Anuett wiped dust out of her eyes and grabbed the trowel from her kit. Despite her aching knees and sore back, she scraped away yet another time-compressed layer of dirt from off the fresco, like she’d done for the last few standard-hours. Finally, she revealed the shape of an eye, the soft wave of a mouth curved into a smile, the echo of color. With a small beep her oxygen regulator alerted her that she had only another half standard-hour, and Anuett readjusted her mask as if that could make the oxygen last any longer. Her fingers left dusty streaks on the mask’s dark surface. At least there’s an atmosphere and I don’t have to wear a clunky space suit, she thought.

Anuett straightened her aching back and looked at the fresco. “Shit,” she mumbled. It would take longer than a half hour to fully clear the fresco of centuries of encrusted soil and dust. But Anuett had to get back to her ship and grab another oxygen tank. Which meant she had to leave, now.

The trowel, barely used, went back into the kit. Anuett pulled her handheld from her backpack and took several pictures of the fresco as it was. The flashlight made the face look stern yet serene, lines harsh in the brightness. Once Anuett was done with that, she forced her body into a standing position. Her kit went into her backpack along with her handheld, and she turned her back on the fresco to face the tunnels.

The electric flares she’d positioned at regular intervals on the floor were blinking her toward the exit, and she followed the trail of lights. The tunnels allowed her to walk easily without crouching. Anuett, who had once crawled for hours into a cave on one of the central planets and had left all the skin on her shins and forearms on the sharp edged rocks there, appreciated that fact.

The tunnels intersected and interwove like the braids of a Tullurian weave. Proper mapping drones. Next chance I get to spend some money. For now, the flares would have to do.

From habit, she counted them, following from the edges of light cast by one flare to the bright center of the next. At the twenty-ninth, her steady footfalls stuttered and she stopped; there was a shadow up ahead.

Anuett’s mind raced. This was a planet in the Waste, and the air was too thin. No one lived here. No one could have followed her unnoticed, not without stealth tech, and the notion of following an archaeologist in a vessel equipped with stealth tech made Anuett assess her state of mind. At that point, the shadow moved.

It was the slow shifting of someone walking lazily, at ease. Watching the shadow against the rough tunnel walls grow before it shrank in the next globe of light should have made Anuett go for her trowel, but she did not. She stood there, finding herself relaxing, exhaling a breath she had been holding. It echoed in her mask, fell warm against the skin around her open mouth. She felt at ease.

From the light and shadow play in the tunnels, a person emerged. He wore a cloak and no mask. He was tall and broad shouldered, and his hair was long and fine as cobwebs gilding the walls of an ancient grave.

“Hello, visitor,” he said, voice rough as the very stone that had swallowed his shadow.

“Where’s your mask?” Anuett asked. With a beep, her own oxygen regulator reminded her that she needed to get back to the ship.

The man shrugged, and the movement made his cloak shiver. “I am used to breathing this air,” he said and moved forward, approaching Anuett.

Anuett took a step back, but then she stopped. There is no threat here. I am at ease. The tunnels are at peace, and this person won’t harm me. The thought filled her mind in the way solar sails were filled with light.

“You can’t breathe here?” he asked. His lips moved strangely, as if he should be speaking one of the cruder dialects, but he spoke with the clear, academic lilt that Anuett had forced herself to conform to long ago.

“No,” Anuett said, and her regulator began an insistent chorus of warnings.

The stranger nodded. “Best get to your craft before you run out of air, visitor. I pass through these tunnels on my daily travels. We will meet again.”

Anuett watched as he walked through another bubble of brightness and down a tunnel that she hadn’t explored yet. It was dark down there, but the man didn’t seem to mind.

Breathing rapidly and blinking tears out of her eyes—from the dust or the lack of oxygen, what else could have sent her crying? —Anuett ran for the ship.

