The Ring in the Dereliction

The Ring in the Dereliction

On their second passage through Karvok, Blena’s mother took one look at the marsh stains and quietly fetched another pair of trousers for Kaelen.

Panarf did not ask whether they still meant to go north.

He asked how much preparation they had, how they would divide it and where they would turn back if delayed.

Kaelen showed him the marked route.

Blena let him answer.

At the northern watch, they left their gulathers in a stone-walled enclosure beside a stream. Kaelen’s mount immediately began eating the rope by which it had been tied.

“Try to remain available,” he told it.

The gulather continued chewing.

Beyond the watch, the land climbed towards the Saviour Mountains.

The first day was almost beautiful.

Cold water ran between clean stones. Wind moved through pines. Blena found berries beside the path and pointed out tracks where a small herd had crossed before dawn.

Kaelen began to wonder whether the maps made the country seem worse than it was.

Then she knelt beside an overturned tree.

Its upper branches still carried green needles.

Underneath, the roots were black.

She broke the end from one with a stone.

The darkness continued through the wood.

Kaelen looked at the surrounding forest. Nothing above the ground appeared wrong.

“How many?”

Blena stood.

“We cannot pull them all up to find out.”

They took their next dose beside the stream.

Blena swallowed, shut her eyes and sat very still.

Kaelen waited.

“One day,” she said, “I am going to visit a healer who gives me something pleasant.”

“Alster would have been interested in Mereth’s work.”

“Alster would have apologised before feeding it to me.”

They packed the pot and went on.

• • •

The moss changed on the second day.

It grew in purple-grey patches among the roots, thickest on the northern sides of stones. From a distance it resembled frost in shadow. Close up, its fine branching tips moved when no wind touched them.

Blena steered them around it.

An insect struck Kaelen’s cheek.

He brushed it away.

It flew a short distance, turned and struck him again.

He stopped.

The creature landed on his sleeve. Its wings opened and closed unevenly. After a moment it began walking in a tight circle.

Blena watched another doing the same thing on a rock.

“Leave it.”

He lowered his arm beside a branch and let the insect climb off.

They camped that evening within a crooked outcrop of pale crystal. The plants growing between the stones were stunted but still green.

Beyond the outcrop, the moss spread almost to the edge.

Kaelen sat with Ressa’s map across his knees.

Blena checked the soles of her boots.

“Well?”

“The boundary came sooner on the eastern slope.”

“I noticed.”

“But farther back where we crossed the exposed seam.”

“You noticed that too.”

He traced two lines with his finger.

“The crystal changes where it settles.”

“Like Ressa’s tests.”

“Yes.”

Across the clearing, something crackled.

Both looked up.

A faint blue shimmer passed through the exposed crystal. Beyond it, the purple moss lifted and slowly subsided.

Kaelen felt a pressure behind his eyes.

It lasted only a breath.

Blena was already beside him.

“What happened?”

“Did you feel that?”

She nodded.

They waited.

No second pulse came.

Kaelen made a mark on the map.

Blena held out the paste.

“Record that after this.”

“It is not time yet.”

“Then record how long until it is. I want something useful to look forward to.”

• • •

By the third day, the trees were leaking.

Dark beads gathered in splits along their bark. Some had hardened into long black ridges. Others remained wet, descending so slowly Kaelen could see their movement only by looking away and looking back.

The smell beneath the branches was sweet and spoiled.

Blena used her knife to shift a fallen limb out of their path, taking care to keep the blade away from the wet bark.

Kaelen stopped behind her.

A curved line of pale stone crossed the slope.

Beyond it, every tree bore the dark streaks.

He climbed onto a boulder.

“Blena.”

“What?”

“Come up.”

She joined him.

From the higher ground, they could see the damaged forest bending west around the valley. Farther out lay the purple-grey growth. Beyond that, the treetops were green.

The bands curved together.

“Waves,” Kaelen said.

“You said that in Karvok.”

“I had ink in Karvok.”

He followed the curve towards the distant mountains.

“The ground changes. The trees change. The distance between the worst patches keeps returning to something close to the same interval.”

“What does that tell you?”

“That whatever is doing this repeats. It builds, releases, builds again.”

As if answering, a dull vibration travelled through the stone beneath their boots.

Blena gripped his arm.

This time the pressure reached his teeth.

Across the valley, faint light moved beneath the soil.

It ran along a buried line, appeared briefly where a stream had cut the hillside and vanished under the roots.

Kaelen counted his breaths until it passed.

Then he climbed down.

