![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt's a boring day at work today. Nothing much going on. Hence, you get ramblings. Beware, for it may bore you to tears.
There was still life here. Of that Kaya was certain.
She could feel it in the same way that you could feel the tiny nip of cold the moment before the snowflake touched you skin, in the same way that sometimes you could feel the air being exhaled by another person who was barely even in the same room. She could feel it beneath her skin, in a layer that was buried, metaphorically, beneath her bones. She could feel it as the metaphysical hairs on the back of her primal haunches began to rise. There was life here, and none of it was friendly.
Not that it mattered. This close to the ruins there was not a lot of anything except the Blasted Land, plains that stretched as far as the eye could see. Admittedly this was not very far, a constant cloud of gray dust hung over the land, blotting out the horizons with a charcoal-like brush. But everywhere that you could see there were rounded shapes that might once have been something, but were now just melted into the earth like the remains of candles. Sometimes the eye would play tricks on you, the imagination would sneak something in on you, and you would think that you had seen some recognizable creation entombed in a sculpture of smooth glass. But then, as you focused, the shape would only disintegrate into random nothingness, a reminder that some mysteries were best left unsolved.
Kaya was getting near to the ruins. She could tell by the tingle on her skin, by the thickening of the choking cloud of debris in the air. Her guides had been mostly unhelpful, on clear days one could see the ruins from the outside rim of the Blasted Land, the few tall towers and broken spires, charred black, that occupied the center of that wasteland. Around them the nomads who lived in the region had created an entire religion, they were stone transformed into living, breathing terror, monsters created by dark and lost magic to suck the life out of the ground around them. Kaya ignored the stories-she had her own reasons for being here.
Something ahead of her moved. She ignored it.
The ruins appeared in front of her so suddenly that they would have startled her had she not been waiting for them. One moment there was just the hint of a shadow, the next a large stone wall, blackened by extraordinary heat, loomed in front of her. There was no warning of its appearance because there was no logic to its creation. The wall ran up to a certain point and then simply ended, jagged and uneven, as if the rest of the wall had been melted off. Kaya looked at it carefully, there seemed to be no danger here, but still the wall pulsed with unnatural energy. For a long moment she stood there immobile, like some guardian statue. Then she was gone. The wall yet remained.
She hurried now. There were still things living in here, as impossible as it might seem. She had seen their tracks on the wall, the hints of their presence embellished in front of her. Where they were now she did not know; this whole place seemed strange to her. But this was their home; it was impossible that she could be here for any length of time and have them not notice her presence. She brought to mind the words the shaman had told her, when she had sat with the nomads and taken of their meat the previous evening. There was a large building at the center of all of this, hidden in the black fog that still swirled around her, hidden in the obscure mists of history.
There was magic sleeping here. And there was magic here that was not sleeping.
Kaya knew this as she stepped within the inner edge, past the outskirts of the ruins, to where the buildings were still mostly intact. She knew it as she set her foot down, as the earth moved beneath her. She had expected it. She felt it wake beneath her, some monster old and powerful and vast. The consciousness of a city stirring slowly into wakefulness. Now she must hurry. There was no longer time. She ran.
Her legs powered her through what must have been, in happier times, a market square. Through the blackened and roofless remains of a warehouse, treading carefully on fallen rocks and the remains of several flagstones. Jumping from ruined sculpture to ruined sculpture. Sometimes things seemed to wake beneath the stone. She ignored them. She was already gone before she entered their perception, a ghost vanished in passing.
And then there it was, rising above the center of the city, a huge building with massive towers at each of its four corners. It had seen better days certainly; the ground around it was covered with huge flakes of stone that had peeled from the walls as if the walls had molted. Of the two great iron-bound doors that had blocked the entrance, one was falling down, the other missing as if it had been ripped off and carried home by some giant to serve as a table. Above there was only silence from the battlements, and that great sense of waking power. For a moment Kaya succumbed to the temptation to look up, just to see if there was some hideous creature, some mass of waving tentacles and cruel eyes, peering over the top of the battlements at her, seeing if she was edible. But there was nothing except for that looming feeling of being watched. She shrugged it off, walked up the shattered stairs, and entered the great hall.
