Yew, and Returning to the Beginning [4/6]

They were here at last, in the fields that may have been her birth, or her resurrection, or something else entirely. The ruins sprawling out across the field were substantially more vast than she remembered. The experience she had gained in all the years since lead her to suspect these ruins had once been a small castle or fort. The tower stood there, where she had once plunged from one of its windows. There was only one still standing tall enough to be the one she fell from, so at least their search area was manageable. Yew had been a bit concerned they’d have to overturn every last inch of the place.

They might still, but here’s to hoping.

It was peculiar, how well the ruins seemed to fit into a landscape they hadn’t been apart of a week ago. It was as if they’d always been there, standing as proudly as they could with what they had left. As ruins go, they were well preserved. The buildings, walls, and roofs were mostly intact at a glance; not that Yew was an expert, but her eyes work.

She stood at the edge of the forest with Ulma, taking it all in.

The original plan was to wait a day and go with a team tomorrow, but Yew couldn’t wait. What if the ruins vanished again before then and she had to wait another ten years? How many of her first memories would remain to guide her search, by then? She wished preservation runes worked on memory. Sure, she could write the details down in a journal, and had, but a journal couldn’t hold onto a smell for her. It couldn’t hold a sound, or a song, or any other thing she was currently feeling and experiencing with her entire being. In this singular moment, there was just her and her senses. So many little things she had forgotten, and would forget again.

The color of the stones, a brilliant white in the sun, streaked with darker grays. The shape of the gutters, square and rounded. The window with the ominous rusty streaks leaking down from its sill; which, come to think of it, was probably her blood. She wouldn’t have remembered that at all, probably hadn’t cared to notice it the first time she was there. In those three months, all she had cared about was eating and the room with the song. Even now, those were the strongest recollections she had of the place.

“Wow, I know what past records have said about this place, but it really does feel like it was built only a century ago instead of ten,” Ulma commented beside her, arm above her head to block the glare of the sun. It was a lovely day to go investigating old ruins. Despite how old they should be, the lack of degradation caused many to speculate that when the ruins vanish they are actually inside a pocket dimension or somehow intangible for several years at a time. Protected from the whims of astrological phenomena, they are in a much better state than ruins of a comparable age. Many of those buildings had a pitiful fraction of the walls that this one has, were often partially or mostly buried, and frequently overtaken by nature.

One of the ruins commonly shown to new students was like that; they called them the Big Tree ruins for the massive cypress tree that had grown up in the center of them and tangled much of it up in its roots and branches. It was beginner friendly despite that, because being divested of its magic as it was, it was utterly unappealing to roaming undead. It also wasn’t a place where they would easily spawn, either. Unlike that place, which was more a giant tree in a pile of rubble, these ruins brimmed with magical energy.

There was so much of it that Yew wondered how or why she was seemingly the only undead to come of it. Her, and the animals, wandering around this massive place all alone. Perhaps there were no battlefields nearby, or graves; rare though it was, it seemed like some places had avoided the worst of the pre-unification wars. Maybe this castle was abandoned before all that.

Ulma placed a hand on her back and shoved her forward encouragingly when Yew remained locked in place. Ulma could always tell when she was avoiding taking action by ruminating instead. Yew closed her eyes, breathing in and out deeply a few times. This was it. The answers she wanted could be in there. About who she was, what she was, and what happened to her. She looked over at Ulma, eyes suddenly glassy and unsure; Ulma just grinned at her, self assured to the last. You can do this, Yew, was written in her stance and face.

Placing one foot after the other, Yew walked forward through the floppy grasses and scattered wild flowers. She squeezed the staff in her hand for additional comfort as they ducked inside the first doorway they found. The second she was inside, it was like she had been possessed. Her body moved on its own, taking her down one hallway after the next without faltering; all the way until she found herself in broad interior room. The ceiling here was double high, arching ever upwards. She hadn’t noticed before, but there was an elaborate mosaic inlaid that looked like fiery swirls of yellow, orange, and white set into the night sky. It was the image you would expect to see if the stars were drawn by someone that had only ever read or heard descriptions of stars. Beautiful balls of fire, high in the distant and endlessly dark blue sky.

