----------------------------------------
The furnace-like temperatures of midday tapered off painfully slowly. Denizens of Secondhome, even the Stormlanders, despite the occasional braggadocio about being able to handle the heat, usually remained in their underground sanctuary until late in the evening. Clans of the Stormheaths were nocturnal mostly by necessity. Nightfall was when the carnivorous plants unfurled. With their bioluminescent snares and narrow range, they were easy to avoid, especially if you stuck to the well-trodden paths. They were mostly a threat to newcomers, naive children, and those exploring alone, lost in thought.
Ma’at (Maat to his friends) liked to spend the twilight hours wandering the path between Secondhome and the river delta. It was a short walk, an easy walk, one on elevated boards just above the forest floor and with a steady canopy above. No chance of running into a ravenous beast or falling into an acid fern. No chance of being snatched by a condor. And the river in these parts was too shallow for terrorfish. It was a narrow oasis within a tropical rainforest where a creature Matt’s size was typically prey.
A disc-shaped moon hung over the far western sky. It had just reappeared after a three-month absence, the largest of several such celestial bodies. While it looked small now, it grew larger every day, sliding in a wide arc across the heavens. Within the month it would hang directly over the Alabaster Isle. The great cyan disc would fill the sky, luring the river water up to fill in the ruins of a semi-circular temple that Ma’at now found himself in. He’d have to find a new place to walk for about two months.
The temple predated his father’s clan ever arriving in these lands. Or so it was said. Other legends claimed the clan had emerged from Secondhome’s cave in time immemorial, so who knows how long ago any of that was. But his father said they found it like this, with baroque brickwork, half collapsed spires, and a dependence on load bearing stones in its archways of radically different design than the dozens of other temples along the River Torrent.
Along the outskirts of the temple, above the water line, sat the clan graveyard. There were humans of the Quarterchief’s kind, a few same-kin, and many more that number of various Stormlander and Plainswalker clans. They were buried in a uniform fashion, with occasional cultural-specific accents to their headstones.
Walking along the water filled Ma’at with a comforting feeling. Whether the waters were placid like at the temple or raging further up near the cliffs, the river just made him feel at home. It was not a feeling the caves, forests, swamps, or glens could replicate.
“Watcha thinking about?” a voice from behind the temple stones startled Ma’at.
Ma’at jumped back, then angled his glow-fern lantern up towards the ruined wall. There was a slender figure staring at him expectantly.
“Hey, Sara.” He refocused. “Don’t scare people like that.”
“Sorry,” Sara said. “Lloyd sent me. That condor attack dug something up back at the glen.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. Want to go check it out before the Quarterchief cordons the area off tomorrow?”
Water was lapping at the edge of the temple grounds. The flooding occurred ever so slightly earlier each year. Something man-size jumped out of the water further out in the shallows. That usually meant something larger was lurking out there too.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
Ma’at quickly did a mental check to see if he knew a route from river temple to glen that was confirmed safe from acid-nettles.
“Might as well,” he said.
It was just a flat glen, what could be so interesting about it?
----------------------------------------
The path through the whitewood forests was a winding one, cutting between old, disused footpaths to avoid thickets dancing with luminescent lure-bulbs. It was an hour later, well past midnight, when the pair arrived back in the clearing.
A faint scent of kerosene lingered in the air even now. Tall grass was charred, but unburnt. Fire, they could handle – their narrow stalks being flattened by the condor proved more damaging.
“Okay, so brittle thistle is about the only thing in this field that burns,” Sara explained. “Well, it appears it was planted here specifically to hide this.”
Brittle thistle was a tiny little four-leaf plant that could quadruple its numbers within the day so long as it had any water at all – and its native habitat was called the Stormheaths. It was a virulent weed, so clans generally burnt it away whenever it was near priority farming ground. Great dug-out ditches could arrest its ceaseless march as well. Out here there was no real need, but nonetheless someone had taken great care to cultivate a small pocket of thistles in three specific spots around this glen.
The first two spots concealed a man-made ditch. Jagged clumps of metal had been cast into the pits, or perhaps the pit had been dug around them. They had narrow, twisted fronts (Ma’at presumed the ‘face’ was their front) and back compartments large enough to fit half the clan in. Metal conjoined with leathery hides, clumps of ruined cloth, and the unmistakable off-white of dried bone.
“Whole thing was burnt over.” Lloyd pointed to black charcoal residue on the metallic shell. “And not by that condor. Years ago. Decades, maybe.”
“Probably a carriage,” Maat hypothesized.
“Like the kinds they’re using on the plains?” Sara scratched at the metal frame. “Those are typically made of brushwood. This material is like nothing on the island.”
“Looks like dad’s map table,” Ma’at said.
The third pit was the smallest by far. It contained just a simple headstone, like those used at the river shrine. A name dulled by acidic downpours from years of the Stormland’s rainy seasons.
“Trevor, Age Eight. I’m Sorry.” Ma’at read from the headstone. “Chiseled into the rock. Looks like father’s script.”
The rest proved illegible. Ma’at could speak and read the Stormlander-Plains-Outlander pidgin script that was linga franca around Secondhome. He could communicate with his father and Hector in the strange, old-world vowels of their mother tongue, but could not read their letters with any precision. Even the Quarterchief’s lesson plans, passed down through the generations, had to be transliterated into the pidgin scripts.
“Another,” Sara said from a few paces away. “Says, uh… Richard, son of Atkins.”
“Never heard of them,” Lloyd said.
What’s more, while there were two headstones, there appeared to be no proper grave site. Just these two shallow graves remained. Not buried near the river temple like the rest of Secondhome.
“Perhaps the river shrine wasn’t the first place the clan buried the dead,” Sara said.
Buried was doing a lot of work. Hidden would be more accurate. Brushed under thistle and forgotten was less charitable but more likely.
A charred skeleton of a long-dead, adult figure sat at the front of the lead chariot. Not even a headstone for this one. Its skull hung loose on its neck, jaw agape. The long-dead corpse matched the general height and proportions as the humans of Maat’s same-clan.
The trio ultimately decided they would not inform the Quarterchief. Not yet, as they had evidence, however circumstantial, that the find was some ancient site of their clan’s not to be disturbed. They certainly didn’t spend more time than necessary amongst the burnt-over chariots. Who knew what ancestral spirits could be roused at this late hour?
----------------------------------------