FOUR
The evening drew in quickly, bringing with it a chilled wind that whipped at the sides of their tents and had them fearing for the longevity of the fire.
It had also brought a solemn energy throughout the group when Amelia and Silas had explained they had discovered the temple, but nothing of more interest.
The junior scholars had traversed the outskirts of the ruins, searching for any signs of the lost civilisation, returning with some more weathered glyphs to translate.
They were two days in to their seven-day excavation, and in the eyes of the group at large, there was nothing to show for it quite yet.
What they didn’t know was that in Silas’ tent, lay two daggers forged from the powerful Monoliths, a first in history that they knew of. They also didn’t know that both of their lead scholars had been injured by the daggers.
It set her teeth on edge, being dishonest, especially to someone she respected as much as Halpert.
Dinner was a stilted affair, the air tinged with anxiety at the approaching nightfall, the threat of midnight looming. The wind picked up, buffeting at their clothes, whipping Amelia’s hair around her.
Somara produced a notebook and started to converse with Tully, a fellow junior scholar, about the runes they had discovered.
“I’ve translated a few, I think,” she said in a hushed voice.
Tully lay her plate down and said something in response that Amelia didn’t quite catch.
Reynolds chimed in, his voice carrying more clearly over towards where Amelia sat. “I agree, they’re definitely depicting the skin-runing of their people.”
Amelia stopped chewing, eyes widening as she stared at the junior scholars across the fire.
“What did you just say?” she asked.
They all looked to her.
“Oh, Dr. Winslow,” Somara said, biting at her lip anxiously and holding up her notebook. “We’ve been trying to transcribe the glyphs we discovered today, and we think they’re signifying that the Gemino tribe possibly used runes on their subjects to imbue them with magic.”
“Sick,” Tully said, her eyes wide not with disgust, but with fascination.
Amelia swallowed, face scrunching into a small scowl.
It was Silas who spoke next. “Well, that certainly tells us a lot about this tribe.”
She turned to him. “What do you mean?”
He glanced at her, fork pausing to hover above his plate. “Perhaps their morals were a tad misplaced, if they’re willing to do something so heinous.”
“They were testing the limits of magic…” Somara said, trailing off uncertainly when everyone looked to her, “…I think. One of the final glyphs possibly depicted trials and limitations. They might not have understood the ramifications at the time.”
“They did live thousands of years ago,” Reynolds chimed in. “A long time before using magical runes on humans was outlawed.”
“Perhaps they led the way,” Silas said with a little laugh that held no real humour, “so we could know better.”
Amelia forced her gaze back to her plate, uncertain what to say.
“Don’t mages still do it?” asked Somara, tone curious.
It was Halpert who responded, a wariness in his tone that kept Amelia’s eyes glued downwards, unable to look up.
“Mages are part of the very few born with the ability to wield magic. No one knows why, they simply are. Runing others who are not born to take in and manipulate magic is reckless and inhumane. The magic can destroy them, and the carved skin will never heal. The lingering wounds themselves have killed many.”
Amelia set her plate down, a hollowness in her stomach.
The cut on her palm burned and she closed her eyes, feeling suddenly ill. Her whole body began to itch with the discomfort. She stood abruptly and left the others to seek refuge inside her tent.
She was feeling panicked, wondering at what she had gotten herself into.
After a few moments of restless pacing, she sat alone in her tent and stared down at the clean slice on her palm.
There were many fanatics across the land that sought out any unusual signs or sources of magic. Once word of the daggers got out, it would garner a lot of interest, and not all of it would be positive.
Should there be any lingering magical impact within Amelia or Silas…well they, too, would become an oddity of interest, and she could only imagine what some of those fanatics might want from them.
If it didn’t kill her first, that is.
Which was a very real possibility.
Everything she knew of working directly with Monolith shards was that the magic was too potent to be handled by mortals. Every attempt in their history had failed with catastrophic outcome.
Yet, Amelia felt relatively normal, beyond the initial surge of magic she had felt. The wound had throbbed unusually once or twice, but otherwise it looked like any normal cut on her hand.
