The sun had finally sunk, and she had waited long enough. It was after dark, just after the final check, and she ran. She ran until she reached the rocky outcropping known as the Bloody Hawk Plateau. Her fingers scrabbled against the still-warm face of the rock, and her knees stung as they scraped across the rough surface. How long she climbed was impossible to tell. She just climbed until her sweaty, dirty palm slapped the open floor of a small cave. She hauled herself into the opening and tried to catch her breath. The first part of her escape had been successful, and while it was far from the hardest part, the success gave her a small boost to her confidence.
The summer air pressed in on her as she lay on the sandy floor of her respite. Her breath was ragged, and her lungs burned from the exertion of her daring escape. She was alive, though. Free and alive. Despite everything she would live through for the rest of her life, she would look back at her first hours of freedom and relive that sense of awe, wonder, and elated terror.
Some of that icy fear dripped down her temples, and her thin slave’s tunic clung wetly to her back. Insects buzzed at the cave entrance as she sat up and pushed the cold strands of her hair off her forehead. Her goal was to spend the night in the small, cramped cave, as well as most of the next day. As soon as she was missed in the morning, they would hopefully follow the false trail she had left that led to the river.
Only a brief trek from the camp was a one-hundred-twenty-foot waterfall. She hoped they would waste their time searching the water. Bloody Hawk Plateau was so close to the camp, in the opposite direction, that she could see the smoke of the fires if she had the inclination.
The small, cramped cave in the rock face, as far as she could tell, was unknown to her captors. When she had seen the familiar landmark growing on the horizon, she had felt hope for the first time in over a year. She had grown up on a small homestead close to the plateau, but her captors were not to know this. They had raided Endmoore, the small village in the north, and taken the thirty or so healthy and hale as slaves to sell, setting the rest of the town to the torch. They took their new chattel further north, and those that did not sell were brought back south. They could not have known they were taking one of their numbers back to a land she was intimately familiar with.
The obsessive thoughts about escape escalated the closer they got to the plateau. Day and night, her mind raced to find the smallest chances of making a break for it. As she lay awake on her thin pallet, she felt the spark seed itself, flaring into a full-fledged plan as she fed it ideas. The plan fell into place as she drifted to sleep.
She had only to wait until they set up a long-term camp for a few days to rest and restock their supplies with fishing and hunting. While she was on snare duty, she had collected herbs and plants she recognized as useful, such as day lichen, a useful fungus that could be used to illuminate things. She also foraged a few that she knew would help with pain or bleeding. In just a couple of days, she had padded out her supplies as much as she dared.
Next, she carefully set up a scene with her fellow slaves. She was constantly caught looking west, toward the river. More than once, she brought up the waterfalls with her companions while they ate.
“Do you think someone could survive those falls?”
“How long would it take someone to get to the river at night, do you think?”
Her final stage of setting her false narrative was to be caught sneaking away toward the river when she was supposed to be ill. She knew it would be worth the reduced rations and the few slaps she got as a punishment if they took their search west instead of east. She also knew there weren't enough guards to put her on any kind of special watch.
She pulled herself deeper into the small cave and shivered in chilled delight. In a few hours, she would peek her head out and see if she could hear or see anything. For now, she would try to get some rest. She hugged herself and closed her eyes, surprised at how comfortable she found the sandy floor. Sleep took her.
A ragged breath on the back of her neck woke her with a scream a few hours later. She reached back and tried to slap away whoever had breathed on her as she flipped over, swinging her hands wildly. No one was there. In fact, her back had been pressed firmly against the back wall of the cave.
In the blackness of the night, she felt around and was surprised when her hand met a fist-sized hole near the bottom of the wall. A soft, musty breeze puffed out occasionally, making an eerie sigh cut the silence. She had no idea where the hole went, but she felt some loose stones around the opening. She gripped one and pulled. It came away with a dusty crumble, and she coughed. She dropped the stone and leaned closer to the hole.
A cold air met her curious face. She reached into the hole, and her hand landed on a smooth, round stone, lightly coated in dust. She felt around the rock and discovered it had two holes. She put her fingers in the holes, braced her other hand on the wall, and pulled. The stone came loose with a hollow crack and a muted clatter deeper in the hole. She pulled her prize from the hole and froze. She was staring at a human skull.
She was more shocked than frightened. She had seen worse in the last year as a slave than a clean, dusty skull devoid of all traces of personality. She merely had not expected to pull a skull out of the wall of a tiny cavern two hundred feet up Bloody Hawk Plateau. She stared at it for a few beats and then carefully set it down next to her. She sat thoughtfully, then shrugged and stuck her hand back into the hollow.
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As she brushed the edge it crumbled and suddenly she was faced with a hole twice as big. She fumbled in the small packets of dried plants tied to her person and found the bundle of day lichen. She chewed a large wad of the bright green plant material and spit the now-wet globule in her hand. She painted it on the smooth wall of the cave above the hole. After a second, the smeared mess began to give off a bright blue glow, illuminating her search.
Her fingers found purchase on a long, thin bone, and she extracted it along with several other small bones. She set them reverentially beside the skull. When she next put her hand in, it met with a cold, wide, flat surface. A quick knock with her knuckles revealed it to be made of metal. She gently brushed off the rest of the bones and dust, then felt around the entire lip of the object. Wide with rounded edges, it was roughly rectangular in shape. She knew she wouldn’t be able to lift it. She bent down and began widening the hole, dismantling the wall systematically.
