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1indigoisles · 8 months ago

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Chapter 4 - Excerpt 1

“Oh, Scarlett Raynott, you are about to deeply regret your life decisions,” Jolene said, lowering into a fighting stance even though she had no weapons.

The Shadow was huge and ghastly in it’s size and girth, bigger than any I had ever seen, which wasn’t very many, sure, but still. It towered over all of us, so much so that we needed to lift our heads to see above its neck. The room itself was just high and spacious enough to encase the Shadow, floored with cracked, dusty cement and crumbs hither and tither. It contained a number of boxes and crates stacked upon each other and pushed away to the sides, leaving a bare middle where Scarlett stood, pale and gaunt as a black-and-white painting, wearing dark jeans and a black tank top with thick straps on the shoulders, looking positively minimalistic stationed right in front of her Shadow. And strangely, they both kept carefully within the bounds of the wide circle of shiny charcaol-like substance.

“Where the hell did you get nightglass from?” Jolene asked, jabbing a finger at the boundary, which I now knew what it was made of.

“It was the only thing I could think of,” Scarlett said in a restrained sort of tone. “And look around you. This is a storage room for nightglass. The Chambers, they’ve been lying to us. Said that there wasn’t much of it left. But here-”

“Not now, Scarlett,” Rowan interrupted, eyes scanning the rest of the room. Jolene kept her eyes trained on the Shadow.

Nothing in the room suggested the existence of the aforementioned element, however. No marks, signs or large banners that said ‘NIGHTGLASS’ existed where anyone could see them. The crates so messily pushed to the sides could contain anything from air to poisonous snakes kept under sedation to any other witchy element exclusive to these parts for all they gave away. One of the crates closest to the witch-circle was half open, its lid sticking out, balancing unevenly and dangerously to indicate where Scarlett had gotten the nightglass from.

I latched my line of sight back on the Shadow, fully expecting for it to maim a surprise attack.

But the Shadow didn’t do anything except hover behind Scarlett like a pet behind its master, its head even a little bent towards the ground, as if expressing submission. Scarlett stood arrow-straight in front of it, intimidating in her stance, unwavering. The expression on her face could have been ice or stone or iron, or all three. The master and her pet. But no, they both were trapped within a circle of dark crystal, slaves to it. The Shadow was no longer the largest thing in the room. Scarlett wasn’t the largest thing either.

The nightglass was.

“How did this happen?” I asked, directly addressing Scarlett.

Jolene glared menacingly at the other girl and crossed her arms against her chest. “Yes, Scarlett,” she said, “tell us.”

“Well, fuck if I know any more than you do,” Scarlett replied. “This,” she gestured expansively behind her, “wasn’t exactly a prearranged tea-party.”

“But it’s morning,” Rowan said, puzzled, “how could it even escape? Scarlett, you need to tell us if there is something-”

“Is Desiree all right?” Scarlett cut in, obviously trying to steer the conversation away from Rowan’s question.

“Desiree can lick her own wounds fortunately,” Jolene snapped, “no thanks to you.”

“You think I wanted this to happen?” Scarlett snarled. “It’s a Shadow. It’s my Shadow, sure, but it still does what it wants, so I don’t know what it’s doing here in broad daylight. And why did you bring him, Jolene?” She jabbed a finger in my direction, not bothering to grace me with even a glance. She took a sharp breath. “If you want me to tell you why this is happening, I can’t.” She gave me a once-over. “But I can fucking guess, and so can you.”

Something hot as molten lead shot through my system like a bullet, lighting a fire deep inside my chest, burning my ears and my thoughts. Ash gathered in my brain. The tips of the flames licked my throat. Anger.

I glared at Scarlett. We were there to help, I was there to help, and already I was reconsidering my decision to come along with Jolene and Rowan.

“Hey,” I said firmly, addressing all of them in part, “stop pretending as though I’m not even here, and say what you have to say to my face. Also, do not assume to assign me blame for your mess. Apart from a crackpot prophecy written hundreds of years ago, you don’t know the first thing about me, so all of you, stop acting like you do. I have no part in this, and even if I somehow do, well, I can’t control it better than you,” I looked at Scarlett, “can control your Shadow, so please, save yourself the hypocrisy.”

Scarlett levelled an infuriatingly cool gaze at me, as if absorbing my anger and putting it in the freezer, and asked somewhat randomly and curiously, “what’s going on over there, Teigen?” She was looking at the hand I’d recently punctured, which hung loosely at my side.

