Lore of Eternal Shadow: The Fugitive King

Chapter Thirty-Five

The chamber beyond was a mile long at least. An entire city had once stood here but all that was left were lines of columns no taller than a foot. The rest of the city's stone had been reduced to uneven waves of sand obscuring the archaic stone-slab floor. Occasional larger chunks of stone peppered the sand. Zicone gazed around. "What is this place?" he asked.

"History, it seems, is laughably too short to know what it was originally," Katharós answered, "It was here even when the Elementals first explored this area some fifteen-thousand years before I came here. Time in this chamber is warped beyond recognition. It is up to you to find the time period in which the piece is located. The damage to time in here is so extensive that there are also swathes of anti-time. Take care, as the anti-time areas could destroy you in a fate worse than death."

Zicone nodded bravely, "Thanks for the warning." The only time he had encountered anti-time before was in a book.

"Perhaps you should enter one at a time," Katharós suggested.

Zicone looked into the room and he nodded. "I'll go first," he said as he put a nervous hand forward. Even the most complex labyrinths of stone or hedge would be easier than this. Zicone concentrated as hard as he could on the calculations around him. He had never been in a place that was this vague. The less he concentrated on the calculations holding everything together, the more success he was having. He stepped completely into the chamber.

A single bright pale blue orb of magical light cast a soft glow onto the ruined city from above. "Look at this place!" gasped Runa. She, Tiberan, and the Vampirex followed Zicone in turn.

"You shouldn't have put your notebook away," teased Tiberan.

"Oh, stop," scoffed Runa.

Zicone tried to make sense of the ruins and of which civilization they belonged to but he couldn't. He tentatively approached one of the column stubs. Zicone noticed that the room shimmered. The more Zicone looked in one direction, the more things rippled as if they were suspended in water. Zicone stroked his chin. It was a barrier in time but he only knew this on intuition.

"Hang on a second, I want to try something," Zicone said. He figured the wall would react to his Time-Master powers and reveal itself.

He channeled through to his hands the raw powers of time from his very core. Zicone turned and targeted the nearest column remnant on his right before launching the swirling bright energy towards it. His spell hit the invisible wall before the column. The power was soaked up into the wall and from the point of impact a hole morphed open. The hole warped the image of what Zicone had assumed was the rest of the room like a single dent in an otherwise perfectly smooth silver plate. The warping of vision swirled around and framed the actual hole.

The four ran over to the hole and took a look through it. "Whoa," Tiberan gasped.

It was the same chamber on the other side but as Zicone compared the vision on the wall with what he was seeing through the hole, he noted that the city was notably less ruined. Some of the columns even appeared complete, though they still held up nothing.

Zicone looked at Tiberan, the Vampirex, and Runa, "I'll go first and I'll call you when I think it's safe."

"Be careful," said Tiberan.

Zicone judged the hole's size and squeezed himself through. "I will," he spoke from the other side.

Instead of a load of sand with some rubble clinging to the basic idea of standing up, most of the stone roads and ground were intact in this new chamber. Zicone could see where buildings, temples, homes... whole blocks of the city had once been; though everything was still far ruined. "Did I just go back in time?" he asked. Zicone looked at the wall he'd made a hole in. The hole was gone.