CHAPTER 6.

The view in front definitely did not consist merely of an ominously teetering pile of moldy stones with some lopsided wannabe-scary faces cut into them.

On the very contrary. The high buildings bathing in the orange early morning light were tickling the bellies of the red clouds above. Where the vine had not totally claimed the top throne, white stone gleamed, reflecting the sunbeams as tiny fireworks of sanguine sparks. The square gap of sky looming above seemed rather diminished compared to these edifices. It had such an aspect as though it had wanted to shuffle sheepishly off from the whole landscape, and seek for a more modest place to pose in.

The square stood utterly still, like the bottom of a giant dry well. The shadowed figures of Hiid and Bee appeared as mere insignificant pebbles somewhere down in the dirt.

Then, there were the faces. No, not those lopsided ones in the abovementioned moldy rock pile that ultimately had decided to give up being vertical.

Behind the turf hulked these colossal, silent faces, carved in the weathered stone all around the walls, creeping up along the steep lines. Even though their archaic features had crumpled and crackled in places, there was still the eminent vestige of superior sculpting talent present. One day those high cheekbones had been sleek. Those callous, hard eyes had perhaps worn a milder, painted expression. Presently they glared down at the intruders as a thousand-headed council of doom, sentencing all sordid mortals to extinction with the merciless coldness of ageless stone.

Hiid actually cringed slightly under that ceaseless, stabbing frown, feeling as though the soles of her boots were too inferior to leave even one smear onto their sacred soil. A bit like if one had popped in President Iiivr’s annual parliament ball, - the utmost glittering fantasy of every jet set buzzard - wearing a crumpled brown paperbag, and a few musty potatoes as a headpiece.

She could not resolve which detail made the worst chills lurch down the spine: the obdurate gaze, or the fact that these visages possessed near-human resemblance. They certainly were neither equipped with twenty compound eyes lolling in the other end of meter-long antennae, nor a dense series of kitchen knives in the place of a mouth. The long pointy ears were perhaps the only out-of-place snippets.

An odd, quick association made her think of bearded midgets in pointed hats and shoes with curving toes. By some reason they were also loading an elk-harnessed sleight with colorfully wrapped packets, and singing some sappy out-of-tune trill in voices that would have made rosebushes turn into chainsaw murderers.

No way. That sort of ears belonged to cartoons, she deliberated. This universe had to contain at least some sense, even though it most of the time seemed consciously avoiding even the merest traces of it. You just did not go on walking around with appendances like that, unless you were a rabid fan of books with lots of uncanny magical rings in them.

And oh, how menacing the blank, stagnant eyes appeared again. Hopefully there was nothing even remotely telepathic behind them...

However, everything around remained quite as motionless as a boiled asparagus when Enkev and the blob shambled across the square. She was furthermore quite full of naïve astonishment, thus hardly observing how her jaw kept drooping open.

A few crimson cloud shreds staggered across the gap of paling sky. Or at least did their very best in this, regarding their dreadfully legless consistence. The empty caterpillar parked near the pierced wall somehow managed to break the picturesque atmosphere with is unbefitting appearance. A tad like trying to make a plastic bucket look elegant in the end of a line of hand-painted kylikes from the ancient Greece.

The both intruders would have admittedly wished to wander deeper into this archaic realm, but unfortunately the route soon became blocked. There was a wide archway cut into the rear wall, and it undoubtedly would lead somewhere inside the long-passed millennia. However, the mightily overgrown stone nose of the effigy above had collapsed right before the opening, barricading it perfectly. And the rest of the gaps were stuffed full of the climber that sprouted freely from its both nostrils. It could be only mused what might lie behind, since there was hardly a peephole left.

The overswollen schnozzle would have been a piece of muffin to cut into bits with Bee’s laser. However, the slightly rebellious duo did not dare tampering that much with the diggings. Probably the barrier would be removed later the same day anyway, if the archeologists wished to begin the more extensive explorations.

So, undoubtedly they would have an opportunity to visit the horizontal abysses later.

They would, indeed...

After ten weeks, the glamour of the first minutes had considerably evaporated. It had become a sort of daily ritual to saunter along some zigzagging cobbled street, lurk under coved passageways when the sun was excessively inclined to burn you, and so on and so forth.

Listening to the scholars’ mummery jargon - even if with half an ear and less than quarter of awareness at a time - was officially the worst bit. Bee sometimes wondered whether they had an in-built random lingo generator in their heads, which shoveled the incomprehensible blather into their mouths and out of it. The general dryness of their lecturing would have probably drenched a few oceans if those poor buggers had possessed ears.