When Anuett got back to her ship, her oxygen supply was already in the red. Over the noise of oxygen flooding the airlock, she could feel the lack lapping at her mind like an anesthetic. The airlock was designed for harsher environments: no or toxic atmosphere, the vacuum of space. This lonely planet in the Waste did have an atmosphere, even had some oxygen, but it was not enough to face without the oxygen tanks. And so Anuett had to endure waiting for the airlock to be ready.

The man had been an oddity. Instead of wondering about him, Anuett saw the fresco every time she closed her eyes to blink away the effects of the lack of oxygen. Her fingers itched to work the fresco free. After finding it and rebirthing it from the sediments of time, Anuett imagined how it had come to be there, which myths had been immortalized in its delicately painted and carven lines.

...and the swift-witted messenger, her hair unbound, carried the last of the mages across the threshold of light.

While others fumbled for scraps and shards, Tullur reached with steady hand to mend the cracks and form a whole.

Tullur was not the prettiest of women. She was the fiercest. She...

Green light blinked on in the airlock, and Anuett pulled off her mask. The ship’s oxygen was a bliss compared to the stale air from her tanks, and the air flooded her awareness with the sweetness of rebirth. Tullur, she thought, Tullur. Was that you back in those tunnels, caught forever on  stone? On the heels of this thought, another followed. Does he know? Has he seen the fresco? What if he follows the flares and finds it?

With air back in her lungs, Anuett felt wariness come back as well. Independent archaeologists could often come into conflict when it came to a discovery, and the prices patrons or academies would pay for them. The man might be another archaeologist even if he didn’t look like any she’d ever met. He could breathe here. Perhaps a specialized medical treatment could account for that. A throbbing in her right temple made it difficult to recall his face, shadowed as it had been back in the tunnels.

A shudder ran through Anuett. The fresco. She had to focus on the fresco. The fresco was important.

Anuett hit the door lock with the palm of her hand, and the airlock opened to the rest of the ship. It wasn’t the largest interplanetary cruiser model, but Anuett made do. She could have taken a position with any archaeological group on the central planets rather than go independent. There was no doubt she had both the skill and the experience. But Anuett loved the hunt for buried secrets too much, loved trusting her instincts and going where most other archaeologists wouldn’t. Still, spending time on a crewed station or at one of the free cities would be nice, just to stretch my legs. Other people, she could—and often used to—make do without.

She ran a trembling hand through her hair. That man in the tunnels… he’d been the first person she had spoken to in over a year. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, how she felt about the way he’d vanished into that dark unexplored passageway. I need to focus on what is useful. I need to follow the fresco. A slight headache was blooming at her right temple.

Sighing, Anuett put the backpack next to the airlock, pulled her handheld out, and with a gesture, copied the pictures she had taken of the fresco over to the ship’s system. Then, she plugged in the used oxygen tanks for cleaning and refilling and put the fresh ones next to her backpack. On her way to the bridge, she considered whether it would be prudent to stay on this nameless planet in the Waste and keep working on the fresco, or whether she should get to an outpost sooner rather than later if only to finally buy mapping drones. The outposts mostly ran on auto. This was fine by her, but most people she knew might think she was either dead or had settled somewhere dreary. Except I’m chasing Tullur in the Waste, Anuett thought. Perhaps I should send messages to a few colleagues, make sure there is no mistaking who found the fresco.

On the bridge, Anuett examined the pictures. Enlarged, the gorgeous work of art came through delicately drawn, and even the colors that had been used to make the carven lines come to life shone brightly. Already, there was a tenderness in the details of the face and the elaborate headdress, in the shape of the eyes and the stray locks that bounced around the smile-rounded cheeks. The fresco was ancient, but the eyes that stared back at Anuett from the pictures, those eyes seemed too present, too engaged to be old.

If this actually is Tullur, I might just have found her home planet. I might have found the place the first emperor was born, the place she conceived of a realm it would take seven armies to destroy. Anuett licked her lips and rubbed away some dirt from the corner of her right eye. She needed to hydrate before she went back out there. And she would need proof if she wanted to claim she had found Tullur, a claim dozens of archaeologists from dozens of free cities would contest before they were willing to travel out here and confirm it. Perhaps I should only consider sending messages if and when I find something more concrete.

