The Archive by Dan Fitzgerald

Author:Dan Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: the maer cycle, maer, carl's adventures, sinnie, finn
Publisher: Shadow Spark Publishing
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter:

Twenty-Three

Luez clung to Fabaris, her mind and body flooded with the sensation of contact. She couldn’t remember the last time she had hugged anyone. She knew his pain, in a way, from her early days in training. When she had joined the Shoza, she had been sent on several missions to abduct Wild Maer children for members of the Sabrit wishing to grow their families. She had seen the suffering of the children up close, felt their tiny limbs trying to resist, their voices swallowed by bags over their heads, their bodies soon wilting, becoming trembling and compliant. She had known that it was wrong, that it had nothing to do with the Shoza’s mission to protect the magical knowledge of the Maer, but questioning orders was unthinkable. She had hardened herself against the guilt, compartmentalized it, telling herself it was a necessary evil. But when she saw Fabaris finally unloading his secret, her shame came flooding back. Holding him tight kept it at bay for a few moments.

No one spoke much during the rest of the day’s march, but it felt like the strings uniting the group had been pulled tighter, among the Maer at any rate. Sinnie, Finn, and Carl floated around the periphery, but they too spoke little, perhaps in reaction to the Maer’s silence. The Great Tooth dominated the sky, and they stopped in late afternoon to look at the map Luez had made, to figure out if they valley they were approaching was the one they needed to take. The map, which she had drawn from memory, put the Archive in a valley on the northwestern edge of the peak. She was sure what she had drawn was accurate, as cartography and orienteering had been a long and tedious part of her training, but there was no way to know if the original she had studied years ago was correct. Given that it had been made from a cylinder map, she assumed it was. The knowledge of the ancients always seemed more certain, being made during a time when the Maer civilization was at its apogee.

“The Great Tooth is here,” Luez said, pointing out the obvious on the map, “and we are about here.” Karul and Fabaris leaned in to see, taking up all the space around Luez, so Ivlana had to move around to the other side to follow. “These lines represent the ridges, the legs of the mountain, if you will.” The drawing showed six ridges, unevenly spaced, radiating out from the Tooth. “The entrance to the Archive should be on this ridge here, if I’ve read the map correctly.”

“And this space between these two lines would be the valley up ahead?” Karul asked, squinting to see the map. His distance vision was not bad, but Luez had noticed he struggled to see up close.

“I believe so. If I read this right, we head east into the valley ahead, cross over this low ridge here,” at which point she touched one of the lines on the map.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.