Every nook and cranny was filled with a red dust, distinct from the natural soil. In some sunken areas it had piled up quite deeply, not that it slowed my progress. Despite taking a day to try and lure out anything aggressive, I’d found nothing. I did find plenty of ruins, though. This was the biggest and earliest town along the dried out riverbed, and due to the lack of vegetation, it was remarkably well preserved. That said, there wasn’t a building left standing, all the wood used in them had completely dry rotted. The church was made of stone, but was mostly collapsed.
The bell I found buried in the steeple’s rubble was small, but still rang when I rapped on it with my knuckles. It didn’t have a casting mark on it or anything, and the brass’s patina was beautiful. The Galefast had taken yesterday to catch up on maintenance, and would be joining me shortly. I’d brought back some of the dust for Cole to look at, and it was apparently some kind of mana-dust. Not useful or anything, but an indicator of the rich presence of Fire and Earth mana here, a long time ago.
I could pick out the nearby fields by the splintered remains of their fences, but the furrows themselves were indistinguishable from the surrounding soil. It simply seemed dry and desiccated, without any life whatsoever. The area around the church was particularly rich with Order and Balance mana, but that might just be because it was the only building in town with more than one wall still standing. Nothing I could find looked even remotely elven to me, and there were no clues as to what had actually happened here, other than the overwhelming evidence of the seemingly permanent drought.
The Galefast was silent as it flew, so the whole ship had snuck up on me while I was searching for a root cellar below the church, and Cole would have spooked me if I hadn’t heard his footsteps as he fought through some of the deeper dust.
“I don’t think you’ll find anything down there.”
“Daniel had basement in his.”
“The foundation doesn’t extend into the soil. I assume you haven’t found anything in the rest of the town?”
“No. Just weird mana dust.”
“Did you search this thoroughly everywhere?”
“Yes, but fresh eyes could be good.”
Despite rechecking everything, we did not locate anything Elven, the few scroll cases and preserved books we found were crumbling, and despite my attempts to see through the book covers, the text inside was illegible, at least to me. Deuin had been doing some kind of ritual in the center of town, and he was now walking my way, holding hands with thin air.
“Hello Creighton, are you free? I’d like to do something to help this young woman.”
“Yes, name she has?”
“Tess. The town’s graveyard is back behind the church, and in the rush to evacuate she and her family’s graves were left unmarked. Would you mind making them a couple of headstones?”
“Not problem for me, where I can get stone?”
He didn’t respond for a second, instead he was looking down to what must have been, heartbreakingly, a kid’s eye level.
“She says any of the blocks from the church’s rubble would do.”
While I was here, I dusted some of the other headstones. Without plants or rain, everything seemed frozen in time. After receiving a secondhand thanks from Tess, Deuin and I returned to the Galefast and he relayed what she’d told him of the Elves.
“She didn’t personally see any. It was a story that was spread by traveling merchants. Five towns down the valley, there was a settlement that apparently did, on occasion, trade with elves.”
“Should we head straight there? We might be missing more clues in what we bypass.”
“No reason to stop at them if we have a lead somewhere else.”
“This is Deuin’s merit, we should follow up on it.”
Only Cole wanted to explore the other towns, but he was out argued and out voted, so we went straight to the fifth one. It was slightly bigger than the rest had been, even possessing a stake palisade around the outside, and some distance from the river. I went to the graveyard first, and looking around I could find a number of unmarked graves here too. I took the time to place something at the head of every grave I could find. By the time I was done, Deuin had already acquired directions, the path the trading elves had always taken.
The path led us up one of the tallest mountains around, and after reaching the top, we had seen nothing. The elve’s trail had blended with the remnants of natural game trails, and the charred remains of the forest. The air was a bit thin in the sky above the mountain, but we couldn’t see anything that the elves could, or rather would, have called home. Apparently, they don’t like caves.
The first day of searching ended without finding anything, and we headed back down the mountain. The eternal drought left us bereft of any locations to land the Galefast, and so we burned through more of the dwarven coal. The next day a heat mirage immediately stood out to me, as it was still in the exact place it had been yesterday evening. It wasn’t too uncommon to see them in the evening, but this early in the morning it stood out alone against the clear skies.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I failed to point it out to anyone else on the ship, despite angling them straight at it. This was actually a good thing, as if they could see it, it would have likely been a natural phenomena. Instead, this meant it was my mana-based sight that let me pick it out. It was a bit of a problem getting the heading right, but we headed over to the otherwise innocuous clearing the heat mirage was originating from. It was perfectly circular, and as I jumped down to take a look at what it was, exactly, I could immediately feel the mana it was made up of. Light, Dark, and Balance seemed to be woven into the very air, reminding me of what I did when I was fighting with Fredrak, where I had created a mana-matrix to keep my weapons from dispersing during the spar.