Oh well, archeology quite was not such an intriguing adventure. All those holomovies had merely brainwashed the mediocre citizens to fantasize about lost temples where secret cults worshipped a wide range of thoroughly illogical entities from pigeon poo to moldy tacos. And in the last second, when the white-clad fair princess was supposed to be sacrificed to the Sacred Sauerkraut or whatever the hip thing was at the moment, she became rescued by the valiant whip-lashing action archeologist. Alongside all the obligatory kittens and doggies regained a merry freedom, so that the children audience could sigh with ease.

However, there were certain aspects in this discovery that made it teeter a tad more towards the movie-cliché escapade side. If only the fieldworkers had not analyzed everything with that accursed textbook boringness.

“Rules are rules, and are made to be followed. We must not make deviations,” Mr. Rmy would snap, if anyone dared inserting some wilder views in-between the methodological pigeonholing of curios and causalities.

The clearing itself had gone on speedily once the right equipment had been fetched. So far, nearly a quarter of the ruins was a sand-free zone throughout even some of the cellar levels. However, there existed a few ickily grimacing problems with the latter issue. An enormous part of the city appeared to consist of completely unexpected layers beneath the conventional surface. The preliminary scans indicated a whole cobweb of passages, tunnels, crypts, and general molework crisscrossing into areas far beyond the borders of the oasis. So, the exoterranean temples and whatnot formed merely a poky coulisse sitting atop something vaster.

Then, they had come across the mess prowling under the sand. At the moment, the scholars could merely express a wide variety of uneasy visages, since their precious textbook reasoning could not really provide with sufficient explanations to this.

There had been household items sprawling cracked on the streets. There had been time-crusted wrecks that could have, in the dawn of time, been half-loaded vehicles. There had been antechambers with what looked like half of someone’s possessions hurriedly piled into them as disheveled stacks. The dry sand had luckily preserved well the culture’s remains, so that even a few fossilized skeletons had been hoisted up from various alcoves.

The concealed hullabaloo left the feeling that the metropolis had been under an excessive evacuation once upon a time, but had not been even tenuously successful in it. No natural catastrophe like an earthquake or hurricane nonetheless made the afterstate comprehensible. The high buildings towered quite intact, excluding the gnawing of the natural erosion. Somehow it did not seem like a war threat either. In that case, some megalomaniac would have gone and bombarded the bulwark into fine beach sand. Undoubtedly there would have been also traces of actively loaded weaponry left. Or, as actively loaded as it could be after a nice multimillennial slumber, during which the sand had intruded every mechanism.

And yet, some kind of hazard had transformed the presumably calm quarters into a sheer bedlam.

Building theories with the commonly instated methods, which included a lot of pyramid charts and differently colored crisscrossing arrows-headed lines that made your eyes water if you stared at them more than a minute, hardly clarified either the culture clash between a few architectural details and the skeletons. Placed next to the carved faces on the walls, the bodies of the natives shared just as much commonality as penguins and toothpaste.

Well, perhaps we can smell the rancid stench of extensive hyperbola here, but the gap between the species was deep indeed. The humanoid stone visages did quite not cease staring just after the first square, but littered almost every public brick from the lowest loo till the highest tower. The natives sported horns, extra eye sockets, and such knickknacks, and definitely could have not posed as reference models for that sculpture.

The scholars kept reiterating that the denizens here had probably been in contact with some extraplanetary culture they regarded with distinction. The ruins confirmed that the culture knew the means of space traveling at least by some degree. No less unfamiliar were the conceptions of electricity and some sort of semi-organic production of it. Hence the power plant kind of facility the diggers had stumbled upon some tens of meters under the surface, might have once been, well, a plant.

That wilted dandelion - or whatever it was - lent no much of a helping petal in endeavoring to resolve any of the present enigmas.

******

It was a hot, dusky hour ashore the lake. The lazy gust of wind, which tried to drag itself across the open areas, was hardly virile enough to make the water’s edge ripple. Maybe the wind was having a well-earned holiday after it had squalled so ferociously the previous day.

