City of Ruins

The city was asleep.

Sehr could feel its slumber deepen as the ground beneath her rumbled and mice scurried out of their nests nestled within cracks in the limestone walls. Scratches and squeals echoed through the unlit alleyway. She drew an ivory scarf to her nose and mouth, tucking away rogue strands of ink-black hair and shaking a weight off her foot. She hated this place.

The Markaz was filled with a cloying smell of rot. No matter how often she sprayed the place with oudent that stained her fingers white or asked the Council to gate the corner, she was always greeted by heaps of garbage. And bodies.

“Bu yerga,” Sehr didn’t shudder at a familiar rasp that called from behind the overflowing fountain. In the dim light of the Aptekac’s lamp, she could see blood in the basin - a streak of red breaking against an onrush of water.

The fifth. A shroud covered the fifth body that was propped atop a stretcher. The Aptekac had finished his job. The Council had appointed a healer to bury bodies when the cemetery teemed with half-eaten flesh and upturned earth.

When Sehr had reported the first body, the Council sent a guard wearing the red aela of a Jalpi with a scimitar clanging at his side. She had known that he was no General - the Jalpi had been stationed at the farms ever since the alarms had been sounded. The guard had handed her a piece of paper embossed with a General’s golden signature and asked her to list the details of her finding before dropping it off at the Zal. Sehr did what was asked and was never met with an answer.

The Aptekac was rustling through vials and bottles placed on a handkerchief on the damp ground when footsteps sounded behind Sehr. “Ular erda,” Her voice cut through clinks of glass and the heavy footfall that reverberated through the alley. They’re here.

A blotch of white cleaved through the darkness before the Aptekac could wheel the body away, followed by a glimmer of metal. The air turned warmer as a torch blazed against the sweating stone of the Markaz.

Ehsey Keluvich looked as regal as she had the last time Sehr saw her. “Light,” A spark hissed at the command, and the Jalpi’s kindled torches painted the alleway scarlet. Eight Generals, all designated to protect the princess of a buried kingdom.

The walls were slick with water from the sewers and mice retreated to their nests as a ninth Jalpi threw a handful of dried leaves into his torch.

“I see you’ve failed to continue the previous Aptekac’s streak,” Ehsey craned her neck to look past Sehr, “he didn’t let a single heap remain for over a day.” She pretended to remain unaware that the Aptekac was completing a part of her job. No healer had ever been appointed to bury bodies that were rotting with a plague. In the months Sehr had spent trying to salvage the old marketplace from ruin, she hadn’t found where he deposited the bodies.

The plague began as a headache that turned into a fever. When a person started hallucinating, the doctors would ask them to wait a night. None woke up the next morning.

Workers at Tuel were the first to perish. They were known to work overnight to break limestone into pebbles, then turn pebbles to dust that would be used to extract minerals and pack bricks. The Jalpi wasted no time in sealing off the factories with workers still inside, and siphoning off the Founders to the farmlands, away from a city that would soon cradle sickness in every overly-warm nook and cranny.

Ehsey swatted away thick fumes and turned to Sehr, “Have you prepared?” Sehr couldn’t tell whether Ehsey was spewing poison or delivering courtesy. Prepared or not, most who tried their hand at this task failed. Stifling the anger that rose in her chest, Sehr drawled, “As well as one can. I’m not exactly a professional - not that they seem to have better odds.”

A smile curled Ehsey’s lips as she replied, “The Council, and the people of Cefha, appreciate you embarking on this journey to curtail the threat that looms overhead.” Sehr made herself stand up straighter.

Entitled or not, a foe or otherwise, Ehsey was still the lone heir to the most powerful family in Cefha. The day her word equated to law wasn’t far considering her father’s ill-health. “Shall we proceed then?” Sehr steeled herself for what was to come. She led Ehsey and the Jalpi past the fountain and into the belly of Cefha.

The Markaz was the lowest part of a city, built underneath rocks. Carved from the limestone that had first brought the Founders to a depression in the Eastern Continent, Cefha was a spectacle.

Streets ran through the underground structure that had once been a cave. Vibrant emeralds and muted reds decorated the domed roofs of apartment buildings and carpets of brilliant cerulean hung overhead, suspended by lampposts whose burning signified daytime.

Stars, the moon, and the sun were immortalised through engravings on every wall and in paintings that hung in the Zal. Colour was rare, but the people of Cefha had managed to manipulate the last of pigments brought by the Founders to create dull shades that colored every fabric, rooftop and door in the city.

The Suqa was the heart of Cefha. Hawkers’ shouts rent the air as buyers bargained with vendors and children ran through the streets, earning curses from cart drivers. The Zal was located on higher ground and devoid of colour. A bridge connected the stone-coloured buildings to the marketplace and city proper - the Lower Cefha. The people treasured the Zal with its towering beams and massive pillars that rose from a deep ditch underneath and windows that looked like burning eyes when lit from within.

