Tainted roots

Unlike the hotel, there were only half a dozen rooms. Each was full of their own personal touches. One had a heavy silver hairbrush, with strands of white hair tangled in the bristles. Another had a book draped over the arm of their armchair sitting before the fireplace—that roared to life as soon as I entered the room—almost as if the owner would be back soon to finish their book. The room next to it had a couple of dresses draped over the bed.

The last room I checked had an easel sitting in front of the curtains, with a large canvas still there. It was a landscape painting, of a snowy valley, with buildings made of ice lining the bottom of the hills. The painting was incomplete, having not finished the sky, and a couple of the buildings had only been sketched on.

I opened the curtains, looking out the window into the same valley from the painting, and frowned at the sight.

While the hotel was gloomy and had the abandoned haunted hotel look in spaces, this place creeped me out way more. With the buzzing magic, the spotless rooms, and the overall feeling like this place was stuck in time—waiting for the owners to return and pick up where they left off. It’s like they left one day, expecting to return, but they never did.

When I went back downstairs, I found a hallway leading out of the atrium. Voices drifted down the hall from behind the first door on the right. Inside was a small cozy library. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled to the brim with books—with no dust, what a shocker. A desk sat in front of gray curtains, where stacks of papers and books cluttered the surface. A low round table sat in the middle of the room, circled by cozy chairs. Koa and Gemini were seated in two of those chairs across from one another, staring down at something on the table. Neither of them looked up at my arrival.

I took the chair on Koa’s right, peering down at the map sprawled out between them. It was easy to recognize this as a map of this realm, with the river branches meeting up with the river circling the lands. Wyatt had done a near-perfect job in sketching his out, it was almost identical. The only main differences were this one had writing sporadically across the map and geography descriptions. The script written across the map reminded me of the writings we saw in the hotel. Deity script, but not really.

Koa and Gemini were translating the writing on scrap pieces of paper. When I asked Koa how he could translate it now, but couldn’t before, he told me he’d been checking on the progress of the vases translations and had picked up on some of the words. He also said that not every word was a direct translation and that some of it was guesswork.

I leaned over and peeked at his paper, reading the few words he had written. Magic training grounds. Obstacle course. Survival training. “Where are they?” I asked, tapping my finger on the map.

“The magical training grounds are here.” He pointed to a piece of land at the top of the map, and then moved his finger, keeping it on the same piece of land, but pointing to a spot on the far right. “Obstacle course.” He moved his finger down a couple of sections on the right, to the second biggest region. “Survival training.”

Magical training didn’t sound great if was for training the creatures. It was bad enough that they were being helped, but if they were being trained? It would be a nightmare. I’d been hoping for formal names of each region or descriptions of the lands and the creatures living in each area. It would be nice to have some context on where each region was located.

“From what I can tell, this is a village.” Gemini pointed to the biggest area of land in the bottom right-hand corner—pointing to the top right of that section of land. She moved her finger down to the bottom of the same piece of land. A rough circle was drawn, connecting five different rivers, with writing above it. “I think this is a lava pit, and is where all the lava empties and goes back into the tunnel system, leading to the volcanos.”

Gemini was squinting down at the paper as she spoke, with uncertainty coloring her words.

It seemed like everything kept leading us back to tunnels during this trip. First, we received a cryptical message about them, and now it was all were finding. It was almost like the land could sense what we were looking for and was leading us to them.

I shook my head at that ridiculous thought. The land wasn’t alive, that was impossible. And even if it was, why would a land where the creatures lived want to help us?

I focused on the place Gemini had pointed out as the village, frowning as I considered what could live there.

None of the answers we were getting from the map made any sense to me. It was like we were getting all of our information in the wrong order. Like starting in the middle of a movie.

The view outside the window, versus what had been painted on the canvas upstairs came to mind. Excusing myself, I hurried up to the room to retrieve the canvas, and laid it on the table next to the map.

Koa leaned over the painting, observing the village. “What’s this supposed to be?”

“It matches the view outside one of the bedroom windows. Well, it would if there were any buildings in the valley.” Their heads snapped up, confusion marring their expressions.

“Any signs that there might’ve once been a village?” Gemini asked, pursing her lips when I shook my head. “It could’ve just been an artist’s interpretation, imagining a nice icy village.