Yellow hover lamps created cozy, slowly pulsating orbs around the campsite. The assortment of differently sized moons was sluggishly beginning to throng the sunset-purple sky. Faint lombing issued from the bushes. Overall, it was rather idyllic, Enkev mulled over, as she was filling her plate by the cook’s smorgasbord. The serenity was broken only by the irritated buzz coming from the near proximity of Mr. Rmy’s marquee. Its front flaps had been spread wide open, and a rickety table stood right before the open outdoors study. The lead archeologists were huddled around it, sticking in turn their fingers into the flickering projection of a giant holomap, like kamikaze mosquitoes swooping down to bite some poor unsuspecting wretch. A major dispute seemed going on.

“They’d need to hire a common arbitrator. First they argue with us about the ship, then with the planet about its unsuitable climate, and now with themselves about their incongruous theories. Next they’ll probably start disputing with the sky and complain that the alignment of the stars looks too messy.” Bee came floating from behind the kitchen pavilion.

“Mm, yeah,” she nodded. “Can see certain someone going up there, and start arranging the suns into tidy squares with name tags on them. An’ get the eternal wrath of the upstairs folk upon him. Y’know, there’s a beautiful order in chaos. Some people just disagree to see it.”

“Beautiful order in chaos? Like the twenty or so unwashed coffee mugs strewn across your tent’s floor and tables? I think I saw an empty shampoo bottle sitting in one of them. What is the winsome splendor thou seest in this concoction? Or are you trying to create some fabulous piece of modern art you’re going to sell to the Capital Museum with a lofty price after we get home?”

She snorted into her evening tea. “Y’know, thanks for reminding me... I should take ‘em back. I just keep forgetting to do it. The cook’s starting to get suspicious as of where the cups keep disappearing.”

Bee rolled his eyes. “You’re impossible.”

“No, it’s the very opposite. I’m painfully possible. Of ‘cause everyone’d like to be a flawless hero that radiates peace and harmony, but the reality just doesn’t support that sort of Mary Sue syndromes.” She shrugged, staring at the mug. “Dunno... you think they arrange some sort of courses on how to learn a bit of orderliness? Just never have gotten the knack of these household things.”

A hint of smile flickered in his eyes.

“So...” she cast her gaze towards Mr. Rmy’s domiciliation. By the table, Mr. Tu-Ssari of the antiquated warcraft study department was flinging his stubby arms in the air, cheeks glowing red with anger. Mr. Rjuikhuli beside him appeared equally livid. “Any idea what they’re maneuvering about now? Thought these people’d get along fine in each other’s company, but I guess it’s not so.”

“Meh... They all think his or her theory is the holy and supreme one.” Bee scowled at the outdoors study. “They’re having a fit about the big broken triangles. Heard some odds and ends while passing by. Don’t seem to find any logical purpose for them. Miss Nyrpis suggested they might have been something that present-day humanoids have lawn gnomes to serve for. Not that either makes any sense.”

“If you wanna start deeply philosophizing on how the lawn gnomes are really making a silent conspiracy under our noses and scheming to take over the cosmos, be my guest,” she snickered. “Just don’t drag me into it. But I wouldn’t mind knowing what the triangles are. Kind of interesting contraptions.”

The aforementioned thingamabobs had been come across alongside with the remains of such normal-life bric-a-brac as pots, kettles, wrecks that could have been oddly shaped cars, et cetera. They were hollow, triangular frames made of some unknown alloy. The dimensions were usually about three meters both vertically and horizontally, even though yet more massive individuals had been spotted. Their framing looked mostly as though an army of metal-eating larvae high in magical mushrooms had gone staggering around along the surface. So tight they were packed with engravings and complicated symbols.  These triangles, or what was left of them, usually squatted on both public and private courtyards, and even around marketplaces. Undoubtedly they had served some more significant purpose than to mimic brownies.

The weirdest aspect however was, that they all had been thwacked broken. Considering how many ordinary kitchen supplies had spent millennia utterly intact in the sand’s embrace, at least a few of them should have remained even modestly upright.

The logical conclusion indicated that the citizens themselves had obliterated them. But here Logic had to admit its failure and saunter off. Maybe only its worst enemy Illogic might have been able to explain why this large-scale extermination had been carried out (There were hundreds, if not thousands, of the trilateral frames, all very much devastated.). But regrettably nobody wanted to invite it under their craniums. Thus, there was no much hope of inventing any ingenious solutions in a long, long while.    

“Fancy for a walk?” Bee inquired after some silence, during which two mugs of tea, a few meatcakes, and a bowl of soup had changed their molecular structure and discontinued to exist in their dishes.

“Yeah. Not feeling any sleepy. And I bet that that dispute club won’t go to bed soon either.”