Anuett swallowed hard. I need to... make sure everyone knows I discovered it. Even if that stranger wasn’t an archaeologist. She remembered his features, though they had been mostly cast in shadow, distorted by the shadows that had shifted in the flickering glare of the flares. Her right temple began throbbing violently when she remembered the way his lips had moved, almost in counterpoint to the words, not really like someone speaking a dialect and more like someone speaking an entirely different language.

The fresco. I need to focus on the fresco and where it leads. I need to follow the fresco.

“Document everything, do not jump to conclusions, find proof,” she whispered, her voice raspy from breathing only air from her tanks and from not drinking enough while she worked.

What Anuett wanted was to go back out there again and continue, but she hadn’t slept or eaten in a while. Her head hurt. The fresco would still be there after she took some time, and then she could spend longer with it.

Anuett had thought the excitement wouldn’t let her get any sleep, but she was out nearly as soon as she dropped into the sleep-pod. The ship around her quieted, but Anuett’s dreams were loud, noisy things. She imagined fragmented ballads, translations of older works which had been lost.

... the knight of the red rode high,

Wanting to claim Tullur’s, wanting to take

The emperor’s head, her blood, her heart...

... and after the fall, dust settled against

The horizon of Tullur’s lands, and all

Was silent, even the bones of the fallen.

And Tullur, in the ruins of her palace,

Went to sleep, if sleep would have her,

If dreams could be made to leave her alone.

For Tullur knew the strength

Of nightmares and of fears,

Of unheard pleas, and suspended mercy.

Anuett dreamed of a sky, first brightened as if by an explosion, then suddenly turned dark. There was blood, and Anuett saw a strange double image of fresh corpses overlaid with dried out bones, whipped by an incessant wind. The wind forced her eyes closed, and when she opened them again, she found herself standing in a high-ceilinged hallway, wide enough for five people to walk abreast. The walls were dark, ash gray, smooth, but in the strange way dreams have, Anuett could feel life in them, a distant echo of presence and perception.

I made them, said someone from behind Anuett, and when she turned around, she saw a figure standing in the hallway behind her, a dark cloak like a living shadow hiding much of the person. The backlit face was cast in shadow, but Anuett recognized the voice as that of the stranger from the tunnels, the stranger who shouldn’t have been there. Visitor, marvel, he said. The stone can sense you, can taste you, and it has waited so long for something living to make it remember what it is to be alive, to make it work and bring us back to—

Anuett woke with a start, and the dark walls of the sleep-pod felt for a moment like a coffin, like the walls of the hallway closing in around her.

It’s fine, it was only a dream, she thought, coming back to herself as the ship realized she was up and made the lights come alive.

Anuett prepped carefully. She normally used her handheld, but for video documentation of a dig she preferred a small camera that could be attached to the harness of her oxygen pack. She bound up her hair, annoyed that she hadn’t cut it already. Then, halfway through, she looked at herself in the mirror and realized that her fingers had woven the beginnings of a Tullurian hairstyle down the side of her head. What in the...

Anuett let her hair fall down, strands sliding from her fingers. Just like in the fresco, she thought. She shook her head and pulled her hair up in her usual bun instead. I should get more sleep and fantasize less about unproven discoveries.

Before she left, she considered taking something from her tool box as a weapon. Her head began pounding as she dug out a hammer, just in case she needed it. The stranger had been of larger build than she, but size was not everything. Anuett had unearthed enough bones to know it took just one strike to break a skull. Her backpack weighed heavier with the hammer inside.

The flares guided Anuett back to the fresco, which lay there in the darkness, and while she walked fast to maximize her time with the image on the rock, her eyes kept darting to the shadows between the light the flares cast. There was nothing there. Anuett stopped at the dark tunnel branching off from the path of light she’d created. She couldn’t see far ahead. Her head, pounding already, flared with a bright pain when she considered going there instead of working on the fresco.