Sweat of anticipation dripped down her back and between her thin breasts. She wiped a forearm across her face and sat back on her heels. Some of the rocks appeared to have a crude mortar holding them together, and she surmised that the bones had been laid to rest purposefully. She had never heard of anyone being buried up here in all her years of living at the foot of the rocky outcropping, though. And the bones were too old to have been put here since she left the area. She felt a heavy foreboding settling onto her shoulders, a disturbed sense of alienation and long-kept secrets pressing into her. Sweat dripped down into her eyes and she blinked as she suddenly felt like a stranger in her own memories.
She had cleared the entire lower wall, about four feet wide and two feet up, revealing the resting place of the bones. She chewed another wad of Day Lichen and smeared the paste on the backs of her hands and forearms, intending to use her limbs as torches to see better in the tomb. She poked around carefully and saw that the wide metal object was an enormous chest, about as wide as her arm span and three feet deep. The chest had a large iron lock on the front and a thick chain wound once around it, binding it shut tightly and keeping whatever it held inside securely hidden. It actually reminded her of the giant chests set at the feet of the beds in the dormitory of the small country school where she had taught in Endmoore before the raiders had come.
She sat back on her heels again, panting with excitement coursing through her. Something familiar wound itself in the air, almost tangible, like the perfume from a past life. She shook her head and wiped more sweat from her face. She leaned forward and ran her hands gently over the top of the chest and her heart stuttered as she brushed something she recognised. She peered closer and she saw the sun and moon crest of the Witch’s Temple.
She had never joined the female cult but her mother had been a foundling of the Temple, an orphan taken in and indoctrinated. She had been told many stories of the horrifying sisters of the temple, been shown the faint scarred brands on her mother’s hands and feet that all temple foundlings were given to stop slavers from being able to sell them. No, she herself had never had much to do with the Witches of Morin, but her mother's long and complicated relationship with the cult was full of trauma and fear.
She brushed the seal again, frowning. She remembered laying in her mother’s arms as a child, running her fingers gently across the beautiful silvery scars on her hands.
“I’m thankful they took me in, don’t get me wrong,” her mother would preface each story. “I just wish that I had had some choice in some of the more… barbaric customs.” Her mother had never eaten meat since she had left the temple and any time she smelled pork cooking she turned pale and trembled.
Shivering away the mantle of the bittersweet memories of her complicated yet beloved mother, the escaped slave found herself wondering what this chest was doing so far up the plateau and whose bones guarded the contents. She put her hands back into the excavated cavity and felt for other clues, trailing her aching hands tenderly across the funerary rubble. Following the glow of her hands and arms, she peered closer as a shiny glint caught her eye. She softly pawed the dusty sand for what had shone in the faint light. She gasped as something sliced across her palm.
Shaking and suddenly dizzy, she withdrew her bleeding hand, still looking for what had cut her. She was dismayed at how deep and wide the cut was. It would make her climb up the rockface extremely difficult. Clutching her bleeding hand to her chest, she looked around for something to dig up the sharp object. Her eye landed on the long thin bone she had removed after the skull. She saw now that it was a long stylus carved out of bone with a flat wide end. She remembered using the same type of stylus on wax tablets to teach the girls to write in Endmoore.
She used the grisly tool to leverage under the area in the sand where the shiny, sharp object had been. Using her own weight, the bone stylus sunk deep into the sand and scraped on the unseen object with a muted metallic screech. She leaned into the lever and flicked the object out of the detritus.
She looked down into the tomb and frowned. Laying there, looking like an oil slick made solid, was an angry looking blade, flame-licked and shining dully in the light. The steel looked like it had been thrown into a tremendously hot fire and dark rainbows danced across its surface. She instantly recognized the weapon of a Witch of Morinn.
That only blade she had seen like it had been her mother’s. Back then she had been told to bury the Witch Knife with her mother’s body, not to keep or try to sell it. She had had no second thoughts as she felt an extreme unease holding the dark blade.
Remembering that same unease, she leaned down and lifted the dagger out, her cut palm clenched tightly to her chest. She noticed that it wasn’t exactly a twin to her mother’s Witch Knife. This one was longer, almost as long as a poignard, and the hilt was dotted with empty sockets where gems had once laid. Puzzlement and curiosity whirled in her mind as she turned the semi-familiar blade in her hands.
“If anyone ever comes looking for me, tell them my Knife is buried with me. Make sure they understand that I am dead, that my Knife is with me, and that I cut ties with the Temple of Morin,” her mother had said as she pulled the covers back and climbed into their shared bed. She withdrew the sheathed blade from under the mattress before sitting down and handing the blade to her daughter.
“Who would come looking for you? The Witches?” The girl had been thrown by the suddenness of the topic and her mind raced to make sense of what her mother had said.
“That’s less likely,” she said, yawning. “If a young man with red hair comes, tell him what I said. That I’m dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Prone to these bouts of enigmatic information, the girl just looked at her mother, nodded once and blinked. She didn’t know what else to say.
Her mother had looked young her entire life except for just then. She looked her sixty years and then some as she pulled her silver-laced black hair into a braid over her shoulder and dimmed the lamp. She laid down with a deep sigh and the room went silent. The banked fire cast a red glow on the room as the girl leaned down to kiss her mother’s forehead goodnight. It was already cold.