While everything else had been mostly destroyed, the hall remained in all its glory. Magical symbols had been written around the top of the walls, runes in strange shapes that she did not want to waste time analyzing. Sculptures of strange gods and odd creatures lined the walls, golden monuments to forgotten guardians waiting patiently on their stone pedestals. A few streamers of cloth still hung on the wall, or trailed down from the ceiling like long snakes. But what really commanded the viewer's attention was two things, the massive altar at the front of the room, and the floor.
The altar was easily the most impressive furnishing in the room. A massive block of marble as tall as a man's chest, the alter dominated the front of the room. Even from here Kaya could see the inlaid gold texture, and the painted symbols that now adorned it, strange runes that seemed to swim in front of her eyes. After a moment of staring at them, of reading the patterns, she had to look away. She had seen enough now, she no longer wanted to look any more. She stared at the floor instead.
Once the floor had been clean and neat, but that was a thing of the past. Now it was covered in bones, fragments of human bodies, bleached and stripped bare. There were torsos, skulls, crushed arms and shattered legs flung all over the floor, rendering the walking surface dangerous. Kaya was about to look away when a strange but familiar scent began to settle in over her. She sniffed the air once, and then bent down near a pile of body parts and hesitantly picked up a long femur. It was small, as if belonging to a child. There were still fragments of meat hanging from the bone.
They dropped from the ceiling, their presence having been masked by the faint light, by the wrongness of the room, and by the overwhelming scent of magic. Kaya had not even noticed them until they decided to attack. The light in the hall was diffused, so they did not cast a shadow, but they did darken the ground just slightly. Just enough so that she noticed.
Her hand shot out behind her, already unleashing the lightnings. Blue bolts of electricity and magic slammed into the bodies dropping soundlessly from the ceiling, coursing over them like drops of water, first darting here, then darting there. Voices erupted in screams and the creatures collapsed onto the floor, none of them near enough to even threaten her shields. As she spun around, Kaya gathered more lightning to her fist until it blazed blue, another spell already being mouthed and being formed around one hand. Then she stopped.
There was enough left of their ancestors in those bodies to tell that these creatures were descended from those who called themselves human. Now Kaya was not sure what they would call themselves. They were hunched over, bodies broken and deformed in ways that no human could survive, some with misshapen heads and glowing, mismatched eyes that made Kaya feel sick. One seemed some gross parody of a woman, tall, bare chest twisted back awkwardly, balanced on legs barely as long as Kaya's hand. Another had three arms and a massive gap where his nose should have been. All of them looked at her with the same expression in their face, fear. That much she could read. They looked at her as if she were the monster, the creature from the Abyss who had crawled here to destroy them. Perhaps, in a way, she was.
Then, as one, they turned and ran. Kaya held up a hand as if imploring them to stay, but did not speak as they scuttled out the door. There seemed to be little point, they probably had fallen too far to even possess speech, let alone speak her language. No, there was nothing she could do for those twisted creatures. Nothing she could offer them except for pity.
Instead she walked to the massive altar and smiled sadly. The spell had been broken off, incomplete. The geometrically exact markings, the calm and steady hand, all disappeared at once. The power was still there, the ground beneath her still rang with it, the voice of the spell still spoke to her, but it was still incomplete. On top of that there was other writing, unsure and clumsy, broken and uneven. It was only a pale imitation, somebody trying to complete some work of art, trying to match geometric precision with their bare hands. Here and there the runes had been finished almost dangerously, each piece bringing what was sleeping here a little closer to wakefulness, a little closer to freedom. But it was, in the end, incomplete, flawed remains of a destroyed society attempting to repeat that which had destroyed them all. She looked at it for a moment, sadly, and then put her hand in the middle.
