Queen Uni

CH9- A Lead?

    "Tom, why did you even do all of this?" Cory asked Tommy, coughing a bit from the musty smell coming from the moist dirt.
    "Dude, you never know when you'll need a way to get out of the castle," Tommy told him, leading him and Leo.
    "You mapped out the vents in the entire castle, found a secret room-and somehow managed to get tons of furniture in it, but I won't even mention the weirdness of that- you memorized the system you had mapped out, found out where the vents are in every room in this giant castle, and even dug out holes to places where there aren't vents. First of all, why? And where did you even get the time to do all this?"
    "You obviously just don't shred like me," Tommy said, throwing a smirk in Cory's direction. "Brutha."
    Tommy sped up a bit, grinning, as the large tunnel started to slope upwards. Leo, Cory and Tommy had decided to try to find the best way to get away from the castle, and were taking a tunnel Tommy had dug under the back wall, which led straight into the forest. The walls were so high that most guards didn't bother looking in the back, making it a perfect exit point for a nighttime escape. The three of them had chosen to go out to map out the start of their route from there.
    "This is the exit?" Leo asked, looking at the small patch of shrubbery with confusion and tilting his head a bit. "How has no one noticed this yet?"
    "Just wait," Tommy said, parting the bushes and holding them open for the other two. "You'll see."
    They all stepped out, and looked around at the forest. The sun shined through the leaves, making the ground mottled with sunlight. They looked back to where they had come, and saw only a bush up against the castle walls.
    "How did you do that?" Leo asked, staring at the bush and prodding it with a paw.
    "Tommy- does that," Cory said, shrugging. "No one can really explain him."
    "Yeah, uh huh," Tommy said, not paying much attention to them, and instead staring at the castle wall. "Guys, come take a look at this."
    "What is it, Tom?" Cory said, walking over to Tommy with Leo right behind him.
    "You see this wall? Isn't it weird that there are deep slits straight down the middle of it?" He said, studying them closely. "And they seem to run all the way from the top."
    The two slits were long, thin, and deeply etched into the wall. Little tendrils of darkness seemed to snake out of them, spreading a bit to the sides of the cuts.
    "These don't feel... right," Leo said, sniffing at them. "They smell weird, but- I feel like I've smelled this before. And they aren't something that would naturally happen."
    "Do you smell it anywhere else?" Cory asked, looking closely at the bits of shadow edging the slits.
    "Not really," Leo replied, scrunching his brows. "The scent is really old. Probably a little over a-" He froze, his eyes widening.
    "What? What is it?" Cory asked, staring at Leo.
    "A little over a month ago, this scent was made." Leo stared back at Cory. "A little over a month ago, I smelled something a lot like this. A little over a month ago, the queen died."
    Cory and Tommy took a step back from the wall, eying the slit warily. "Well," Tommy said, slowly and unsurely, "At least we have a lead?"
    "Wait!" Leo said, running up to the trees up ahead. "Come take a look at this!"
    Leo was sniffing at a symbol carved into a dying tree. It looked like a dartboard, except the only circles on it were around the outside, one close to the middle, and one large circular imprint right in the center. Between the second circle and the imprint were a whole bunch of lines, making a jagged star. From each point of the star, a line stretched to the outside circle. Shadows stretched from the imprint in the middle to the rest of the carving. Leo pressed his paw to it, his paw about a quarter of the size of the symbol, and quickly pulled it back, yelping a bit at the pain and licking it a couple of times.
    "This is really strange," Leo murmured, looking over it again.
    "We need to remember this symbol," Cory said, looking at Leo. "Can you sketch up a quick drawing that we can bring back to the others?"
    Leo looked back at Cory, confused. "I think you're thinking of Uni," he said, furrowing his eyebrows a bit. "I can't sketch to save my life."
    "Hey Carl, why don't you just take a picture of it with your fancy face?" Tommy said, elbowing Cory.
    "Shut up, Tommy!" Cory shouted back. "Besides, you know that I can't share my memory pictures, or whatever you want to call them."
    "We could just take a rubbing," Leo suggested, butting in between them and pulling a piece of paper and a pencil from the messenger bag hanging over his shoulder. He put the paper on the tree, then jumped back and dropped it as the dark pattern printed itself onto the paper.
    "Well, that's done." Cory said, picking up the paper by a corner and tossing it at Tommy. "Let's show this to the others."

AN: Sorry for the long wait! I procrastinated, and just generally didn't write, but I still have enough ideas for this to keep continuing for a while now. Also, thanks to a good frien, I have decided to post everyone's backstories as subchapters of this book! They will be labeled as SC instead of CH.
I'm looking forwards to what's coming!
-Helena!! :§