This Feels Like the Wrong Way

“All I’m saying is, you only act like this when you’re hungry. So why don’t we just stop here and eat?”

Ianthe stopped short, glowering darkly. Her fingers curled into her palms as she calmly asked, “And how am I acting, exactly?”

“Oh, you know.” Fairuza adjusted her knapsack as she continued walking. She hadn’t noticed Ianthe was no longer beside her. She certainly hadn't noticed the expression on her friend's face. If she had, she might've kept quiet instead of saying what she said next. “Bossy and whiny. I mean, you’re always bossy but usually in a cute, socially acceptable way. Right now you’re being bossy in a really-getting-on-my-nerves way.”

Ianthe said, “And whiny?”

Fairuza scoffed. “You’ve been complaining about the map more than usual. It’s not even midday, and I think you’ve mentioned how much you hate cartographers at least a dozen times already, which is a record even for you. So all I’m saying is—”

Fairuza looked down and realized she’d been talking to the air. The bigger girl turned around to find her companion standing twenty feet behind her, hands balled into small fists at her side, an angry frown scribbled over her face. 

Fairuza made a sweeping motion with her hand. “Do you wanna catch up? I feel like I’m talking to myself here.”

It was late morning now, and the day had begun earlier than usual when Ianthe had awoken screaming thanks to a fat squirrel that had fallen out of the tree they were sleeping under and landed squarely on her face. It was uncertain who was more frightened: the hysterical Ianthe who wouldn’t stop screaming, or the petrified rodent that dashed in mad circles as Fairuza chased it with a giant sword. 

The sword was probably unnecessary. Slashing at it while howling like a banshee was definitely unnecessary. But waking up to a screaming Ianthe clawing at her face and leaping to her feet in genuine terror had pumped buckets of adrenaline into the girl’s blood and pushed logic straight out the window. Fairuza had felt more than a little embarrassed when she’d realized she was terrorizing an innocent fluffy-tailed rodent and quietly slipped the sword back into its sheath, hunkering down onto her sleeping roll.

But the harm was done, and even when their hearts stopped pounding, they were far too frazzled to go back to sleep.

So they’d begun walking. 

Upon reflection, it was no wonder Ianthe was in a bitter mood. Which she was, all her denials to the contrary notwithstanding. She was bossier than usual. She had cursed the existence of cartographers at least a half dozen times. (Not quite a dozen, as Fairuza had claimed. Fairuza was prone to exaggeration.) Ianthe had been more argumentative, and she was hungry.

“I am not hungry,” Ianthe insisted for the third time that morning. “I’m justifiably annoyed because we’ve been following this map all morning and none of the landmarks make any sense.” Ianthe shook the parchment crumpled in her fist. “The outcropping we camped at last night was exactly where it was supposed to be. We are going in the right direction. But what we are seeing is not matching what is written on the map.” 

Ianthe’s voice had begun to rise, and color rose in her white cheeks. “So I think I’m right to be upset. What I want to know is why you are so calm.” 

Fairuza folded her arms over her chest and ambled back to where her friend stood. She heaved her broad, heavy shoulders with practiced nonchalance, her movement loose and languid. Nothing ever rattled Fairuza. Not really. Most things that really annoyed her she could hit with her sword, which was certainly an advantage. But there was more to Fairuza’s easygoing nature than just the safety granted by her large stature and athletic fortitude. She was just naturally…unflappable. Most people found it admirable. 

Ianthe found it endlessly infuriating.

“I expect the scale in this particular area might be wrong,” Fairuza said. Gently, she took the map from Ianthe’s grasp, shaking out the wrinkles and opening the document wide before them. “Look. At the bottom of the map, there are two different scales. Looks like maybe the wild areas are less detailed than the explored areas, so the scale is less accurate. I just wonder if maybe we’re misunderstanding what the cartographer meant.” 

Ianthe narrowed her eyes. “And what kind of map requires the reader to interpret the cartographer’s intentions? That’s my entire point, Fairuza. We shouldn’t have to interpret anything! It should all be crystal clear! We should be able to understand where we’re going and what we’re supposed to do just by glancing at the thing.” 