“We should move.”

Blena did not argue.

• • •

The creature met them on the fourth morning.

At first Kaelen took it for a lowland moonstalker that had somehow strayed beyond the watch.

It stood between the trees with its head lowered.

Then it moved.

One of its four legs was much shorter than the others. A second bent outward at a swollen joint. Bare patches interrupted its coat, showing dark skin stretched too tightly over the ribs.

Blena stepped in front of Kaelen.

“Stay behind me.”

The animal approached.

It showed none of the ordinary hesitation of a grazing creature facing people. Its ears did not turn towards Blena’s voice when she shouted. It continued forward with slow, uneven steps.

A thread of dark moisture hung from its mouth.

Blena struck her sword against the rim of her shield.

The sound cracked through the trees.

The moonstalker did not stop.

Kaelen moved sideways with her towards a shallow stream.

“Water?”

“Lets try it but don’t get your hopes up.”

He remembered Panarf’s story about the snowpyma.

They crossed backwards, boots slipping among the stones.

The creature reached the bank.

Its head lowered until its mouth almost touched the moving water.

For a moment it remained there.

Then one front foot entered the stream.

Blena raised her shield.

The animal jerked away so sharply that its shortened leg folded beneath it. It fell, struggled upright and stood trembling on the bank.

“Keep moving,” she said.

They did.

Kaelen looked back once.

The moonstalker remained beside the water.

Farther between the trees, two smaller shapes had appeared.

They were watching too.

• • •

That night, Blena caught him staring into the dark.

“What?”

“I thought I heard a boat bell.”

They were high above the nearest navigable water.

She put down the strap she was repairing.

“Just once?”

“Yes.”

“Do you hear it now?”

He listened.

“No.”

She came to sit opposite him.

“What is my father’s name?”

“Panarf.”

“Where is Alster?”

“Looking for his brother in Virielian Bloomlands.”

“What did you catch in Bordrad?”

“A root.”

Her mouth moved.

“What else?”

“A brown frog. Several useful green ones. Something I would prefer not to discuss beneath my knee.”

She nodded.

Kaelen looked at her hands.

“Have you heard anything?”

“No.”

“You hesitated.”

“I was deciding whether to tell you I keep expecting insects.”

He listened again.

The silence beyond their shelter seemed to draw closer.

There had been fewer insects all afternoon. He had welcomed it without thinking.

Now he could not hear one.

Blena passed him the measured spoon of Mereth’s reduction.

They ate the paste without complaining.

Afterwards he said, “In the marsh, you looked happy.”

“I was catching frogs.”

“I noticed.”

She turned the spoon between her fingers. “I think we can do this.”

“Now you think we can, what about before we left?”

“It seemed achievable but now that we are here I think it will be as easy as catching frogs.”

“It was extremely difficult to catch all those frogs. Not to mention the unplanned bloodsucking repercussions.”

“You know what I mean.”

Kaelen paused and looked at Blena whose uncertain face was reflecting in the waving light of the fire. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

• • •

By the sixth day, even the damaged trees had thinned away.

Their trunks stood pale and split over bare ground. Nothing grew beneath them. There was no leaf litter softening their steps, only grey soil and flakes of bark that broke without much sound.

The wind still moved.

Without leaves or reeds to catch it, Kaelen felt it more than he heard it.

They crossed a ridge shortly before midday.

Beyond lay a shallow basin.

At its centre stood the remains of a rectangular structure.

“Well I just knew it. There was a tower in the center of all this dereliction.”

Most of the stone from the ancient walls had fallen.

Three jagged walls remained above a field of pale blocks. A staircase climbed halfway up one wall and ended in open air. The upper chambers lay scattered across the slope, their broken faces weathered smooth.

Inside the ruin stood a ring.

It rose taller than Karvok’s great doors, fixed upright between two heavy supports. Sections of its outer casing had fallen away, exposing dark metal and cloudy crystal.

But the circle itself was almost complete.

Kaelen stopped breathing for a moment.

Blena looked from him to the ruin.

“That is different from Alderat.”

“Yes. The ruins are more like the one in Ruodoon.”

“Better?”

He studied the ring, the broken stone and beneath it. He saw a thin line of light creep across the floor and disappear.

“I do not know.”

• • •

They left one pack behind an outer wall and approached along a strip of bare stone.

Kaelen unrolled Anderix’s copied diagrams beside a whole section of the outer wall that had fallen in tact.. Blena tested the floor ahead, checking cracks and loose slabs before allowing him past.