They started off towards the city with a leisurely pace. Ten weeks ago Hiid had created complex theories on how the archeologists would enclose the diggings with high barbed wire and ‘NO TRESPASSING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ -signs painted with jumbojet-sized letters, complete with skulls and crossbones added in them to create dramatic effect.

But nothing of that sort had occurred. There were perhaps a few small quadrangles separated from the main area with low fences, but otherwise anyone could fairly freely roam among the cleaned cobblestone lanes.

The cityscape was perhaps in its best either early in the morning or by twilight. Then the white stone glistened with the bright oranges and purples of the sky, finally melting together with either the midday’s luster, or the velvety night blue strewn with silver lanterns.

And there was no danger of getting caught in pitch-black all of a sudden. The dusk and dawn crept on with the pace of a slumbering mollusk, lasting several hours, the light and dark sweeping over the landscapes as softly shifting gradients.

The jungle path did not pose such a sinister peril any longer for Bee. The branches above seemed oddly void of the overtumescent birds these days. Hiid had pondered that this phenomenon probably related to the odd whiteish meat, with which the cook had been spicing the soups lately. She had at least once spotted the cook emerging from the woods with a huge bulging sack thrown over his shoulder. The sack had been wobbling and emitting faint whining noises.

Whatever the cook was cooking up, it was to hope he did not commit any permanent damage to the forest’s delicate ecosystem.

Like aforementioned, the two mismatched friends often trotted around the old metropolis. There was surprisingly lot of idle time to spend, now that no more major machinery setups were committed. Excluding the occasional maintenances, this novel liberty felt like a kind of vacation.   

Gibbering this and that, Bee’s voice occasionally decaying under Hiid’s loud snorts, they swept across the old city square. The vines had been ripped off from the exalted walls, while some giant broomstick had excellently banished the ruddy knee-high sand from the bottom.

The haunting frown of the stone visages was more soul-piercing than ever. Hiid, being a cold rationalist that usually rolled her eyes at any forms of superstition, still experienced a nasty lurch in her stomach every time she treaded under that group-stare of apocalypse. At the moment, she decided to keep her eyes focused on the intricate patterns of the flagstoned ground. Stones of alternating color had been lined up to form multifarious symbols.

She had come to recognize a few of them over the weeks, since the outlines kept repeating in various places. Most of all in the triangles.

“Wonder what these scrawls meant for the people here...” she reflected. They were currently passing over one that resembled an overcoquette pitchfork with all kinds of extra curls and swirls protruding from it. That particular ensemble of gibberish seemed the number one fashion item in the symbol department here. One could spot it emblazoned almost everywhere.

“Probably some horrible magical mantras that turn your head into a roll of toilet paper or something... Nah, might be anything. Maybe it says ‘King Mumbo Jumbo Atchoo the Sixth built this for the memorial of his favorite, late pet parrot.’ Or something.”

“Yeah, that’s what it mostly is, the boring and the obvious,” she grinned. “A bit like when you come across some shady minute building having a kind of mysterious dark aura about it, and five minutes later you understand it’s just a public lavatory.”

They entered the archway jutting in the rear wall. The stone nose had been heaved aside. It lay in a few meters’ distance, staring at them with its huge, cavernous nostrils. Evidently it was endeavoring to imitate the callous gazes around, even though it possessed no eyes.

“Might’ve been a nice place to live in, when this was still in shape.”

“Yeah, well, wins the suburbs of T’ylsa M’alsa IV. Miles of gray apartment houses that are all each others’ clones. This place’s got all the exciting narrow alleyways crisscrossing the town, and little decorated balconies where’d you least expect them, and pretty statues sticking out from every recess. It’s cool, you know.” Hiid let her gawk wander around. The goggling mugs were no longer present.

“I’ve heard that’s one of the most ho-hum places in the whole Capital Solar System. Don’t tell me you grew up there?”

“Well, where else’d you expect a working-class patron to find a decent apartment for his family?” she sighed. “I admit I had trouble finding my way home from school sometimes. Every darn inch of it looks the same. Gray concrete mass with rusty tricycles sprawling in every corner. I’m so glad I left it behind. Perhaps the spaceports aren’t all that shiny either, but at least their appearances are not giving you lobotomy.”

They arrived in a fork of seven open passages. The eighth was furthermore full of sand. So unless one was a sandworm, he or she preferably selected something from among the septet.

“So, where should we go this time? Or do we just turn back and get to sleep?”

