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“The Gudersnipe Foundation has the Dragoon Lancers, the largest military power in the known worlds. Also generally the best equipped, most highly trained, and best disciplined of any large standing army. Their equipment is used the verse-over due to its ruggedness and high degree of reliability. TDFN Marines often joke that the only real difference is the color of their dress uniforms. This is all pretty good when you consider that the Foundation, technically, is a haberdashery.”
– Know the Known Worlds
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Chapter 18:
The First Day of Autumn
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#18.1 – Tuesday, the First Day of the 10th Month, the First Day of Autumn…
As the rays of the sun crept into her room, Scarlet waited eagerly on her floor. She’d been working for the past hour, having finally unlocked all the secrets of the amulet.
“If I take the shape dad drew from the glyph, and I use the Dragon’s Head Rising* to scale it—no, don’t ask why, the amulet says so—and then overlay that on a map of High Mountain, placing the God Seat over the Horde, then I get this,” Scarlet said. “And if I point the amulet at High Mountain at sunrise or sunset… it makes a black spot.”
Scarlet looked down at Jayce. “Yes. I am aware of the ridiculous leaps of logic I am making. But the Blood Chrism† exists so a Jusenkyou can find the Blood Stele+.”
The breaking dawn crawled across her floor and hit the gem of the amulet in her hands. Holding it precisely above the map on her floor, she watched it project the black spot. Her theory proven, Scarlet felt more sure than ever that she had found the Blood Stele. One slight snag: her map was, very technically, not accurate. In fact it detailed the track on the High Mountain rollercoaster at the DragonlandP amusement park. Scarlet’s big glossy poster came from the gift shop the ride’s exit let out into.
“Now, Jayce, there are two possibilities here,” Scarlet announced to her cat, because the duck was still asleep. “The first is that, thanks to something my dad got out of the back of a comic book, I have solved a mystery which has plagued generations of scholars before me.
“The second, and equally likely… is that this is all a load of bollux and I’m about to get stuck in the mud at the bottom of a random hole.”
Jayce rolled onto his back and began to paw at the air.
“Yeah… the second one is more likely,” Scarlet agreed. “I better wear a hat.”
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* #18.2 (Tuesday, 1/10) *
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The Blood Chrism offered the first real, tangible chance for Scarlet to find something. But never one to shirk additional projects, she packed up all her references on Emily Jusenkyou and took them with her to school. Scarlet’s hadn’t gotten much sleep, but phys-ed first thing in the morning(stupid rotating schedule) certainly woke her up.
Any schoolchild knew well the story of Emily. How, when her father lay dying on the Plains of Blood and Salt*, she picked up Echbalder and led his armies to continue the fight. How she orchestrated the defense of Arindell, how she ordered the dragons to raze the city so Samuel Fate couldn’t have it.
Scarlet knew all that and a half. Emily was her own ancestor. In fact, it was through Emily Jusenkyou that the line continued; and not Naomi as many people assumed.
“Of course, it would probably be better if I were descended from Naomi,” Scarlet whispered under her breath. “Then I could probably do magic.” She wiggled her fingers at the girl sitting at the desk in front of her. “Zap. Zap.”
“Scarlet, why don’t you read, now,” Mr. Bright announced.
“Glad to,” Scarlet replied. “‘The Fall of Emily Jusenkyou† is recounted as follows: in the year of our lord six-nine-hundred-sixty-four, Emily led the expeditionary force of Samuel Fate+ into a route. Meant to be the glorious last stand of the First File, they lured Fate’s army into favorable terrain on the slopes of the Black MountainsP and orchestrated a brilliant pincher maneuver. Casualties are recorded at better than ten to one, despite Emily’s small and haggard force facing Fate’s elite guard in open combat.’ Now, here is the part I find really interesting: ‘During the battle, Emily found herself inflicted by the White Rot’—that’s a type of enchanted infection inflicted by the weapons the bad guys carried—‘and she took shelter in a cave. Her second asked her to give up the sword, so that the armies of the Pendragon could continue to be led by it. Emily refused, and her second tried to take Echbalder by force. Emily threw sand in her second’s eyes, and then drove the sword into the living stone, sealing it in place with a magic spell.’ Isn’t that fascinating?”