Ten minutes later, slightly tired, she emerged from the front of the building. It had been more difficult than she had anticipated, wrestling with that consciousness. It had been more awake than she had expected. Perhaps the many years of fighting, of the existence of what was left of humanity here had dripped enough blood into the ground to feed it, to raise its awareness. It was difficult to tell. But something had awakened it, and it had fought her seal every step of the way. In vain though; now it really was sleeping, and with any luck would remain sleeping for another thousand years or so.
Kaya looked around the ruins. What she had seen confirmed her earlier suspicions. The spell to summon that conglomerate of angry souls buried under the towers had been incomplete, the shielding had been inadequate, the preparations too hastily done. One of the four pillars they used to anchor it had some invisible micro-fracture or some-such. She could not be certain. What she did know is that when the spell overloaded, the sudden energy flux had fused the Oxygen and Nitrogen in the air immediately, releasing a nuclear explosion that had reduced the entire town and the surrounding countryside to nothing more than a crater. Even now, with most of the long-lived isotopes having decayed, the radiation was still dangerous. And there was enough magic to feed some strange creatures that were all that was left of this place's creators. Only the inside of the city had been spared, that part that had been partially protected by the inner shields projected from the tower. Those outside had suffered a swift death. Those trapped inside had not been as fortunate.
Slowly she reached down into the blackened soil. She plunged her fingers into the dirt, wincing at the grimy, oily texture that licked against her, making two holes in the ground. Then, carefully, she extracted two objects from a pouch at her belt and dropped a seed in each hole. If she was correct, and she had planned well, those plants would actually prosper here, getting much of their energy from the ambient magic in the earth. Slowly they would spread and multiply, and then they would transform what was left of the radioactive waste, or the building waste in general, into new and fertile soil. And maybe someday, in the far future, they would shade the remainder of that strange people who had lived there.
Perhaps she would come back in a thousand years and see. For now she tucked her cloak around her and walked off into the clouds of black soot, disappearing from the city that had disappeared from time. Behind her the world of the dead slept again and waited.
There was still life here. Of that Kaya was certain.
She could feel it in the same way that you could feel the tiny nip of cold the moment before the snowflake touched you skin, in the same way that sometimes you could feel the air being exhaled by another person who was barely even in the same room. She could feel it beneath her skin, in a layer that was buried, metaphorically, beneath her bones. She could feel it as the metaphysical hairs on the back of her primal haunches began to rise. There was life here, and none of it was friendly.
Not that it mattered. This close to the ruins there was not a lot of anything except the Blasted Land, plains that stretched as far as the eye could see. Admittedly this was not very far, a constant cloud of gray dust hung over the land, blotting out the horizons with a charcoal-like brush. But everywhere that you could see there were rounded shapes that might once have been something, but were now just melted into the earth like the remains of candles. Sometimes the eye would play tricks on you, the imagination would sneak something in on you, and you would think that you had seen some recognizable creation entombed in a sculpture of smooth glass. But then, as you focused, the shape would only disintegrate into random nothingness, a reminder that some mysteries were best left unsolved.
Kaya was getting near to the ruins. She could tell by the tingle on her skin, by the thickening of the choking cloud of debris in the air. Her guides had been mostly unhelpful, on clear days one could see the ruins from the outside rim of the Blasted Land, the few tall towers and broken spires, charred black, that occupied the center of that wasteland. Around them the nomads who lived in the region had created an entire religion, they were stone transformed into living, breathing terror, monsters created by dark and lost magic to suck the life out of the ground around them. Kaya ignored the stories-she had her own reasons for being here.
Something ahead of her moved. She ignored it.
The ruins appeared in front of her so suddenly that they would have startled her had she not been waiting for them. One moment there was just the hint of a shadow, the next a large stone wall, blackened by extraordinary heat, loomed in front of her. There was no warning of its appearance because there was no logic to its creation. The wall ran up to a certain point and then simply ended, jagged and uneven, as if the rest of the wall had been melted off. Kaya looked at it carefully, there seemed to be no danger here, but still the wall pulsed with unnatural energy. For a long moment she stood there immobile, like some guardian statue. Then she was gone. The wall yet remained.