The fresco. I need to follow the fresco, Anuett thought and turned her back on the darkness to win the art back from the dirt. As she knelt before it and started working, the almond shaped eyes with the slight, upward tilt seemed to look straight at Anuett when she turned her light on them.

She dropped her backpack and pulled out her kit, got her trowel out. Normally, she would talk while she worked so that the recording was as complete as possible, but with the constraint of limited oxygen, Anuett would comment only when it was absolutely necessary. She carefully scraped away what clung to the fresco, knees resting on the dirt, neck and back bent. It was almost as if she were genuflecting in front of the emperor to honor Tullur’s forgotten magic and fierce governance. As her hands began to wrestle the fresco back from where it had been hiding, the throbbing behind Anuett’s right temple began to ease.

Anuett worked calmly, methodically. The echo of her breath in the mask and the noise of her trowel scraping time away soon drowned out everything, or almost everything; Tullur’s eyes held Anuett’s gaze, their brightness nearly blinding. There was a strange depth to those eyes, and Anuett recalled stories about how Tullur knew the mind of anyone who dared look into her eyes for too long.

The oxygen alarm had started, crescendoed, and was blaring insistently by the time Anuett was done with the pictures, had collected her things, and was ready to head back.

Tullur, I’ll return, Anuett thought, looking over her shoulder at the fresco of the emperor. Tullur’s regal robe revealed her strong shoulders, and her three guardians stood around her: Vigal, the victorious, who’d met more than twenty enemies in single combat and won, if the tales had any reality in them; Mascar, the wise, who was Tullur’s polyglot and advisor, possibly her spy master; and, painted like a sprite into a wedge of slanting light, Cador of the shadows. There wasn’t much about him to be found in any of the records, in any of the tales that had survived. They all broke off when his name was mentioned, and Cador had seduced the imaginations of countless storytellers, writers, and historians.

He was not a creature born on this plane of reality but one who could shift between planes, some said.

He was either a weaver of magic, or a maker of science so far beyond anything known that it might as well be called magic, others said.

He had never really existed, was a mirage Tullur had made up to terrify her enemies, was another opinion.

Dramas and stories and plays made each of these theories and countless more appear more plausible than the known facts could prove.

Because fictions are all we have about him, Anuett thought as her ship came into view in the hazy light. Until now. Anuett felt dizzy. It was the lack of air, she realized, and an alarm from her tanks confirmed that—all empty, it blared.

This world lacked enough oxygen for proper breathing, but it had more than an empty tank did, and so Anuett pulled her mask off, forcing herself to walk, willing her feet to find the safety of the ship. Her lungs sucked in the thin, dusty air of this nameless place that was no more than a grave unless Anuett survived and brought back what she had found here to the civilization that had survived the fall of Tullur.

Once, people lived on this planet and were able to breathe this air, Anuett thought. Once, this planet gave life.

She was stumbling, and her breathing soon became as rapid as her loudly beating heart. Her head was foggy, and she felt the lightness that preludes fainting.

“You do not look as if you are doing well.”

The voice seemed disembodied, but then Anuett managed to look over her right shoulder, and there was the man again, backlit by the last of her flares. Anuett stumbled. She fell, hitting the ground hard enough that her teeth clanked together as if she’d been punched.

The man walked toward her. “Get up,” he said. “This place needs no more bones.”

Anuett recalled her nightmare at the mention of bones, all the death, the sky shifting to darkness.

“On your feet,” he said, the cadence of his voice shifting to something unfamiliar, strange.

With a last burst of panicked adrenaline, Anuett stood and staggered forward. She made it into the airlock, which closed behind her. She went to her knees again, lying there, but the ship automatically pumped in breathable air now that she was inside.

This place needs no more bones, no more bones, no more bones... The words were an echo, flowing with the pounding in her head, a marching tune of sorts that kept her struggling for oxygenated air.

