A/N: I know I say this every time, but thank you all so much for sticking with this story and for the amazing reviews! I look forward to them every week, and re-read them a lot while drafting the next chapters, so they really make a big impact on my motivation!
Ruination has been my singular focus since I started drafting it in September (I'm a slow writer), so getting any kind of response to it means the absolute most to me. Y'ALL ARE GREAT ILY~
xXx
CHAPTER FIVE: SEED
"They do go in for sharp rocks around here," winced Edmund as he lowered himself down the sharp decline, jagged rock digging into his hands and snagging his clothes as he dropped down to the next outcropping.
"Just imagine if we'd come down the other side," said Peter, landing beside him and reaching up to help Lucy.
Edmund glanced over to the sheer cliff running down into the valley about a mile to their left. "I think I'd rather not." His head was still aching from his last fall.
All in all their midnight escape had brought them to the only scalable ridge the mountain seemed to offer, and in that sense Edmund thought they were almost lucky.
Not that anything else about their situation was very lucky—no food, no horses, no idea what they were walking into, and Peter and Edmund were both badly scraped from their tumbles last night—but it was something, at least.
Edmund still preferred hunger to a broken neck. Marginally.
They'd come across a mountain stream just after the sun had risen, about an hour ago now, and had a good drink and a wash there.
They took it in rotations to stand guard while the other two scrubbed the blood from their clothes and faces. Edmund's cuffs and collar were irreparably stained, not that he was too concerned about fashion out here, and Lucy had washed his hair, bloody water running into the stream for a concerning amount of time from the lump that had formed under his badly torn scalp. As far as Lucy was concerned, it was a miracle he hadn't split his skull. Edmund still wasn't too sure he hadn't.
"I think if we keep right of this pass we'll be at the bottom in about half an hour," said Peter, hiking over a new ridge and down the next drop.
Edmund followed. "What are we going to do when we get there? Walk up to the door and knock?"
"I'll bet anything it's an evil tower," mumbled Lucy. She paused to take a pebble out of her boot, and Edmund turned to look at her.
"Of course it's an evil tower. Did the inhabitants of this land look particularly friendly to you?"
"I'm just saying I don't like the look of it." Lucy pulled her boot back on.
Edmund caught sight of a blister bleeding through the heel of her sock.
Part of him wanted to offer to carry her, but after a full morning of hiking down the treacherous mountainside with a splitting headache and a punctured ankle of his own, a much larger part of him felt he could barely carry himself. "I don't remember anyone asking for your artistic input."
"Alright, alright," said Peter, "Let's just get there."
They'd been trudging again for about five minutes when Edmund paused mid-step and looked sharply to the left.
"What—" Peter was about to ask, but then the crunching of loose stones came again, and a dusty grey form scrambled up away into the rocks, disappearing between sharp boulders almost before they'd seen it.
Lucy stepped instinctively closer to Peter.
Edmund's eyes never left the place where it had vanished, ears pricked for any other noises, and when Peter breathed "Come on," Edmund said "Wait."
Lucy shot him a look. "Ed, I'm really not in the mood to get eaten after everything we've been through to get here."
He rolled his eyes. "Think about it. If that thing was infected, it would be aiming for us, not away."
"You want to go after it?" asked Peter.
"Why not?"
"Well, I don't know if you remember this, Ed, but these people weren't exactly our friends before everything wanted to eat us."
Edmund pursed his lips. "I think we can handle one creature between three armed monarchs. And besides, how many uninfected people do you think we're going to find around here? It might know something."
Peter sighed, and Edmund knew he'd won.
He drew his sword and scaled the low rise to their left, stepping between larger rocks as the other two followed.
Peter kept Lucy behind him.
The mountainside was more like a maze than a hill with such uneven ground, but Edmund knew where he'd seen the thing go, and confidence surged back into his limbs as he crept around boulders, sword braced in his hand. At last, this was familiar.
A light crunch and rustle caught his ear, and he advanced until he came to a dark crevice in the side of the rock.
He stopped just a few feet from the entrance, blade out in front, eyes piercing the shadows.
"Come out peaceably and we will have no quarrel with you."
