The Deadlands, it turned out, weren’t quite as dead as she’d imagined.
Most of the branch was an airless, frozen wasteland, to be sure. But near the trunk of the world tree, there was greenery to be found, and an assortment of creatures big and small who lived among the greenery. The narrow band of life extended about thirty kilometres out from the trunk—far enough that she suspected there was still a bit of molten arlium still churning beneath the surface down there, if only for a few tens of kilometres before it dried up. Seeing this, it begged the question…
“If even a tiny part of Ulugmir is still habitable, why is no-one here?” asked Saskia. “Where are the dwarrows?”
“Like as not, Abellion killed them,” said Ruhildi.
“Oh.” Saskia frowned. “You’re probably right.”
While searching for a suitable landing spot, they passed over a series of hills formed out of ancient ruins and machinery jammed up against the trunk, half buried, and overgrown with grasses and vines. Among the ruins lay gears the size of two story buildings, and piles of twisted cables as thick as tree trunks.
Ruhildi’s eyes lit up with excitement at the sight of them. “Those, methinks, are remnants of the great lift that once carried our forefathers between Ulugmir and Ciendil.”
Saskia swallowed. The two branches were hundreds of kilometres apart. To create an elevator between them; it boggled the mind. Oh, she’d heard about the great lift before, but seeing the evidence of it up close was a very different thing. It made her feel oh so tiny.
They touched down on a wide shelf of flat stone in the midst of the ruins. Stepping out of the dragon, Saskia breathed in the scent of crisp, clean air, and felt an irrational surge of relief. For some reason, she’d been expecting to smell…well, death. Which was silly, now she thought about it, because the parts of the Deadlands that were dead didn’t have air.
“We should have everything we need to survive here,” said Saskia. “Just as well, that, because Pentus isn’t close.” It was too far away for her to see it on her map, but the keystone had helpfully pointed out the location of the Great Library for them. “It’ll take days for you to get there, travelling on foot—even at the speed you can run, and without needing to stop for rest.”
“Days, aye, but not too many of them. I won’t be going on foot.” Ruhildi pointed at a nearby patch of bare earth. From the ground rose the bones of a four-legged beast that might, if she squinted hard enough, resemble a horse.
Fantabulous, she thought. It’s not quite as easy as summoning a mount in a game, but pretty close. Aloud, she said, “You know, it would look way cooler if its eye sockets were glowing and its hooves were on fire.”
Ruhildi looked confused. “This is no game.”
Saskia frowned, realising that her friend, once again, had been listening to her thoughts, not just her words. “I meant video game. It’s an Earth thing. Hard to explain.”
The dwarf’s eyes widened. She must have caught a glimpse of Saskia’s memories in that moment. “Such wonders you have seen; beyond my most fevered imaginings. I wish I could see them for myself.”
“Who knows, maybe some day you can. It might be possible…”
“Mayhap. But let’s save such fanciful talk for another day. Each day we linger is another day Ciendil bleeds. And Baldreg…” Ruhildi looked stricken. “I must go.”
Without further ado, she did a backward somersault, landing lightly on her undead steed’s back. With a clatter of hoofbeats, the beast galloped through the sparse, twisted trees, before passing out of sight.
Exhaling a soft sigh, Saskia turned to her other friends, who were settling in for the long wait. She and Rover Dog went off to hunt some dinner, while Kveld shaped some comfy little shelters out of earth and stone, and Zarie called on her lightning magic to start a campfire, under the watchful gaze of a dozen beady little eyes.
In the days that followed, Saskia devoted only a small slice of her attention to her immediate surroundings. She hunted, ate, slept, and spoke occasionally to her friends. But all the while, she kept her oracle eyes glued to what Ruhildi was seeing as she rode through the frigid wastes.
The sky, she noted, didn’t turn completely black as Ruhildi passed beyond the habitable zone (except at night or during eclipses). It was more of an extremely dark shade of purple. That meant there was still some atmosphere, even out there—albeit too thin to support any life beyond, perhaps, a few hardy microbes.
On the surface, the landscape was bleak and desolate and monotonous. White and grey, as far as the eye could see. But beneath the metres thick layer of snow and ice, their shared oracle interface was telling a different story. There were forests down there, and fields, riverbeds and lakeshores. There were also people and animals; dead, yes, but very well preserved. Equally well preserved were the things the people had built; their roads and bridges and houses, and also their…
“Holy crickets on a pogo stick, look at that!”
