Joroboros
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[YF] Chapter 242: Origin Point
🕑 Added 2024-11-13 11:11:02 +0000 UTC“Wow, the ocean sunrise sure looks glamorous up this high.”
Two days have passed since the second Collapse, and somehow, I still haven’t managed to shake Anoures. The Jarl slouches in the flames between my wings; an unwanted guest that refuses to leave.
“Do you even know the meaning of the word?” I ask, appropriately snarky.
She leans back further, using me as a recliner. “We've been together for days now, and you still think of me that way? Be a little malleable. After reaching one’s centennial, even heqet learn to enjoy more things in life than war,” she says, before correcting herself. “Well, some do… A couple do.”
The first thing we did after leaving the devastated fjord was return to the closest village Sylvan had captured. Thankfully, it had experienced almost none of the damage that had warped the landscape of the fort island. A couple walls had crumbled, but that was it.
Infuriatingly, Jarl Anoures had been telling the truth. The village showed no signs of a liberated society. If anything, the living conditions of the thralls — which had once been Anoures’ soldiers — were worse than previously. Evidence of assault and abuse from the former slaves upon the new ones was abundant.
As Anoures is a slaver, I cannot help but dislike her, and it makes it so frustrating that I no longer have the grounds to judge her. I want to condemn her, but if the horrid crime is unavoidable within heqet’s culture, then I can’t.
Ignoring my unwanted passenger and the bundle of frustration she incites, I find the damage brought about by this second Collapse is not consistent. There are places hit even worse than the fjord, but most of the land seems untouched. This should, hopefully, mean that not every city of the northern countries will have fallen to the quakes.
Still, I can’t imagine the pact nations got off easily, from this or the first.
Besides that first village, we’ve made no other stops. I know where I need to go now, and have flown without rest toward the source of the Anatlan beam. In a single day, we travelled the same distance we did with all our time with Sylvan.
It truly makes me regret not ignoring the heqet entirely. If we’d simply continued on, we could have been back in New Vetus already… though I’m now realising that even if the village heqet had the willingness to direct us, that wouldn’t have been enough to find the source.
For the last while, there hasn’t been a single island. If I hadn’t seen the beam myself, I would doubt we were heading the right way.
“Have there really been no heqet to come out this far?” Leal asks. Unlike myself, she seems to have no problem chatting away with the slaver.
“Oh, of course. They simply die before they get far.”
Below, a shadow shifts beneath the waves. Something massive flits through the dark depths. Ever since the isles faded into ocean, the waters have grown dark. The relatively shallow seas between the islands deepen until it is impossible even for Leal — with her marking that enhances sight through water — to see the bottom.
It’s obvious why none of those heqet ever came back alive. Even flying as high over the waves as I am, I’m nervous looking at the constant shift of shadows beneath us; I would hate to be stuck in a ship out here.
We’d seen the beam rise from far over the horizon, so we don’t really know what we’re looking for, only that it came from this way. We have no way of knowing if its origin is above water or not. I hope so; otherwise, we’ll have to abandon this search entirely. I can’t exactly swim, and I won’t have Leal descend into the depths to face whatever monstrosities lurk down there.
Had I not seen the beam myself, I never would have taken us out this far. The farther we fly, the farther we are from anywhere travelled. What lies beyond this southern ocean is unknown. Alien. It unnerves me what horrors might live beyond where people have been.
The first sign that we've finally found our destination is the peak that rises over the horizon, followed soon by dozens of others of similar stature. At first I think they are mountains, but they approach far too quickly to be anything of such scale.
As we fly closer, countless other silhouettes join them, all seemingly identical. It isn’t until the sun rises at our backs and bathes the ocean in its light that their forms become distinct.
Pyramids. Each rise a modest ten metres and placed in strange patterns near a kilometre from the next.
As I fly over the first, I note the terrible state. Years of wear have rubbed the stone smooth, leaving it impossible to tell if it was originally intended to be so, or if it might have had some other shape. The bottom half is in a far worse state; the outer edges have collapsed from the waves eroding the structure’s base.
The pyramids themselves are nothing impressive, or even noteworthy. Simple stone mounds that have been beaten down by the ocean weather for who knows how long. No, it’s what they are built upon that is eye-catching.
The islands beneath the pyramids are mere millimetres above sea-level. Of course, that still means the waves of the ocean carry along the surface to lap at the base of the pyramids, but the height is consistent between each.
A dozen metres out from the stone of the pyramids, the islands drop beneath the waves permanently. At another fifty, the land drops off in a sharp cliff. Each island isn’t so much an island, but a pillar rising from the black depths of the ocean.
The islands seem like nothing more than sand and stone, but could they be something greater? Like the vessels of the chthonic? The pyramids aren’t anything more than a pile of rocks. I even pass my flames through one to see if anything is hidden within, but nope; nothing. Only the islands themselves seem important. And my interest is raised further when my flames find that besides the outer edges, they are ranked stone.
Flying through this field of pyramids, their numbers only grow. Anywhere we look, the stone piles spread as far as the horizon. It’s obvious we’ve found the right place, but I’m not sure what to make of it.