My mind stuttered to a stop for a moment before I looked down myself to find a small ball of light swirling in the gap between my index and middle fingers. Rowan and Jolene stared. I stared too; I hadn’t even noticed the strange sphere forming there.

I raised my hand, inspecting it with some curiosity. It was white, bright, and hurt to look at for too long, like the sun, although that was more in comparison to the pitch-black background that was the Shadow than a nod to it’s actual glow. I then looked past the thing, at the Shadow, wondering.

I arched my arm back.

Rowan, seeming to catch up first, interrupted with some alarm, “Kenneth, don’t do it.”

I lowered my arm a fraction. “So what do we do, exactly? We can’t just wait around and expect the thing to vanish on its own, or do Shadows just do that if you leave them alone long enough? Because if so, I have to say it didn’t seem to be the case when they came for me.”

“You’re going to make it angry,” Rowan said, ignoring my sarcasm. “And if something happens, and it gets out of the circle, it’s game over for us. The nightglass binds it to where it is, and it knows; that’s why it isn’t struggling. But if it gets out... either it kills us or it escapes with Scarlett or both. We need to be careful.”

“Back to my first question, Rowan,” I answered, still not completely lowering my arm, still aiming to fire. “Enlighten me, would you?”

Rowan pursed his lips. A moment passed.

“Thought so too,” I said. “I’m not-” I stopped, unsure whether what I was about to say next was entirely true or not. “I’m not acting unreasonably. My... power or ability or whatever killed a Shadow. Now, I may not know much about this town and these creautures and you people, but I do know that that’s supposed to be a big deal. And this,” I held up the still-swirling ball of light, “is nothing in comparison to what I did a few days ago. Best it’ll probably do is just tickle.”

“This thing isn’t something to be experimented with, Kenneth,” Rowan said, frowning. “There is a way to subdue the Shadow, but Scarlett here,” he glared at her, “has made that impossible.”

“What exactly is it that we would need to do?” I asked.

“We would have to get the Shadow to come out of that hell-space, and we would have to fight it off long enough until we could push it back inside Scarlett,” Jolene answered for her brother with a sick look on her face, as though the words had tasted like bile in her mouth. “The Shadow comes out when it wants to, and up until now, we’d assumed that it came out only at night. Obviously, it has somehow gotten stronger.”

But I was no longer listening. Suddenly, I could feel the ball of light, more than I’d felt it before, as an actual weight between my fingers. It was taking my concentration, begging me to let it go and see what happens.

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. As the ball hit the Shadow somewhere off the center of its chest, I thought the worst possible thing that could happen would be a contact-explosion, a burst of white light that would be sure to wake up everyone in Knightville, like it had some days ago. The implications of that possibility were just hitting me then, and I felt like an idiot for not listening to Rowan. It was an annoying feeling because the rational thing to do would have been to follow Rowan and Jolene’s lead, but I had completely overlooked that choice and instead put all of us in a dangerous and life-threatening situation.

But that feeling soon evaporated as the ground began to shake steadily, like an earthquake. It was clear and precise and terrifyingly real. The ball of light had disappeared and lost its way in the cloudy expanse of the Shadow’s body, and the Shadow crouched due to the impact, looking surreal in its existence.

What was not surreal was the terror. Rowan and Jolene looked deathly scared and at each other, eyes wide, breath shaky, reacting in the most teenager way that I had ever seen them do, feeling something akin to surprise as I watched them. It was then I realised how much had changed already, just for knowing the truth. For knowing differently. Because before they told me, they’d seemed normal enough; almost everything had seemed normal at the time. But when three days ago happened, and then they had to, it was as though nothing much could touch them; they’d been scornful of my confusion, because that was how they’d been raised, born without the right to be scared. And I’d thought that that was how they really were.

It was also then that I realised how much they hadn’t dealt with at their age, and how much they had.

And right now, they didn’t know what to do.

There was a crash. The lid of the box where Scarlett had gotten the nightglass from had already been dangerously teetering, and now the shaking ground had made it choose to fall directly on top of the nightglass circle, disturbing one-fifth of it in the process.

A wide door.

The room suddenly stopped shaking, and before I could open my mouth for a shout, the Shadow made a sharp, terrible sound like cackling and whooshed out in a dark mass, twisting, turning, forming, promising black things. It rang in my ears, the sound it made, along with the terrible words, your fault.

Scarlett, who’d been standing still as a statue all this time, standing as if a twitch of a nerve could set everything rocketing into hell, existing with the restraint of staying still, immediately darted out of the circle and ran to the corner of the room, where the normal shadows were the darkest.