Ruhildi flinched at the sound of Saskia’s voice, which was maybe a little overexcited. Although it was good to see that even a dead woman could be startled sometimes.
“What am I looking at, Sashki?”
Ruhildi wasn’t actually speaking aloud. There was very little air, and therefore no sound. Instead, their oracle voice link was detecting her mouth movements and translating them into what she would have said, had her lungs still worked. It was a pretty handy trick, and it was just as well they’d figured it out, because Saskia had idiotically forgotten about the no-sound-in-space thing before her friend set off. Having to communicate via a notepad would’ve been a pain in the butt.
“The thing my interface is highlighting beneath the ice,” said Saskia. “That, if I’m not mistaken, is a railway track.”
It wasn’t like any Earth railway she’d ever heard of—it was too wide, and there were three rails—but she couldn’t think of anything else it could be. At Saskia’s urging, her friend followed the tracks beneath the ice, until she found the motherlode: a locomotive and dozens of wide, square carriages, still sitting on their rails under metres of ice.
Saskia let out a whoop, causing Ruhildi to flinch again. “Now that is something I never expected to see on this world. Think we can dig it up?”
“Mayhap, but ’twould take a while. ’Tis metal, so mayhap I could…no, there’s too much ice weighing it down. I can’t move ice directly. Only metal and stone and bone.”
“I have an idea,” said Saskia. “See that big rock sticking out of the ice over there? Could you, I dunno, shape it or something?”
Ruhildi didn’t stir from the back of her skeletal horse, but Saskia could feel her drawing on her essence. Didn’t she normally have to touch the ground to work this kind of spell?
“Not any more,” said Ruhildi, reading her thoughts.
The rock slowly began to shift. The central part elongated and rose proudly into the air, while two bits on the side sagged down, becoming smooth and round and…
“Wow, Ruhildi. Really? I guess the TTP factor is just as small for magic as it is for games. Okay, keep doing that, while I…”
Light flared. Suddenly the rock was red hot, and surrounded in billowing steam. Saskia didn’t know if water vapour would normally look like that in a vacuum back in Earth’s universe, but this wasn’t quite a vacuum now, was it? The rock, which she immediately dubbed Dwayne, managed to maintain its shape even while molten, presumably because of the fact that Ruhildi’s magic was still at work shaping it. Now that opened up some interesting combat applications…
Very quickly, the ice around the rock began to melt and boil away. Her friend backed her mount up slowly as the ice crater grew. When it had melted all the way down to ground level, they shifted the focus of their magic to a patch of ground closer to the train. It wasn’t long before the carriages and locomotive stood exposed, beneath a wall of receding ice.
“Well, I think it’s safe to say wild magic has a use, after all, besides making things go boom,” said Saskia. “Lets take a look inside! I wonder if it’s a steam engine. It certainly got steamed.”
It was not, in fact, a steam engine. It was something far more interesting. In the rear of the locomotive were a series of gears and pistons and other…enginey things. In their midst stood a barrel-shaped object. A jagged crack ran down the middle of the barrel, and from that crack emanated a bright amber glow.
“Huh,” said Saskia. “If it runs on arlium, this must be magitech then, not just technology.”
The dwarf reached through the crack with the tip of her finger. Suddenly Ruhildi cried out, and a gasp escaped Saskia’s own lips at the same time. Warmth flowed through her, and she felt very, very good.
Her own body had fallen to the ground, and through her other sight, she saw that Ruhildi had done the same.
Only then did Saskia properly register what had just happened. Ruhildi had just absorbed arlium for the both of them. How was that even possible? What was she now?
“Princess having happy time without me,” said Rover Dog. “I help?”
“No, Rover Dog,” she said, feeling a flush spread across her cheeks. “It wasn’t…that kind of pleasure.”
“Whatever ’twere, I want more,” said Ruhildi, springing to her feet.
“Careful,” said Saskia. “That’s the stuff that killed you, remember?”
“Aye, and now the arlium is keeping me…not alive, but intact.”
“Maybe. But more isn’t always better. Maybe after absorbing too much arlium, you’ll burst into flames. Or I’ll burst into flames. Best to take it slow, and please don’t go shlooping up any islands like I did.”
