Revolutions

174 - Teqosa

The Great Forge of Pachil has been cold for several moon cycles. No smoke, no hammer strikes, no sparks catching in the dark. Only silence. How can such quiet be so jarring, so disturbingly loud?

I stand beneath the forge's gaping maw, where the light of dying embers once pooled like molten gold. Now, it is just shadow and dust, the skeleton of something that used to breathe. The remnants stretch around me—scattered slag, rusting tools, massive bellows half-deflated like the lungs of a dying beast. The air is dry, cracked with the scent of old ore. A place meant for war, now left behind by a war it did not get to forge.

In the center of the wreckage, a slab of stone that's blackened from generations of heat serves as our table. The scroll is laid bare upon it, its edges curling like something reluctant to be read. The glyphs crawl across the parchment, etched by a hurried hand. I have read them already, once with the young invaders—those strange, pale-faced things who speak in tongues that slant like broken reeds.

One of them, the short, stocky boy, had recognized a symbol. There was a flicker of recognition in his soft, foreign face. The same way a hunter knows the silhouette of a predator in the dark, even if he has never seen the beast before.

Upachu crouches over the scroll now, fingers following the markings as if he could feel the history beneath his fingertips. He mutters to himself, tracing the lines, piecing meaning together like pulling sinew from bone.

"They wrote this quickly," he finally says, his voice rasping against the stillness. "Perhaps while in fear. The script is fairly difficult to discern because of how hastily it's been written. Nothing like the markings we've seen elsewhere."

Paxilche huffs from where he stands near the broken mouth of the forge. "Does it at least tell us something useful?" His arms are crossed, his fingers digging into his biceps, the way a man braces for a blow before it lands.

I keep my eyes on the parchment, on the markings that should have faded but haven't. "The markings themselves haven't yet, but the invader's reaction to one of them has."

Walumaq steps closer, curiosity gleaming behind her piercing blue eyes. She's quick, I know. Picks things apart like a chasqui reading the knots in a quipu, untying the world thread by thread. "How did you read it?"

I exhale through my nose. "We spent moon cycles deciphering what little we could from the ruins in Wichanaqta. The glyphs were everywhere—carved into stone, hidden in murals, embedded in the very bones of the palace. When we returned to Hilaqta, Upachu studied them in every moment of stillness he could afford. But for me, well, I didn't have that luxury." I drag a hand down my face, memories of those trials resurfacing. "He did his best to teach me when he could, but after the incident with..." I struggle to find the words to explain the miserable assassin that sought us out multiple times during my trials. I shake away the horrific memory of Upachu's near death. "I learned them the hard way. Part of retrieving the lumuli chest, and the journey to reach it, forced me to understand them—or die trying. The trial wasn't just about proving my worth, it ended up being a lesson in understanding the ancient glyphs."

Upachu nods, his fingers still ghosting over the parchment. "While he was away, I passed the time while I was recovering to learn as much as I could about the glyphs. The more I studied, the more I realized they weren't just letters or symbols. They carried weight of significance. Intent. Some of them were warnings. Others, commands. It felt like the person creating these glyphs was trying to convey a message to us, to teach us something invaluable. But the thoughts and messages told in the scrolls were fragmented, incomplete. We have yet to determine what they mean in their entirety."

The sound of movement jostles us alert. A creature? A foe? Following soon after, there's an unmistakable sound that echoes through the still air—a lazy, contented... chewing. We all cautiously turn toward the broken archway at the forge's entrance. There, standing like it had never been lost, is our llama, munching absently on the sparse tufts of dry grass growing between the cracked stone. Its ears twitch at our stares, but it doesn't stop chewing.