Anuett’s eyes fell shut even as her heart kept beating and her lungs were bellowing. Darkness took her. In the darkness, there was a voice, speaking in rhythmical cadence in a language Anuett didn’t know. The rhythm was overlaid with the wish for no more bones before it drowned out those words. The voice that held the rhythm subtly slithered over the edges of Anuett’s mind. It roamed in her head like a snake hunting prey. It called to her like an echo, each lilting beat folding like the turn of a winding cave, deeper and deeper, dark tunnels exploring. The voice that spoke was sweet and soft. Before she came to, Anuett saw a face, beautiful, smiling; it was Cador of the shadows, her name a whisper on his lips.

Anuett studied the pictures she had taken of the day’s work. The flashlight had brought the colors out brightly, reflecting the pinks in Mascar’s robes, the dark coppers in Vigal’s, and the shifting hues of blues in Cador’s. Tullur shone in gold and the shimmering white of a comet’s tail.

While her eyes were seeing, Anuett’s mind was elsewhere. The first thing she had done once she’d been back on her feet and out of the airlock was check the outdoor cameras. There had been no one there. Anuett had checked her oxygen regulator, and she’d lost some time on the airlock’s floor, so it was entirely possible the stranger hadn’t waited around. Perhaps he had somewhere else to be, she thought, her right temple throbbing violently.

Anuett forced herself to look through the forty or so pictures she had taken. Her hand waved them by in front of her, until she stopped, waved the previous one back. A crack in the carefully designed fresco had caught Anuett’s attention. She zoomed in on it.

“Shit, did I—” But the line wasn’t fresh, and far too fine to have been made by her trowel. It looked like a fracture in the rock, not unexpected given its age. “Shame. With proper light, this looks so well preserved,” Anuett mumbled. She found herself brushing her fingers over the line in the pictures as if she could wipe it away, as if she could make the fresco whole and beautiful. She knew deep down that it was supposed to be that: whole, beautiful, enchanting even. And Anuett wanted it to be that way, longed for the image to be... real?

Anuett sighed and forced herself to look away from the pictures. She’d give the fresco a closer inspection tomorrow to see if there was anything she could do to keep it in the best condition possible while she worked on it.

No more bones, no more bones. The echoing words eased the pain in her head. The more she focused on the words, on the sweet, soft voice that had spoken them, the more the pain in her head subsided.

Eventually, her own voice pulled her out of her reverie, pulled her away from the depths hidden in Tullur’s eyes. Anuett was reciting the words of that poem she’d heard when she’d been out on the floor of the airlock. If it was a poem. She had no idea what she was saying, because it wasn’t a language she knew, but on a whim, she recorded it. She considered sending it to a fellow archaeologist outside the Waste, along with the pictures of the fresco, but a piercing pain behind her right temple made her abandon the thought. Even just a short message—the though made hues of blue shift like sprites in front of her eyes, and the pain behind her right temple flared again. Sending the information could wait. She left the computer to figure out what it could about the poem while she went to her sleep-pod for some needed rest.

Sleep came in reluctant bouts, struggling against the pull of Anuett’s fantasies.

I will craft a realm that grows a thousand years, blooms a thousand years, then grows and blooms for another millennium from the seeds that it has sown.

I will plant with you.

And I will water your realm and find it sunlight.

And I will weave its roots for you, make them reach deep. I will guard the seed in its sleep and guard its waking, its rising from the ashes.

The voices flooded Anuett’s dreams, but they were noises in the darkness, bringing no images or smells, no feeling. What they did bring were flashes of color, pinks and dark coppers, the gold and shimmering white of a comet’s tail, and circling it all, shifting hues of blues, bubbling like the circles cast by Anuett’s flares, leading deeper down the tunnels, deeper, to where—

Anuett woke with a start, her skin slick with sweat, and her heart racing.

She had to calm down, focus; she had to go back to the fresco and find out why it had shattered.