Up close, the ring showed damage the ridge had concealed.

Its left support had sunk. A curved inner assembly sat unevenly within the larger frame. Three narrow markings that should have met across adjoining pieces were staggered.

Kaelen followed them with his eyes.

“There.”

Blena came up to stand at his left shoulder beside him.

“What am I looking at?”

“The inner section has shifted.”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, I am not completely sure as I have never seen an intact ring, but look at the misaligned inside ring compared to the outside, something doesn’t fit there.”

She looked at him.

He acknowledged it with a small, unhappy nod.

“Yes. You answered well for a stupid question and I heard myself. Fact is your observations are very sharp.”

The first pulse came while they were still examining the base.

Light entered through crystal channels beneath the floor.

Kaelen stepped back.

It climbed both sides of the ring, met near the top and broke apart at the crooked inner joint.

The centre remained empty.

A moment later, pale light spilled outward through the ruined floor.

The pressure struck behind Kaelen’s eyes.

Blena caught his sleeve, but he was already moving away from the channel.

They waited until the glow faded.

“Energy is being fed into this thing and it seems to go inside the metal portion,” he said.

“And then comes doesn't make it all the way to the top and spills out again. Just you just wish Anderix was here?”

“He would never eat frog goo long enough to make it all the way up here.”

“Look at this section where the crack is the light tries to go up to here and then somewhere first.” Blena stretched to point to the crack in the ring.

He crouched beside the sunken support without touching it.

At Alderat, the broken ring had lost too much of what it gathered. This one held the energy long enough to attempt something. He could see the sequence now: the channels feeding it, the light travelling around the circumference, the brief gathering at the inner edge.

Then the failure.

“The alignment is wrong,” he said. “The light or energy, cannot complete the trip around the ring.”

“To where?”

“I cannot tell, just around it I guess. Maybe once it goes around it will show us the images from the Alderat tower again?.”

“Can you stop the failure?”

He looked out through the broken wall.

Beyond the tower lay the silent basin. Farther away, black and sickened trees stood in widening bands of damage.

“It has been doing this for a very long time.”

Blena followed his gaze.

“How long?”

“These supports shifted with the ruin. If it began then…”

“Since the Sundering?”

“Possibly, I mean look at this stone and it had time to collapse and remain undisturbed.”

She rested her shield against her leg.

“All this time?”

“Receiving power. Trying to send it. Losing it into the land.”

He thought of Ressa’s maps, the exhausted seams, the black growth avoiding the fragments of crystal in her box.

“The crystals in the ground have been taking some of it. Holding it, perhaps. Settling it into something the soil can bear.”

“And we have been digging them out.”

“Yes.”

Blena looked towards the south.

“My father is being asked to mine the thing keeping this away from Karvok.”

Kaelen did not answer.

He could see the answer in the floor beneath them.

“Anderix would say the idea needs testing but it is a great theory.”

They began with the incoming channels.

One ran exposed along the edge of the chamber, passing beneath a cracked ceramic cover. Kaelen waited through another pulse, counted the interval and lifted a loose bridging piece with the wrapped end of a tool.

The channel went dark.

Blena let out a breath.

Then a deeper line beneath it illuminated.

Light rushed through a second path.

A sharp note rang from the tower, and twice as much of the circumference lit before the next failure.

Kaelen replaced the piece.

“That was not the only supply.”

“I noticed.”

“It compensated.”

“For us trying to stop it?”

“For a damaged path.”

Blena retrieved her shield.

“Then we try something it cannot replace.”

They moved to the alignment assembly.

A narrow adjustment collar survived beside the lower support. Kaelen compared its markings with drawings he took of some structures in Ruodoon and he thought it might be like a clasp that went around the outside of both rings holding them together, then showed Blena which section appeared to have shifted and where to put it.

They cleared the grit from the seam. Blena fitted a short iron bar into an exposed socket receptacle that looked like it might have held a crystal. She used it to leverage the clasp up to the right position without sliding back down the outside to the ground.

“Its almost there.. Don’t let it drop,” Kaelen said.

Blena grunted as he held the iron rod with the weight of the clasp on both her shoulders as her arms were now fully extended above her head. “Don’t you hate it when people tell you not to do something you have no intention of doing. Like, “don’t fall down.” Ugh. She grunted again.”

She braced herself against the side of the ring and pushed upwards on her tippy toes.

The collar moved with a reluctant scrape.

Something clicked beneath the clasp and he sat locked in place.

“I think you can let go of it.” Kaelen suggested tentatively.