She hurried now. There were still things living in here, as impossible as it might seem. She had seen their tracks on the wall, the hints of their presence embellished in front of her. Where they were now she did not know; this whole place seemed strange to her. But this was their home; it was impossible that she could be here for any length of time and have them not notice her presence. She brought to mind the words the shaman had told her, when she had sat with the nomads and taken of their meat the previous evening. There was a large building at the center of all of this, hidden in the black fog that still swirled around her, hidden in the obscure mists of history.
There was magic sleeping here. And there was magic here that was not sleeping.
Kaya knew this as she stepped within the inner edge, past the outskirts of the ruins, to where the buildings were still mostly intact. She knew it as she set her foot down, as the earth moved beneath her. She had expected it. She felt it wake beneath her, some monster old and powerful and vast. The consciousness of a city stirring slowly into wakefulness. Now she must hurry. There was no longer time. She ran.
Her legs powered her through what must have been, in happier times, a market square. Through the blackened and roofless remains of a warehouse, treading carefully on fallen rocks and the remains of several flagstones. Jumping from ruined sculpture to ruined sculpture. Sometimes things seemed to wake beneath the stone. She ignored them. She was already gone before she entered their perception, a ghost vanished in passing.
And then there it was, rising above the center of the city, a huge building with massive towers at each of its four corners. It had seen better days certainly; the ground around it was covered with huge flakes of stone that had peeled from the walls as if the walls had molted. Of the two great iron-bound doors that had blocked the entrance, one was falling down, the other missing as if it had been ripped off and carried home by some giant to serve as a table. Above there was only silence from the battlements, and that great sense of waking power. For a moment Kaya succumbed to the temptation to look up, just to see if there was some hideous creature, some mass of waving tentacles and cruel eyes, peering over the top of the battlements at her, seeing if she was edible. But there was nothing except for that looming feeling of being watched. She shrugged it off, walked up the shattered stairs, and entered the great hall.
While everything else had been mostly destroyed, the hall remained in all its glory. Magical symbols had been written around the top of the walls, runes in strange shapes that she did not want to waste time analyzing. Sculptures of strange gods and odd creatures lined the walls, golden monuments to forgotten guardians waiting patiently on their stone pedestals. A few streamers of cloth still hung on the wall, or trailed down from the ceiling like long snakes. But what really commanded the viewer's attention was two things, the massive altar at the front of the room, and the floor.
The altar was easily the most impressive furnishing in the room. A massive block of marble as tall as a man's chest, the alter dominated the front of the room. Even from here Kaya could see the inlaid gold texture, and the painted symbols that now adorned it, strange runes that seemed to swim in front of her eyes. After a moment of staring at them, of reading the patterns, she had to look away. She had seen enough now, she no longer wanted to look any more. She stared at the floor instead.
Once the floor had been clean and neat, but that was a thing of the past. Now it was covered in bones, fragments of human bodies, bleached and stripped bare. There were torsos, skulls, crushed arms and shattered legs flung all over the floor, rendering the walking surface dangerous. Kaya was about to look away when a strange but familiar scent began to settle in over her. She sniffed the air once, and then bent down near a pile of body parts and hesitantly picked up a long femur. It was small, as if belonging to a child. There were still fragments of meat hanging from the bone.
They dropped from the ceiling, their presence having been masked by the faint light, by the wrongness of the room, and by the overwhelming scent of magic. Kaya had not even noticed them until they decided to attack. The light in the hall was diffused, so they did not cast a shadow, but they did darken the ground just slightly. Just enough so that she noticed.
Her hand shot out behind her, already unleashing the lightnings. Blue bolts of electricity and magic slammed into the bodies dropping soundlessly from the ceiling, coursing over them like drops of water, first darting here, then darting there. Voices erupted in screams and the creatures collapsed onto the floor, none of them near enough to even threaten her shields. As she spun around, Kaya gathered more lightning to her fist until it blazed blue, another spell already being mouthed and being formed around one hand. Then she stopped.