Over the next couple of days, Ruhildi rode past other tantalising signs of Ulugmir’s once-great civilisation: a row of broken-down wind turbines; a giant excavator, remarkably intact; clockwork animals under the snow. Though Saskia would have loved to investigate them further, they both agreed that they couldn’t spare the time.
It wasn’t until the third day that they found a sight truly worth stopping for: sticking out of the ice at a steep angle were a pair of large cylindrical somethings, with a smaller, windowed something in the middle; all three of them connected by thick metal wing-like struts. It vaguely resembled the starship Enterprise, minus its saucer section. And for that reason alone, she just had to check it out.
Ruhildi found a hatch in the side of the central cabin. For that was what it was. The cabin of a…well, probably not a starship, but at least some kind of aircraft. Rows of seats ran down the back half of the cabin. Bones littered the chairs and the floor around them. Dwarven bones. The front half was buried under the ice—which had invaded the interior of the craft through the shattered front windshield. She could see what lay down there through her interface, and it wasn’t pretty. This thing had come down hard.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As for what the side nacelles contained; the contents of one of them was plainly visible through the gaping hole in its side.
Arlium.
Ruhildi reached hungrily for the stuff, and before Saskia knew what was happening, they were both once again sweating and gasping on the ground.
“Dogramit, Ruhildi, I said to take it slow!”
“So…good,” was all the reply she got.
“You realise what we’ve just found though, right?”
“Aye, Sashki. This must be one of the skyships of legend.”
The next day, Ruhildi skirted the edge of a vast, deep chasm. She couldn’t see the bottom, but her oracle senses told her it was tens of kilometres deep. The walls of the chasm, beneath a layer of ice, were a mix of argnum and crystalline arlium.
Could this have been what killed the branch? There was no sign of any molten arlium down there now—just the solid stuff. A wound this big could surely have bled the branch dry in a matter of weeks.
But as she examined it further, she realised that couldn’t have been what had happened. There were stairs and ladders and what looked like artificial tunnels all over the walls. Surely after the branch bled out, no-one could have survived long enough to build those.
Strangely, despite its immense scale and depth, she had the distinct impression that what she was looking at was a mine. But what could they have been mining down there?
When Ruhildi made her way toward one of the staircases leading down the cliffs, Saskia told her, “Oh no you don’t.”
“I just want to get a closer look,” said her friend.
“What do you think will happen if you touch one of those arlium veins?”
“Och,” said Ruhildi.
“Yeah,” said Saskia. “That is not what I had in mind when I said to take it slow. Besides, that thing is so vast you could spend weeks down there and still not find anything.”
Reluctantly, Ruhildi decided that any further explorations of the gargantuan mines could at least wait until they’d exhausted other, more obvious avenues of investigation.
On the fifth day, she crested a hill, and drew her mount to a halt, gazing down at the ruins of a sprawling city: Pentus, capital of Old Ulugmir.
Much of the city had been buried under ice, like almost everything else in the Deadlands. What remained on the surface was an open wound. Smashed walls, covered in scorch marks. Skyscrapers whose tops had been sliced off, and fallen askew. The outer walls had been reduced to low bumps, so deeply were they buried. Ruhildi could ride straight over them.
Beneath the ice, in and around the city, the story was even more dire. Bodies; many thousands of them. Dwarves, elves, skarakh—even a few trolls. They melted a patch of ice so Ruhildi could raise and inspect some of the combatants. Many of the dwarves and trolls had been reduced to strips of tattered flesh hanging off bleached bones. That wasn’t battle damage. They’d been dead before the battle started.
“Necrourgy,” said Ruhildi.
“Looks like,” agreed Saskia.
Entering one of the battered buildings, they found bones and ice and shattered steel. And everywhere Ruhildi looked: arlium. A quick check of the surrounding structures revealed more of the same. Arlium was everywhere in Pentus, powering lights and appliances, door locks and elevators.
Ruhildi showed as little restraint in hoovering it up as she herself had, back on Fireflower Isle. In it went, faster than she could say, “Oh don’t you dare touch—”
At the edge of the city stood a massive slab of a building, helpfully highlighted on their minimap. Inside, an awe-inspiring sight awaited them. Huge upside-down vats hung from the ceiling, their insides shining with a bright amber glow. Below them lay a series of shallower containers, filled with chunks of crystallised arlium. The upside-down ones must have held arlium in its superheated, liquid form, she reasoned. Then when it cooled, it fell, and eventually solidified.
