Nine || Lakeside

Elroy had designed his labyrinth to keep people out, not trap them inside, so fortunately once they began making their way backward they suffered no further interruptions; the path was singular and straight, and though there was something the sounds of scuttling and movement and sometimes the shadow of a long, thin leg melting into the darkness, the lantern light was enough to keep the monsters from getting too curious.

After what felt like a very long time, they found the fissure in the wall that led them back into the cobalt mines, and stepped out of the pale blue illumination of the atelier tunnels into the warm, inviting light of the lantern path Mint had ignited. From there it was only a few more minutes until they could see the dazzling light of day, and with a final push they crossed the threshold, out of the stifling mines and into the open clearing. They were struck immediately by fresh air, the scent of damp earth and crushed leaves, the heat of the sun burning a hole in the sky. Rue felt a little throbbing pain start up just behind his eyes, and stumbled off toward the tree line. He ducked into the shade, leaned against the first tree he came across, and closed his eyes.

He was relieved they had escaped, and escaped with so little bloodshed; battered and bruised as he was, there had been no major damage. Plus, they had come away with something physical, something that seemed of at least passing importance, and the tiara– well, they could worry about that later. Altogether it was a successful experience, if more painful than he would have liked.

But he still wasn't happy about it. Atelier guardians, he had seen before. It was a stretch to say he was accustomed to seeing fully functional guardians – most had worn out or unwoven many years before, or had been poorly constructed in the first place – but at least it wasn't a complete surprise. The treasure hunters, though... he had not expected them.

How had they gotten in? And when? Judging by when the seal had broken, or when he suspected it had happened, they had gotten into the atelier no more than twenty minutes before he and Mint had, but there was no indication that anybody had gone into the mines ahead of them. Nor any indication of why. They had only found Cadomon's notes the prior day, and only been told of their contents that morning.

Maybe it was coincidence. But what a remarkable coincidence that would be.

"Mint," he said finally, looking up and squinting through the light. He found her splayed out on the grass not far, lying on her back, one arm draped over her eyes. He wrenched himself from the tree and took a couple of tentative steps toward her. "Mint."

She did not look at him, but she did respond; "Artema."

"What do you know about that woman?"

Mint's immediate response was an irate, guttural grunt. "Just a treasure hunter," she said. "We ran across each other about a year ago, chasing the same treasure. It didn't go well for her." Mint laughed lightly. "Guess she's still holding a grudge."

"And the man that was with her?"

"Dunno. She didn't have any flunkeys when I ran into her. Must've picked him up somewhere."

"Do you suppose... do you suppose they'll follow us?"

Mint did not respond immediately. She mulled over the question, considered the implication, and then forced herself to sit upright. She gave Rue a long sideways glance, then looked over to the mouth of the cave.

"They might," she said, and with a grunt she forced herself upright, staggering slightly on her feet. "We'd better get back to town."

And back they went, a little faster returning than they had been going. There was no sign of any pursuit, but both of them seemed to have decided there was no point taking any chances, and did not slow down until they were past the town gates and heading toward Klaus' house. By the time they arrived at his door, it was mid-afternoon.

"You got the thing, right?" Mint asked.

Rue shifted the rucksack around, opened it, and tilted it, draining some of the water still clinging inside. It would need to be properly aired out or it would probably begin to mildew, pleasant thoughts. Once that was done, he reached in and drew out the little golden box.

"Right here."

"Klaus better have some good news about this thing."

Rue agreed.

He abandoned the rucksack outside the house, flipping it inside-out as best he could and loosely disposing of the damp and ruined remains of the food Mira had packed them. Leaving the pack out to dry, Rue kept the cube in hand and knocked on the door.

A muffled voice – female, adult, Mira – called from the other side; "It's open!"

He pushed open the door and stepped into the house. Mira was busying herself arranging some of the goods in the front room, but when she heard the door open she spun to take a look, and visibly exhaled in relief. "Ah, you're back! I'm glad to see you, those mines are– oh!" She bristled, alarmed, and practically sprang across the room to them. "What happened?"