There was enough left of their ancestors in those bodies to tell that these creatures were descended from those who called themselves human. Now Kaya was not sure what they would call themselves. They were hunched over, bodies broken and deformed in ways that no human could survive, some with misshapen heads and glowing, mismatched eyes that made Kaya feel sick. One seemed some gross parody of a woman, tall, bare chest twisted back awkwardly, balanced on legs barely as long as Kaya's hand. Another had three arms and a massive gap where his nose should have been. All of them looked at her with the same expression in their face, fear. That much she could read. They looked at her as if she were the monster, the creature from the Abyss who had crawled here to destroy them. Perhaps, in a way, she was.
Then, as one, they turned and ran. Kaya held up a hand as if imploring them to stay, but did not speak as they scuttled out the door. There seemed to be little point, they probably had fallen too far to even possess speech, let alone speak her language. No, there was nothing she could do for those twisted creatures. Nothing she could offer them except for pity.
Instead she walked to the massive altar and smiled sadly. The spell had been broken off, incomplete. The geometrically exact markings, the calm and steady hand, all disappeared at once. The power was still there, the ground beneath her still rang with it, the voice of the spell still spoke to her, but it was still incomplete. On top of that there was other writing, unsure and clumsy, broken and uneven. It was only a pale imitation, somebody trying to complete some work of art, trying to match geometric precision with their bare hands. Here and there the runes had been finished almost dangerously, each piece bringing what was sleeping here a little closer to wakefulness, a little closer to freedom. But it was, in the end, incomplete, flawed remains of a destroyed society attempting to repeat that which had destroyed them all. She looked at it for a moment, sadly, and then put her hand in the middle.
Ten minutes later, slightly tired, she emerged from the front of the building. It had been more difficult than she had anticipated, wrestling with that consciousness. It had been more awake than she had expected. Perhaps the many years of fighting, of the existence of what was left of humanity here had dripped enough blood into the ground to feed it, to raise its awareness. It was difficult to tell. But something had awakened it, and it had fought her seal every step of the way. In vain though; now it really was sleeping, and with any luck would remain sleeping for another thousand years or so.
Kaya looked around the ruins. What she had seen confirmed her earlier suspicions. The spell to summon that conglomerate of angry souls buried under the towers had been incomplete, the shielding had been inadequate, the preparations too hastily done. One of the four pillars they used to anchor it had some invisible micro-fracture or some-such. She could not be certain. What she did know is that when the spell overloaded, the sudden energy flux had fused the Oxygen and Nitrogen in the air immediately, releasing a nuclear explosion that had reduced the entire town and the surrounding countryside to nothing more than a crater. Even now, with most of the long-lived isotopes having decayed, the radiation was still dangerous. And there was enough magic to feed some strange creatures that were all that was left of this place's creators. Only the inside of the city had been spared, that part that had been partially protected by the inner shields projected from the tower. Those outside had suffered a swift death. Those trapped inside had not been as fortunate.
Slowly she reached down into the blackened soil. She plunged her fingers into the dirt, wincing at the grimy, oily texture that licked against her, making two holes in the ground. Then, carefully, she extracted two objects from a pouch at her belt and dropped a seed in each hole. If she was correct, and she had planned well, those plants would actually prosper here, getting much of their energy from the ambient magic in the earth. Slowly they would spread and multiply, and then they would transform what was left of the radioactive waste, or the building waste in general, into new and fertile soil. And maybe someday, in the far future, they would shade the remainder of that strange people who had lived there.
Perhaps she would come back in a thousand years and see. For now she tucked her cloak around her and walked off into the clouds of black soot, disappearing from the city that had disappeared from time. Behind her the world of the dead slept again and waited.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-08 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-08 11:16 pm (UTC)I call it a rambling because I had no real outline of how I wanted to do this; I just sort of wrote. I haven't written anything complete in a while, so maybe that was how it got out there. I'll have to think about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 01:52 am (UTC)"Beware, for it may bore you to tears," you said. So I read it, hoping it would put me to sleep.
But looky here, I'm still awake.
*shakes head*
Just can't get the service these days.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-09 02:02 am (UTC)The above was a compliment.
Lack of sleep makes my grasp on language deteriorate, sorry.