“Where are we going?”
She was actually quite proud that she’d kept the tremor out of her voice just then. It felt like a major accomplishment, no matter how silly it sounded.
Caleb barely glanced behind him. “I’m going to show you the sights, remember? The temple is just up ahead. You’ve got to see that!”
Temple?
Elan didn’t know even what a temple was, but if he was excited, she supposed that she should be too. It was all very new, and if she were unprepared, then she needed to work on becoming prepared, after all.
“Okay,” she said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
It felt forced, sounded worse to her, but Caleb didn’t seem to notice.
She followed where he led, shying away from the people as much as she could while trying not to be too obvious about it. Elan realized that she felt out of place among other humans, and that was a disturbing realization. She hadn’t really been able to delve into it before they arrived at their destination, however, and she was pulled inside the place he called a temple.
The temple was a familiar place.
Not from the outside, not at all. The flat stone or whatever it was jutted out oddly to her eye, and people had mounted platforms and rails all around it, making it look even stranger. Inside, though, the impossibly smooth walls and floor brought her back to when Kaern had located her so quickly that she had to rub her wrists to quell the phantom pains.
It was a Redoubt, as he called it.
There was…something, many things, she rather thought, different though.
“The lights are off,” she said, surprised.
“No they’re not.” Caleb frowned at her in the shadow of the oil lamps that flickered in the interior. “See?”
“Not those, the lights,” Elan insisted. “The ones that glow evenly by burning everything.”
Caleb looked at her oddly. “That sounds…unpleasant.”
She shook her head, frustrated. “I’m not explaining it right. Just…there should be better lights. Trust me, I’ve seen them.”
“If you say so,” he said, shrugging.
They made their way in by the flickering lights of the lamps, and Elan took in as much of it as she could. She’d spent some time in the other place, of course, but most of it had been while unconscious or delirious, so her memories of it were perhaps not as great as they could have been.
She still remembered enough to take the lead, though, surprising Caleb. She made her way to the wide platform and looked over it, comparing the area to her memory.
“There’s dust,” she said, thinking about what Kaern had told her. This Redoubt was in use, the lights should have been working, right?
“There’s always dust, everywhere,” Caleb snorted. “That’s the world.”
Elan shook her head, annoyed with her lack of understanding, and she found herself wishing that Kaern were there to explain. The man…
Demon? Is…is that even possible? Elan didn’t know. She’d been trying not think about it, if she were to be honest with herself, and even now forced the question from her mind. Whatever he had been, he had saved her and he had educated her during the time they had spent together. She would try to focus on that.
“The lights should have burned the dust away,” she tried to explain, but clearly failed if she were to judge by the look on Caleb’s face. So she just shook her head. “Never mind. I was just surprised.”
Caleb just shrugged and seemed to accept that as he showed her the interior of the “temple” and went on about what different places in it were used for. Elan couldn’t see what he was describing, however; she could only hear Kaern’s voice and words as they walked through.
She spotted the door to where she’d gone when she needed to…go…
It was open here, no lights flickering beyond the door, so she assumed that nothing inside was working.
It’s been emptied completely out, Elan realized as she saw the dust-filled shelves where things had been in the other.
She paused at an open hole in the wall where there had been an invisible wall and looked at the spot where the shirt she was even then wearing had been hanging.
Writing on the walls, faded and covered in dust, told her that this was a transport hub…just as the other had been, but none of the little points of light were lit up here at all. Elan wondered if the power sources had burned out… They do that, right? I think? Elan didn’t know, but she supposed that seemed right…or maybe someone had come in and taken it?
Was it just turned off?
So many questions, her head was whirring with them such that Elan didn’t even notice that Caleb had completed his little “tour” and led her back outside until she was hit by the heat and blinking in the bright sunlight.
“That was the…temple?” Elan asked, just to be sure.
“Yeah, impressive isn’t it?” Caleb answered with a grin.
Elan nodded numbly.
Her father had told her stories of the “temple” in the great city, the place where demons ruled. He’d described it as a place of power, but now that she’d walked this one and had memories of the other, Elan recognized some of the descriptions in her father’s stories.
If the temple were a Redoubt of the Ancients, as Kaern said, and not the place of magic and mystery her father described to her…Elan was genuinely lost, yet again.
Being lost was beginning to feel like being home, Elan supposed rather sourly. The feeling, unpleasant though it was, had that same familiarity to it.
“Come on, Elan,” Caleb encouraged from ahead of her when her steps slowed. “The beach is this way.”
Elan followed dutifully, trying to focus on everything at once and generally doing an incredibly poor job of it to the point where she finally had to put the temple out of her mind and just follow Caleb to the so-called beach.
She just hoped it wasn’t another thing to destroy her worldview. She really felt like she could only recover from such events so many times in such a short period.
Later, Elanthielle found that she couldn’t stop staring at the water.
It was endless, just undulating ceaselessly as far as her eyes could see. She’d never even imagined anything like it. She stepped onto the edge, the cool wash of it running over her feet and tugging slightly at her as it pulled back into the blue.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Elan ignored Caleb’s question. Honestly, she barely registered it. The great water entranced her. Her father had told her about the sea, about the endless water, but she had never managed to put it into a proper place in her mind. Something about it defied description until you’d seen it for yourself.
She was in up to her knees when Caleb caught her by the shoulder and held her back.
“Hey now, come on, can you even swim?” he asked. “Because I promise, even if you can, it’s different out there.”
Elan glanced back at him, startled after being brought from her thoughts.
“I…I understand,” she said after a moment. “I won’t go any farther.”
“I didn’t say that.” He smiled easily. “I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention. It looked like you were a little zoned out there.”
Elan dipped her hands into the cool water, lifting it up to her face.
“You can’t drink it,” Caleb warned her.
She ignored him, lifting it to her lips and tasting just a bit of it before spitting out the saltwater back to the sea with a cringe on her face.
“I warned you.”
Elan nodded. “I know. Had to try.”
Caleb just nodded. “You’re not the first. Everyone seems to when they first get here from outside. You’re just from farther than anyone else I’ve heard of.”
Elan took a breath and sank down into the water, letting the undulations of the sea wash over her as she leaned back and felt the cold seep into her body. It was as though her life had just begun again somehow, in that moment, in a way she couldn’t describe.