Three weeks scavenging the smoldering ruins of Ellakar proved to Raya that there were plenty of bandits prowling the defenceless still—she once had to hide in a roofless, ash-strewn shoe shop in order to listen to them thieving from, raping, and then killing refugees outside. Between Benn, Dondar, and she… there was nothing they could do but wait until they were safe again. It was worse than any nightmare Raya could imagine; when they heard the bandits stroll off down the street, she charged out to see if anyone had survived and needed help. No one had.
Despite it, the situation at the Old Wall, where they slept, improved gradually. A group of guards joined them a few days after that horrible incident in the cobbler’s, and a professional sellsword kept watch over the makeshift inn free of charge. Yogara, a bald white man with scars and a wrinkly beard, told Dondar: “Don’t take a girl out there, fool. Don’t go out at all.”
But each day, Raya dragged Benn and Dondar out to search the ashes for hope and answers. They had a pattern to cover ground without missing anything—when they came across friendly survivors, they sent them in search of the Old Wall Inn. Gradually, their search brought them closer and closer to the rocky slope of Mount Lukar.
There, they found the scattered remnants of one of Ellakar’s outer walls. The ruptured rock of the mountain lands was forced upward into a slope by the curve of the small volcanic mountain, tossing the wall down into the edge of the town. Some sections of it still hung at precarious angles from the cooling molten stone. The smoke was hard to walk through, but Raya led her comrades onward anyway, as close as they could.
“There’s not going to be anything more,” Dondar said. “This is the edge of town, and on the volcanic side. The refugees would have gone the opposite way.”
Benn coughed and waved a hand in front of his face to clear the ash. “We’re not staying in Ellakar for refugees. Hemsten told us to find out what happened.”
“A volcano burned up the city,” the guard snorted, slashing his sheathed sword through a mound of ash and finding a singed body there. There were bodies everywhere, it seemed. “Maybe magicians caused it. Maybe not. Nothing all this ash is going to tell us.”
Raya didn’t join their argument. She was staying, and she knew Benn at least would stay with her. They reached the end of a street to find only scattered rocks and debris blocking their way, and the broken wall looming over it. They’d have to turn back and navigate around another city block.
“What’s that?” Benn asked. He pointed up the pile of rubble toward the wall. There was a big stone block with a singed red cloth dangling from it. A body lay on top of the crooked, rock, unmoving. What caught Raya’s eye was the way the corpse’s arm seemed to be pointing at the wall, nearly out of sight from their vantage.
Dondar caught Raya’s arm as she started to stride toward it. “Where are you going?”
“To see,” Raya said.
“You’ll break your leg, or worse,” Dondar said.
Raya shook her head. “I spend all my days climbing hills and trees. I’ll be fine.” She pulled out of his grasp and began stepping, cautiously, from boulder to broken wall to sand mound to uprooted tree. She was panting for breath before long, and paused after one slip to nurse a nasty scrape she had earned on broken wood. By the time she reached the shadowing wall at the top of the debris hill, she was sporting a dozen scrapes and bruises and Benn had called out to her to come back at least once.
At the top of the rubble, she found a stone slab on its side, with a red cloth across it, tattered by wind and sand. A page of parchment was caught between a few of the rocks that rested on top of the slab, and she pulled it out. She couldn’t make it out any of the foreign writing on it, so she tucked it into her belt.
“What’s up there?” Dondar called.
Raya shrugged. “I don’t know,” she returned, quieter than his shout. She looked at the dead body, scorched by fire. It didn’t appear to be the cause of death, but she couldn’t find any visible wounds on him. That’s when she realized that his outstretched hand held a knife, the blade of which had etched rough words into the stone of the wall. The white scratch marks were hard to read, but she managed anyway. “We have sinned—” read the first line. Below it were two named, each on their own level, like a list. “Nalisa Orr / Axar / I” The I seemed to refer to the start of another name, but it could have just been the last scratch of the man’s strength, dragging down the wall.
She memorized the two names before gradually making her descent down the pile.
“What was up there?” Benn asked, while Dondar stood nearby, shaking his head at their antics.
Raya pulled out the strange page with its foreign text. “This,” she said. “And someone scrawled a note against the stone.” She told them what it said, and shrugged. “I don’t know what to make of it…”
“We should bring this to the Archive in Vagren,” Benn said, examining the gibberish parchment. His chin had grown scruffy during the last few weeks, but he looked like a book-reader as he searched the strange document for any info he could make out.
“Lotha said magicians were behind this, right?” Dondar asked, stepping closer to the other two. “We should tell her those two names, demand answers!”
Raya held up her hand. “We don’t know if Lotha had anything to do with it, Dondar. I think Benn is right. We’ll figure out what we can before bringing it to anyone else.”
Dondar shrugged. “I’ve some questions for her, either way,” he said. “But I’ll back any plan that gets us out of this ash.” He put his hand on his sword and led the way back through the ashen fog.
Raya followed, while Benn passed her back the page. Her friend hurried up to Dondar and asked, “You realize Lotha saved your life right?”
Dondar threw up one hand. “Hardly!” he laughed. “I’ve been hurt much worse than I was.”
Raya repeated the names she had read in her head. We have sinned—Nalisa Orr, Axar… She hoped this was enough to help Hemsten rest at ease, but that wasn’t the only reason she was doing it. Ellakar had been destroyed and many of its people suffered still. Raya wasn’t sure if she owed them anything, but she would give everything she could to help them. They would soon set out for Vagren once more, and maybe eventually, home.