The ruined old place we found ourselves descending into was like some fantastical temple from out of the mists of forgotten legends and long-ago myths. Something amazing an angered titan had come and smashed into the deep places of the earth to teach mortals their place. A place you’d only see in that summer’s mega blockbuster about worlds just like those the Rangers now found themselves in. It was too overwhelming and awe-inspiring to be taken in. Every shadowy corridor and luminescent light shaft exposed a statue that hinted at lost stories I would never know, things that would remain mysteries for the next ten thousand years to come and the next ten thousand years that would follow. It was like finding and reading the last paragraph in a great book that was otherwise gone forever. You only got part of the story. And even just that much was epic.
It brought to me the oddest sensation because I knew this feeling…
It was like a marvelous abandoned mall that had once been the place to be, twenty years or so ago. And a lifetime. A place where girls were met after school on a Friday night to catch that year’s blockbuster at the now- silent movie theater near the forever-dark arcade that would never whir and beep again. Where one could once pick up a fresh “lid” from one of the seven different stores that sold sports memorabilia—the glories of our grand past. Check out the food court and try to see all the stories, lives, loves, and dramas that had once played out among the leaf-covered tiles and overturned chairs dirty with long-ago rainwater from a roof that had caved in. Now the stores are darkened and hidden behind shuttered gates that will never rise again.
This was us. Weep, Ozymandias.
Imaginary worlds must have brave heroes. Our memories of those long-lost malls of our youth must’ve said as much ten thousand years ago as this was saying to me now. Like some demand that it must be if we are to face the winter of old age. The realities of the way things have gone, and how they are now.
Perhaps I’m overselling what I saw down there. Getting a little purple with my prose. I’m a new writer. Maybe even the only writer left in the world we ended up in. So… forgive me. I’m still figuring it all out. How to
tell a story. Malls were before my time, really. But I’d seen the pictures. Watched the retro movies full of actors my age but targeted at my parent’s generation. And I saw the way they impacted my mother to the point that I felt it. I knew what she was feeling. When I think back about what was below the ruin of that temple Last of Autumn led me deep into… it was like that. Those memories of memories I would never know. It made me feel how you feel sometimes when you catch the vaguest harmony of a song you once knew, but know there’s more you can’t remember. A song you loved. But haven’t heard for a long time.
The well of the temple might have once been some kind of open subterranean garden, sunken below the main level, and open to what must have been a great lattice-work dome of carved stone. Now that dome had fallen in, collapsed across delicate ancient white marble floors dirty and grown over with moss and giant feathery ferns. Strange necrotic purple mushrooms grew and pulsed down there in the depths, giving off a faint and definitely unholy sinister light. There was a feeling of diabolical intelligence down there. Something that was as malevolent as it was mindless. Dark-purposed and mindless at once. And hungry. Very hungry.
“You said this was where elves worshipped? But not your people?” I whispered as we threaded down cut marble steps past ruined statues of beautiful women, seemingly elves by their ears, holding torches, books, wheat. All of it carved in stone. All of it ruined by time, marred by damage. She was focusing hard down into the darkness. Fighting to find our way forward through the maze of destruction. Even the special abilities the Moon Vision conferred seemed to struggle down here against that overwhelming dark and malevolence that radiated from somewhere far below. As though whatever was waiting unseen in the darkness down there
didn’t want to be revealed.
Not just yet.
She stopped like a cat intent on hunting a bird, then looked back at me over her shoulder and shook her head, putting one delicate finger over her lips. Sword out, she continued down.
The goat men and centaurs above us could still be heard, circling the ruin and challenging one another to go in after us. We could hear the stamp of their hooves and their madly whispered plans. They were sure they had us cornered, if the dark glee in their voices was to be believed. I had no idea
what language they spoke, but I was catching hints of German. Or what Last of Autumn called Grau Sprache. Gray speech.
She’d cursed Jabba in it. Did that mean it was the language of the enemy? I filed that away as intel in case I ever made it back to the Rangers. I’d need to develop that and find out what it meant. What it implied. But honestly… at that moment, descending into the well of darkness below the ruin of the broken old moonlit temple above, I wasn’t convinced I’d be getting out of here alive.
Especially if there was a demon down below.
Was there? Could there even be demons? Had there ever been? Yes, answered a voice inside of me and I knew it was true.