Darkness manipulation.

Although how Scarlett’s powers could help in this situation I didn’t know, since light seemed to be the Shadows’ repellant, and darkness their friend. I didn’t wonder for long. The Shadow was the problem, and while Scarlett Raynott had the potential to be a bigger, more particularly annoying problem, this was obviously first priority.

I felt power rush through my veins, and explode out of my palm as I held it up and bolted my feet to the floor. I gripped my arm with my other hand to keep it straight, and felt as a beam of brilliant white light hit bullseye.

The Shadow had been lunging for me, but now it was thrown back as the surge of light hit it right in the middle. I squinted. Something was wrong. I didn’t feel the immediate give that I felt a few days ago, when I’d killed a Shadow with my bare hands; rather, I felt an immense pressure, a hard and persistent push. As far as I could see, the Shadow wasn’t blasted across the room – it was stuck mid-air, trying to fight against my light, my power. The only effect it seemed to be having was in holding it back, which was worrying. I later wondered exactly how powerful Scarlett’s Shadow was.

I heard Jolene shout something at me, but I couldn’t hear it over the ringing in my ears. Nor did I even turn to look at her and Rowan, keeping my focus solely on the Shadow. I had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

I could not tell how many minutes had passed since locking myself and the Shadow in this position – our forces seemed matched somehow – and it was like pushing a wall. I wondered how long I could stay like this, a beam of endless light, an extension of my self, protruding out of my hand and in an arrow-straight line, direct and unmoving.

I didn’t have to wonder for long. The Shadow, with a sudden surge of energy, gave a loud push as it moved forward sharply and in a flash, catching me completely off guard and skidding me off-trajectory, my beam of light flying helter-skelter before disappearing entirely.

I hit the ground on my right arm, sending a prickly, bruising pain all over it because of the crumbs of cement digging into my skin like rough pebbles on the ground. I didn’t even give myself time to think or be surprised before shrugging it off, and immediately trying to get back on my feet. As soon as I did, however, the Shadow extended a large, black, taloned hand a little more than two-thirds my size, and swept me aside with an inhuman sort of strength, making me fly into a couple of large crates stacked next to each other, some sitting on top of others on the ground.

As I crashed into the whole structure, my head banging and my limbs knocking, I saw dark spots dance in my vision. My body shoved some of the crates off their pedestals with successive crashes as I landed on two of them, slipping and sliding on my back, my arms and legs and sides throbbing and my head hanging. The pain struck like lightning in what felt like every square inch of my body, terrible and forbidding and impossible to shake. I felt like lying there and letting myself lose consciousness in the blackout I knew was coming, but no, there was still things left to do, and I couldn’t just forget that, as much as it felt like I needed to. I forced my eyes open (I hadn’t even realised how close I was to shutting them) and while it hurt the back of my neck to lift my head, I did anyway, and I tried to regain fine motor control in my limbs. Clumsily, I got down from where I laid, barely being able to keep my balance as I tried to stand, leaning on the crates as I did. The Shadow was coming at me again, claws outstretched, but I barely registered it. I barely felt any fear either, despite looking from my angle like it was the end of the line for me. I was in no shape to fight, I thought, as the clawed hand, instead of tearing me to shreds, twisted around my leg and gripped it tight, as if meaning to fling me across the room like a rag-doll.

I gasped at the feeling of the Shadow’s hand on me. It was the cold air on a winter night in December when the clock had just struck twelve, it was like a vacuum that would take whatever it could get, it was like slow poison, draining my life and energy. I could feel it sucking at my power like it was a mosquito an I was a blood-bag. I could feel my vision beginning to blur around the edges, darkness waiting to claim me once more. But the feeling of getting the life sucked out of me didn’t last long, since my own body instinctively rebelled too, a flash of bright light erupting on the leg encased in the Shadow’s grasp. Light escaped in slits between the Shadow’s fingers as it immediately jerked back, like it was burnt. I couldn’t tell at that exact moment, but I was pretty sure I was grinning at it.

Not even a second had gone by standing in that position, however, when Scarlett Raynott leapt out of the shadows, clutching a long, simple blade like a sword. The blade was made of a smoking material darker than night, and somehow I couldn’t help but think that Scarlett had created it herself, out of nothing but shadows.

She was running to the Shadow, the lower half of her top whipping around her frame as she did. When she was close enough, she slashed straight through the cloudy part of it’s body, although what good that would do, I didn’t know, since the only defined parts of the Shadow were the head and arms, and striking there seemed smarter. Regardless, the Shadow seemed to recoil sharply, or an inhuman, ghastly version of the action anyway.

