping with one foot as dozens of sharp projectiles shot upwards and broke dozens of legs.

“On three. Gnarly, protect Nurana, alright?”

“Creak.”

Silas shoved another skeleton with his shield. “One.”

He Silas drew on his Landscape and slowly guided a trickle of energy into his legs. According to the booklet Tom had given him, now that Silas had strengthened his body, he could use his Landscape’s energy to give his body little bursts of speed.

Crouching low, he readied himself to lunch at the creature. “Two.” Zaya stood right by his side, three heavy rocks floating in front of her.

“Three!”

Silas surged forth with faster than he had thought, barreling through the skeletons as Zaya’s rocks sent them flying. On a whim, he infused his arms with energy, releasing a series of lightening-fast thrusts that struck at the black ball floating in the creature’s chest. Pain followed. His muscles felt close to rupturing, and he almost lost his grip on his spear. That had been too much, yet the result spoke for itself. Never had he been so fast.

An ear-piercing scream echoed through the crypt. Its eyes glowed with a fierce light, the ball leaking wisps of dark energy that dissipated into the air. Within the same heartbeat, two rocks pummeled into the creature’s chest, sending it flying backwards until it hit one of the graves with a dull thud. It sat there, motionless, the skeletons frozen mid-action.

Neither Silas nor Zaya hesitated as they ran to end the creature. They were almost upon it when its head jerked back up, yellow eyes staring into them. Talons forming a claw, strings of black fog shot forward. Silas swiped his spear at them, but his weapon went right through them. A tendril latched onto his leg, another one grasping onto Zaya’s arm.

Cold washed over him. The spear grew limp in his hands. His heart beat weakly, its life fighting to repel the foreign energy. He needed to rest, to lie down. The stone was cool to his touch, comforting. Someone stood to his right, legs quivering. The image tickled something in his mind, yet his mind was too fuzzy to recognize it.

Another person walked in front of him, the scales on their forearms glittering in the dim light. Her hands gripped the strands holding him and the other girl, ripping them out. Somehow, she managed to push back the dark energies, the strands evaporating as the creature’s eyes lost a bit of their sickly glow.

Life surged through his body. Silas took a shuddering breath, propping himself up with one arm. Adrenaline shot through his veins, his heart threatening to burst out of his ribcage. Grabbing his spear with shaking hands, he crawled toward the creature.

Zaya stood with both arms extended towards the ceiling. Clenching her fists, loud cracks shook the dust off the walls as multiple slabs of stone broke and fell onto the creature, burying it under their weight in a cacophony of noise. A last hate-filled scream tore through the air before everything went still, the skeletons collapsing as one, reduced to nothing but heaps of bone.

Zaya pulled Silas back up and stumbled towards Nurana, her toned skin looking unusually pale. “I think you not can fight.”

“I’ll explain later. Let’s get out of here, first,” she said, throwing one last glance at the pile of stones.