The ring answered.

Small lights appeared across the base, illuminating symbols that had been invisible beneath the dust. A sequence ran from the place his fingers rested towards Blena’s side.

She stopped.

“Kaelen.”

“I see it.”

“No. Look where you are touching.”

He lifted his hand.

The lights remained.

They had seen machines wake before. Kaelen knew the small, terrible shift from examining a thing to being awed by something that was beyond their ken. The next pulse climbed higher and held longer. From within the ring came a second rhythm.

Three brief flashes.

A pause, then two more.

Kaelen looked down at the copied diagrams.

Blena watched his face.

“What?”

“That sequence was in Alderat’s ring when it woke.”

The ring hummed.

He looked at the lit symbols beneath his hand.

“And look, something has stopped calling into empty country.”

• • •

They moved away from the centre to think and to get a look at the pulses that were no longer shooting into the blackened forest.

Blena handed him water.

“Do we leave?”

Kaelen drank just a little, remembering the advice from Mereth, then studied the cracked floor.

The pulses were closer together now.

“If we leave it like this, we may have made the release worse.”

“That was not my question.”

He looked at her.

She was pale beneath the grime. He suspected he looked much the same.

“One attempt to draw the excess away,” he said. “From out here. If it fails, we leave.”

Blena considered the ring. “Well it is broken so I don’t see how it could get any worse.”

Then she nodded at Kaelen but more at his plan.

The clasp allowed more light to travel up the ring and the clasp is metal so I propose we use the blade of your sword to make another connection on the opposite side.

“But there is no clasp to hold up over there.”

“Right but my guess is the energy can use the metal to travel through it like when lightning strikes a spire on a building it runs through the building to the ground.”

“What if I don’t want to use my steel? There are no other weapons out here except my dagger and I still intend on getting back to green and safe land past the Sentinels.”

“I am sure if it works your whole crestrealm may have half a new country to live in. And I have seen you with a dagger, you could take down a snowbat with that thing.”

Blena reluctantly gave into the flattery and pushed the blade into the highest inside edge of the ring where a clasp might have been. She then pushed her sword into the space dissecting the gap with the steel and managed to push the pommel into the other side of the gap making a straight bridge of metal from one side to the other. At first the sword held and looked promising. They waited for the pulse and light thinned along the upper ring. The Sword began to wobble and vibrate before it sang.

A blue line opened beneath their feet.

Blena seized the back of his cloak and pulled him clear as the crack flashed white.

The sword snapped and bent inwards to the shape of the ring but it was not broken.

Out in the basin, branching light spread beneath the bare soil.

Kaelen stared.

The pulse faded slowly.

“We gave it another path into the ground and would you look at your sword.”

Blena was still gripping his cloak.

“Did I not just say we are gonna need that. And smart Mr. Kaelen is all, no, don’t worry, we can stick it in the machine from the gods and it everything will be fine..”

He turned towards the pack.

“You are right.. This is beyond us, we are leaving.”

Behind them, the curved end of the sword arced light and power flashed once completely around the ring and then caught against a black metal stone at the base. Sparks snapped between it and a second contact. Heat darkened the broken floor and the blackened stone.

Kaelen stopped.

Blena followed his gaze.

“We cannot leave that bridging there.”

“I agree and I really want my sword back but that thing is not coming out of there ever again.”

Their clean water was in sealed skins. Kaelen took the smaller one.

“Stand back.”

He directed a narrow stream across the hot black rock, hoping to cool it enough to return the ring to a dormant state.

The water struck.

Steam burst upward.

For an instant the sparks stopped.

Then light raced through the spreading water towards a recessed channel beneath the ring.

The empty centre shimmered.

Blena swore and dragged the pack away from the wet stone.

Kaelen approached the sword but he could feel heat coming from it and knew it would not come free.

He dropped the waterskin. The ring’s hum deepened.

Across the centre of the ring, something almost formed.

Not an image he could recognise. Depth, darkness perhaps. A distance where the ring should have remained transparent and nothing should have been. Then the anomaly collapsed.

The release shook dust from the remaining tower walls and the diseased trees around them bent with the motion.

Blena caught Kaelen's forearm.

“I am pretty sure we broke it, I think we have finished here.”

“Yes, so much happening without us learning anything.”

He gathered the diagrams he had brought with him but with hands that were no longer steady. “I would say let's sleep on it and look again tomorrow but with the danger of infection I think we have done all we can here.”