She was almost salivating at the sight of all that delicious amber goodness, but her rational mind latched onto something even more enticing. This could be exactly what they needed!
“Can you find out what those ceiling vats are made of, Ruhildi? If they were strong enough to hold molten arlium…”
“I were thinking the same thing.” Without warning, Ruhildi sprang into the air, and hung upside down from one of the vats.
The sudden movement made Saskia feel queasy. “Ugh, give me a heads-up when you’re gonna do—”
Ruhildi’s hand brushed the amber residue clinging to the inside of the vat. Saskia’s queasiness disappeared—along with most coherent thought.
“Methinks ’tis the same material that the skyship and the…train engine were made out of,” said Ruhildi, when she’d recovered enough to inspect the vat.
Saskia scratched her head. “The arlium held in the train’s engine might also have been molten, once. The heat it puts out could be used as a power source. Or the fact that it defies gravity when it…oh.”
Now she felt like an idiot for not having thought of this sooner.
“You think molten arlium is what made the skyships fly.”
“I mean, it makes sense, right? Heat up a chunk of arlium, and it basically becomes an anti-gravity device. The only problem is containment, and it seems the ancient Ulugmiri solved that. The height of their empire came centuries after Sarthea’s time. In the intervening years, they must have come up with much better heat-resistant materials than they used to forge her armour.”
“If it won’t melt, ’tis fair tough to work with,” said Ruhildi.
“Yeah I was afraid of—”
“For anyone but me.”
Ruhildi landed lightly on the floor. Before Saskia could object, she shlooped up the arlium from one of the containers on the ground. The vat above her began to dissolve into a fine powder, landing in a pile inside the now-empty container below. She stirred it around with her fingers. Her other hand painted the air. Then, before Saskia’s eyes, the dust rose up, slowly coalescing into a new form. Bit by painstaking bit, layers of dull grey metal began to take shape between her fingers. It was almost like watching a sculptor in reverse; instead of shaving away pieces of stone or wood or bone, she was forming those pieces out of sand, and layering them onto each other.
When Saskia checked in on her an hour later, Ruhildi stood admiring her handiwork: a dwarf-sized breastplate.
“This one’s for me,” said Ruhildi. “I wanted to see if I could work with this…I’ll call it duanum. There’s more than enough duanum here to cover you from head to clawed foot.”
“Me? You think I’ll be accompanying the metamagician—or frostlings, or whoever—to the arlium rifts?”
“Aye, like as not.”
Saskia sighed. “You’re probably right. Dogs forbid someone else save the world.”
“Either way, I want to bring a supply of duanum back across the Deadlands. And I ken just how to do that.”
“Oh?” said Saskia. “I doubt the train or skyship can be repaired any time soon. What do you propose?”
“This will take a while, Sashki. Get some sleep. I’ll show you in the morning.”
“Okay, well, give me a yell if you need anything.”
Leaving her friend to her work, Saskia cast her gaze around the darkening camp. Rover Dog sat nearby, eyeing her with an unreadable expression. From the bushes nearby came a soft laugh and a sigh. Zarie’s voice. And wherever there was a Zarie, there was a…yup. Two blue markers on her minimap, almost on top of each other. But what were those other blue markers, converging on their…oh no.
A shriek erupted from the bushes, followed by the rapid exit of five fuzzy white forms, chittering excitedly.
Saskia gathered them up in her arms. “Bad floofies!” she admonished. “That was a really horrible thing to do. You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
The adorribles blinked at her in mock innocence. Then they began to purr, and it was really hard to stay angry after that.
She drifted off to sleep with five lumps of fur clinging to her arm. When she awoke, hours later, the arm was numb, but not a solid brick of ice as she might have expected. She shook them off and went back to sleep.
The next morning, she returned her attention to her undead friend, and was greeted by the sight of…wow.
Before her stood the corpses of four trolls. Three of them carried stacks of duanum strapped to their backs. The fourth was bigger than the rest, and it wore a completed suit of dull grey duanum armour.