“It is,” Mr. Bright replied with one of his trade-mark smiles. “And, I might ad, excellent diction. …But that’s not the book you were supposed to be reading from. Do you want to try again with your literature text?”
Scarlet felt her face flush as she looked around at the pile of books on and beside her desk. “I sort of didn’t bring it,” she said in a small voice.
“Heidi, loan Scarlet your book,” Mr. Bright said. “Scarlet, top of page eighty-seven, please.”
Red-faced and sweating, Scarlet laid the textbook over her collection of reference guides and started to read. Her mouth went on auto-pilot while her brain kept wracking over the information.
When class ended, Scarlet quickly tore up her math homework to make half a dozen bookmarks. Mr. Bright approached and folded his arms, leaning on the cabinets beside Scarlet’s desk.
“I know, I know,” Scarlet mumbled. “I need to bring the textbook for this class, not just A textbook.”
“Actually, I wanted to ask you about what you read,” Mr. Bright said. “Shouldn’t that mean the sword is somewhere in the Black Mountains?”
Scarlet winced. “No. The account is all wrong. A lot of the details are right. There’s this whole mystery cult that practiced a—you don’t care. Uhm… everyone agrees the sword is probably in a cave somewhere; but no one can agree on exactly where. If you ask two historians you’ll get three opinions.”
“Damn,” Mr. Bright snapped his fingers and banged his elbow into the cabinet. “Here I thought you’d finally done it and found the sword.”
Scarlet’s head shrank into her shoulders. “I’m not going to find the sword.”
Mr. Bright looked at the stack of books on Scarlet’s desk. “You’re really trying to find it, aren’t you? Like really, seriously going after it?”
Scarlet turned her face away from him and tried to fight back tears. She did not want to break down crying in front of her literature teacher, of all people.
“Scarlet,” Mr. Bright said pointedly. “Keep looking. Also, hurry up and get to your next class. I know Mrs. Winkledorff is no fan of tardiness.”
Scarlet grabbed her things and started to run. Focused on her breathing, she took deep breaths in through her nose to keep herself from crying. By the time she reached Mrs. Winkledorf’s room, she was back to her usual stoic self. She didn’t know why it hurt her to have an adult come too close to learning about her search.
Scarlet slipped into her desk just as the bell announcing the start of sixth period sounded. The end of the school day drew near, and she had a grand adventure with Esperanza planned. One she hoped would bring her closer than the dusty old books in her bag.
Mrs. Winkledorff began passing back papers and stopped at Scarlet’s desk, towering over the girl and frowning at her. “You cut class yesterday, young lady.”
Yeah, and you didn’t turn in attendance, so I guess touché? Scarlet thought to herself, but said “N-no, I was here.”
“I should make you stay late to clean my erasers,” Mrs. Winkledorff said.
I’m going on a caving adventure under High Mountain, snapper! Scarlet thought. She said nothing, just opened her history textbook and faced forward(Actually, the book Scarlet opened was not her history text, just one the exact same size and shape. Weeks ago she’d put the history book’s dust jacket on there, and nobody noticed).
When the bell rang, Scarlet simply walked out of the room. If Winkdorf said anything, Scarlet didn’t listen, and she knew the old crone couldn’t fill out a detention slip to save her life.
She dropped her school bag at home and took her adventuring supplies, which consisted of a plastic pith-helmet, souvenir bull-whip, and a faux-leather shoulder bag.
An hour later, Scarlet made it to the valley-floor level entrance to the mountain. At the end of a cul-de-sac, two normal house-sized lots sat empty, the space instead covered in a long field of gravel that sloped upwards into a bolder field. Past that, the yawning maw of a cave big enough to fly an airplane into.
Scarlet knew the neighborhood; apparently her mother and father nearly bought a house here because they were so cheap. Residents made extra money renting parking spaces to dragons who used the entrance.
Out in front of one of the nearby houses, Esperanza played with a little human boy she’d apparently befriended, while chatting casually with his mother.
Scarlet approached. “Hi, Espy.”
The mother cocked her head and smiled at Scarlet. “Oh, are you a dragon, too?”
“I’d sure like to be,” Scarlet took out her map# and showed it to Esperanza. “This is where I want to go.”