Scarlett continued swiping viciously at it, slashing and nicking and stabbing, twisting her body into a fast-paced dance as I struggled to be of use. Scarlett was going too fast for me to be able to properly track her exact movements, but it seemed to me like she was trying to confuse the Shadow, trying to make it knot itself up instead of directly killing it, which confused me.

But the Shadow was getting angry at Scarlett’s toying. In a fit of rage, it swung wildly around, half-twisting it’s body, and while I wondered what exactly it was trying to accomplish by doing this, I had no time to figure it out, since one of it’s hands swatted my aching body aside like a fly.

I skidded off-balance once more and landed on my hands and knees, my face missing the ground by mere inches. Pain shot through my palms as the rough, crumbled ground dug into my skin to get at the blood underneath. I felt the breath get knocked out of me once more as I tried to get up, to forget the pain, to do something, but my body simply refused. I was in a crawl, and my hands stung so much I was positive I would see blood if I turned them.

But I didn’t turn them; instead, I looked up. Above my head existed the still-glowing light bulb, whose existence I had entirely forgotten about, emanating its steady gold-yellow light, bathing the ground that I was scrawled upon with it.

And I looked at the light beseechingly, questioning, wanting, looking at it as though it was hope, asking it for something although I didn’t know what it was, just filled with the desperate yet unmistakeable need to fight back. Otherwise... otherwise I feared we would die, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen if we did.

And as I lay there, looking at the ground, not really seeing anything, I felt something form underneath the palm of my left hand.

Light manipulation.

I held it up. It was a short sword.

It looked ethereal in my hand, although it felt solid enough. It had a very basic design, as though crafted by a beginning blacksmith, but design wouldn’t be needed to make it noticeable. In stark contrast to Scarlett’s blade, the core of mine was pure white light, with yellow and gold framing the sides. Looking at it, I somehow couldn’t shake the feeling that I had created this myself, out of nothing but light.

I got to my feet in an instant and turned back to the fight.

Now it seemed the fight had flipped itself. The Shadow was toying with Scarlett as it tried to back her up against a wall. She was trying hard not to falter, trying not to let pain or exhaustion show, but it was evident that she couldn’t hold it for much longer.

If I was weaponless, I would wonder where the hell Jolene and Rowan could possibly be that was keeping them for so long. But I was not weaponless; I had something that had a sure possibility of working, and while at any other time I would be slightly bemused at having to wield such a medieval and dangerous thing, there was no time to worry about it now. I ran at the Shadow from behind, and instead of directly stabbing it, I slashed at it the way I’d seen Scarlett do, diverting its entire attantion from her to me.

It turned one hundered and eighty degrees, bending its head to look discompassionately at me. Maybe it was the lack of facial features that did it, or maybe it was the fact that it was a demonic creature trying to squeeze the life out of the two living beings in the room, but it suddenly looked ten times more dangerous to me than it had before. Fear gripped at my stomach, forcing me to take a step back. The Shadow raised it’s black hand to make a killing strike.

But it never came, because Scarlett had attacked again. She had taken a deep swipe at the Shadow, and it flinched as if stung and half-turned to Scarlett. I retreated another step.

“Raynott,” I called, grateful that my voice was still steady, “what do we do?”

Scarlett went at the Shadow again. “You,” she replied, swinging her long, pointy blade at the Shadow; it flinched again, “are going to stay,” she swirled and slashed away the Shadow’s attempts at a counter-attack, “out of my way.”

The very first thought that formed in my brain after her command was, Rude.

I glared at her. Now a part of me just wanted to follow her clear instruction, even if things get bad, just to spite her. But I ended up tracking her movements instead, trying to figure out exactly what it was she was trying to accomplish. Scarlett looked like she was circling the Shadow, trying to get it to hover in a particular place, and I saw the particular place being the curve of nightglass.

Then it clicked.

Of course,I thought, how did I not see it?

Now, I didn’t know what this nightglass-thing could do – I didn’t even know if that was how it was even spelt, but one thing I knew for sure was that the Shadow obeyed it. When Rowan, Jolene and I had first walked into the room, it had seemed trapped within the circle, carefully making sure the very fumes from its cloud-like figure were kept away from the element. It had seemed, at least the closest definition of it for something like itself, scared of it.

The nightglass wasn’t a trap; it was torture, and it could hurt and maybe even kill Shadows.

I still had the short sword in my hand.