Reaching out to touch it, I started trying to just absorb the bound mana and the mirage seemed to intensify. I heard gasps from the Galefast behind me, but despite my as of yet unlimited capacity, I could only open a small hole in front of me. Inside I could clearly see a stone wall, and ducking slightly, I could see it continued upwards beyond my line of sight. When I stopped pulling the mana in, the lattice returned to its original form, the window I had made faded quickly out of sight. I stepped foreward into the lattice, and the next thing I knew I had turned around and stepped right back out. I tried again, this time focusing on suppressing foreign mana. After doing so I passed through, before a wind started trying to push me back out. Not that it affected me much with how heavy I am, and I followed the lattices to where they entered into the tower in front of me. Despite trying to peer through the walls, the bricks seemed infused with mana, and it obfuscated the interior.
The only doorway had been filled in with stone bricks, but it had obviously been the original entrance and exit to this tower. I pried briefly on the bricks to ensure they were not bearing any of the tower’s weight, and then started to pull them out. After the first few the whole false wall collapsed and I didn’t bother to step out of the way. The door itself opened outwards, however, and I had to spend a couple minutes cleaning the rubble so it would open. If someone had bricked this up from the outside, I couldn’t tell. Magic could control stone, so if these elves were as proficient as everyone claims, I wouldn’t put it past them. When I did get the door open, I had to make a choice. I could go back and try and drag someone in here with me, fighting the wind and whatever illusion had originally turned me around, or I could go inside and try and find the source.
After manifesting a lamp in my right hand I looked around the insides of the tower. I could immediately identify the source of the lattices around the tower, but the room also contained two other notable things. There were stairs that wrapped around the outside wall, and a brass colored alcove, inside of which was what must have been an elven skeleton. The elf looked slightly taller than the humans of this world, but around the same height as earth’s humans. The source looked almost like a rubik's cube, but the center pieces were jutting out on every side. One of them I couldn’t identify, but the other three all matched the types of mana that had been keeping me outside. I started by pulling on the light attributed one, and intricate traces like that of a motherboard appeared before me. Once I pulled it all the way out, I could feel the corresponding latticework fall apart. The wind cube was next, followed by the apparently befuddling cube. It was by far the most complex looking, and I sensed many different types of mana, but the most prominent were Light, Dark and Vietae.
Looking at the third, It was almost entirely pure balance mana. My best guess was that it had something to do with the tower’s structural rigidity, as its lattice only extended to the walls, and while not including the ones that had been used to brick over the doorway, it did cover the door itself. The others would come inside soon, it might take Cole a second to make sure it was safe, but I was confident enough to keep exploring, at least this first floor. Leaving the fourth magic cube in place, I walked over to the brass contraption housing the elf’s skeleton. Its clothes still clung loosely, and despite not understanding fashion in this world it looked like what an old man would wear. He weighed nothing to me, and remembering yesterday’s interaction with Tess, I picked him out of the alcove with the intention of burying him outside. As I did, I heard a clicking sound as his right hand brushed past an orb that was embedded in the right armrest.
~~~
Despite the heavy atmosphere, the crew was still energized, as Deuin had already proved to be an invaluable asset by divining exactly where they needed to head. While morale had dropped slightly when they hadn’t found anything that day, it had soared to new heights when Creighton had spotted something everyone else couldn’t see. Creighton’s mana sense was far more advanced than even Joan’s, and they followed his directions to a seemingly ordinary clearing in the dead forest. Creighton had flown down before the ship had steadied itself, but the entire crew had been awestruck as he used his bare hands to open a gap in the illusion spell. Creighton had seemed to have initially had trouble entering into the tower, but after a few minutes the illusion around the tower dropped, and they could see the door he must have entered through.
As the crew started dropping rope ladders to climb down, a vibrant red light lit up the inside of the tower. Despite the cloaking enchantment having been disrupted, the tower’s bricks blocked attempts to use mana sense to sense anything inside, including Creighton. Rushing down the ladder, and further through the doorway, Cole had to cast a simple light spell, as the interior was nearly pitch black. The Arcanum in the center of the tower’s floor first caught his attention, along with an empty brass device against the far wall. When he started walking around the Arcanum, he noticed the alcove was not as empty as he’d thought. Laying sprawled on the ground was a skeleton, resting on top of Creighton. Creighton hadn’t entered with real clothes on, instead going in with only his “armor”. Now he was naked, suffused entirely with Vietae and Life mana, and appeared, unmistakably, human.