“They’re nodes,” I hear Leal murmur.
“What?” I prompt her to speak her mind.
“The pyramids; they’re positioned like the nodes of an inscription array,” she says.
From our vantage point, it’s obvious now that she points it out. The placement of the pyramids is in a similar enough arrangement as the nodes in some arrays I know. Of course, I don’t know nearly enough to decipher what the inscription could be — especially because there are no lines to complete it — but the pattern is obvious. But… I feel the pattern is more similar to my kind’s etchings. The inscriptions of the other races so rarely repeat like this, after all.
“I don’t know its purpose, but I think we can follow it. It repeats frequently enough that the core of the inscription is obvious,” Leal says. “Head south.”
I listen, shifting our flight left and follow the sea of pyramids. At first, nothing seems to change. The rock piles are identical to the rest we’ve passed. Some have collapsed, and the rock swept into the depths, while most remain whole, if weathered. It isn’t until the pyramids suddenly grow twice, then ten times as large, that Leal’s guess is proven true.
The waters grow still, no longer lapping at the base of each structure. While the depths between islands are just as dark as before, no shadows shift. I keep an eye on the waters, regardless. Despite the relief of movement below, my unease doesn’t relent. It grows.
The pyramids now have varying sizes, and I cannot discover any sense to why the largest are placed where they are. With each minute that passes, the pyramids we find become less eroded. As if the weather has had less of an effect. They appear no less ancient, but at least now some details appear where before there was nothing but smooth stone.
A sudden spike of familiarity pierces me. The sight of huge steps leading to a flat top that might have once held an arched ceiling strikes a memory. But the next sight makes it all too obvious that I have already seen one of these before.
Ahead of us, a break in the pyramids appears. As we fly over, we find the pillars still there, under the surface, yet carved away as if by an impossibly large, impossibly sharp knife. This is not part of the inscription; this is an unnatural gap where the pyramids that should be here are simply gone.
The Void Fog swept through here. That’s where I know these pyramids; I climbed one years ago.
That which I’d seen in the Void Fog had been like new compared to the ancient pyramids here. Did the Fog swallow it millennia ago? Or did the Void somehow restore the pyramid to its original state?
Following the gap in the pattern cut away by the Void Fog, it is obvious when the damage caused by the Fog ends and something… else starts. If you only look at the missing pyramids, it isn’t clear that the cause could be any different, but the way the support pillars have been destroyed leaves no doubt.
The path of the Void Fog stops dead, but where the next few pyramid islands should be, only shattered shards remain. And that’s only those we can see beneath the water. Where some should be, they are missing entirely.
The thick, shattered pillars appear much like something crashed through it. One — the least damaged — retains its overall shape, but half the circular top is just gone; as if a massive spear ran it through and snapped off the other side.
Beyond even that, there is a vast stretch of missing pillars. But this gap appears incorporated into the inscription, considering how consistent it is, and how there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the neighbouring pillars once we cross the distance.
On this side of the gap, the pyramids are flawless. Not a day of wear affecting them. It’s such a stark difference from what we’ve seen on the previous islands, that my suspicions amplify.
We already know the Anatla have something to do with this place, and even the slightest thing strange could be impossibly dangerous. I do not want to deal with another green eye awaking and trying to kill us simply because of our proximity.
“Is that where you’re trying to go?” Anoures’ voice startles me, but with how my flames are constantly flickering, neither of my passengers realise.
I follow her gaze and spot an island off to the west. Like all the pillars around, the surface is mostly smooth, yet it rises into a trio of ridges across its length. This island is far larger than the other islands and pokes out over the horizon. Unlike the platforms for the pyramids, it does not rise only to sea-level.
“No…” Leal says, twisting between the island of focus to the west, and our current path southward. “The nodes still point this way. It can’t be.”
I keep my gaze on the distant island, which is just as bare of any life as any other support around here. Considering what we’ve seen so far, I’d almost expect there should be another pyramid built upon that; maybe a kilometre tall or something, considering the scale of the others. But no, this island is the only one that remains empty, yet isn’t destroyed.
“We follow the nodes first,” I say. “If we don’t find any leads there, we’ll check out that island.”
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We're pretty much at the end of the Warring Isles section, and this is starting to become a bit of a pattern, haha, but it went on longer than I expected.
Comments
Joroboros
You're right. Unclear subject. Changed to 'As Anoures is a slaver..."
Joroboros
Oh? What sort of cliches?
Sjonzy
The soured mindset was not anything you did, by the way. I just thought it was going down the road of clichés, but then it didn't.
Sjonzy
I have nitpicky suggestion for you. "As a slaver, I cannot help but dislike her,...", I think this could be better worded, like 'The slavery that she is is', or something like it. As it is currently, gives the impression that Solvei is the slaver. i.e. 'As a friend, I like you, but as a coworker, I hate you'.
Sjonzy
Honestly, even going in with a picky and soured mindset, I still thought this section was great. It was definitely the perfect length.
Summer Coff
I don't think it can be helped. Young Flame has to bear the weight of most of the information about the cultures in its world, so digressions are part of its nature. All is as it should be.