There came another rustle, a long silence, and then very slowly, the face of a hag crept into the light, cocked to the side so that one red eye stared straight up at Edmund.
He lowered his sword ever so slightly, though kept it in his hand, and eventually the miserable creature shambled out so that the daylight struck her threadbare rags and feathered scalp, beak clicking in curiosity, prominent bones swaying with her steps.
"Masters," she whined in a cracked, scratchy voice, "What ever could a humble old woman such as myself offer such… dignified travellers?"
"You know who we are," spat Edmund. "And I know very well what you are, too, so let us have no games between us."
The hag gave a stilted, over-exaggerated bow. "Whatever his kingship pleases, of course. Yet still I wonder what business three easterners have in this western land. It is a rough place for such advanced and elegant—"
"Enough. We're here on our own business. You were watching us, you know where we're going."
The hag nodded so deeply that it was almost a second bow, spine contorting unnaturally with the motion. "The tower, the tower, yes, the great sorcerer's tower. That accursed thing. Nowhere else to go, in these parts. You must have some powerful business there."
Edmund set his mouth in a hard line. "Sorcerer? What sorcerer?"
The hag clicked her beak again, almost in a tut tut sort of way. "The worshipful master sorcerer rules these lands. His kingdom is not so great as your own, of course, the eastern lands are truly—"
"Skip the flattery."
"Ah, yes, of course, whatever his handsome kingship pleases."
"This place is infected," said Edmund, "Your people are mindless brutes—even more than they were before—the land is consuming itself. What does your sorcerer have to say to that?"
"I cannot presume to speak for his worshipfulness," she grovelled, "I am only a very simple creature. I do not often hold audience with the great Man himself, 'tis far beyond my rank and—"
"Man?" asked Peter, stepping up next to Edmund, Lucy still a pace or two behind. "I thought there were no men in the wilds."
"Oh, he is a clever one," she sneered, and Edmund couldn't tell quite what she meant by it. "One of the White Lady's truest disciples. He was wolf-kind, you know, until his artful medicines gave him the cure. A wise and judicious man, to be sure. Gifted in the arts. I have only a small practice, myself, but he has… vision."
"What is his vision?" asked Edmund.
"Why don't you ask him yourself?" she scoffed. "He has not emerged from his doors in a fortnight. Not since this madness spread through the valley and into the hills."
Edmund looked at Peter.
"This madness," he said, "This death. Did it come from the tower?"
"Do not rely on me for such information," croaked the hag, cocking her head back and forth between the kings, always looking just a little crooked. "I am but a poor mountain dweller. I have only survived this long by keeping my nose out of places it doesn't belong."
Peter sighed. "Come on, let's go. She's not going to be of any more use to us."
But Edmund knew better than his brother about such creatures. Most importantly, he knew when they lied.
His blade flashed inches from the hag's throat and she flinched, every muscle instantly frozen.
"Did it come from the tower?"
He glared as if he could burn straight through her, and she cowered, hands over her head.
"Yes, yes," she whined at last, "Where do you think it came from? That idiot messed with something he shouldn't have, like as not, and us poor folk pay the price! They blocked up the doors from the outside, but bodies fell from the windows. We're all keeping our heads down, waiting for them to wipe themselves out."
Edmund lowered his sword and looked at Peter again.
He was gratified by a nod of concession.
"Will that be all, your kingship?" wheezed the creature, still grovelling pathetically on the ground.
"Yes," said Edmund, stepping away. "Thank you for your help," he added dryly. "And stay out of our way on the way out."
They were already halfway back down the path they'd taken when she called sing-song after them, "There is no way out," and disappeared cackling into the rocks.
Edmund turned but ran smack into Peter's hand, already out to stop him.
"Don't waste your energy."
Edmund glanced at him, sighed, and turned back to their path, sheathing his sword to crawl down the rocky decline and help Lucy over the next dropoff.
The sun broke through the clouds just as they emerged into the valley, piercing the mist to illuminate earth and wild grass in its pale golden glow; a strange contrast with the desolation that opened up around them.
There were a few run-down wooden dwelling places scattered throughout the valley, but most were blackened and burned, or else collapsing in on themselves. It was clear at a glance that no living thing had existed here in weeks.