A shuffle of movement at the entrance to her tent had her eyes finally raising, finding Silas standing there, holding a flap open and looking at her.
Amelia turned her hand over and folded them into her lap.
“How are you feeling?” he asked in a low voice.
She shrugged one shoulder. “I haven’t noticed much. You?”
“Same,” Silas said, dropping the door shut and stepping inside.
He pulled his pack from his shoulders and knelt at the foot of her bedroll, opening it. He pulled out two small, wrapped bundles and lay them between where Amelia and Silas sat.
They both stared down at the daggers hidden by layers of fabric.
“I was thinking about what you said,” Amelia started slowly, “about what might happen if the wrong people become aware of these.”
Silas glanced up at her. “Yeah?”
“And I think we should keep them hidden, somewhere safe while we research them.”
He nodded. “Agreed, and I’ve also been thinking—”
“Well, that’s dangerous,” she said before she could help herself.
Silas paused to stare at her, unimpressed. Amelia bit at the inside of her lip and smiled with a semblance of apology.
“I was considering that they might be more threatening to us if kept together. I think we should keep them separate from one another.”
Amelia reared back slightly at the suggestion. “What? We don’t even know what they do yet. Keeping them apart might be more dangerous.”
“Or we could be preventing something disastrous. Not to mention if someone tries to steal one, at least they wouldn’t have both.”
Amelia considered his words before responding. “The impact of separating them could be worse. I don’t think we can make any decisions on that until we find out more.”
“Well, who’s supposed to keep both hidden, hm?” Silas asked. “You or me? You would really trust me with both blades?”
She tilted her head to the side with a cynical look. “Am I supposed to think you would trust me with both?”
He smirked at her. “Not the point.”
Amelia huffed and stood, stretching out her legs before she moved over to her small table with the few books she had on hand.
Every one of the books she knew well and had never come across anything like the daggers.
She would need to schedule time in the library of the Lux Spire.
If anywhere had the answers, it was in the enormous library nestled in the bowels of the prestigious university.
She heard Silas shifting and then he was standing next to her, hands coming into view as he placed the wrapped daggers on the table in front of her small pile of books.
“We don’t yet understand what we’re dealing with,” he said, “and I believe that splitting them is the safest option, one with you, and one with me.”
“The safest option?” Amelia gritted out. “I think the safest option would have been to not bloody touch them in the first place, but we clearly failed at that.”
“Yes, well, there’s no changing that,” Silas said before he picked up one of the daggers and held it carefully, “but we can be meticulous in how we choose to deal with it from here forwards.”
Amelia turned her body to face him, her eyes falling to the dagger in his hand, wrapped in his shirt. “Yet you still handle it like it’s not radiating ancient magic.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to be anymore.”
She frowned, looking down to the blade he had left on her table. He was right. The glow that had exuded from both was now gone and the faint thrumming of magic they had both been able to feel the moment they had entered the temple seemed snuffed out. She trembled slightly at what they had done.
Amelia swallowed. “For all we know, something might happen at midnight. The earthquake last night…and having these with us now, we don’t know what we might have just unleashed on ourselves.”
He fell silent at that, the unspoken threat of midnight hanging in the air between them.
The wind whistled menacingly outside, pulling the canvas of her tent walls taut over and over, the noise distracting.
After a beat, Silas moved away, taking the dagger with him.
“I’ll take this one. We should get some rest.”
“Yeah,” she nodded, only because there was nothing else to say. Absently, she brushed at the necklace sitting in the centre of her chest and felt the warmth of it. Amelia looked down at it, noting the swirling tempest on the Stormglass. She sighed. “It looks like there’s a storm coming.”
Silas was at the entrance to her tent and paused to glance back at her, eyes questioning.
He saw what she held and tilted his head to the side, and she readied for his lecture on how unlikely the accuracy of the magical trinket was in the middle of the Rift.
Instead, all he said was, “you are the storm, Winslow.”
It was a vain effort, but Amelia still pulled out her Wayglass, and tried to call her closest friend. She spoke clearly into the Wayglass, hoping it would connect to the one she had all the way in East Town. But the glass merely rippled before returning to its mundane reflective surface.