At the lower edge of the ring, a damaged crystal had begun to protrude from its mounting. Light flickered inside it, jumping across a black fracture.

The mounting opened another fraction. A scorched symbol shone beneath it.

Kaelen stopped.

Blena’s grip tightened on his arm.

“That symbol is glowing. And this whole stone looks like it could slide into the gap behind it. See the space there?”

“That could be a release catch.”

“You do not know what it releases.”

“The crystal. Alderat had the same mounting. The others are fixed. This one is meant to come out.”

The fractured crystal gave a thin, rising whine.

He looked from it to the sequence of light still moving around the ring.

The energy was crossing the break, failing, returning.

“If that black stone is holding the failed cycle open...”

“Kaelen.”

He heard the warning in her voice.

He also heard Panarf and remembered saying that there is nothing to worry about. They would return.

He reached for the pack instead of the switch stone but the damaged crystal shifted outward with a hard click.

The sound from the ring sharpened painfully.

Blena flinched.

A narrow jet of light struck the floor between them and the open stone doorway.

Kaelen dropped the pack.

“The fracture is opening.”

The ring flashed again. Stone burst from the edge of the escape path.

Blena raised her shield.

“I feel like we should undo whatever we have done? Can you stop it?”

He looked at the release catch.

“I can try.”

He saw steam coming from the water on the black sliding stone and wrapped his hand around a power crystal. He knew he couldn’t touch the stone but his earth powers could move it out and break the ring of light. .

Blena stood beside him with her shield buttressed with her one blue power crystal and angled light towards the ring.

“Tell me before you pull it back.”

“I will.”

The crystal shook inside its loosened mounting.

Kaelen thought of home and of carrying things home from the market for his family and then focused on the black stone and with his mind he pulled. “I am doing it now.” he let Blena know.

It yielded easily as if it were hot metal on ice. The symbols at the base changed with light now shining through a different one.

Blena leaned closer.

“What does that mean?”

He did not know.

Behind the fractured crystal, a metal rod began pushing the moving piece out.

The damaged crystal fell on the floor and without any volition or action of his own the blue power crystal in his hand flew out from his grasp and sat perfectly in the crystal receptacle. His hand was stung by the sudden movement of the crystal.

The clear one was now in pieces on the floor and his blue one locked into place.

Light joined across the gap.

For the first time, the whole ring shone in a whoomp of energy.

The sound stopped. That silence was worse than the noise.

Kaelen stared at the complete circle and understood, too late, that up till now they were doing things for the device but now it did not need them.

They had somehow bypassed and removed failed parts and it had accepted the repair but not due to their knowledge of it and now it was there.

“Back,” he said.

The centre filled with ripples of blue light.

Blena turned towards him.

“Kaelen, move.”

He stepped away, but the floor beneath his heel was uneven on centuries of undulation and his foot turned on a higher stone. Blena was already in motion when he twisted and she rebounded off him putting one foot backward to catch herself. The water that Kaelen thought he was lubricating the stones with was now a cause for the loss of traction and Blena was unable to stop her backward motion with her slipping heel so she put her other foot backwards as well in an effort to stabilise.

Kaelen saw the flailing Blena and reached out one hand to offer her help but his momentum was already moving in the exact opposite direction.

Blena attempted to catch his arm but she could see it was already out of reach.

Beyond her shoulder, the brightness of the blue ring folded inward.

For an instant Kaelen could see the fallen wall through it.

Then the wall was gone.

A white edge gathered along the near side of the ring.

Blena saw it.

The wave struck.

Her shield flashed.

The force pulled her from her feet.

Kaelen laid on his back and could only watch it all unfold as if time had slowed for him to see it all. His fingers still reaching out in her direction.

She went backwards through the illuminated centre, turning as though she still meant to find the ground beneath her.

He scrambled so that he was laying towards the light, the ring, his falling friend.

“Blena!”

Her shield had passed beyond the rim.

Her boots should have struck the fallen blocks behind the tower.

He could see those blocks though the light but she was not making contact. Inside it, there were blocks.

Kaelen plunged his arm towards the fading light.

For one impossible instant he saw her clearly: one hand reaching towards him, her loosened red hair waving around her cheeks, her mouth open around a word he could not hear.

She was still falling.

But she was no longer falling backwards through the ring.

She was impossibly far away.

• • •

Thy Quest: Where Is Blena?
Predict what has happened to Blena after she falls through the ring. Where is she now, and what physical and emotional state is she in? Explain what you think she will see or experience next, using at least two clues from the chapter to support your prediction.