Ianthe’s face glowed pink as she worked herself into a tizzy. Several strands of long, white hair had escaped her ponytail and were now sticking out around her face, making her look feral and more than a little unhinged. Her nostrils flared and her eyes flashed. She was ferocious even under the best circumstances.

She was terrifying when she was hungry.

Fairuza had had enough arguing for one morning, and anyway, she knew it was impossible to reason with Ianthe once her hair became unkempt. So she plopped down onto the ground with her legs crossed and pulled out her knapsack. She flipped it open, reached inside, and withdrew two hunks of meat. The first she bit into, and the second she tossed to her companion.

Ianthe caught it mid-air, fumbling a bit but managing to secure it before it fell into the dirt. She glared at the meat as though it had attacked her whole family, but eventually, she sighed and sank down next to Fairuza, taking a huge bite of the meat she absolutely was not hungry for.

Her stomach howled in anticipation. The meat was delicious.

“I don’t know what you have against eating,” Fairuza said around a mouthful of meat. “Eating is one of the best parts of being alive. Maybe the best part. I look forward to every opportunity to eat. In fact, I have to make myself think of reasons not to. Like, for example, if we eat too much, we’ll run out of rations before we reach the next town, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody, especially you, because you get whiny and complainy when your stomach’s empty.” 

Ianthe knew she was being needled and wisely said nothing. She chewed with vigor, wiping the grease that dripped from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. When she finished, she sucked the fat from her fingers and stretched out her legs. She leaned back onto her hands and peered into the sky.

“I’m certain we’ve been heading in the right direction,” Ianthe reiterated. Now that she was full and feeling like herself, she could admit she’d been a little unreasonable earlier. And she couldn’t really blame Fairuza for not taking her seriously when she was acting like a prat. Still, she knew she was right, and that worried her. “We should be able to see the ruins from here. So the fact that we can’t means something is wrong.”

“Could be,” Fairuza agreed. “Could be we’re just not looking right.”

Ianthe scowled. “How do you look wrong, exactly?”

Fairuza heaved her shoulders, her expression relaxed. “Well, you keep saying the landmarks aren’t right. Which landmarks do you mean?”

Ianthe counted them off on her fingers from memory. “There’s supposed to be a lookout tower and a rose garden,” she said. “We haven’t seen anything like that.”

“We haven’t,” Fairuza agreed. “But maybe that’s because they’re not here anymore.”

Ianthe cocked an eyebrow and leaned her head to one side. “The maps aren’t that old,” she said, a vague mocking underlying her words. “Do you suppose the landmarks just got up and walked away?”

“Yup.”

Fairuza turned, gave her friend a goofy grin and waited patiently for her to catch up. It took Ianthe a few moments longer than it should have for her to realize what Fairuza was saying. But when understanding finally dawned, the girl’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. “You think those landmarks turned into bergs?”

Fairuza shrugged, still grinning. “Can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” She sat up, leaning forward in excitement as her idea caught fire. “I can remember several sojourners coming home with stories of trees and wooden buildings coming to life. Never heard of a rose garden coming to life, but why not? If a tree can suddenly become ambulatory and just pick up its roots and walk off, why not a garden? And lookout towers in these parts are made of wood. It seems more likely to me that our landmarks turned into bergs than our cartographer was an idiot.”

Ianthe stared in stark disbelief as she mulled over the possibilities. “How did you even think of that? I didn’t think of that. It never even occurred to me, and I’m about three times smarter than you are.”

Fairuza made no attempt to disagree. “While you’ve been focusing on the landmarks, I’ve been looking at the actual land. The ground. This whole area looks like the farmlands after they’ve been abandoned. Nature takes over, and the grass always comes up real soft and smooth. That’s how this looks. Like this earth had been disturbed, and then the grass grew over it in time. It looks like a closed-up wound. And that got me thinking: what could cause such a thing? And the first thing I thought of was a berg. Waking up, climbing to its feet, and going on its merry way. It would leave huge indentations in the ground. Big wounds. And with enough time, those wounds would turn into scars that looked like this.”