“Hmmm…” Esperanza studied the glossy poster and absently bounced a ball off the garage, expertly aiming it so the six year old she played with could hit it back. “You know that’s not even remotely what High Mountain looks like on the inside, right?”
“I was afraid of that,” Scarlet gulped. “It… does say ‘map not to scale’.”
Esperanza squinted at Scarlet’s poster. “I guess it’s got all the major chambers. I think the connecting passages are about where it says.”
Scarlet ran her finger tips over the spot indicated by the amulet. “But is there a chamber over here?”
“Yeah… in the dry caves, I think. I don’t live here,” Esperanza said. “There’s going to be a few tight squeezes to get there. Come on. You’re lucky, the dry caves are near this entrance. I think. We can be there in a trifle!”
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* #18.3 (Tuesday, 1/10) *
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Just slightly over a trifle later, Scarlet and Esperanza arrived at the dry caves. Esperanza let Scarlet ride on her back* most of the way so they could make better time. A dragon walks at about twice human running speed, which meant Scarlet spent her trip clinging to Esperanza’s scales for dear life.
Esperanza’s idea of a “tight squeeze” proved to be large enough to drive a school bus through. Apparently, she meant tight for dragons.
When they got to the “tight” parts and Esperanza needed to navigate difficult passages, Scarlet got off and walked. Being a lousy human made it tough; a dragon could casually scale inclines the average human would describe as “vertical”. Like climbing a mountain, but from the inside. Fortunately there were no real scary parts, just a few boulder-strewn slopes which Scarlet could pull herself up. She wished she’d brought a helmet and knee pads instead of a toy hat.
Light proved a bigger problem.
The more populous parts of the eerie were illuminated by orange veins of glowing Dragonite+, but the further one got from the horde, the fewer these became. She had her little flashlight, but that didn’t do so much in the yawning cavern. It had a bright LED bulb, but the cave was simply too big and too dark for the beam to get very far.
For particularly arduous passages, Esperanza could create a ball of fire and light up Scarlet’s path. That didn’t last too long, though; and the brief flashes sometimes did more harm than good. By chance, Scarlet found a large spar of stunningly ancient wood lying among the debris, and it provided a novel solution.
Sacrificing her toy bull whip, Scarlet wrapped it tightly around the end of the stick. Then, Esperanza coughed up a thick glob of jelly-like phlegm, which burned brightly once exposed to flame. Scarlet now had a serviceable torch.
With that problem solved, they quickly reached the area Esperanza had called The Dry Caves. “Though, admittedly I don’t have a clue why,” the girl-dragon was saying. “Aside from the obvious… They aren’t wet.”
They had by now descended to a level well below the valley, to a place seldom visited by dragon-kind. The large cavern had a perfectly flat floor, a layer of fine silt like talcum powder. Footprints covered it—mostly from dragons—with air so still the markings could have lain undisturbed for thousands of years.
By now, Scarlet’s eyes had adjusted enough to the torchlight that she could see easily for about ninety to a hundred feet. The fine silt of the cavern floor shone pure white, while all the stones were grey or black. To Scarlet, the juxtaposition seemed strange; why had silt of a totally different color spread across the floor? No real answer occurred to her. Rocks rose out of the sea of sand like islands on an ocean, and the many tracks of previous explorers felt like the wakes of distant ships.
Scarlet broke off from the more densely-traveled routes and began to wind her way through a forest of stalagmites. Perhaps it was divine will, maybe it was her higher self. She didn’t know, but it felt as if some unseen hand guided her to where she needed to go.
Scarlet fell to her knees and stared up at the stone.
The great carved face stood some twenty feet high and forty wide. Small, by dragon standards, yet impossibly monstrous besides Scarlet’s tiny frame. The torch fell to the ground beside her and clattered in the sand while she reached out and touched the rock. The stonework itself had been polished until it felt like glass, but the glyphs were inlaid and the letters filled with gold.
Like the sword, seeing the Blood SteleP with her own eyes made the myth turn real. Most of the legends of the stone described it as a freestanding slab of rock. The real stele had a fine cut to it, but still a part of the mountain, still connected to the ground.
“This isn’t Scoriography,” Scarlet breathed.
“You’re smart. Do you know what it is?” Esperanza replied.
Scarlet shook her head from side to side.
