The Butterfly Effect

She didn’t plan on doing much with what remained of the day after they got to Kevabel. They made camp outside, not trusting any of the crumbling buildings, and stayed right there for the entire night. She woke them all up in the morning and they started the careful investigation around and in some of the buildings. Lydia led the search, the first to decide if something was safe to enter and leading the way through.

All of them wandered around a bit inside, though for a while none of them said anything. Eventually, when he saw an ancient and relatively intact vase, Tim asked, “Isn’t it weird that no one’s even come to take the artifacts out?”

“I guess not, depending on how desperate they were to pretend like this all never happened,” Henry mumbled. He saw something and gently pulled it out. “Look at how preserved this book is…”

“Be careful, it’s a lot easier for it to fall apart if you don’t handle it right.” Tavin gently took it from him and sat it on a nearly-flat collapsed part of the building. He leafed through the pages and, from a glance, proved to the rest of them that this was something worth looking at. It had the same kind of writing as those platforms while they were following the phoenixes. “It’s someone’s journal.”

“What does it say?” Lydia prompted. “Look at the later entries, see if there’s anything about the leader in there.”

It took him a few moments to find something like that and a couple more to mentally translate it. Some of the text was faded or missing, but he was able to make do with what he had. “‘I know what I saw, but he will not believe it. Darkness lurks behind him. Shadows bend towards her—towards them—wherever she goes. Yet he does not see it. He does not see that he is being led by Darkness. Admittedly I do not know what it would mean to do such a thing; darkness, by itself, is nothing to be afraid of. But when the day turns to night and all light leaves the land, the scariest things appear. I fear that he is wandering closer to this night, and no one is sure of what awaits for him there.’” He turned the next couple of pages but that was it. “The rest of these all looked to be done daily. Whatever happened couldn’t have happened long after the person wrote this.”

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to find anything else here,” Lydia remarked after a quick glance around. “Let’s try another house. Maybe someone else has exactly what happened.”

They made their way further in now, close to an extravagant pile of rubble she could only assume to have been the town hall. But that place, she decided, would be saved for next, if they chose to go in there at all.

The boys followed her into a different building; much like the one before it, though a lot more had crumbled away. While it was a shame to be unable to see what it had resembled in the past, it meant there was hardly anything to worry about in terms of things falling down.

Knowing what they were looking for, it didn’t take them as long to find it. Of course, Tavin also let out a deep sigh to see the text scribbled in it. “This one might take a little longer. Mom, do you have something I can write with?”

“You know I pack for the stuff that’s never gonna happen,” she responded with a smirk. She pulled out a quill and a loose piece of paper and handed them to him. He got to work almost immediately.

Lydia and the twins wandered a little bit away to give him some room to concentrate. She kept an eye on him, though, even after the twins got distracted by some of the other things around them.

“Do you think any of this stuff is enchanted?” Tim wondered aloud, observing the small trinket in his hand. “At least some of it has to be, right? It’s old enough and I’m pretty sure the people here would’ve been able to use it.”

“Try blowing up that rock over there,” Henry suggested in a half-joking manner. “Don’t know until you try.”

“You’re not going to try to blow anything up,” Lydia interjected firmly. “There’s plenty of ways to try without possibly hurting someone.”

“Didn’t you drink out of a chalice once that either turned water into wine or caused instant death?” Henry pointed out.

“It did neither and that’s what counts,” she defended. “Just because I did it doesn’t mean I’m going to let you do it. If you want to bring it home, then we can test and see what it does later—with Dad, since he’s the most likely to be able to figure it out without breaking anything.”

That was enough for Tim and he stashed the trinket in his bag. Judging from his expression, he already had plans for it, no matter whether it did something special or not.

They stayed in silence for a little while longer until Tavin called them over. “I think I have most of it.” He’d written down the translation on the piece of paper, though it still had a bunch of question marks and small notes. Looking over it, he decided to change his statement to, “I think I’ve gotten everything I’m capable of translating.”

“That’s already a lot, for how little time it took you to do it,” Henry remarked.

Tavin shrugged. “It’s not hard to figure out how to translate it as long as you know the basics.” He picked up the piece of paper and started reading. “‘I remember when they met… or at least, what I think was their first meeting. Achadus was not leader yet; that role still belonged to his father, though even at that point his health was declining. She—Dree, I believe is what he calls her, though she has never introduced herself to any of us—had just arrived here. We all knew what she was; her secret could not be hidden from us. Well, all of us except for Achadus. He believed everything she told him. It wasn’t long that they went from sharing glances across the street to actually appearing together.

“‘We all just watched, waiting to see what might become of them. Some of us tried to talk to him, but he never listened. They went away together, when his father was at his worst. Achadus said it was a puzzle of some sort. They were gone for countless months without a word to anyone about their whereabouts, nor upon returning discussed what they had done. He took up his role as our leader and, though young, proved to have promise. Dree went away too, and for a while we assumed that everything would go back to how it was before her. We would be safe and bathing in Orestis’s light, safe from the dangers of the shadows.

“‘But she came back. They got closer then, and a couple of days ago they went to a quiet place to talk. One of the townspeople tried to see what they were saying, but she made sure to be quiet. While they went off together, we tried to figure out what Darkness could have wanted from our leader. We were brought out of our theories to hear crying. There they were, together, and we could do nothing but watch. She killed him. Her voice went loud but the words she spoke were impossible to understand. We did not dare move from where we were. The sun did not shine for as long as she stood there and her wings shattered. Ichor and human blood mixed, a reminder or perhaps warning of something we do not want to uncover.

“‘None of us want to wait and see what might happen. We are all leaving here and, for the sake of those who come after us, never returning. Only Orestis knows now what might lurk in the place of Darkness’s Fall. There is no time to bury the dead, lest we risk succumbing to a worse fate. May the world forget the fate of Kevabel…’”

“So, remember that you’re the only one with any kind of detailed grasp on Qizarn myth…” Henry began. “What’s ichor, again?”

“The blood of the immortal,” Tavin replied solemnly. He closed the book and hid it away again, stashing the translated paper in his own small bag and handing the quill back to Lydia. He made his way back out of the ruined building and looked around. “There might still be some, wherever his body is…”

Lydia pointed to the extravagant rubble pile. “We can try to look around there. If she cared about him, she wouldn’t have left him outside, but there’s nothing out here to suggest she actually dug a grave. That’ll be the next best place to look.”