We made it down to a main floor below the temple, and I could see that it was not as totally dark and utterly mysterious as it had first seemed. Bright shafts of startlingly blue moonlight shot down into the gloom from the sections where the roof had caved in high above, once again making everything beautiful in that post-apocalyptic mall meltdown sort of way.
I wondered about this whole world and all of its stories I would never know. I wanted to know them all. Maybe that was why I was here. To know the stories of these places. To write them down. Or at least one of them. Our story. So that whatever became of the Rangers wouldn’t be like this forgotten and sunken ruin lost out here in the forest forever. Mysteries no one would ever know again. I would do my best not to let that happen. For as long as I could hang with the Rangers, I’d mark it all down in the permanent record. The deeds. The heroes. The myths and the legends. And try, in some small way, to defy the relentless destruction of time.
A thought occurred to me at that time. That I was being arrogant. That I was assuming that because I didn’t know, no one else did. That Last of Autumn, who knew of this place and knew to come to this place, couldn’t know its stories. I resolved to lament less and learn more.
There was a thick, almost throbbing silence down here in the gloomy darkness below the shattered upper levels.
She led me along a passage whispering, “The gotaur are excellent trackers. They’ll follow. This way.” Using basic linguistics, it was pretty easy to figure out who the gotaur were. The goat men. But what about the centaurs? Surely the half man, half horses couldn’t try to come down here.
As if on cue I heard the clop clop clopping of one of them at the top of
the ruined stairs. To them, the elf was a prize worth folly.
I followed, and soon we were threading our way along a narrow passage that, had I not been plus-oned by the Moon Vision, would have had me stumbling blindly and probably sending me off into a bottomless pit.
Yeah. There were pits down there, and no bottom was visible from along the ledges. It was that kind of place.
“What about that demon?” I whispered. The silence pulsed and breathed like a living thing.
She said nothing.
Soon we came out into an underground cavern that was kind of like a pit in its own way. A small waterfall fell from ground level high above, cascaded down the side of the ruined shaft, and disappeared down into the darkness way below. There was no splash. No sound of any pool down there in the deep dark. At least, not that I could hear from the ledge we found ourselves inching along.
The moonlight reflected off the falling water, providing more illumination here, and that was good because the ledge around the side of the shaft was much too narrow to be navigated comfortably in the dark. Or comfortably in the light, for that matter. I wondered if the centaurs would manage it. I could hear the hooves above making their way down through the upper levels.
We were moving toward a fissure in the wall along the side of the shaft on the far side. Well below where we were. The ledge was on a slight grade, corkscrewing downward. And the closer we got to that fissure, the more we worked our way around the shaft, the stronger was the foul stench. Which was strong enough to begin with. There was something about that fissure that didn’t feel right. That crack in the wall felt like an infection in the very being of this place. Even with the ruin of the temple and the caves below, the fissure itself was a separate thing from all of it. Separate and far worse. I knew that. I felt it. Something rotten and festering was in there, and its cold malevolence was inside my mind.
The demon.
She’d said that. Last of Autumn. In my mind.
She pointed and whispered the word once more. Aloud this time.
Pointing toward the fissure. The doom crack. “Demon.”
My plan, if anyone was asking, would have been to do the exact opposite of what we were currently doing. Which was continuing on around the ledge straight down toward the spot where the fissure in the wall waited.
No one was asking.
I flipped the selector switch on the MK18 to kill. Opting for full auto instead of semi, considering ammunition reserves and loaded magazines, or “kill sticks” as the Rangers called them, weren’t exactly surplus. Still, I intended to be hard to kill.
Be meaner than it, the sergeant major had said.
We were creeping, me making as little sound as I could, Autumn making none, closing on the ragged fissure in the cave wall. Then she stopped.
She turned to the raw rock wall and whispered something. I barely caught it in the throbbing malevolent silence. It was a Tolkien word, and I had no idea what it meant. But what happened next was pretty cool all the same.
“Málo.” That was the word. She whispered it softly. So quietly that I barely heard. As though she didn’t want to wake someone—or something— up. And then just barely, the cave wall slid inward from two sides of a silvery seam that hadn’t been there a second ago. There was a darkness beyond the gap in the wall and she looked back at me once, happiness and relief crossing her earnest features, and then we slipped through the crack in the wall.
A second later, as the centaurs and the gotaurs came down into the cave well, the hidden door closed behind us.