Well, Scarlett Raynott may not want or appreciate my help, but then again, she couldn’t tell me what to do.

I ran at the Shadow, which had it’s back to me and turned just in time for me to get a good swipe at its arm, and although I suspected I was wielding my weapon poorly, it got the job done.

The forearm of the Shadow, including the elbow, separated itself neatly from the rest of the arm and fell to the ground, but just before it could hit, the arm fell apart and dematerialised itself into thin, fine, black smoke.

The Shadow let out a feral shriek meant to tear the skies. Behind it, I could see Scarlett, gazing glassily into space and swaying a little as though I’d chopped off her arm too, which I didn’t understand at all. She didn’t seem to even be present in the current situation, like she’d been caught in a bad daydream.

There are some Shadows that form... attachments with particular Diaforians.

But how?

“Scarlett?” I called, not fully returning my gaze to the Shadow.

Scarlett seemed to snap out of whatever daze she’d just been in. She levelled me a furious glare. “What part of ‘stay out of my way’ don’t you understand?” she snarled.

It took a certain amount of self-control not to snap ‘you’re welcome’ right back at her.

The Shadow seemed to be vulnerable now, now that it had lost a limb. It was shrieking and shrinking to our size and holding its body together in a huddle as if finally willing to accept defeat, and it was hovering close enough to the nightglass that one small push could mean the end of it all. Just a small action.

But I wasn’t taking my chances, and neither, it seemed, was Scarlett.

We both ran to the Shadow at the same time, locked gazes, came to an understanding, and pinned the Shadow right to the ground on top of the nightglass, our blades piercing either shoulder.

The Shadow stopped moving entirely for a second as though it was surprised, and gave one last shriek before disintegrating entirely, head and neck and shoulders and all, into a feral black cloud, twirling slowly around Scarlett’s skin, her arms and legs and upper body, into her eyes and ears and nose. It then enveloped her completely, such that I couldn’t even see Scarlett for a few seconds, before it seemed as though her skin had absorbed the Shadow entirely, while still looking entirely pale and bloodless as ever.

We’d been standing in a crouch; we straightened now, our weapons hanging loosely in our hands.

But then, as if it understood that its purpose had been fulfilled, my short sword gave a short tug as it flew out of my hand and went back to its source, dissolving into shimmering light on the ground. I didn’t even have it in me to twitch a brow as Scarlett's blade did the same, only it was the shadows that the weapon retreated back to.

And then it was over.

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#writing #land of magic #indigo isles #writers on tumblr #tumblr novels #writing stuff #my novel

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jeannahas · 11 months ago

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I slung myself from the saddle of my weary horse as we reached our destination, far out into the Irdelan Wastes, and stared up at the structures that marked my destinations. I had trudged through the barren landscape, the layered cloth and leather that covered most of my face blocking out the oppressive glare of the sun reflecting from the pale sands, as dust billowed around me, but also in a futile effort to protect against the sickness. No one knew exactly what it was, but the stories remained- and still affected people, in some places.

This place... none of us knew what to make of it. Massive spires of black stone - a strange composite that according to legends, the ancestors had been able to produce on a whim, with their knowledge of the laws of the world, jutted out of the ground like thorns bursting from caked earth following a quenching rain. They crossed and wove with each other, and we had learned through use of our sailing kites, that the structure was easily a mile across. Row upon row of needle spires, dark and imposing, and older than any of us. All that had been left were the stories. Ruins of a great war, or a site to summon great power. We had descovered them more or less by accident as we had explored following our latest war with the Kepu tribe. We had better guns - longer barrels, reinforced with some actual metal we had been able to mine from the old sites - but still fired the same ceramic slugs as any one else. Still relied on the sulfur that we had to carry down from the hot-pools and from the poisonous vents. Relied on the salt-peter harvested from the dung of our striped horses.

We had all felt it though - the fear, deep - primal - something that some old part of us understood.

But none of us knew why.

I was one of very few who wanted to. For upon each one of these spires, was written the same set of symbols -well, the same set of MANY symbols. Writing in more languages than any of our scholars knew, and all of them predating our own current script, and likely our own worlds. I was our tribe's speaker- the one who kept the old books, the scrolls, plates, and tomes of laquered wood that held our stories from the old days - and my apprentice was quite ready to take over my other more menial duties- sending and wirting missives to the other neighboring tribes, negotiating and writing costs of trade for various goods and livestock. I was free to indulge myself, free to come here.

I walked to my horse, brushing it's short mane, and the skittish animal glanced around wildly in fear for a moment. My saddlebags draped over it's rump, and I clicked at it reassuringly as I tried to sooth it.