This was the music room, where Yew had learned the song. It came to her subconsciously, notes slipping out in gentle succession from her lips. There were carved boarders around the mosaic to create the illusion that they were in an open courtyard instead of an enclosed space. Yew walked straight to the wall where the song rune used to be. She had studied runic magic for so many years, she now knew, in part because of this. She placed her hand on the wall, only to realize it was too high up; she had grown much taller in the years since. She slid her fingertips slightly down the wall to where the echo of the rune should be. She could feel it now, with all her training.

It was completely drained, with no one around to refill the reserve that powered it. Yew had played the song so many times back then that it ran all the way out. But if she was careful, and she was, she could wind the spiral reserve back up and get it to play again. When she finished, the notes came spilling from the stones. Back then, she hadn’t been looking up enough to notice that the tiles on the ceiling were slowly circling around in a mimicry of orbit. The notes of the song lit up upon the wall too, written in an ancient notation method. Even so, she could tell by how they followed the rhythm that they must be the musical score the rune was playing.

It was likely the first and most significant time when Yew had ever wondered about the purpose of any given place in a ruins. To her, this was a nursery, but it was too large to have been that when it was built. Nothing else suggested what its purpose could be to her untrained eyes. She lingered there a while with Ulma, listening to her song play after so many years of only memories to go off of. She was relieved, when it cycled back to the start, that she hadn’t forgotten any of it. With her song continuing on it the back of her mind, they walked on to check out the other rooms.

There were more mosaics, on walls and floors too, than she knew. They could hardly walk a single hallway without finding another. Usually, they depicted some imagery related to the sky at different times of day and different patterns of weather. Within the largest chamber they found, there was one depicting a brilliant sunset on a western facing wall. It contained every color she had ever seen in a sunset in the last ten years of living. She absently noted that all the mosaics were in mint condition, undamaged and unfaded. Even in the rooms where the walls were chipping and collapsing under their own weight, the mosaics remained unaffected, if a bit dusty. The bulk of magic present was focused on the preservation of those colorful tiles; so much so that the walls were probably only benefiting passively from being in proximity to them.

When she inspected the matrices, the actual walls had little to no preservation spells directly on or for them. It was as if this whole place existed just for those mosaics of the sky. Made doubly weird, by the apparent lack of windows; there were exceptionally few, seemingly only enough for the minimum airflow required to keep people alive. It was strange to her now, after becoming accustomed to buildings that were full of windows and natural light.

They didn’t find a path that lead up the tower amongst these walls, opting to go back outside and try a more direct attempt. If there weren’t any doors or stairs, perhaps they would just try climbing the tower and go through the window. Although, she might be too big to fit through it now, it was too far to guess accurately.

They had lost time inside the ruins, which tends to happen in places without windows or natural light. They had wandered around those inner halls, that shrine to the sky, for hours. It was easy to be distracted by the mosaics and the fascinating runes that were preserving them. They were unlike any she had seen before; admittedly, she was a newbie researcher and hadn’t seen every rune ever written, but she knew a decent amount. The shapes of the runes were so uniform it was like they hadn’t been inscribed by mortal hands at all, she had never seen anything so complicated and yet completely vacant of any natural deviations expected from handwritten symbols.

Yew and Ulma traced the whole perimeter of the tallest tower. Thinking of the sky theming they had seen inside, Ulma observed that it was the eastern tower that stood the tallest in the direction of the sun. In fact, the other towers hadn’t fallen apart, they were simply never built as tall as the eastern tower to begin with. Ulma stopped, placing a hand to a stone marked with a sun sigil. The stones rumbled and parted before them, allowing entry. Ulma paused a moment to celebrate, smiling victoriously at the ruins, as if she had uncovered all their secrets. Yew just shook her head at her sister’s antics.

They entered the dark tower, and the hidden doorway snapped shut behind them.