The valley was still as death.
Bones littered the dew-soaked ground, yellow shards poking up into their boots, swaths of bodies picked clean by scavengers and bleached white in the sun. Huge bones of ogres, delicate sharp bones of skittering Wooses; the long, spiny tail of a great lizard.
And in the middle of it all, the dark tower rose like a horn of black obsidian protruding from the earth.
It took half an hour to even approach the massive gates, piled high with debris just as the hag had said. It was as if the contents of every surrounding shack had been thrown into a heap and abandoned.
Edmund wrinkled his nose as he tossed a rough plank aside, along with the flattened remains of some small creature crushed amongst the pile.
"I don't suppose there's another way in?" Lucy asked.
But it was a pointless question. No fortress worth its salt had a back door. There weren't even any windows on the ground level, by the looks of it.
Edmund and Peter set to work uncovering the gate, sometimes working together to heave the heavier things aside, a massive cauldron big enough to fit all three of them proving to be the worst of it all. They were both sweating through their shirts by the time they actually got near the iron gate, the sun beating down hard on Edmund's shoulders despite the chill in the breeze.
Fortunately for them, the gate hadn't actually been latched properly the last time it was closed, and the boys stuck their fingers through the crack and managed to heave it open with the horrible squeal of metal, just enough to squeeze through.
They stood for a moment, bracing for some kind of reaction, but no noise came from inside.
Peter went first.
The stench of rot struck Edmund even before he followed, pressing himself through the tight opening into a courtyard that was now little better than a mass grave.
Lucy held the end of her sleeve over her nose as she came in last.
There were no guards, so signs of life, only heaps of bodies, some eaten, some decomposing, the stone stained black underfoot.
Peter drew his sword and advanced, stepping over limbs and mangled flesh as Edmund and Lucy followed carefully in his footsteps, and they came around the side of the tower to what seemed like the main entrance.
The door was already unlocked, and opened with a heavy metallic groan like a mouth ready to devour them, to swallow them into the abyss.
Peter stepped through without hesitation.
Only the shaft of light pouring from the doorway illuminated the cruel entry corridor, a sea of dust motes floating in the air as Edmund stepped in after his brother and tried not to choke.
Staircases wound up both sides, carved human heads with open mouths adorning each banister, the floor tiled and polished black, cruel iron lamps in the forms of creatures Edmund didn't recognize hung dark and empty.
The rot was so pervasive here that it practically hung in the air, clinging to every slimy, dingy surface, clawing its way down their throats as they struggled to breathe.
Peter coughed.
"Well, it definitely started here," rasped Edmund, squinting into the darkness even as his eyes watered.
"Do you suppose anything is still alive in this place?" whispered Lucy, slightly muffled through her sleeve.
"There's only one way to find out," said Peter, and started up the right-hand staircase.
Edmund followed. His stomach turned to lead, but he wasn't sure if the smell was making him nauseous, or if it was something else.
The landing was no better, strewn with remains; two different hallways led to dozens of rooms and open spaces with black statues and carvings, devices and furnishings Edmund didn't even want to know the use for.
The place was huge.
They poked around a few rooms before going up another flight of stairs, and finding the same situation there.
Edmund was just about to second Lucy's question when a door banged open down the hall and they all jumped, weapons up in an instant as they whirled to see… something.
It had been some kind of bestial thing, once, but now it was so bony and gaunt and torn that it was impossible to tell. It gave a scratchy roar and loped horribly toward them, claws tapping on the tile.
Edmund stepped back just as Peter brought Rhindon down on top of it and sliced clean through its neck, sending the head and body sliding across the floor to thump against the wall.
There was no power in its bone-thin carcass. Feeble, rotten, wasting away.
Edmund shared a look with Lucy.
They checked the room it had come from but found nothing, climbed another flight of stairs, and then another, and encountered a few more decrepit beasts, but nothing remotely close to living.
At last, Edmund was sure they'd taken the last staircase.
The level they entered now was smaller and more open than the rest, and it reminded him of their own private quarters back home, set apart from the rest of the palace, only this was all dark and blood-smeared, and the heads of evil beasts stared greedily from carvings on the wall.
