News travelled quickly in the confined spaces of the Safehold. Soon after the Citadel docked with the mountain the first curious crowds began to gather. I couldn’t have stopped them jumping the gap to reach the plateau if I’d tried. So I didn’t try. I just stood there reminding them to be careful and ready to grab anyone who messed up the jump and got wedged in the gap.

Eventually the news percolated through to someone in a position of actual authority and the Mayor came to join me. He walked along the gap, inspecting the closeness of the fit before saying, “Well this answers a question I’d never thought to ask.”

“There’s nothing about this in the Archive?” I said.

“Oh I don’t know about nothing, I’m no expert. You’d have to ask Gertrude about the contents of the archive. There’s certainly nothing about it in any of the official histories or in the earliest Council minutes.”

“You realise that a lot of people are just going to walk into the mountains,” I said.

“And that’s their choice,” said the Mayor, “We can’t keep them in the Citadel if they want to leave. Even if they’re planning to walk through the mountains with no map and minimal supplies. Now you, on the other hand, you absolutely should be exploring the mountain top. This is what you’re built for. Off you go.”

I hesitated. It felt wrong to just run off and explore when I had responsibilities. But then there was no guarantee that there would be anyone to be responsible to, or for, before long. There might be nobody left in the Citadel by nightfall.

“I’ll just go and grab my gear,” I said.

###

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

It felt very strange to make the leap from the Citadel to the plateau. It was not the same as travelling down to the ground in a Gondola. I was robbed of the transition that allowed me to recalibrate my senses. My feet were convinced that there was no real difference between the pavement of the Citadel and the natural ground of the mountain top. The rest of me felt very unsteady.

I crouched down and ran my fingers through the rough grass. I scraped at the thin, dusty soil with my clawed fingers and toes. I stayed there until the world stopped shifting around me and I felt at peace with it.

Like most of the hilltops I’d been on in the last month, the plateau was studded with badly overgrown buildings. These buildings seemed in much better condition though. Perhaps they were younger, or perhaps there was some magic at work to preserve them. These buildings were also much grander in style than most of the hilltop villages I’d visited.

All the other villages had a simple, ancient style of building. They looked like Native American Pueblo villages and reconstructions I’d seen of ancient Babylonian towns. Those buildings were cuboid or cylindrical in construction with plain walls and small, high windows. The individual buildings crowded close together, often bunched around courtyard gardens, without much in the way of streets.

This place looked like a more modern town. The buildings were discrete from each other, the gaps between them felt like long overgrown streets. These buildings were heavier, with thicker walls, constructed of dressed white stone and not the rough cut yellowish stone blocks of the villages. They looked a lot like the stones that most of the Citadel’s buildings were made of.

I wandered between the buildings, finding my way to the centre of the town. There was a wide octagonal plaza there, with flagstones visible between tufts of grass. In the very centre was a structure that I, at first, assumed was a well. It was octagonal with a domed roof that reminded me of the dome on the Temple of the Source on the Citadel. In fact it looked a lot like the Temple, as if it was a novelty well in the shape of the Temple but everything about the well looked much older than the temple.

I climbed the steps and looked over the side of the well but it was dry, and much shallower than I’d expected. It was only about ten feet deep but there was something about it that felt deeper. As if it contained an unseen void.