Anuett’s breath echoed against her mask, slickening the skin around her mouth and nose. She’d had to stop to replace some of the flares before she got to the fresco, but now she was finally kneeling before Tullur. The glorious lines and fragile memories shone brightly in Anuett’s flashlight, pink, copper, gold and white, and a blue, drawing her eyes to it. In the position she was in, Tullur reached just a little higher than Anuett, and the other three stood below their emperor, Cador behind Tullur’s right shoulder. The small line that had looked like a fissure ran with the sunlight that draped around Cador like a cloak, and Anuett, eyes wide and sweat moistening her brow, ran her first finger along the break, all the way from the right of Cador’s head to where it reached the hemline of Tullur’s robes.

The fissure was fine, and Anuett could barely feel it. But then, when she was just about to pull her hand back, she felt air rush against her skin from the other side of the cave wall.

“Oh, no,” Anuett said. But even as she considered all the ways the fresco could be damaged, a small tremor ran from the painted and carven stone up through her fingers, first just a mild vibration, then something rumbling and vicious.

Under Anuett’s fingers, the fresco crumbled inward. Tullur’s face dissolved, the colors and the depth of her eyes disappearing into dust and dirt and nothingness as the wall vanished. Anuett’s eyes filled with tears that clotted when the dust of the decaying ages mixed with them.

Anuett wanted to cry out, to scream, she wanted to scramble after the fading image into the darkness that opened behind it. Her lungs wouldn’t work, and it felt as if her heart didn’t want to beat.

Then, the noise of rumbling stone subsided, and Anuett’s heart beat again, her lungs started bellowing, though taking a breath hurt because Anuett’s throat was still sore with loss.

Anuett forced herself to blink the curdled tears away. The dust left where the fresco had been just barely veiled the brightness Anuett’s flashlight cast. She felt the flush of air from where the wall had been, from where the faces of Tullur and her three guardians had gone forever. Anuett bent forward and reached a hand out. There was room behind the wall, blackness that the light sliced into without hitting anything.

I could climb in, Anuett thought. She knew she shouldn’t, not without preparing first, not without climbing gear and a fresh oxygen tank. She shook her head, angry. She turned to pack up her things for the trip back to the ship when, out of the corner of her right eye, she saw movement. Her hand reached for her backpack and the hammer within.

“Hello, visitor,” said the stranger. He loomed over her, seemed even taller from where Anuett was kneeling. “What are you doing?”

It was said in such a sweet, soft voice that Anuett wanted to cry out. Her fingers loosened from around the hammer’s handle, and instead Anuett wrapped both arms around herself. She had just lost a precious thing she had discovered here, and this person, whoever he was, did not seem to care. Her flashlight dropped from her trembling hands, and the spear of light caught on the blue-hued hemline of the stranger’s cloak.

“What are you doing here?” Anuett asked. Her voice was rough. Anuett tried to remember when she’d last hydrated properly.

“I saved you from the air yesterday,” he said, voice soft and sweet and unconcerned by the undercurrents of accusation in hers.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. No more bones.” She swallowed, but it was difficult. Her tongue seemed swollen and her mouth was so dry. “Thank you,” she added, voice nearly failing on the last vowel.

“It was of no concern,” he said. “This has been such a lonely place for such a long time.”

With the sudden force of a hypnic jerk, that feeling like falling on the cusp of sleep and jolting awake, Anuett recalled that line, or thought she recalled it. It had been in a book, a fiction of Tullur’s life thousands of pages long and turning the mundane and uncertain into the deeply romantic. In it, Tullur had been a scientific innovator, drawing on the ancient knowledge of her forebears. In her work, the emperor had broken a threshold and crossed it, and beyond, in a castle cut into an obsidian mountain, she had met Cador. This has been such a lonely place for such a long time, he had said in the book.

It had been ages since Anuett had read that story, and she hadn’t thought of it in so long. Now here she was, kneeling on the floor of dark tunnels with promise woven into them and remembering a fiction.

“I need to return to the ship,” Anuett said, but her legs weren’t moving. It was almost as if she were genuflecting.

