To the Western Desert

Yew set out, travel pack on her back, rowan wood staff in her left hand and suspicious chalice sealed in a special artifact case in her right hand. She only swapped out her usual pants and shirt for thinner materials to wear under her cloak. She went on foot; primarily because teleporting is expensive, whether in magic usage or paying someone else. It was less strenuous for her than it would be for most; if she wanted to walk several days without resting, she could. And so she did, or else the journey to the western desert would take over a month on foot. She went alone for a similar reason.

There was some excitement in knowing that the tomb she was heading towards was technically a second set of new ruins. The ones that Dame Leah’s questing party had been trying to get to were above ground. But the ones they ended up in, by way of trickery, were deep underground. Yew hoped she would be able to track them down. She only had a vague relative location based on Dame Leah’s story, assuming the mummy acting as a fake guide hadn’t done anything to confuse their sense of place. They should be within a day’s camel ride of the first major town. She could easily walk a giant spiral around the perimeter until she found it.

The road along the way was quite peaceful, which was odd, but someone else probably just came through and exorcised all the nearby undead recently. The adventurer’s guild occasionally cleansed the common roadways; it was something of a regular chore the empire requested various guilds or nobles with knight orders to handle. Yew realized that she must be one handling that task for the areas around Oakwood most frequently, she made a mental note to ask about compensation for past efforts. The wolf year was especially messy, but she had just been passively purifying whatever she came across as she journeyed around. Yew was a firm believer that work should be compensated and effort rewarded; Ulma had taught her that. Don’t get scammed out of the fruits of your labor.

Yew observed as the ecosystem transitioned from lush temperate forests into fields of grasses and then into scrubland with sparser foliage and shorter trees over the course of two weeks, before she made it to the boarder of the desert. She hadn’t been out this way very many times in her life, but the variety of plants and animals that still managed to live amongst the arid landscape fascinated her. In a way, the creatures here felt akin to the undead; they survived so desperately in such a harsh place, clinging to life in same way the undead cling to their continued existence. They were also fairly hostile to other creatures, another commonality. But in the end, there is a stark difference between an animal fighting to survive and a being that has already failed to.

She did not like the sand as much. Yew had barely looked at it before turning around to find her boots full of it. How??? How does it do that? Sand possesses mystical abilities; it can teleport to the places on your body that it is least wanted and gather in great enough quantities to fill an hour-glass. It got to the point where Yew started traveling barefoot at night, when she didn’t need her boots to protect her from the sun. The little pebbles and rocks she sometimes stepped on weren’t the epitome of comfort, but it was marginally more tolerable than the texture of hot sweaty sand grinding against her skin.

Yew took a short break in the same border outpost that Dame Leah’s group had, mostly to take a quick sponge bath and enjoy a real bed after so many days without; she also wanted to see if she could find any guides that were secretly mummies. But of course, such things never happen when you want them or when they would be helpful and convenient. Yew doubted whatever was going on with the mummy cult was truly over; absorbed into a cup for magical energy or not, ruins weren’t easily divested of power. Even if a whole horde was gone, more may have risen by now. Tombs were like that, anywhere that corpses are relatively well preserved, such as cool and dry underground chambers, tended to be hotbeds of undead activity. Honestly it was more surprising that an incident like this hadn’t happened sooner.

Although, for all Yew knew, it had. The western desert and its surrounding territories had their own academy and college of ancient studies. It was entirely possible that the records hadn’t been read, or written, or forwarded. The two colleges were natural rivals, all the empire’s colleges were to some extent. The competitive state of academia made it so, but negligence was equally likely; it may be so common that they don’t think it’s worth mentioning. For Yew, it was equivalent to reporting the presence of skeletons in a ruins; she still included it, for record keeping’s sake, but she never elaborated.

Whatever the reason, she would make sure to properly investigate. If nothing else, then at least why a tomb so close to a settlement had never been discovered before. Yew knew the desert wasn’t a place that most could survive casually wandering around in the way she could, but the people that lived there had to be well adapted after so many generations. A trip out in any direction for a day shouldn’t have been undoable, even for a non desert-dweller. Yew fell asleep to thoughts of sand-sunken ruins and mummies guarding rooms of treasure.

***

Opuntia is a bustling town, vibrant and colorful. You can hardly walk a few feet without seeing something painted in red. Yew supposed that was the economic power of the carmine industry that was the main work of the area. The cultivation of the insects used to create rouge and carmine powder was clearly going well for them. Briefly, Yew wondered about the existence of undead insects; she had never heard of nor seen such a thing, but if something as small as that were undead would you really notice. Like so many small things, she suspected it wouldn’t be thought about unless it made a nuisance of itself.

Up until she entered the bright red town, Yew had been camouflaging unexpected well in the sandy environment with her beige cloak. There were so many people in colorful clothes that she stood out for how plainly she was dressed in comparison. Two separate people had already told her where the local inn was, unprompted. While she usually preferred to travel inconspicuously, at least it was helpful. Rumors about the woman in the beige ratty cloak carrying a shepherd’s hook hadn’t quite made it far enough out this way yet for anyone to stop her in the streets and chat. It was, perhaps, the most she ever felt a mere tourist in a long time.

Yew spent only enough time in Opuntia to drop her excess luggage in a room until she got back. In her experience, the discomfort of being without a few changes of clothing for a few days was less than the hassle of replacing them if they were lost or otherwise destroyed during a fight. She only needed, food, water, and her exorcism tools anyway. And really, she didn’t have to carry any food or water either if she didn’t want to; the desert had plenty of plants and animals, she wasn’t limited by what only a fully living person could eat. She was more akin to a carrion bird in that way, but she had developed a taste for things that don’t taste of death and decay in her many years of living. She had received an odd look as she left the town, however, with few supplies and no camel and walking randomly into the desert.

She thought they might stop her, but maybe she looked confident enough that they believed she knew what she was doing.

Either way, she spent a full day walking in the approximate direction the tomb should be in. Then she spent another three days zig-zagging her way back toward Opuntia before she found a cave that wasn’t actually a cave. It was intriguing how insular the magical energy coming from it was, she had almost overlooked it. If not for the fact that she had gone into every nook and cranny she found the past few days, looking for the ruins, she may not have found felt it at all. The way it was set up, it was all focused inward in such a way that you had to be touching or practically on top of it to feel it. It was a closed-loop matrix! Such an exciting application of runic magic! Yew wished she were here for the runes and ruins themselves, instead of an artifact.

Even so, she couldn’t keep herself from running her hands along the walls as she descended the stairs. She only really studied the runes used in the western desert in theory and isolation. She knew what all the different components were, but that wasn’t the same as the feeling created by combining multiple together. The cultural habits and logic of the combinations and layering were also beyond the limits of what she could imagine on her own. There’s an intuition to it that can’t be captured by descriptions in records and books and papers and lectures. Not one that is easily put into words, anyway.

These runes were preservative and protective. There were others that were layered together to cause conflicting effects, resulting in a spell that confused the mind; it was similar to how seasickness works, sending incongruent information to the ears and eyes that cause nausea and dizziness. She activated the rune that caused the magical lights to turn on, rather than the ones that lit the torches. Lines of light raced in ornate geometric patterns down the center of the ceiling and at the boarder between wall and staircase. They accompanied her all the way down to the antechamber, where Yew faced the three doors framed by their respective murals.

There was nothing inherently wrong with them, but they gave her a bad feeling all the same. She had a terrible track record with ruins and well preserved wall décor, after all.