Page 2 of At the Mercy of Midnight
Hence why Amelia firmly believed that the stories of midnight disappearances, with claims their fellow venturers were‘teleported to another realm’, were absolute hokum.
People died in the Rift, simple as that.
The sun beat down on the back of her neck, though the uncomfortable heat was a small comfort to her, knowing that the danger came out in the dark.
Amelia glanced past the crumbling wall she and Silas were inspecting to take in the rest of the ruins. They had yet to explore past the outer grounds of the newly accessible location. All around the central ruins lay colossal pillars, some half standing, others laying on their sides, cracked and crumbling into the sand. There was a large depression in the earth, a crater the size of a building sitting like a scar to the ruins’ landscape to their left. Broken statues lay all around, half buried in sand and weathered beyond recognition.
The Ruins of Veilthorne, only recently traversable, were a yet-to-be explored city of a lost civilisation that Amelia predicted predated the magic they knew in their modern day. Because of its central location between the North and South Monoliths, the head scholars of the Lux Spire had hypothesised that there could be some answers laying among the crumbled city of how to stabilise the lands’ magic, which was slowly deteriorating around them.
No one in their known history had been able to approach the ruins, an invisible barrier keeping everyone out. The main reason they were there, was to source the power of the ward that had kept the city inaccessible for so long. It had been a long-standing cause of intrigue, and she knew she was blessed to have been chosen for such a historical excavation.
Amelia could see in the distance the remnants of a half-collapsed temple and felt the buzzing of discovery running through her veins.
There was something else, whispering within her. Amelia had convinced herself that she was here for research, for discovery, for the betterment of their land. But the truth was both simpler and harder.
She didn’t want to be alone in her own head anymore.
Joining an excavation team meant a break from the solitary studying in her laboratory back at the Lux Spire, no longer confined within the lonely walls of her single apartment where she had no friends to speak of.
A shadow fell across the crumbling wall, and Amelia turned to find Somara there, one of the junior scholars. “We’re going to move ahead with the tracker, see if there’s anything unseemly we need to be wary of.”
Amelia agreed, watching Somara look down at their tracker device, fingers fiddling with the dials.
Silas turned his head. “More unseemly than Dr. Winslow?” he said with a mocking tilt of his head and sending Amelia a pointedly raised brow. “Highly doubtful.”
He gave Somara a crooked smile, to which she appeared baffled by the slight against Amelia.
Amelia just looked away with a long-suffering sigh and moved to sit on a slab of rock, flipping open her notebook. The ancient language was not something she had seen before but knew that Silas had a runic translation text that might help them. She would be chagrined to ask for his help, but the discovery was more important than their rivalry. Only by a thin margin.
She had known Silas for many years, and he had proven to be little more than a thorn in her side. Their competingideologies had always turned heads in their published papers or their warring speeches at seminars.
He had spent his life studying ancient artefacts and viewed the arcane arts in a way that contrasted deeply with Amelia. Silas felt that magic should be instinctual, intuitive and that science had little to do with explaining its existence. He believed there were forces at play that the humans of Aethrial could hardly begin to comprehend. And he called himself a scientist!
Amelia had dedicated her career to arcane physics, having studied the origins of magic for almost ten years. She was one of the leading scholars in magical physics and the properties of the Monolith structures. Amelia had a firm belief that magic was an energy to be controlled, studied, and harnessed as a natural force produced by the twin Monoliths—not some mystical energy.
Their warring views and differing approaches had always created a chasm of misunderstanding between them. Amelia was constantly in danger of dislodging her eyeballs from her head from the sheer number of times she rolled them in his presence.
Silas wandered over to where she sat, and when his dusty boots entered her line of sight, Amelia squinted up to him, finding it difficult to see him with the bright sun directly above.
Silas stood over her, the sun blazing off his blonde hair and giving him a damned halo.
Of course he’d look like that.
Tall, lithe, and unnaturally graceful, Silas moved as if the world had been built for him and not the other way around. With his alabaster skin and bright hair paired with icy blue eyes, Silas was unusually pleasing to look at, from a completely aesthetic standpoint. It was a shame that his personality slid him firmly off the attractive scale.
And don’t even get her started on his aristocratic smirk, borne from his family’s obscene fortune.
He was stunningly, infuriatingly perfect.
And he knew it.
“This might be a variation of the old glyphs mages use to power devices,” Silas mused, glancing between his notes and the wall. “From a quick look, it’s talking about an energy source, likely the Monoliths.”
“The Gemino Tribe predates the Monoliths,” Amelia corrected him, shading her eyes with one hand, “so I’d wager it’s referencing something older, something that came before.”
Silas made a quick noise of irritation and shifted to take a seat next to her. He pointed to a rough version of a glyph he had drawn on his paper. “This one means ‘twin’, or ‘dual connection’…” He shut his journal and raised his brows at her. “Go ahead and tell me how that doesn’t scream North and South Monoliths?”
Amelia shifted her jaw with rising irritation. Sometimes, she swore that Silas argued with her for pure enjoyment. There were times that his heart didn’t seem in it but continued to negate her out of sheer idiotic determination.