She was reaching out to check Rue's injuries, but he raised his arm and gently batted her hand away. "It's all right," he said. "We just had some trouble at the atelier."

"Way to undersell it," Mint growled.

Mira, seeing as her immediate help was unwanted, pulled away. "I assume you have more of a story than that," she said.

Mint snorted. "Just a bit."

"You aren't too badly hurt?" she asked, frowning slightly. "Although I suppose if you got back here from all the way out in the mines, it can't have been too bad. Have a seat, I'll get you both some ice."

She disappeared into the next room and busied herself with just that. In the midst of her preparation, there was another sound from deeper in the house, uneven footfalls, and Klaus appeared in the door frame, looking entirely too pleased.

"I thought I heard something up here," he said. "I was hoping you'd be back soon, I–"

"Out of the way, please," Mira called, and he shoved himself to the side as she bustled past, clutching in her hands a pair of cloths, both of them tied off and laden with a few ice cubes. She handed one to each of them and backed off again, her gaze flicking between the two.

"I can get more if you need it," she said.

"Ice?" Klaus asked, but Mira was already disappearing into the kitchen. He turned his attention to Rue and Mint as they began nursing their wounds, and seemed then to actually see how bedraggled and rough they looked. "My god, what happened down there? Are you all right?"

"It's mostly superficial," Rue said.

"We almost got killed," Mint added.

Klaus made his way to a nearby chair, cleared off some of the accrued junk, and sat himself down. "Tell me what happened," he said.

They did. Rue let Mint tell most of the story – she seemed eager, so why interrupt? – and Klaus let them go on mostly uninterrupted. Fortunately, most of the narrative was centered around the events at the atelier, with Mint only providing some comparatively minor grievances about the tunnels.

"Minding my own business and suddenly I'm in the middle of a magical maze! You wound up there too, right?"

"Different path," Rue said. "but yeah."

He offered no additional details about how he'd had to make his own source of light after Mint had inadvertently stolen the lantern.

She talked about the atelier, about the room with the dolls, about the attack, about how she was almost crushed by an angry skeletal dragon, about how the two of them only got away because their pursuers had been too busy killing each other to get around to killing them.

"And all we got out of the deal," she said, snapping the cube out of Rue's hand and dramatically slamming it on the table, "was a stupid box!"

Klaus was silent for a few seconds, giving her a chance to continue, but Mint was done. She sat back in her chair and folded her arms, doing her level best to look as annoyed as possible. Klaus' gaze slowly turned to Rue, and Rue simply shook his head. Nothing to add.

"Well, you certainly had an adventure," Klaus said. He reached over the table and picked up the cube, grunting with unexpected effort when he realized how heavy it actually was. He pulled it over to himself and looked at it for a moment, flipping it across all sides, studying the contours. "But I think I have something that can cheer you up."

Mint gave him a withering glare. "Unless you found a Relic while we were gone, there isn't much that'll make me happy."

Klaus merely smiled.

"You're kidding!" Mint was almost indignant. "Where?"

"Right here," he said. "Right on the island."

"This better not be a joke," Mint snarled.

Klaus ignored her. "Not far from town, either." Klaus wrenched himself out of his seat and grabbed his cane. "I can show you right now, if you like." His eyes trained on the icy cloth in Mint's hand. "Of course, if you'd rather rest and recover–"

"Like hell." She nearly threw herself out of her chair. "How far is not far?"

"Perhaps a half-hour's walk." He started to rise as well, reaching for his cane. "According to Elroy, anyway."

Rue had been carefully avoiding getting excited. He looked between the two of them and leaned into the couch, pressing the ice pack against his bruised arm. "How did you find this?" he asked levelly.

"In Elroy's notes," Klaus explained. "Poor Cadomon died before he could translate most of them. Now, I do want to clarify that, from what I've read, this was mostly speculation on Elroy's part."

Mint's shoulders fell. "So you're not sure."