Lucy panted, propping her hands on her knees, and they split up to try doors and peer around corners. Peter found a bedroom, Lucy found a corridor with a long table, and finally, down the last hallway, Edmund came to a door barricaded from the outside.
He dragged a heavy chair screeching across the floor, tossed a shelf aside to crash against the wall—he didn't care how much noise he made now—and in a moment he'd uncovered the ornately carved wood of the door, and reached at once for its ice cold handle.
For a single moment he hesitated, though he didn't know why, and pushed the door open with a stubborn creak.
Light flooded the corridor and pierced his eyes.
He blinked, squinting into the room.
It was all windows, narrow shafts of daylight pouring in from every direction, shining off dusty surfaces, tables and chests and the glass bottles that seemed to be everywhere, furniture in shapes Edmund didn't recognize.
But it only took a second for his eyes to settle on the thing in the middle of the room.
"Uh… Pete?"
Peter was behind him almost at once, and from the smaller footsteps he knew Lucy had followed.
He let the door swing open the rest of the way.
Lucy sucked in a breath.
It was a study, strewn with books and papers—in fact it looked not dissimilar to Edmund's study at home in the Cair—but slumped in the middle of it all, melting into the desk, was what he could only assume had once been a person.
None of them moved or spoke for several moments, until Edmund stepped inside, boots crinkling over torn pages strewn through trails of blood.
He stopped a pace from the desk.
"It's him."
"How can you be sure?" asked Peter, taking a step inside.
Edmund set his jaw. "Have you seen anything else around here that looked even remotely human?"
Peter stopped beside him, his boot scuffing the tile. "Are you… sure that's a human?"
"Well. It used to be."
Edmund licked his lips. His mouth had gone suddenly dry.
Lucy's voice came from the doorway, small and uncertain. "What… what do we do now?"
Peter turned to look at her, and his eyes said everything his lips didn't.
That was the moment Edmund's heart hit the floor.
They had no answers. They'd come all this way, left Narnia, lost the horses, made it down the cliffs, climbed the tower, only to find… nothing.
There was nothing here.
Any hope he'd had when they first saw the state of this place seemed foolish now. It was a dead end. The person who started all of this was dead, and probably had been since the day it happened.
It had been pointless from the beginning.
But he said none of this.
"There has to be something else," said Peter, spinning to look at the rest of the room. "We must have missed something."
"Pete…"
"This place is huge, we can't have looked everywhere."
Edmund bit back a sharp retort. He knew even Peter didn't believe that, and he wasn't going to be the one to say it right now. "Okay."
Peter glanced at him, eyes desperate and grateful.
"Why don't we split up," said Edmund, feeling as if the life had already gone out of him. "We'll cover more ground that way."
Peter nodded. "Good idea. You two go through the lower levels again, I'll look up here."
Edmund didn't like the idea of leaving Peter alone, but agreed for lack of anything else intelligent to say.
"Come on, Lu." He walked back to the doorway and squeezed her shoulders. "Let's start at that library place. There were doors down there we didn't check."
Lucy was staring into space.
He turned her around, and she allowed him to guide her out of the room and down the stairs. Tomb-like passageways enveloped them once again, footsteps echoing off obsidian, the only demons foolish enough to wander these halls.
"It's over," she murmured, and stopped at the bottom of the third flight.
Edmund turned to her, mouth hard. "Maybe not."
Lucy's eyes rose to meet his, tears brimming silently in bright blue. She didn't believe that any more than he did.
He swallowed and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, a thousand comforting words crowding into his mind, none of them true, and Lucy sank into his chest, eyes staring blankly forward.
"It's okay," he said. The simplest lie of all.
"Promise?"
The question was child-like, but her tone was heavy, weary, lost.
Of course he couldn't promise. "Yeah."
She lowered her head, and he squeezed her tighter.
"Come on. Let's keep looking. Who knows, we might have missed something." He couldn't put on the same kind of optimism Peter could, but at least it didn't sound like a total lie. His mind wasn't letting him accept failure just yet.
Lucy only leaned deeper into him.
