Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

ruins of smaller buildings around the site... evidence of a civilization long buried beneath the desert.

“Holy shitsnacks.” I leaned over Karalti's shoulder as she caught a thermal and glided around the edge of the sinkhole. My eyes couldn't penetrate the darkness beneath. “That's big enough for us to fly into.”

“I think we're going to have to,” she replied. “We can’t get in by ground. We’d be squished.”

She was right. There was nowhere stable enough to attach a rappel line. Even as we coasted around, one lip of the hole broke away under the weight of the sandfall gushing over the side.

“Okay, we're flying in,” I called back to Suri. “Get ready for a fight as soon as we hit bottom.”

She nodded, gripping the saddle with one hand, the other bracing her sword over one shoulder.

Karalti dropped into a shallow spiraling dive, dipping out of the thermal so she could come in slow. She easily cleared the sinkhole, three times larger than her wingspan, and descended in a lazy arc toward the ground. We passed the ruins of the prison complex on the way down, open tunnels and steel wreckage, the rubble of the fortress. But even though the very bottom was choked with debris, the cavern complex into which the fortress and prison had collapsed was even more vast than the hole itself. The remains of Bakhat Khasir looked like a tissue crumpled in the middle of the floor.

“Yeah... I remember this place.” Suri kept her voice down, but even with the wind rippling over us, every sound seemed to echo like rifleshot inside the cavern. “I remember passing through here. Scared the shit out of me. I'd never seen this much space in my life.”

“This must have been the eyrie for the dragons who lived here,” Karalti said. “Look at all those doors.”

The doors she was referring to were big dragon-sized niches in the walls, many of them cross-bored with perfectly round tunnels that had to have been made by the patient gnawing of sandworms. As I noticed that, Karalti gasped, and flicked a wingtip to steer us toward the largest cavern entry: a huge open oval with two smaller openings to either side.

“Look! That's a Queen's apartment!” She sounded like a kid who'd just rushed down the stairs to the Christmas Tree.

“Really?” I said. “How do you know?”

“It's the biggest. And it has three doors! Because you mark your door with smells when you go inside your house, right? The Queen's Door is only for her, so it always carries her scent. Other people use the side doors,” shereplied.

“Stay on task,” Suri said to her, as she veered toward the door. “We need to land. I can show you to the ruin complex from here.”

“Right.” I slid to my belly on Karalti's back, and Suri did the same. “Okay, girl. As quietly as you can.”

Karalti flared her horns, the newly- formed small membranes near the base of her tail, and opened her arms and legs to create drag as she glided toward the ground. She landed on a patch of sand, taking the rolling impact with her knees, and sunk down to a four-limbed crouch.

Suri winced. “Damn. Still loud. Every sandworm from here to Dalim probably heard that one.”

“I weigh like eight tons. I can't really stop from making SOME noise.” Karalti snorted, head darting curiously as she straightened back up onto her feet. “I smell something interesting.”

“Like?” I stood and checked myself over. Weapons, potions, armor, keys, testicles. All in order.

“Like magic.” She leaned over to let us down. “Really powerful magic, but it smells sweet. It reminds me of...”

I hopped to the ground as she trailed off. “Like what?”

Her crests clamped to the sides of her head, and she rumbled with something like embarrassment. “It smells... like a nest. A place where people and things were born.”

Suri and I lit torches as Karalti concentrated, shifted down, and donned her new Fox Striker armor. She fitted the heavy cold iron gauntlets of the Baru on last, flexing her hands.

“Always feels weird to take this shape just after I've been flying for a while.” She swept her hair up into a high ponytail to keep it out of the way, and tied it back with one of her braids.

“Stick to P.M. if possible, guys.” Suri's voice piped up from my HUD instead of her lips. “One thing I figured out about this place was that the less noise you make, the better.”

That reminded me: Rin. I held up a finger, and opened up the group audio chat with her. “Okay, Rin, we’re in. Nothing exciting to show you yet, but we’ll send anything your way once we spot it.”

“Okay!” Rin was already waiting on the end of the line. “Be sure to send me any weird languages you find. I’ve got a stack of books here with me. I might be able to translate some things, and if I can’t, I can at least try and identify the language.”

“Copy that.”

Suri took point, her shoulder-mounted launcher loaded and ready to fire. The hope was that the noise it made would blind any Sandworms that attacked us... and give us enough time to run from the Level 45 monsters like a pack of wussies. Karalti and I both carried torches, the light barely seeming to penetrate the darkness forward or back. Every tiny sound put my back up... and now and then, we felt distant rumbling through our feet.

“Man, this is creepy,” Karalti grumbled. “I thought the sewers were bad. I can smell sandworms everywhere.”

“Yeah.” The odor – a weird musky smell that reminded me of pillbugs under a wet log – was so strong that I could smell it as well. There were no carvings to send to Rin, no indications of civilization. Suri paused at a corner, looked around, and then turned into a tunnel the size of a subway. There was a great big capsule lying in the middle of it. It was about the size of