“Did you not want to look beyond the darkness?” said the stranger. Did you come from beyond the threshold of this plane? The fictional Cador had said to the fictional Tullur in the book.

Anuett turned her head to the black hole that gaped where the fresco had been. The darkness called to her. With every fiber of her being, Anuett wanted to explore this void that had taken her fresco. She wanted to take the darkness’s mystery in a twisted kind of vengeance, even if reason said she should change her oxygen tanks before she did so.

“Yes, it’s just a bit farther,” Anuett heard from behind her right shoulder, though the voice was so sweetly soft that it might have been wind, a breeze.

The opening was big enough, no doubt. Anuett had a rope in her backpack, standard, but the climbing gear was back on the ship. The ship; Anuett knew that she should go back to her ship. A bright pain sliced into her head at the thought, and Anuett looked back to the darkness in front of her instead. She took a deep breath, pulled her second flashlight from her harness, slid onto her belly, and tried to get a better view of what lay beyond.

Whatever it was, the space was large. While Anuett couldn’t see the opposing wall, from her current position, with her head angled, she could see the floor. Worked stone! Oh, by the stars!

The loss of the fresco cut deep, tasted bitter, but this was something else, something that would make this excavation not be a total loss.

I have broken the threshold to find you, because I could feel you calling to me. You have always called to me, Cador, haven’t you? It’s like I wasn’t really alive until I decided to listen to you call me. The words came into Anuett’s head, dragging her back to the very scene in the book when Tullur first met Cador in the ash-gray stone hallways of his obsidian palace. Anuett tried to remember what he’d been, in that fiction, a demon, a magician, a creature so far evolved he might as well be magic.

She looked at the floor and estimated the drop: not too far, just about to her hip if she were standing up. She had the strength in her arms to pull herself back up, even without a rope. So, driven on by the loss of her work and her curiosity, Anuett reached for her backpack, tossed that down. She reattached her harness flashlight and decided to leave the one she had dropped in the tunnel, and then, still on her belly, went down feet first.

As her feet hit the floor, a breeze shifted the air, and Anuett thought she heard the rustling of fabric, a cloak, from above, but the shadows looked solid and undisturbed. The darkness in the room beyond was still absolute.

Anuett looked back up from where she had come. It was barely a drop, nothing she couldn’t handle on the return, and the ground was solid, decidedly smooth wherever her flashlight touched. Anuett pulled a flare from her backpack and dropped it under the opening, then walked into the darkness. Her flashlight caught nothing but dancing dust for six slow steps, but after the seventh, the light fell harshly against the straight edges of something artificial.

Anuett walked up to the angular block. It was polished, and her fingers smoothed lines into the dust that covered it, ages worth of dust. Underneath that, the block was dark, but as she worked to get the dust off, Anuett’s fingers felt ridges, edges, things cut into the material. She pointed her light and saw the curves and coils of what was clearly writing. Could this be the lost Tullurian? Or any of the other languages vanished in the wake of the seven armies?

Anuett’s beating heart picked up speed, and her blood echoed in her ears. No one had ever found anything like this, not anywhere in the Waste or outside of it.

Something brushed against Anuett’s neck, a breath of cold air. She turned around, letting the flashlight fan out before her.

The darkness was night-black silk full of nothing, but Anuett pricked up her ears. There was a noise, the tiniest of noises, like the high pitched melodies lost with the body’s aging, but also different. There was a poetic rhythm there that Anuett couldn’t quite make out.

I will guard the seed, and I will guard its waking. Color exploded in Anuett’s vision, pink and copper, cold and white, throttling blue. Anuett dropped to the floor. The darkness she’d stood in shifted into something else, a large room, round and windowless. Alcoves were set into the walls, evenly spaced and shaped as if to receive a person. Standing burials, Anuett recalled from a lecture on ancient funerary practices.

Closer to the center of the room, four sarcophagi stood, forming the corners of a square.