She raised a brow. “Nah. Drank too much coffee a few hours ago. Won’t catch the sandman probably until the dawn. Let’s pick this one here.” She pointed at the lane nearest to the sand-infested one. “They cleared it a few days ago, and I think we haven’t explored it yet.”

“Explored, yeah... You should’ve become an archeologist. You got more adventure spirit than our dear scientists put together,” Bee pointed out, half-kidding.

“Adventure spirit, by the guano moons of Graa! Even a Klaavian Lollerslug’s got more adventure spirit than me. Firstly, I don’t much enjoy heights. Secondly, I hate running. Thirdly, I rather find a comfortable bush inside which to hide, than face the carnivorous bunnyrabbit that guards the... whatever it guards. Seriously, go rather interview the sloths in the Capital Zoo. I bet even they’d be better applicants for the profession of an action hero than me.”

The night drew silently on, draping the purple with a slight darker shade of blue. Bee had lit a few of the internal spotlights of his exoskeleton. He looked distinctly like an oddly placed disco ball. The alleyway was rising, meandering among high buildings, whose doorways had not yet been freed from the millennial prison of dirt and weeds. Short but steep stone steps perched here and there between paved landings.

Suddenly, the passageway got all bored to the zigzagging and lurking amidst the houses, and plunged into the open air aloft, far above the mure’s capping. A wide balcony with crumpling stone banisters spread in front, giving space for almost a dreamlike vista below.

In the dying sunlight, the city with its thousands of white turrets glimmered like a sea of jewels. Behind, the red ocean of sand was apparently envious to it, thus attempting to glitter even more lavishly. Somewhere on the far horizon rippled the outline of a maroon mountain range. Above loomed the silvery faces of the six moons, and as smaller figures, the planet’s siblings.

The panorama would have put even an extreme cynic to utter a breathy ooh, and made Diogenes leave his barrel for forever. Bee decided to snap a few photos with his tiny holocamera extension. If he ever returned to Blihvaria, he would have something to gloat over.

After the roof terrace, the road made a ninety-degree turn, and dived back into the mass of edifices. Here one could without effort notice the less scrupulously tidied surroundings. Heaps of turf plagued the carefully cobbled streets, and the walls were grimy with dirt. And finally, behind one corner, the road became blocked with waist-high sand. A grubby sand sucker perched nearby, telling that someone would slouch back the following day to do some larger-scale vacuum cleaning.

Hiid and Bee gazed at the hemi-impasse. The sand-infested road continued to writhe for a while between two walls, and then became utterly devoured by the shadows.

“We might... Or you might - since I don’t possess such protrusions - set your conk towards the way back. It’s getting rather dark. And you tend to hit your toes against rocks a few hundred times a day even in bare daylight.”

“Yeah, but I might try doing a world record in nighttime clumsiness. Wouldn’t mind a few extra hexadecimals onto my bank account. You won’t become a zillionaire overnight as a pathetic mechanic,” she laughed.

Just when they were about to turn around, an odd glimmer caught the corner of Hiid’s eye.

“Hey, wait a sec...” she frowned, squinting at the darkening end of the uncleared pathway. Nothing. Perhaps it had been a microscopic idea lamp that had decided to switch itself off, because nobody had use for such an insignificant intuition.

However, when she treaded half a step back, the glint was there again. She balanced for a while in that one-footed position, craning her neck to see better.

Yes, there was something faintly shimmering beyond the sand. Apparently the last beam of the dying sunlight caught the thing via some hole, and could be observed only from certain angle. This was not the kind of flamboyant twinkle the local rocks did while bathing in the sun. The light sort of bounced off from them into every imaginable direction, as though throwing a handful of marbles onto a trampoline. The present luminescence effect had a more lackluster kind of sheen. Like oxidized metal.

Bee raised a brow, goggling at her ludicrous pose. “What in the name of all the moldy Gorgonzolas? Are you attempting to learn levitating, or what?”

“No, I just... No way, it can’t be...” Brows still knitted, she approached the sand’s edge. From inside one of the deep overall pockets she extracted a small high-intensity floodlight, and aimed the beam at the greedily spreading blackness.

Yes. It had to be one.

“Hey, did someone just do a spring cleaning in your attic or what’s wrong?” Bee flitted off to pursue the irrationally behaving girl. She had abruptly gone sand-swimming, arduously slogging herself through the waist-high accumulation.

“Ohoy! Are you listening at all?”

