Chapter 37 #2
Casting one last nerve-wracking glance at the pool below, Alex swallowed and thrust herself forward as she scurried from the ramp onto the ledge.
Thankfully, the ledge was nowhere near as narrow as it seemed from a distance, and her breath exited her all at once in a sigh of relief as she took in her surroundings.
From above, everything was laid out in an almost magical fashion.
Maintaining a safe distance from the edge, she looked down, her eyes skimming over the view below.
Naturally, she still couldn’t quite see over the wall, but she hadn’t expected to since the ledge sat at roughly the same height.
Her eyes skimmed along the wall and down to the stretch of bright blue water.
Like many bodies of water within the deep caverns, the mico-organisms present made it glow a pale icy blue.
She would have assumed that it was just as frigid as the cave air, except that she saw what appeared to be faint trails of steam rising off the surface of the pool and billowing up thicker where the descending water met it.
That looked like signs of heat if she wasn’t mistaken.
“Fuck. What I wouldn’t give for a proper bath.
” The pool within the royal chamber wasn’t bad.
It was warm enough. But it wasn’t a nice hot bath either.
The rising steam looked so inviting that she momentarily struggled to ignore her desire to be fully submerged within it before refocusing and forcing the analytic part of her brain to the fore.
“I wonder what the source of the heat is? And why have this ledge overlooking it?”
It all seemed purposefully scenic and atmospheric rather than just a simple utilitarian disposal of water.
“Curious.”
Slowly turning in place, Alex turned her attention to the ledge itself.
The ledge itself appeared rather unremarkable, except that there was a table on the far side beside the wall with several faded cushions arranged in front of it and a handful of objects laid out intentionally across its surface.
It was clear that someone had once sat there—but to what purpose?
Although the table sat facing the edge a bit closer than she liked, and there was a lingering sourness that clung to the air the closer she got, Alex didn’t hesitate to approach it for a better look.
And why not, since she was already up there?
Seeing anything there at all, compared to the relative emptiness of the palace, was intriguing.
It was like someone had been interrupted and left it abandoned, perhaps with intention of returning.
It was the only sign that she’d yet to see of a living presence that once inhabited the elder palace.
The one place in the elder palace that was void of complete emptiness.
Her heart beating with excitement, she drew closer to the side of the table but paused in surprise.
Her eyebrows rose as she scrutinized the items spread across it.
This was no ancient scribbling that had been left abandoned.
A small, squat pot and the writing stylus preferred by the Seshanamitesh were both covered with a fine layer of dust that spoke of only a few years passing rather than generations.
Even the bowls that sat opposite them on the long table were crusted with a layer of whatever had rotted and decomposed in them, as if a meal had been abandoned there not too long ago.
Alex ran a finger along the edge of one bowl, noting that it too only had a light layer of dust on its surface, but it was the scrolls tucked against the wall that captivated her attention.
She didn’t know what she expected to glean from it.
She didn’t understand Seshanamitesh characters, and without a working comm she had no hope of even attempting to decipher it.
And yet, when she unrolled it, there was something about the painted image within that reached far beyond the script that filled the bottom half.
The image of a female Seshanamitesh entwined with a male Uralial was nearly as unmistakable as their intimate embrace, as they seemed to be caught in a moment of sensual frenzy that she recognized all too well.
Despite the sensual nature of their embrace, the way their faces were turned toward each other captured a longing that made her swallow thickly with emotion, even as it made her mind whirl in confusion.
It didn’t make sense. Seshanamitesh purposely segregated themselves from Uralial, and not peacefully from the sound of it, from what Bousoa said.
The sort of relationship illustrated on the scroll would have been expressly prohibited.
True, there were known instances of Seshanamitesh hunters crossing the boundary to mate in secret with Uralial females—such as the case with Ehsash’s parents—a female Seshanamitesh taking up with an Uralial male would have been explicitly taboo if not illegal.
Alex shook her head in wonder at the sheer daring of whoever had left the scroll behind. “Who do you belong to?” she whispered. “And what story do you tell?”
If only it could speak and just tell her without keeping its secrets contained within its script.
“I guess I’m now going to have to pester Therxian into teaching me to read if we are doing this mates thing,” she muttered, her mouth curling despite the note of complaint in her words.
She wouldn’t admit aloud that she was looking forward to the challenge of the new life she was embarking on.
A strange trajectory in life path for a pilot and mechanic, but it brought a feeling of excitement and of real purpose that she didn’t dislike.
For now, she would just have to ask her mate to help her decipher it.
Smiling to herself, she rolled the scroll back up and tucked it under her arm in preparation for the nerve-racking descent back down from the ledge.
Somehow, the ramp was ten times worse going down than it was going up, but it didn’t stop her from hurrying around to explore the other side of the wall once she was once more on level ground.
Perhaps a little too eager, since she came dangerously close to the lip of a massive pit that opened before her.
Thankfully, this time there was a large railing that offered some kind of a barricade that offered sufficient warning that she was able to put on the brakes in time to come to a stop just behind it.
Eyes wide, Alex leaned forward against the railing and peered down into the pit.
From what she could tell, it wasn’t just a pit but a bottomless exit tunnel into which the levee of the wall released small, regulated streams of water in a ceaseless flow from the pool.
Lips pursing, she whistled quietly to herself.
This was it. It was exactly what she had thought.
Water was provided from some point above and traveled through the palace before flowing out of it.
It was fabulous. Why would they have ever abandoned it?
She studied the depth for several long minutes, listening to the quiet echo of the water dispersing through it.
She could see why the wall was high enough to block off the view of that side of the chamber.
As fascinating as it was, it certainly didn’t have the cultivated ambiance the other side possessed.
“Damn, that’s some drop,” she observed.
“That it is,” a familiar voice hissed behind her. “But my question would be why my mate is hanging dangerously over it instead of in the queen’s nest where I left her?”