“Methinks that should fit around your enormous arse,” Ruhildi told her.
Though the design was simple, the armour was solid enough to protect her from…well, everything, really. Not a single patch of skin or bone was visible beneath the interlocking plates. Eyeing the various pieces, two…oddities jumped out at her.
“The helmet has no visor. Not even eye holes.”
“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “Any hole you can see out of would let the heat in. If you are the one who wears this, you can rely on your oracle sight to guide you, mayhap. If not, I’ll have to make some adjustments.”
“Good point. The undead don’t need to use their eyes, either.” Saskia frowned, as a thought occurred to her. “But what about the joints? Won’t they let the heat in, too? Not to mention any air holes…”
Her view bobbed up and down as Ruhildi nodded. “Kveld can add some wards to help keep the heat out of the tiny gaps. ’Tisn’t be perfect, but methinks ’tis enough.”
“Okay, next question. Do you really think I’m that fat?” Saskia gawped the massively bulging chest and midsection of the armour. Even the arms and legs had weird little bulges in them.
Ruhildi chuckled. “’Tis large enough to fit some of our frosty little friends inside the armour with you.”
“Oh. That’s actually a really good idea. An internal refrigeration system.”
Ruhildi left her undead armour rack waiting in the foundry, while she followed the minimap’s directions to the Scholar’s Circle: what had once been a walled-off district on the east side of the city. It was more of a bent oblong than a circle. Below the ice, the streets were torn and thick with corpses. The walls, and many of the buildings within, had been levelled.
One of the last structures still standing was the imposing tower that her minimap (with the help of the dragon’s keystone) had marked as the Great Library. The top of the building looked as if a wrecking ball had gone through it, but the lower floors were largely intact.
Ruhildi climbed through a window, and found herself in a wide room, covered in the shattered remnants of armoured skeletons. The walls were lined with blue arlium, in its inert, non-glowing form.
“So this was one of my father’s dens?” said Saskia. “Figures. It was his keystone that brought us here.”
Her friend climbed the winding staircase, moving from floor to floor, finding more of the same: ice, corpses, and blue arlium.
“If this is a library, where are all the books?” asked Saskia.
“Looted, mayhap,” said Ruhildi.
“The bookshelves too? There’s nothing to suggest there were ever any books here.”
It had been centuries since Ulugmir fell; time enough for shelves and paper and parchment to rot away. But in this freezing, nearly airless environment, such decay would have been greatly slowed, if not halted entirely. So they should have found some evidence of the library, if it had ever existed.
On the next floor stood a black, rectangular monolith, half buried under rubble, and cracked down the middle. Another keystone awaited them in an adjacent room—shattered into fragments.
“I think…I think those keystones were the library,” said Saskia. “They must have tapped into a unique—or at least more recent—database than the one in our keystones from Ciendil. Little good it’ll do us now, unless we can find an intact one.”
The damage on the next level was even worse. And above that—well, there was no above that, because all that remained of the upper floors were twisted columns of steel and smashed blocks of masonry.
“Damn,” said Saskia. “Looks like we’re wasting our time here.”
“There are parts of the lower floors I haven’t explored yet,” said Ruhildi. “Mayhap we’ll find something there.”
“Maybe.” She wasn’t holding out much hope. Except… “Do you see that? Two floors down, behind the collapsed hallway. Something highlighted on the map.”
The something, it turned out, was a corpse; the remains of a dwarf in a tattered, bloody tunic, lying face down in the rubble, arm outstretched. Its shrivelled, frozen fingers gripped a black cube. An intact keystone in its smaller, mobile form.
Without hesitation, Ruhildi reached for the keystone. The moment her fingers made contact with it, a message appeared on a familiar faux scroll:
Say your command, mouthlet of the master.
Saskia stared at the scroll for a long, confused moment. “Huh? But you’re not…”
Before she could complete her sentence, a wave of dizziness swept over her. Over both of them, it seemed. Her view tilted sideways, and she found herself staring into the ice-covered eyes of the dwarf on the floor. He was remarkably well-preserved for someone who had been dead for centuries.
But the state of the corpse wasn’t her number one concern right now—far from it. There was something eerily familiar about those sunken eyes; that gaunt, bearded face. She’d seen that face before, in photos and in dreams.
It was her father’s face.