With her palms, she began to brush over the surface, surprised to find she could make no differentiation between the gold inlaid script and the stone upon which it lay stamped. There wasn’t even any dust, it was so smooth the dirt simply rolled off. In her mind’s eye, Scarlet could picture half a dozen ways a dragon could create such a thing, but even so it added to the mystery and wonder.
To Scarlet’s barely-trained eye, the arrangement of glyphs and symbols appeared clearly more than decorative. The eldritch forms were not like Scoriography#, which relied on scratch marks, pits, and bubbles. Instead, Scarlet saw a curious serif font, small lines attached at the end of strokes, which flowed naturally into roundels and curves. Having seen thousands of ancient inscriptions, Scarlet couldn’t think of anything in her experience that looked quite like it.
“…I can’t read it,” Scarlet cried.
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* #18.4 (Tuesday, 1/10) *
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Esperanza’s human form leaned casually with her back against the stone, examining her nails and picking through her many bracelets. “C’mon, kid. I promised your mom I’d have you home by dinner, and it’s… whoo, past then.”
“Can you please not lean on the ancient stele that is the key to my very destiny?” Scarlet asked. Her torch burned low, and she’d been sitting, near motionless, staring at the rock for over an hour. In her hands she gripped a notebook where she had begun to copy the writing down, but all too quickly realized it would take weeks just to accurately transcribe a single line of the six-inch high characters.
“I can bring you back any time,” Esperanza offered.
“You don’t understand!” Scarlet said fiercely, tears streaming down her face as she glared at Esperanza. “This got left here for me to find! My ancestors made this thing for my bloodline, I’m supposed to be able to read it!”
“What are ya gonna do, kid?” Esperanza barked. “Sit here ‘till ya die! You’ll make for a nice mummy I bet, and maybe the next Jusenkyou will find you and recognize you.”
“I can’t fail!” big wracking tears rolled down Scarlet’s cheeks as her hands ran through the fine sand of the cave floor. “Not now! Not this far!”
Esperanza took a few steps over to Scarlet and made a big show of blatantly leaning her backside on the stele as she bent down to bring her face close to Scarlet’s. “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Scarlet rubbed her eyes and began to cry even more after getting sand in them. With her nose stuffed up and her eyes still watering, she picked up the slowly dying torch and began to retrace her steps.
The final insult came as she stumbled around and realized the route she took proved ridiculously circuitous, and at least six other tracks led by a much more serviceable path directly to the stone.
Though difficult to tell through her tear-filled eyes and the dying light, two sets did appear to lie atop all the others, marking them as the most recent. The tracks of a human wearing boots, and the feet of a red-fire dragon.
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* #18.5 (Tuesday, 1/10) *
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“Scarlet. I did not want to have to this to you. But… you’re grounded. …how do we ground Scarlet?”
Ann looked to Roy, who shrugged uncertainly. “A three-eighths inch cable to the third prong on the outlet? I don’t know.”
“Can we skip to the part where you tell me to go to my room?” Scarlet asked. Her head felt heavy and her eyes were red, narrowed to just slits. She stood before them, cargo pants and boots covered in mud, the rest of her caked with white dust, and her face filthy. To her parents she’d clearly had an ordeal, but home well after midnight on a school night left her in violation of effectively every one of the few rules set.
“Roy, she’s your daughter too, do something,” Ann said.
“Right, let’s do that,” Roy took Scarlet by the hand and led her into her bathroom, sitting her down on the edge of the tub while he ran hot water from the faucet and wetted a wash rag. His movements tender, he started around her eyes and then got to her cheeks, cleaning away the mud formed by the fine white powder mixed with his daughter’s tears.
Ann followed close behind, and paused in the doorway to pinch the bridge of her nose, before taking a towel and joining in. “Dear child, what did you get yourself into?”
“It’s nothing,” Scarlet mumbled. “Just wasting time on foolish ramblings.”
As far as Scarlet knew, she had failed. She couldn’t read the Blood Stele, and her research into Emily Jusenkyou mired firmly between a rock and a very hard place. Here she sat: covered in dirt and stuck at two dead-ends. A hopeless, endless wellspring of failure.
But unbeknownst to the muddy middle-schooler, she was already closer to the sword than any searcher before her.
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End:
Chapter Eighteen
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