Ianthe’s amazement dissipated and once again settled into irritation. “That was the first thing you thought of, huh?”

Fairuza chuckled. “Okay, it wasn’t the first thing. But it makes sense. If we ignore the landmarks and just look at the land, do you still think we’re in the wrong place?”

Ianthe took a deep breath and surveyed her surroundings with fresh eyes. Now that she wasn’t looking for giant buildings or lovingly tended roses, she had to admit that Fairuza might be onto something. The course of the river had changed a bit, but that was expected over time. Everything else was right. The hills to the north were right where they were supposed to be. So was the copse they’d passed an hour ago. It all made sense if you ignored the manmade landmarks.

Ianthe didn’t like being wrong and disliked Fairuza being right even more, so she stopped thinking about it and said, “I don’t think we’re in the wrong place, but that doesn’t change the fact that we should see the ruins from here.” Ianthe climbed to her feet and made a visor of her hand as she peered out over the landscape. The sun was directly overhead, and it was getting hot. “I still don’t see anything. Do you?”

Fairuza followed Ianthe’s lead and climbed to her feet. She, too, shaded her eyes from the sun as she gazed out into the distance. “Not yet. Let’s keep walking and see what we can see.”

Ianthe made no argument, and the two continued walking. 

Here and there, Fairuza picked up a rock and squinted at it, examining it closely. If she was satisfied with it, she exchanged the stone for another she carried in her pocket and chucked the discarded rock into the distance. The new stone she stuck happily into her pocket, whistling something jaunty but off-key. Sometimes she didn’t discard a rock at all, which was how her collection grew. She usually carried no more than three or four rocks at a time, which to Ianthe seemed three or four rocks too many. Why did she collect rocks, anyway? It wasn’t like they weren’t surrounded by rocks all the time. Rocks were not rare. Rocks were not interesting. Rocks were rocks.

The pair had been walking long enough that they no longer needed to shade their eyes to look out into the distance. The sun had moved behind them, casting long shadows before them. Something flew overhead, its shadow large enough to stop both girls in their tracks. Fairuza looked up and pointed.

“Bullgazer,” she said, squinting up into the sky. “Never thought I’d actually see one in real life life.”

Ianthe followed her friend’s gaze, the color draining from her face. “Shouldn’t we hide or something? Aren’t those things meat-eaters?”

Fairuza nodded once, eyes still focused on the enormous winged beast overhead. “Yeah. But I don’t think it’s coming this way. Look. I think it’s heading for that island up above.”

The two watched as the bullgazer, a species of pygmy cyclops dragon, soared upward in a slow lazy spiral, its enormous webbed wings carrying it up toward a small floating island.

Ianthe dropped her gaze and planted her hands on her hips. “I’m calling it. We’re lost. Or the mapmaker was an idiot. Or—”

“Hang on.” Fairuza was still staring into the sky, but a new emotion had bloomed over her face. Her mouth slowly dropped into a little o as she leaned her head back and suddenly broke out into shoulder-shaking laughter.

Ianthe wasn’t amused. “This isn’t a joke, Fairuza. We’ve been walking for days, and—”

“We’re here.” Fairuza wiped the laughter from her face, but she still wore a huge smile as she met Ianthe’s grumbling stare. “We’ve probably been here for hours.”

Ianthe lifts an eyebrow, glancing around the plains. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but unless these ruins are invisible—”

Fairuza stomped a foot on the ground, her impish grin growing wider. “It’s beneath us,” she said. “If it had been above us, we would have seen it. We would’ve walked right beneath its shadow. And if it were in the plains, we couldn’t have missed it. It’s an entire civilization, after all. It makes sense, Ianthe. The ruins are beneath us. We just have to find a point of entry.”

Ianthe’s twisted frown said she was skeptical, but that she offered no argument and followed behind as Fairuza led them towards rocky outcropping said she was willing to be convinced.

