Chapter 34: Interlude 4, Ch 3: The Graveyard of History

Tumbling with dirt spraying all over me, I regret wearing my sword as it presses into my side and nearly knocks the wind out of me. I have no idea how long I fall but it feels like at any moment I’ll come out on one of the planet’s other continents.

Suddenly there’s a harder impact on my whole body that knocks all my breath out. Rolling over and trying to breathe, it’s not until I get my first pant out that I realize I’ve stopped falling. I shove my sword’s hilt out of my side.

“Piece of junk,” I spatter and pant some more.

I can’t see a thing. No light comes through that angled hole and I’m surrounded by a lifeless, hateful darkness. I spit out dirt and stand up, raising my hands to check the height of the cavern. It’s at least high enough for me to stand.

I don’t move. I listen to the echo of my breath. From the sound, it appears I’m in a sizable cave. I don’t know if it’s filled with holes or water or covered with bats. Instincts of terror tell me to run. Grundarin training tells me to pull out my sword and charge the mysterious blackness I know nothing about. I draw my sword but hold my ground, waiting.

I feel my breath flow onto my fingers and whisper echoes of invisible terror as I stand frozen, unable to think or do anything in the darkness. “Courage, Millar, courage,” I say. I grip my sword tightly and take a slow, short step into the blackness.

Suddenly a tiny hint of light comes down and reflects off my blade. I look up and see it’s coming from the hole in the ceiling. It gets brighter and brighter till I can see the outline of the hole and that it’s fifteen feet above the ground.

The light barely penetrates the cavern’s darkness, but it allows me to see the strange shape dangling from the hole. I walk closer to it and touch wood and fraying rope. “Rope ladder,” I say, and kick it.

A muffled voice shouts something from the hole. “Beln!” I shout back. “Beln, is that you? There’s a rope ladder! If you can get to the hole, I can climb out!” My voice sounds terrifyingly loud echoing in the cavern.

There’s a muffled response that doesn’t get any closer. It says something more, but I can’t understand a word. Then the light grows brighter. It quickly begins to light up the cavern as it approaches and suddenly I’m staring straight up at it. Quickly jumping to the side, I’m barely able to avoid the falling torch.

It lands with a clatter and I grab it before it can get out of reach. “Thanks!” I shout. There’s more muffled words but I ignore them, wide-mouthed at the sight before me.

Low mounds line the stony ground. Dozens of them, covering the entire cavern, which is about fifty feet across. At the head of each mound is a shaped stone, cut like a rimless, round hat. It’s cut poorly if it’s supposed to be a civilian’s hat because the stone is way too thick. But it’s too small to be of use to a soldier.

Looking down, I realize that I’m standing on top of one of these mounds. And to my surprise, there’s a shattered eye socket staring up at me through the dirt.

I jump back and nearly fall over another mound. Panting, I realize that being in a lighted graveyard isn’t much better than being in a dark cavern. At the far end of the cavern is a tiny, slanted hole that looks just big enough to squeeze through. With gratitude to whatever natural force shaped this stone, I squeeze through and leave the unknown graveyard.

Torch held high, I find comfort from my out-thrust sword as I walk into another, smaller cavern. Something moves across the floor to my left. I turn sword and torch in that direction, but there’s nothing there. My adrenaline soaring, I hear it move quickly again where I’d just been looking. Turning that way, I see nothing again. When I hear it coming from behind me, I anticipate its movement and charge with a cry, ready to kill whatever it is. But all I see is the cavern wall.

The room seems to be alive with movement now. I hear it coming from all around, from the ceiling, from the floor. My torch isn’t bright enough or fast enough to catch this invisible force. As I turn, searching for my enemy, I jump back at the sound of a deafening crash.

Metal falling against metal fills the cavern as I stare at an enormous, half-buried monstrosity. The tip of the metallic, um, thing, continues to collapse as dozens of rats spill out of it and seek shelter from my torch’s light inside holes in the wall. I sigh with relief and investigate the object. It’s metal, but doesn’t have that smell steel has. Plus it’s way too thin.