The Founders resided here. Sehr was reminded of Ehsey’s station again when she caught the faint scent of jasmine prickling her nose. The streets of the Zal always smelled of jasmines, a stark contrast to the humid and spice-laden air of Lower Cefha. With abandoned carts and husks of tarpaulin tents remaining behind, the old marketplace was foreboding.

A spot marked in white was all that remained of Dochra and Jansin’s sacrifice, a harrowing reminder of what happened to those who tried to leave. Tried to reach the surface.

Above her, Sehr could see the end of the chasm that had been sealed at the other end - the only way to sunshine and air. Cefha had managed to survive with the little air that escaped through rocks, amplifying it with inventions of their own.

Someone had to break out of the fissure. Dochra had been the first one to try doing so. Sehr had grown up with the twins. They took her in when she lost her parents in a fire that left her house in the Zal destroyed. They’d taught her to climb the rocks with her hands and feet anchoring her body. She had watched them remind the Zal of what lay overhead and spark new hope amongst the buried. The Founders had locked themselves and a few from their city in, but kept the reasons to themselves.

The fall hadn’t been pretty. And Sehr was glad she hadn’t been there to witness it.

They left her alone in the city of ruins.

She wanted to leave now.

Securing the ice axe in a jutting rock, Sehr focused on breathing her way through the panic that seeped into her stomach. “You’ve been climbing half your life,” She whispered, “this is just another drill. Just another drill,” She repeated as she stepped into her climbing suit.

“Sehr.” She’d forgotten that Ehsey was there, and the Jalpi were watching her every move. “No hard feelings?,” Ehsey extended her hand. Sehr could feel the blood in her veins course faster as she beheld Ehsey’s grinning grey eyes.

There was no time for this. She was ready.

Ready to leave behind the city she had grown to love, the city that had tried to suffocate her in smoldering flames while humming in her ears. Sehr felt a thrum of life behind her and knew that dawn had arrived.

She began dreaming. She always dreamt on the rocks. A better tomorrow. Escaping Cefha. Fresher air.

As she launched herself upwards and into a darkness that threatened to devour her whole, she didn’t bother lighting the stick of heshke in her pocket.

She didn’t want the last face she saw to be of the woman who watched the Jasiraat family burn with a smile on her face, and the keys to the oldest Founder’s treasury dangling from her fingers.

Greed was the Council’s vice. And Sehr didn’t care how they burned for it.

~

Two hours had passed since she had left the Markaz, and every movement weighed her limbs heavy and set her heart pounding in her throat. She had run through three sticks of heshke that managed to pierce the dark lightly.

There wasn’t more of her left to climb to the top. Dreams flooded her vision again.

Waking up in a sweat to find her father carrying her out to the streets of the Zal, crouching and asking her to hold onto something while he ran inside to get her mother. She held onto the peridot ring engraved with ancient lettering perhaps longer than she should have.

Her axe clanged against something in the dark.

A lever, she realised as she gripped it. Sehr knew she had to make a choice. The suit would tear under the weight of an axe. To pull the lever, she’d need both hands.

The axe was left beside the lever as she suspended herself off a broken rock that jutted out of the wall, finding purchase on a ledge. She tried not to think of the steep fall, and pulled.

A small shift and creak.

She pulled again, gaining an inch downward. Sehr battled the exhaustion that weighed her tired eyes, and allowed a final dream in.

The Zal, drowning. Every mansion the Founders built for themselves, every inch carved by the hands of a slave, all submerged underneath currents that would fill the chasm and drown the slavers.

It had taken her years to decipher the pattern on the ring, even longer to free herself of the shackles that bound her to the Founders. Her parents had made mistakes and died before making amends.

She would make amends.

A final pull left a click ricocheting off the rocks. The darkness parted when a metal sheet did, revealing water above. The glass had cracks on it, formed by waves that rose gently and swirled against the panel.

This was it. Sehr didn’t care for the people beneath her - the Founders deserved to drown. And death was kind to a slave.

With a blow of her fist, the glass cracked further and water spilled into the chasm, drenching her and knocking her off the lever. Sehr’s feet lost ground, and she pushed herself upwards, grabbing onto shards that cut into her palms.

Sehr inhaled before hauling herself onto the floor, her limbs working against the rush of water.

Red light poured through breaks in the waves, a silent promise of air. Dochra had taught her to swim. Jansin had taught her to save herself from drowning. She couldn’t fail them. She broke through the surface just in time to draw a breath.

Instead of the cool air that seemed to her so desperate, she was met by a burning heat in her lungs. A smoldering heat that addled her vision. The moon was above her. So was the sun that bled red into a darkened sky, and onto the wings of an awaiting Jabberwock.