“I thought so too, but then you mentioned how there was one in the lava region, and I can’t think of any of the creatures there living in a village. Wyverns and firebirds aren’t known to be able to use doors."

“You think the village isn’t there anymore,” Gemini surmised, tracing her finger over the unfinished section of the painting. “That this map is possibly outdated.”

I shrugged and sat back down. “Possibly. It is written in some variation of the deity script. This place is also littered with relics of the past.” I pulled out a small, thin blade that when folded in on itself, formed a bangle. I’d found it when I went back up for the painting, sitting on the table beside the easel.

Gemini gasped holding her hand out for the blade. When I handed it over to her, she twisted it, turning it into a bangle and then back into the blade. I only knew what it was because Ander showed it to me one time when he was giving us a tour of the archive room, at the Aurora court. It was used over a millennia ago before they created the rings they now used. A way to ensure they always had a blade on them to draw blood. “This design is ancient compared to our oldest ones in archives,” Gemini marveled.

“Like I said, relics of the past. You should check out the wardrobes.”

“You’re implying that the maps predate the creatures,” Koa said, turning his calculating stare to me.

I nodded as I tried to gather my thoughts. “We figured the hotel had been built before the creatures ever set foot here, and if these two places exist, who knows how many others do.” My attention snagged on a large single rune drawn on the second-largest piece of land.

“What does this symbol mean?” I asked impatiently tapping it.

Both of them leaned over the map, studying where I pointed. Gemini mouths words to herself, while a crease formed between Koa’s eyebrows as he narrowed his eyes.

“It reminds me of the symbol for house,” Koa muttered.

"Yes, but look at the dash here and the flick there,” Gemini countered, pointing out some of the discrepancies in the rune. “With the circle at the top and the slashes at the bottom, it almost reminds me of the word communal.”

“Could that be the hotel?” I asked thinking communal house did sound a lot like a hotel—that was assuming they had translated it right. I couldn’t be too sure, but it seemed the right distance from the river. It would make sense that the forest the second biggest region, it had felt vast and endless. And now, we had an idea of what two of the regions were.

They looked back at the symbol with that in mind. “Possibly,” Gemini said almost a minute later.

“Any idea where we are right now?” I asked, waving my hand over the map.

Gemini told me to give her a few minutes and returned to studying the map as did Koa, while I sat there unable to help. I couldn’t bring myself to regret not learning the deity's language. I’d never been one to care about those kinds of things. It was a miracle I knew the basics of the other three Mythic languages. I never bothered to learn the sorcerer’s and sorceress’s spoken language, since that was only used in spells.

On the map, there was a small section of land partially between the forest and the lava, with a bunch of triangles that I was pretty sure meant mountains. The placement made sense, when considering the last time the forest had been on our left and the mountains on our right.

The mountain region had almost a dozen areas marked up with that writing and I assumed they were also villages. I had a feeling if we were to go to any of them, that there wouldn't be any signs of civilization. Whether or not that was due to age, or something happened there, I had no clue. It had to be the latter because even the most ancient of places in the human realm still showed signs they had once been there. We didn’t have places like that in our realm. Once a place showed signs of aging, we fixed them.

“There,” Gemini said, pointing to the second section from the top on the left. Looking over the writing, I found a single rune marking a space near the top of the land. This one was different than the one for the hotel, but it stood out from the other script as had the hotel’s rune.

With that thought in mind, I looked over the map with a fresh set of eyes, looking for singular runes larger than the script. It paid off and I found several in each region. I pointed this out to the others and commented about how nice it would be if they had marked where the portals were.

“They didn’t. I checked the surrounding area of the forest, but I couldn't find anything,” Koa replied, wiping his hands down his face.

“Fuck. Of course, this map wouldn’t give us anything of actual use.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I think I found something useful,” Gemini said, pointing to an area at the bottom left of the map. “This says something about a network of tunnels.”

To say my interest was piqued was a vast understatement. I tried not to get my hopes up, afraid it would be like the tunnels we had encountered so far, and not what we were looking for. “What else does it say?”

A smile lifted Gemini’s lips as she glanced up at us. “They were boobytrapped.”

My lips curled in response. The perfect place to hide something, say two powerful keys.