Where the pointed tip broke off the cylindrical structure, copper wires and metallic tubes stick out. Some of the wires are colored and covered with something I can’t recognize. The whole thing is charred and rusted, covered with rat nests and droppings.

More metal bits decorate the cavern, and I see another opening at the far side. The opening doesn’t appear to be natural. It looks like a large, stone structure, eroded into the soil. On the front, done in metal letters, is written Grundar Style and Apparel.

“A store?” I ask. I look up and see that the dirt and rock mix with a partially caved in stone ceiling. I’m inside a buried building that sold clothes?

Curiosity and the desire to find an exit overwhelm my fear as I go through the opening. I have to make my way through rotted wood and piles of decayed shirts. As I step over a collapsed part of the building’s wall, I find myself in another cavern.

It’s gigantic. My light doesn’t even reach the ceiling as I walk toward the center of the room, staring at the amazingly bewildering sight.

Skeletons lie everywhere amidst twisted shapes of metal. The skeletons all wear metal helmets shaped like the stone ones in the first cavern, many rusted to nothing. They lie in the twisted shapes of men who died in pain.

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Among them are metal beasts, house-sized things with spiked edges. Some are in pieces or collapsed from rust. One looks like it’d been blown up. But one is intact, the smaller round top having a long tube sticking out of it. I approach it and look at the structure. A skeleton, hunched over in pain, lies on the structure’s top opening, as if he had been trying to escape the scorched metal box.

I lean down and see another skeleton, crushed under the spiked sides. Wheels that don’t touch the ground run along this spiked strip that look like if they turned they’d make that strip move. Was this enormous metal beast a vehicle?

If it was, this must have been a warzone like nothing history has ever heard of. Moving houses crushing men and apparently fire scorching both sides. There is another, smaller vehicle in the center of the room on the edge of a small mound. Water drip, drips from the ceiling and has formed a shallow pool around the vehicle. The vehicle’s a metal object as well, but made of thinner material and not enclosed. It has two seats, completely eaten away, and a rusting body.

I walk over and investigate. Lying next to the empty vehicle, a metal box in his hand and pressed up against his rotten body, is a skeleton. In his bony, stretched out fingers on the other hand is a metal object that I find strangely familiar. It’s small, no bigger than a dagger, but is shaped with a handle and a tube resting on it that points outward.

Cory’s dream. That’s where I’ve seen this before. I sheath my sword and slowly lean forward to pick up the… gun.

“A gun,” I say, and look at the rusted, metal object. “There were guns in Grundar?” I look around at the battle scene in front of me.

My imagination goes wild. All the sudden I’m not standing in a cave. I’m standing on an ancient battlefield. Though it’s the distant past, the technology is far advanced. Men rush others with armor lighter and stronger than steel, blasting away at their opponents with enormous guns. The shots roar and ricochet off man and machine as the vehicles spray with their gigantic guns.

Men scream with hate and terror as they kill and die. There is a shockwave as a flying vehicle zooms by and drops something on one of the vehicles that makes it and several men around it explode. Amidst all this carnage, one man, carrying a message in a box he sees as more important than any life, runs to this vehicle I’m standing next to. His goal is something in that vehicle, something he can use to talk to his commander.

He runs toward it, shooting the man occupying it, before another soldier puts a shot through his head. Still clasping the message, the soldier falls and dies. Whatever he had to say, it went unheard, and the battle raged on till all were scorched and killed.

I lean down, seeing the rusting carnage for what it is now, and the small hole in the skeleton’s skull. And I realize what I’m looking at. I’ve seen this before, and not just the gun. In the first tale, Jasper went to a dead planet, one ravaged by war. He saw the ruins of a battlefield that, as he said, ended a great people founded by conquest. It looked just like this. This was a civilization’s end.

“Tragic, isn’t it?” Eelian asks.

I jump back and nearly cut down the old man, barely able to keep from dropping the gun and taking out my sword. Eelian sits on the edge of the little vehicle and looks at me, a deep frown on his face.