"We have to do something," he breathed.
For a long moment Lucy didn't respond, but then she pulled back and looked up at him, searching his eyes before straightening her shoulders.
Without another word, they turned, and walked back through the hallways they'd already explored, taking a corner into a new series of rooms, just as dingy and claustrophobic as the rest, but to Edmund's relief, there was less rot here.
At last he felt he could almost breathe.
They descended another flight and suddenly found themselves in a pantry, lined wall to wall with shelves, filled to bursting with all manner of strange foods.
Edmund looked at Lucy, gratified to find he wasn't the only one gaping.
They'd been hours exploring the tower. By now they'd missed at least two meals since their sad dinner yesterday, and despite the pervasive stench of death, Edmund's stomach still managed to rumble.
"That can't be a good idea," he said eventually.
"Definitely not," affirmed Lucy.
Both of them moved forward at once, peering into pots and testing the strange fruit with their fingers. Most of it was rotten or moldy or stale, and Edmund wasn't sure he would have tried it before it went off, but if there was a human living here, or at least something like one, surely there was something edible.
Lucy picked up a roll, hard and crinkly as she squeezed it, but normal enough. She sniffed it, then eyed it again.
Edmund uncovered a bowl of apples that were only a little soft.
"Are you sure we should—"
But Edmund had already taken a bite out of an apple, bruised and dry and a little tasteless, but edible enough.
Lucy blinked.
"Come on, Lu, we always knew food poisoning would take me out one day."
Lucy's mouth twisted into a smile and a half-suppressed giggle burst from her throat, the musical noise echoing off the cavernous walls of the labyrinth and bringing her back to her senses.
She pursed her lips and looked at her roll. "Maybe I'll risk it on the return journey," she said after a minute, and tucked a few of them into her pockets.
The return journey.
Somehow that thought hadn't occurred to him yet.
Whether they succeeded or failed, there would be a return journey. Not that he had any clue how they would make it through the mountains on foot, but even if they did, they would return to Narnia, defeated.
He didn't want to know what they would find there.
We're laying low, waiting for them to wipe themselves out.
The hag had been right about one thing. The death, or whatever it was… it wasn't sustainable. The infected would consume each other eventually, and the remaining would waste away, whether that took a month, or a year.
But unlike the creatures of this land with no care for each other, Narnia didn't have that kind of time.
He thought of Tumnus, the woodland creatures. They would starve before the month was out, if miraculously they weren't bitten before then.
He would rather die out here than return to that Narnia.
"Come on." He took another bite of his wrinkly apple. "Let's keep looking."
They descended another few levels, scouring every room, but it was only more destroyed halls and corpse-filled archways and the occasional snarling bag of bones that fell with the slightest flick of Edmund's sword.
Just as they thought they'd hit the end of it, however, Lucy pulled open a groaning door to what Edmund had assumed to be a closet, but turned out to be another stairwell.
Narrow, dark, damp.
Underground.
"That'll be the dungeon," he thought aloud.
Instead of backing away, Lucy pulled an arrow from her quiver.
Edmund smiled at her.
He took a torch from the wall, lit it with the flint he kept in his belt, and held the flame out in front of them as they descended into the black pit, coming eventually into view of exactly what he'd expected to find.
Iron bars ran floor to ceiling, eerily creaking doors hanging open in their path, the shadows playing through grids of metal until the whole space was cast in a web of flickering light that moved as they did through the cavernous walkway.
Edmund smelled the bodies before he saw them, slumped in their cells, starved or infected, he wasn't sure, but the air reeked of death.
He shone the torch around, casting an orange glow down the long corridor.
"Nothing," murmured Lucy, her voice echoing off the walls.
Edmund sighed—not that he'd really expected anything else—and turned to leave, just as the faintest scuffle echoed in the furthest reaches of the cavern, where their light didn't reach.
He turned again and held the flame just behind him so that the light didn't blot out the shadows, sword drawn in his hand, and just made out a ragged form dragging itself scraping out of the darkness.
Some kind of goblin, bone-thin, gaping mouth emitting a rasping gurgle. Edmund shrugged and waited until it had nearly reached them before he lopped its head from its shoulders, skull rolling to bounce off the bars of a cell.