"Lun'iale, my friend - good feelings only here - we must hold to them, or this place is sure to strip them from us."

I opened the flap I sought, and produced my notes transcribed from my previous rubbing of the spires. It appeared that seventeen languages had been used to convey this message - and at a scale that was fairly easy to register and copy, varying from vaguely squarish glyphs that I had no hope of identifying, to pictographs that were likley even older, given their position higher on the spire, but the bottom four were written with the same lettering, and had clearly come from the same root as our own language, as I could actually Identify many of the shapes of the letters, even if the words themselves were foreign to me.

It was exhilarating though, to think that If I could crack even one of these paragraphs... the branches of study, the legends I could trade for and encounter, would be massively widened.

So, on my last visit, I had brought a roll of what we called paper, and a charcaol stick the inkmaster had produced for me, and had taken a rubbing of those last few languages, to bring home to my tent, to my scrolls and books, to try to find a comparison.

I could get a few things - "this place" , "repulsive" "your time" "Ours".

But I had smudged that rubbing.

I had taken the notes I could, and here I was again, my rifle slung over my shoulder, a combination of carefully carved wood and meticulously shaped ceramics and forged metals, my defense in case any members of our enemies had seen me and my horse making our way here.

I pulled the cloth that sheilded my head from the harsh light of the sun, and the mask that sheilded me from the opressive cold that was setting in steadily, and began to work, Comparing my notes, matching my assumptions to the words in my oldest scrolls and plates that matched this. One language used our script - our jagged letters and harsh lines - but the words .... I beleived the words were the same.

And so I puzzled it out. The first full line.

"this is not a place of honor."

I trembled. I was certain I had found the answer. The letters matched - mostly, the sounds did at least - to a similar passage in the Book of Cruel Ashes that some scholar had etched into remarkably soft metal plates that had somehow survived the thousand years since the fall of the old ones, since their war that had leveled the world and destroyed their cities. That scholar had been a generation or two removed from the event, and had written "this time is not one of honor," but the words .... the words were the same.

Frantically, I pieced together the rest - transcribing the unlocked sounds into the script I was more famliiar with, comparing the words to my own tongue, as the dark spires loomed, like a warning from a malevolant god.

I stared at the page, and, free of scholarly elation, read the entire passage.

"This place is a message - a part of a series of messages - pay attention to it.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture, capable of commanding the earth itself.

This is not a place of honor- no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, nothing valued or valuable is here.

What lies here is dangerous and is repulsive to us. The message is a warning about that danger.

The Danger is here - the danger is greatest towards the center. The danger is buried below us.

The danger is a form of energy. It can Kill. It WILL kill."

Already chilled by the warning, it was the last line that froze me in my place, cross-legged upon the ground, ashen faced as my horse complained beside me.

"The danger is as great in YOUR time, as it was in ours. This danger is a threat if this place is disturbed physically, this place is best left SHUNNED and UNINHABITED."

I stared at the words. Old words. Words from a people who could make stone, who according to the stories could speak like gods, with anyone anywhere in the entire world, who had stepped upon the worlds of the stars, who had created the Great Scar on the Moon. Who had held secrets of lightning, of the sun, and all other things. Those people had feared this place. I had expected a warning - a notice to weaker cultures. I had not expected fear. Not from the old-ones.

I stood. I said nothing more as I saddled Nemen, my horse, with his black and brown stirpes, and rode away from that place, skin burning and bones aching, my mask afixed tighter to my face. The danger was an energy? Enemy tribes you could fight - disease you could treat - energy... energy was like the sun -

You cannot fight the sun.

I told my people of this warning, read them the words, and transcribed the finding of the place, and a detailed copy of the strange drawings into our books and records in hopes that a wiser scholar in the future would understand them even as I hoped to one day interpret their meanings.

We went out with metal tools, then. Myself and seventy three clansmen, with determination in our face, and with the best protective masks and spells our wise men could make, and we went to all spires that faced our tribe's homeland, on the border of that massive ring of horrible spires, and we wrote that message again. In our tongue. With one addition.

"The Great ones who traveled the stars feared this place - they could not contain the evil they buried here. It lives still."

"This is T'Ibik Khró Nu'luniva - This is the Place Without Honor, graveyard of the gods."

And we did not return.

You just finished translating an ancient message found near an unknown structure that roughly means “…this is not a place of honour…”

#writers #nuclear #nuclear waste #nuclearwarning #writing prompt

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