"Until we see it for ourselves, we can never be sure," Klaus said. "But even if it's not right where Elroy thought it was, I'm certain it's on the island. I've only gone through perhaps a third of Elroy's papers – the ones Cadomon was holding on to, that is – but by the dates it seems he had this theory relatively early into his move to Carona. The fact that he went on to build an atelier and take on two apprentices here means that he was certain the Relic was a stone's throw away. He wanted to be near it."

"Where exactly did he think it was?" Rue asked. Mint was stepping away from the table, and he rose, preparing to follow.

"There's a lake not too far from here," Klaus explained. "We've directed the town's fresh water supply from there– the fountain's fed by the lake, too." His brow furrowed. "It's a bit difficult to explain, exactly, but to be honest I'm not entirely surprised."

"You don't need to explain it if we're going there," Mint said.

"You're sure you're up for another walk?" Klaus asked.

"I am now."

He looked over to Rue. Rue managed a faint smile.

"Let's have a look," he said.

. .

The lake was, as Klaus had said, located not too far from the town, and fortunately in a direction that took them nowhere near the old mines or anything that was still inside of them. The path to the lake wound down, past the battered ruins of Cadomon's laboratory. Eventually the ground sloped upward again, forming a little hill, where the trees became sparser and the dirt more densely packed.

"I have to admit," Klaus said, "I'm not entirely surprised. When I first came to Carona this site was one of the first ones that interested me."

"But you didn't find anything?" Rue asked.

"As far as I could tell, there was nothing to be found," Klaus said. "This area is very well documented, actually. I looked at everything I could about it, I visited personally, but there's really no indication that there's anything... I was going to say 'out of the ordinary' but it's obvious there's something out of the ordinary, I'm sorry. I mean, anything particularly magical about this location."

He crested the hill, and a few seconds later Rue and Mint followed. Klaus stopped at the top of the hill and looked over his shoulder, waiting for them to catch up. Once they fell in alongside him, he gestured ahead of them.

The hill sloped downward again on this side, but it was a uniform depression, forming a relatively shallow bowl at the top of the hill. The bowl was dominated by a lake, flaring white and gold in the sunlight, its surface perfectly smooth. And in the middle of that lake was something very much unlike water; a slab of stone, edged by shallow walls. From his angle, Rue couldn't see what was inside, but there had to be something there.

The stone structure stood alone in the middle of the middle of the lake, blatantly out of place but not entirely isolated. The opposite side of the platform was connected to a long length of slightly elevated stone, a wide platform that skimmed over the lake surface and attached the platform to the opposite shore, to the far edge of the bowl. It merged into a broad set of stairs and crossed up to the crest of the hill, where it disappeared into the heavy shadows of crumbling, dilapidated buildings.

"I would like to welcome you," Klaus said, "to Old Carona."

It spread all the way across the opposite side of the lake's bowl, the ragged silhouette of decaying civilization. They were too far to make out the details, but it was clear that certain buildings had held more importance than others; most of them were fairly low to the ground and obviously prone to decay, but some others – most notably the impressive spires of a true cathedral – rose prominently over the rest, somehow standing proud against the ardors of time. He could almost see how it must have looked back then, before it had collapsed, the skyline dominated by–

By–

He winced and pressed his fingers against his forehead, grinding his teeth. The image was just on the edge of memory, flitting in and out of his mind's eye just long enough to tease him with the thought before receding again. He didn't know what it was or how it even related to what stood across the lake, but there was something that he knew should have been there and yet there it wasn't.

A growl of frustration rose in his throat, but he swallowed it, shook it off, looked up again and focused on what was immediately in front of him. Klaus was leading the way down the bank, Mint not far behind, and Rue dragged himself out of his spot to follow.

"What do you mean, Old Carona?" Mint asked.

"Just what it sounds like," Klaus answered. "This is the Carona that stood in the days of Elroy– before Elroy, in fact. Judging by the architecture and the structure of the old magic, the general speculation is that Old Carona is over a thousand years old. It was likely destroyed around Elroy's time." He frowned to himself, rubbed his chin. "It's hard to be sure, though. Whatever happened was... cataclysmic. Destroyed most of what was in the town. The few documents that were recovered weren't exactly dated, but the few found use the phrase 'baptism of fire'."