Unable to take the shock of what I’ve seen, I fall to my knees and try to hold back tears. “This was Grundar,” I say. “This was what we were long before Mendar Steel, long before Grundar.”

“I have always liked that name. Mendar’s father showed him the cavern you see now, before their fight. Mendar didn’t believe his father’s story, though, nor that Grundar was the name of a fashion designer with a big store,” Eelian says with a chuckle. “He thought it was an ancient city, and thus named his country after it. The humor has not died out.”

I look around, dry heaving in shock. “The gun,” I say, trying to latch onto a concept that my life and training won’t allow me to admit.

“You’ve discovered Grundar’s lost history, Millar. Sander was Mendar’s father. And he and Steel were not just husband and wife, they were Prophets.”

I drop the gun. “How did we fall so far?”

“Every nation, every empire, every kingdom and every state eventually falls,” Eelian says. “It’s known to the Prophets as a cycle. A country develops, grows powerful, then that power caves in on itself, in this case literally. All the technology and progress is lost and the cycle starts over. The Sevens Prophets think unity can end this cycle.”

“Unity, through war?” I ask.

Eelian reaches down and helps me up, sitting me down on the rotting vehicle and holding my torch. “Sander and Steel, Red and Gold Prophets, didn’t just love each other. They fell in love with this land. And knowing its past, didn’t want to see it destroy itself again. They decided to stay here permanently, and set up a peaceful kingdom, united and devoted to prosperity and peace, not war.”

“But war and prosperity go hand in hand.” I see the hurt and disappointment in Eelian’s face. “Don’t they?”

“It worked for awhile. And they tricked the whole population that Sander had been killed, not healed after the battle. Mendar led the country to unity and peace with his parents as his guide.”

“But he led a war, he fought against the Grundlins and neighboring tribes to unite them,” I plea.

Eelian shakes his head. “Sever, then known as Verland, attacked and forced Steel and Sander to prepare the nation for war. The Prophets weren’t able to stop the invasion, but were able to win the battles and the war. It was the only place where Verland’s military might failed, and made the Grundarins very proud. That’s why Sever hated Grundar so much and called it an evil, barbaric place. They were just upset that they lost. And what was said to be the only war Grundar would ever fight became the proud achievement that called them to arms when Steel and Sander finally passed on.”

“This is too much. We’ve been on a path, and put there by Prophets!”

“On a path, good prince,” Eelian says, “of conquest and glory. It’s happened before and I can see it now. Grundar will grow strong, and powerful, and take over this entire continent. Then it will battle with one of the other continents, a nation that has also achieved ultimate power. Then another, and another till only two sides, Grundar and the other united continents, are left. A great war will tear the planet apart and leave the empires too weak to survive. Grundar will collapse and die.” The storyteller pulls out the two metal balls he’d shown me before.

“Yes, Millar,” he says. “You’re on a path, a path that will inevitably lead to this.” Eelian hurls the metallic balls into the air. They spin and light the entire cavern, making the carnage of the room entirely visible. Death, death in all forms fills the cavern in rotting piles, and I see the future of my nation rusting before me.

“How can I stop it?” I ask, grabbing Eelian by his shirt. “How can I stop Grundar from destroying itself! I’ll stop the war, I’ll make peace with Nardor, just tell me how I can—”

Eelian punches me across the jaw. I fall to the ground, but catch myself.

“Don’t touch me,” he says, and straightens his clothes. Then he helps me up. “I’m sorry, Millar. I’m just a little sensitive about people getting that close to me these days.”

“It’s alright,” I say, and check my jaw. “I’ve still got my teeth. Just, next time punch me in the stomach so I don’t fall on a skeleton. That’s just creepy.”

“Duly noted. Sit here,” Eelian says, and places me back on the front of the vehicle. “You asked how to stop the cycle. I’m afraid ending a war, or ending all wars, is not enough. You must change people’s minds, not their actions. If you are willing, Millar, I’d like to tell you another tale.”