Astra flinched as she touched the ice-cold water, but eased herself in and
soon began to swim. She remembered the days of her girlhood, where she'd
snuck out at night with her sisters and swum in the reflecting pool
outside the royal palace. The chill water she swam in now was just as
invigorating as that she had swum in as a child, but what loomed above her
instead of the palace, lit in splendor by magical lights, was a bleak wall
in a cave full of evil and fear. She felt great sadness for those who must
have once lived in these caverns before the Dragon came. [1988] She
wondered why anyone would choose to live in these caverns, and how long
ago it had been since he had killed those who had used the marketplace. It
had only been a year since this dragon had taken any interest in
Aqualaria, but Fred had told her that the dragon had tormented his people
for a number of years. [2] It couldn't have been all that long ago,
though, since the clothes and other relatively perishable goods were
intact and not overgrown by the fungi that was everywhere in these damp
caves. Yet the ghost had spoken a language Astra had never heard of. Then
again, perhaps there was some kind of spell on the marketplace which kept
the goods kept in it from decaying--Astra had seen several items of food,
and none of them were rotting. The dragon would have no reason to set up
such a spell, so if there truly was such a spell it no doubt predated him,
perhaps put up by the merchants to prevent the loss of their goods.
Thus lost in thought, she finally reached the other shore. She saw that a crude tunnel was cut through the wall near her, one that could be squeezed through with some difficulty. At her feet was the small cairn. Astra noticed that the water behind her had started swirling again once she had left it. The small, crude cairn had an equally small, crude headstone above it, with writing roughly in a script that Astra remembered seeing in the marketplace. There had seemed to be two forms of it, a relatively simple form on signs outside the booths and a more complex form that she had found on a large obelisk which had perhaps been an official proclamation. The writing here, while not as neatly carved as the writing on the obelisk had been, seemed to be of the latter form. Astra wondered whether it didn't have some kind of religious function as well as an official one, similar to the heiroglyphics of the ancient Empire of the Four Gates, which had ruled the lands south of the Sweltering Jungles of the South in the time of the Great Empire of Tetrilonia. From the few ruins of that civilization that had been found in the southern jungles of Aqualaria, scholars had apparently been able to tell that all gravestones were written in the sacred form. For whoever buried this person to have known that form, they must have been either a nobleman or somehow connected to the priesthood. Then again, Astra had no idea how the society that had once inhabited the caves had been organized. Astra reverently moved away the stones of the cairn, uncovering scattered bones whose condition was every bit as pristine as the goods in the marketplace. There only seemed to be one skeleton, which made Astra suspect that she was being tasked to bury the bones of the young woman in the same place as her beloved. But where would those bones be?
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12/28/2009 10:56:33 PM
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