The plains stretched for miles in every direction before running up against the base of hills or mountains that stretched into the sky. But here and there the vast emptiness of the plains was broken up by a copse of small trees, a glittering lake or stream, or the remnants of small stone homes that had long been lost to time, ill weather, and scavengers. The girls had walked past many of these, sometimes commenting on how out of place they were, or wondering about the people who used to live there, or admiring any fruit that hung heavy from the trees.

But one thing they hadn’t even noticed were outcroppings of silvery rock that jutted from the ground at odd angles like crystals that grew straight out of the earth.

To be fair, the reason they hadn’t paid much attention to these outcroppings was that back home in the Trunks, such rock formations were everywhere. The Trunks was situated at a base of a large seaside mountain range called the Overprides, one of the more majestic mountain ranges on the continent. The rocks that erupted from the ground throughout the local villages had likely once been part of the mountains, but after centuries of war and storms and the natural evolution of earth they’d become independent formations, providing gentle heights from which children would play lookout, welcome shade to nap under, or cover for sneaky teenagers engaging in secret trysts in the middle of the night. The outcroppings were simply part of everyday life in the Trunks. Nothing interesting to explore.

But here? No, here the rocks didn’t make sense, a fact that Fairuza could have kicked herself for not realizing earlier. Between the two girls, Ianthe liked to believe she was the more intelligent, and she probably was—at least when it came to book learning and academic trivia. Ianthe knew the chemical compositions of dozens of potions, elixirs, draughts—even more dangerous items like combustible sand and gasses that could put an entire family of horses to sleep. Ianthe knew how to sew and make dye and sometimes she even had predictive dreams that came true. Ever since they were young girls, Ianthe had known that her intellect would make her Important one day.

But where Ianthe flourished in the arcane and esoteric, Fairuza boasted a practical kind of wisdom that few appreciated and fewer still could rival. Fairuza understood the earth. She knew which mushrooms were safe to eat and which would make you vomit purple sludge until you broke out into painful boils that, if not quickly treated, would eventually eat the skin right off your bones. When the wells went dry, Fairuza knew where to dig to find large reserves of groundwater unpolluted by the sea. And if you needed to know which rocks were good for building and which were better for weapons, Fairuza could tell you that without hardly thinking about it.

And she could also tell you that the size of a tree wasn’t limited to what you could see above ground. A tree was at least as big as its roots, and sometimes, depending on the tree, it was even bigger because it was part of a network of trees, all linked underground by systems of roots, soil, and fungus.

Fairuza knew that sometimes, what you could see was only the beginning.

She stopped before a large collection of oval rocks that emerged from the ground at a gentle angle. The outcropping was a broad, low dome of limestone with a pitted, uneven surface. Large, oval rocks looked like they had pushed up from beneath the soil over time. Cracks and shallow grooves marked the stone, and small patches of moss and lichen had taken hold in the crevices. The rock was pale gray with darker streaks where water had run over it in the past.

Ianthe frowned at the rocks. “More rocks?”

Fairuza offered her friend a lopsided grin. “You have to look with better eyes than that.”

Around the edges, dry grass and hardy plants had grown up between the stones. In the center of the formation was a narrow opening, just large enough for the bigger girl to pass through if she slipped in sideways.

Ianthe would have no problem traversing the passage.

Fairuza hefted the pack on her shoulders. “You ready to go down?”

Ianthe blinked. “Down? Here?” She gave Fairuza another dose of her signature skepticism before letting the expression fall away. “Really?”

Without a word, Fairuza slipped between the rocks. The limestone structure was curved, forming a ceiling that blocked out most sunlight from above. The inside of the outcropping was cooler and damper.

With a triumphant grin, Fairuza pointed to the ground. “Behold—a cave entrance.”

Iantha blinked again, pushing a stray lock of flaxen hair from her eyes. She gazed into the darkness, and her throat closed. She looked at Fairuza with terror in her eyes.

“That’s a hole in the ground that goes straight down into nothing,” the girl breathed.

Fairuza grinned and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. “After you, my lady.”