Sweat dripped down her arms as Sarisa looked through the open trapdoor. It had taken her a week to find this place. Dark, deep, damp.

She had thought this a crypt, at first, until she had noticed the barrels. They were empty, of course--some of them cracked open, the ground soiled with the spilled and now dried liquid--but it was enough to tell her something. This, more likely, was some sort of cellar.

Then she had noticed the trapdoor. Though unlocked, the slab of metal was so heavy she'd had to improvise a pulley to help her open it. She'd attached a rope to the ring that served as a handle; the other was tied to a small bot she'd found on the ship. At first, she had asked it to open the damn thing, but it had not understood her instructions. It was a simple machine, designed to clean the ship, with limited capacities. Despite its small size, it was strong enough to lift heavy obstacles that might be on its way, so it was a simple matter of working around its programming.

Once everything was set up, she had asked the bot to clean the room next door. When it had started to move, a loud crack had resonated through the silent halls and the slab had begun to rise, lifting a cloud of dust with it. Coughing, she'd run out and waited for it to settle.

She now stared into a pit, wondering what could be hidden in such darkness. Steps went down, even deeper into the bowels of the dead world. After a brief moment of hesitation, she took the stairs.

The glow floated before her, lighting the way as she walked. The passage was narrow, with stone walls on either side. She wrinkled her nose at the sudden rank smell that assaulted her nostrils.

It did not take long to reach the bottom. There she found another room with writings on the walls. She lifted her wristpad to record all the inscriptions and drawings. Frowned as she recognized the word 'wind.' She had seen much more of it as she explored the abandoned city.

She was convinced of this now. The place hadn't been attacked or sacked--there was not a trace of violence anywhere. The people had just left, taking with them their belongings--which also explained why she had found no items. There likely had been looters as well, but they were not enough to explain the state of abandonment she witnessed everywhere she went.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Including in small, cramped places like this one.

"The wind will reap what it sows," she read out loud.

After a week of solitude, she found the sound of her own voice comforting. She thought she had come prepared, planning for food, weapons, rope... Sarisa never anticipated how much she would miss talking to other people. She had never minded being alone, so she had not expected this to be a problem.

Perhaps she should have taken a crew after all.

Well, it was too late now.

"The wind can be stopped."

Her frown deepened as she read the words.

Why had these people been so obsessed with the wind?

After making sure there was no other way out, she went back up the stairs and found the bot moving back and forth, still busy cleaning the stone floor of what might have once been a tavern--dragging the heavy trapdoor in its wake.

"Silly thing," she muttered. "Stop that, will you?"

When the machine ignored her, she grunted and brought up the controls on her wristpad. It stopped squealing as she punched in the security code.

She sat in a corner, wiping sweat off her forehead, and went through her latest recordings.

"None of it makes any sense," she mumbled.

Wiping through data, she stopped on what she suspected to be a celestial map. She'd found it drawn on a wall in a building with a glass ceiling. It could be the key to finding where these people had gone. To some other world within their empire, perhaps. They would have had to have some sort of map, so this seemed a likely candidate.

Reading it, however, proved difficult. She was good with language, but this... This was something else entirely. There were writings here and there, but she suspected they were just names. She would have preferred directions, or even some indication of where this place was on the map, but she found none of that.

Frustrated, she jumped to her feet and headed for the tent, leaving the bot behind--she'd come back for it later, she wasn't done here, anyway.

On her way, she glanced to her right at the looming silhouette of the Temple... and froze.

She stared at the scene. Blinked. Lifted her wristpad and brought up the map.

"Well, I'll be..."

It was as if the city had been built in a way to reproduce the dots on the map. If the dots were worlds, then the Temple likely represented the planet she was on now... Or perhaps the center of the empire? Either way, she needed to locate both. What could the other be?

She looked around the city, and her eyes stopped on its other significant feature. A tower. On the opposite end of the Temple.

Her eyes darted back to the map. She stabbed the dots that matched the positions of the two buildings and grinned.

"Gotcha!" she whispered into the silence.