Nonetheless, when the blob had hovered ahead of the mechanic, his reaction was exactly the same. Any O-letter would have been venom-green with envy because of the perfectly circular shapes of his wide-flown eyes.

The sand-filled patch of road amidst the walls reached no infinite lengths. Shortly, an almost clean inner courtyard spread out, surrounded by engraved mures and a small vault that let a fleck of sky peep in. But neither pal had come to ogle at the architecture.

No. It was the enormous triangle stagnating right under the canopy. And the fact that it had not been applied with a dozen sledgehammers and a roadroller to add a piquant finalizing touch.

“Wow. It’s all intact.” This was saying something, since the comrades had passed by a fair thirty smashed ones. Not even the scholars had so far come across a non-wrecked copy.  

Hiid tiptoed round and round it, gawking at the structure. A light smear of mould partially spoiled its sumptuously decorated frame. A few vines, presently mummified, had begun spiraling it eons ago, yet had perceived their mistake too late. They should have planted themselves elsewhere in the first place, since those specks of soil provided no ample nourishment.

“How come the one who was clearing the way back there didn’t spot this at all?”

“Well, if it was Prötti or one of his cronies in the other end of the sand sucker, I wouldn’t wonder if pressing the device activation button took his whole brain capacity.”

“Hey, the custodians’re ok. He’s maybe no Einstein, but basically a nice guy.” Here, her voice had caught a terser note, which told the blob not to go on further taunting those, who actively did not consider themselves the high supreme overlords of the universe.

“Alright, alright. They’re basically good folk. I just don’t get what he means with that hrrump. ”

She went on ripping off some of the crinkled veggies from around the frame, and wiped the dirt off as high as her stunted physique allowed. The colossus was about four meters high. From under the earth’s scurf popped up a hodgepodge of the same hieroglyphs, whose panuniversal purpose the duo had meditated earlier. This triangle chum seemed especially keen on showing off with a kind of extra-spiky G.

“Honestly, these can’t exist just to replace lawn gnomes. I mean, what kind of wacko goes around bashing lawn gnomes? Unless they suddenly become extremely out of fashion.”

Unfortunately, here the poltergeist of ungainliness decided to hit. Or actually the normality. Hiid had succeeded to spend a good few hours without stumbling into anything, so it was time for the universal balance to return anyway.

She was rending more of the weeds away, blabbering about some intuitive theory concerning peculiarly shaped clotheshorses, when her boot got stuck into a shrubbery of some of the less deceased vines. She tripped, hit her knee painfully against the metal, and barely got support from the rest of the frame as not to make another embarrassing belly-landing.

Something caved in under her knee with a hollow clack.

The white twirling dots caused by the stinging pain would have been altogether enough. Yet, when the whole frame out of the blue burst alight, her brain failed to express nothing more than an incoherent ‘eeyyaargh’. Blindingly bright, purple sparks begun raining down from the frame’s top joint, while every single scrawling, carving, and stickfigure doodle on the metal blazed with the same blaring shade of crimson. A swirling, transparent ripple, looking slightly as though purple liquid had been poured onto a glass saucer, had begun evolving in mid-air, right in the hollow centre of the frame.

It was pain beyond anything Hiid had ever experienced. The electric charge issuing from the contraption seemed binding the grip of her hands onto the metal with invisible superglue. Her very bones were on fire; it felt as though some nameless demon from the deepest pits of Gehenna was tearing her flesh apart with hot forks... Only desperate gurgle could barely escape from her throat. The lungs were empty; the very air had turned into a ten thousand daggers that rived everything they came across...

The purple whirl expanded and expanded, until one more fulgent flare of sanguine fire filled the courtyard.

Then, there was only blackness left.

And a silence that could compete in decibel rate only with a goldfish on dry land.

Half a minute or so later, a wide, intensely spreading crack appeared in the frame’s upper part. A few seconds more, and there were nothing but smoldering bits of metal sprawling on the ground. The decrepit triangle had traversed till the end of its days, and fallen apart.

Bee, shuddering in mid-air, would have been white from shock if his exoskeleton had been able to express custom colors. The miniature Armageddon had occurred within such a breeze, that he had hardly comprehended what was going on. Now, he was slowly waking up from a sort of conscious stupor, yet hardly believing his senses.

He was staring at a charred heap of bent metal bars and some fried weeds.

“En... Enkev...? Hiid? B - buddy?” he piped up.

Silence.

There was no sign of the woman. Not even a small rag of burnt cloth. Present was only the deepening night above the dying embers.