He kicked the body, and almost turned to leave again when a humming—almost a buzzing—came from the other end of the room.
Edmund squinted and stepped forward.
The light moved along the wall, shadows spreading out and disappearing behind him, and it was a few moments later when he realized this place was bigger than he'd originally thought.
Much bigger.
Two huge archways split off on either side, no doubt into further shadowy cell blocks, so deep and black he had no idea how far back they went.
The buzzing, shuffling noises came from every direction, echoes only amplifying this effect, and then movement followed, like an army of cockroaches crawling from the deepest recesses of the earth, corpses pouring over each other and clamoring out of every corridor to converge on the place where the first had died.
An arrow zipped past Edmund's ear and struck a hag in the forehead just as he thrust his sword through a wolf's ribcage, tossing it aside to strike another body, and then another.
Screams erupted all around him, the swarm throwing themselves too fast to even keep track of what he was killing.
For several minutes it was all a haze, sword flashing in one hand, torch in the other, burning anything that got too close and sending it screaming alight back into the tunnels.
If these had been the same creatures that attacked them in the mountains, they wouldn't have stood a chance; but these were the older beasts of the tower, their rot having set in long ago, muscles flexing starkly under saggy skin. He tossed them from his blade easily, as if pitching hay from a fork, and Lucy's arrows picked off one after another until their numbers dwindled to the single digits and the heap of bodies underfoot were high enough to slow their approach.
He chopped down a towering orknie and ducked out of the way to avoid its hooves as the last shrieking goblin threw itself over the bodies of its kin, white eyes flashing in the torchlight.
But just as he brought his dripping blade up for the final blow, a hand closed around his boot from behind and he stumbled, lurched backwards, slammed into the iron bars.
Stars exploded in his vision, the world went white for a second. Something crashed into him hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, throat squelching under something hot and sticky.
"Edmund!"
Lucy's voice echoed distantly, the world tilting under his feet as the life came back into his limbs and he grappled at the skeletal form attached to him, lurching forward and throwing it off.
An arrow struck it in the eye socket and threw it to the ground before it could leap back at him.
Edmund stumbled to his knees, the world still spinning, vision blurring.
Lucy's knees crashed at his side and her dagger sank with a thunk into the skull of something on the ground.
The twitching in its arms ceased instantly.
"Edmund," came Lucy's voice again, her form swimming before him in the wavering light.
The torch had fallen somewhere nearby.
"Edmund, are you alright?"
He brought a shaky hand up to his throat, burning numb, his fingers brushing against jagged flesh, running along slippery ridges, warmth pulsing from the wound. The bite.
Lucy gasped sharply, and Edmund pulled away.
"Ed—"
He scrambled over a heap of bodies, ribs cracking under his knees, grasping the bars of the nearest open door as he dragged himself to his feet and swung around into a cell, slamming the iron behind him.
Lucy crashed into the bars just as he pulled the keys from the lock and threw them back against the wall.
She shook the door, breaths almost sobs now, and Edmund looked at her, the scene playing out before him as if he wasn't even there.
"Edmund, you come out here right this second!"
He shook his head faintly, and the world tilted again.
No words came, though he tried to make them. He wanted to tell her… something…
It's okay echoed in his head.
Sweat drenched the front of his tunic… or was it blood?
The girl was begging him now, but he no longer knew for what, her pathetic noises hitching and gasping as she rattled the clanking iron in vain.
Dry heat clawed up his lungs, scratching at his throat, breaths raspy, and then he coughed and doubled over with the effort, hot stickiness flooding his mouth and dribbling out down his chin as he stumbled.
The ground rushed up to his knees.
And he ceased to be Edmund Pevensie.
xXx
A/N: Well… that's it until next week :)
Friendly reminder that I have lots of bonus Ruination content up on my insta tricia_pevensie! It's all collected in one highlight for anyone who wants to check it out. (Special shout-out to Birdie who carved a Ruination-themed pumpkin and absolutely made my life.)
See you on Halloween for the climax! (There will still be one more chapter after that, but next week's is extra special ^^)
