“Yes, I recognize these lines,” she said finally.
“Very interesting,” Simone breathed. “I may have to make a visit to the temple later. Will you come with me, Elan?”
Elan nodded. “Of course.”
“Thank you,” Simone said, glancing outside as she folded the map back up and put it into the box. “In the meantime, I believe it is time to train. Sword drills today, Caleb. Elan, you and I will work on stave work and new drills for your blade.”
*****
Simone eyed Elan’s form as she went through the motions with her blade.
“Good. Remember,” she said, “stay away from the power strikes. You do not have the muscles, the weight, or the steel for them.”
Elan nodded, sweat beading along her forehead and face as she swung the blade and returned to her starting position. Her muscles felt sore in ways her father’s exercises had never quite pulled from her. She didn’t understand it. Nothing Simone was making her do was even half as strenuous as her father’s exercises.
She said as much to Simone.
The older woman just laughed. “Different motions, different muscles. You were training for a power style that gives you strength to lift and to strike, but not to move swiftly and with control. Control, especially, takes strength in specific muscles.”
She walked around her, tapping the underside of her arm.
“A blade, even a small one like yours, is heavy and only gets heavier the longer a fight continues,” Simone told her. “But you must control it, and maintain that control, or you will lose your battles.”
Elan nodded resolutely and returned to her starting stance before beginning again.
Simone continued to walk around her. “Life, battles, and swordplay have things in common with one another. All three are harder than they appear from the outside, all three require many kinds of strength, and…eventually, all three will kill you.”
So Elan worked the new style Simone insisted she learn, then picked up the stave and worked with that as well. When Simone told her to take a break and went over to help Caleb, however, Elan picked up her blade again and carefully practiced the forms and strikes her father had taught her.
Perhaps it was not the right style for her, but it was her style, handed to her by her father. No matter how well-meaning, or how nice, or even how right, she would not let anything of her parents be forgotten.
*****
Later, as the day was cooling but while there was still light enough in the sky not to require torches, Simone took Elan back to the city’s “temple” and had the girl show her the map.
Sure enough, it was there on the wall, faded and covered in dust, dirt, and grime, but it was clear enough once she’d wiped away the debris of the years that had gathered on it. Simone carefully cleaned the wall and then compared it with the map she had acquired many years earlier, noting the coastlines were identical, though she knew that the map wasn’t completely accurate in that regard.
“The coast has changed,” she said, nodding to herself.
“What?” Elan asked from beside her.
Simone looked over at her. “The coastline has changed over the years. I always suspected that it had, but some of my old compatriots believed that my map was simply bad. This confirms it, I was right.”
“Okay.” Elan was confused, but that wasn’t all that odd as of late.
Simone just smiled at her. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense to you. It makes little sense to many people far older and supposedly far wiser.”
Elan just nodded dutifully. “Why are the lights off?”
“Lights?” Simone asked, curious.
“The one in the desert, it had lights,” Elan said as she looked around. “K…Kaern showed me.”
Simone frowned, looking around herself by the flickering oil lamps. “I’m not sure. Does it look the same?”
Elan nodded as she walked deeper and pointed. “There was a sign there, on that wall. It said Embarkation.”
Simone walked in the direction the girl had shown, having to hop down a drop to make her way across to the wall. She looked at it closely in the shadowy, flickering light before finally reaching up and wiping away the dust to reveal the traces of large white lettering, the letter R. A glance to either side confirmed Elan’s word.
“Embarkation,” she mumbled, pronouncing the word as though tasting it. “I wonder what it means….”
Elan shrugged. “I don’t know. Kaern said it was some sort of transportation, but I can’t see how it could be.”
“If that old bastard said it, it was probably true,” Simone laughed, climbing back out. “I wonder why he told you all this. In all the years I’ve known him, he never said a word to me…”
Elan shrugged. She didn’t really know the answer, and any speculation she might make would feel too personal.
“There’s a door over here,” she said, walking in another direction. “It was…locked? Sealed? Kaern said it was gene locked. I don’t know what that means.”
Simone shook her head. “No idea. Where?”
“Here,” Elan said, frowning as she stared at a bare wall. “I know it was here.”
“Well,” Simone sighed, “I suppose that the layout isn’t identical.”
“No, something’s wrong here,” Elan grumbled, glaring at the wall. “It’s not the same.”
Simone looked at the wall, but it didn’t look any different to her. It was a long stretch of dirty stone, covered in oil, soot, dust, and the leavings of generations before them. There was nothing about it that stood out to her at all.
“What do you mean?”
Elan gestured behind her with a casual flick of her wrist, not looking over her shoulder as she did. “Just look at the other walls.”
Simone did that, peering through the murk and flickering lights, but still saw nothing but the walls and the shrines of the temple.
“Don’t you see the pictures?” Elan asked as her confusion became evident.
“You mean the shrines? Those were made by the city,” Simone said.
“No, they weren’t,” Elan insisted. “The other place had them too. Cleaner, easier to see, but they were there on all the walls. So why isn’t there any here?”
Simone looked again, now with narrowed eyes as she examined the shrines, and realized that they did indeed dot every other wall at even intervals, but not the one she was standing in front of. She turned her eyes back to the wall in question, now glaring at it, as it had become evident that it was hiding some secret from her. What, she could not say, but the child was right.
“Well, isn’t that interesting,” she said finally, stepping back and staring at the wall pensively.
Elan pouted at it, a look Simone privately found somewhat adorable as she noted it out of the corner of her eye, looking for all the world like the wall had done something she found personally offensive. Finally the girl stepped forward and ran her fingers over it, leaving tracks in the dust and soot as she turned her hands black.
“It’s rough,” she said after a moment.
“Stone often is,” Simone replied dryly.
Elan shook her head. “Not in here.”
She walked across to another wall, near a shrine, and repeated her actions. Simone could see the tracks she made actually gleam in the flickering light, reflected more than she had expected.
“See? Smooth,” Elan said. “Burned smooth by fire. That’s what Kaern said. Earth converted to fire. Cold fire, for light. It turns the stone smooth.” She turned back to the offending wall. “But not that wall. Why wasn’t that wall burned smooth?”
Simone really had no idea what the girl was talking about. Earth turned to cold fire? It made no sense, but she was more than willing to give her a little leeway given what she had revealed earlier and the clear oddities that were being pointed out. She walked over to test the other wall herself, finding it smooth as the finest glass she had ever seen in her life.