Mint chuckled. "And this has nothing to do with a volcano sitting in their backyard, huh?"

"The Raging Mountain has been silent for thousands of years," Klaus said. "Nothing to do with that." Mint's amusement evaporated almost immediately. "They make it sound like there was some manner of divine judgment. Personally, I think it was a dragon."

He said 'dragon' so cavalierly that it was several seconds before Rue suddenly spoke up; "Wait, sorry, dragon?"

"Oh, yes, dragon." Klaus pointed over the horizon. They couldn't see it from where they were – the rim of the bowl blocked the horizon – but the hazy image of the Raging Mountain stood out in that direction. "There's an old story that the dragon once took great offense to the actions a mortal conqueror and burned him and his lands to ashes. There's a bit of speculation that perhaps that's what became of Old Carona."

He turned his attention back to Rue and Mint.

"That's not really the point of this excursion," he added.

"Right, sorry," Mint said, rubbing her face. "Just a little concerned what with hearing about the giant fire-breathing lizard that once sacked a town."

"Maybe," Klaus added mildly. "Anyway, the point is, I suspected this of once perhaps being under the auspices of an Aeon. Nobody had ever found indication of such, but I wanted to have a look for my own curiosity. I didn't find anything at the time, but I'm not well-versed in the field of magic. Elroy, I'm sure, would have known better than I what to look for."

"So, what, it's just... down there? We can swim over and get it?" She tensed visibly. "Did we tool around that damned mine for nothing?"

"Quite the contrary," Klaus said. "Elroy suspected the Relic of being here, but, well, nobody had picked it up for five hundred years by the time he arrived, and nobody's picked it up since then."

"Sealed," Rue said.

Klaus nodded. "So Elroy believed."

"Did Elroy happen to believe in any keys?" Mint asked.

"I'm not sure yet," Klaus said. "But given all the trouble he went to settling here, I'm sure he had good reason to think he would be able to unlock the seal." He looked between Rue and Mint again. "You said the only things you found were the cube and the tiara?"

"We didn't really get to look around upstairs," Rue said. "Although I'd think if Belle and Duke had found anything else they wouldn't have left it behind just to fight us."

"Actually, that fight did stink of desperation," Mint said. "They must've come up mostly empty-handed, too."

Klaus hummed to himself and closed his eyes, deep in consideration. "Then there's a good chance one of these items might actually be Elroy's attempts at fashioning a key," he said. "Or else directly related to them."

"Better not have been those dolls," Mint grumbled. "I'm not going all the way back down there just to haul one of those out. Things were creepy."

"We'll address that if we need to," Klaus said. "In the interim, I'd like to have a better look at that cube. Perhaps he makes mention of it further into his papers." He looked at Mint. "You said you felt something inside?"

"Some kind of magic, yeah. It's... from what I can tell, there's some kind of something inside there, and the box is acting like a dampener so it stays inside."

Klaus grinned. "That's promising," he said. "I think now is as good a time as any to follow up on that." He turned and began walking back up the hill. "I'm going to head back and see what I can make of all this. If you'd like to stay, of course–"

"No," Mint said flatly. "I don't know what Belle and Duke are doing, but if they followed us down to Elroy's atelier they can follow us out here. I'm not letting you wander through the woods alone."

"Why thank you, Mint."

She waved his words away. "I mean, I can't read any of the crazy going on in that paper," she said. "You get kacked and where will be?"

Klaus laughed; genuinely, loudly. "I appreciate your pragmatism," he said. "At least I know you won't have a change of heart!"

"Yeah, yeah." She fell in step behind them, but after a few paces turned.

Rue was still standing on the slope of the hill, looking out over the lake to Old Carona. It was right there, right on the edge of his mind, if he could just–

"You coming?" she called.

He was silent for a few seconds, then blinked, shook his head, turned around. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, sorry."

Mint gave him a look, grudgingly accepting his apology, then turned and resumed heading over the hills. Rue followed, but couldn't help casting a glance back over his shoulder. The skyline was badly damaged, but he could not shake the feeling that he had seen it before.