The hues began to blur like watercolors, and the room and its contents drifted away like dust in a storm. But Anuett heard voices.

For how long do you expect the anchors to hold and draw power from that place?—a woman’s voice said. It rang with easy authority and subtle command.

Long. Are you afraid? That voice, Anuett knew. It was soft and sweet and almost familiar, even in its strange cadence.

Vigal informs me that we stand little chance of winning, and Mascar’s spies—those that survive—don’t give us any more reason to hope. I do not have the luxury of fear, the woman said. But I do want victory.

It will be a different kind, but I will give you victory. There was more depth to that sweet voice now, care almost. There is an element of luck of course; the anchors will need to be dislodged, and that needs to be done by someone living. So exactly for how long will depend on when someone chooses to look in the ashes the shockwaves will make of the Heiban Seven Army.

Luck? Cador, to see you rely on such a flimsy concept surprises me.

As if she’d fallen from a great height, Anuett came back to herself. What was that? What by the stars above was that? Color had shifted to darkness again, and voices were replaced by the strange pressure against her eardrums. Swallowing spit she didn’t have, Anuett stood. Forward. Move forward. She turned into the darkness and walked, her feet barely making a noise against the smooth ground.

After a handful of steps, Anuett felt a ridge under the ball of her left foot and looked down. There was an indentation here, rounded; a circle. The block was behind her, and on a whim, Anuett walked along the line in the ground pointing her flashlight outward, and sure enough, after about a quarter turn, there was another block.

This one too was covered in a thick layer of dust. Anuett brushed the dust away with her hands, and this block too had an inscription Anuett couldn’t read. Breath rushing inside her mask like a stoked flame, Anuett went back to the circle. She found two more blocks before rounding back to the first, just like she had seen in that strange explosion of a vision.

“What is this?” she mumbled into her mask, taking pictures of the third block for later examination.

Her oxygen alarm pulled her out of her work just when she was about to walk to the edges of the room, to where the alcoves had been in her vision. Two more pictures Anuett dared, but not a third. On her way back to the single flare marking her exit, Anuett crossed the circumference of the center circle, and as she walked through it, she felt a slight tremor shaking the room. She didn’t stop, because if this was an earthquake, leaving was her best bet. The gentle shaking felt almost like pulling an anchor line free from soft rock, and it had subsided once she reached for her backpack, and hauled herself back up through the crumbled wall.

Her feet fell heavy against the cave’s floor, but Anuett felt light. She wasn’t sure what she had found, couldn’t know for certain yet, but Anuett knew history when she saw it, and the unearthing of it was as special, as singular, as any other birth. When she was breathing the ship’s heady air, Anuett smiled, the loss of the fresco hardly stinging anymore.

No more bones. What she had found weren’t bones, not even close. It might well be the discovery of a lifetime.

Back on the bridge, she examined the pictures she had taken, looked at them, marked out repeating characters. So it is a language; it has to be, she thought. Nothing was known about Tullurian, not even what that language had really been called by those who spoke it.

When Anuett input the characters into the computer, it had an alert for her. The translation she had requested had come through, though the computer gave it only 83 percent accuracy.

I will plant the seed,

And we will water it with you.

I will sing the seed to bloom,

And we will make it drink your light.

I will birth again an unending circle of harvest and seed and renewing bloom,

And I will guard your dream in the dark.

It was a strange little poem, and Anuett wondered where she could have heard it. The computer didn’t give her a clue, because it had used a translation algorithm. These pulled from several languages and dialects, and computers often went straight for algorithms when they encountered something poetic, presumably to get metaphors right, though Anuett didn’t know the intricacies of the tech.

I will plant the seed. I will guard the seed. Her eyelids seemed heavy, and her tongue was swollen, dust clogging her pores. Anuett cleaned up, drank water, set the computer to watch out for any seismic activity. Then she went to her pod, adamant she wouldn’t sleep a minute longer than she had to.

Anuett dreamed of color. The court was bright, plants blooming and growing, branches heavy with fruit Anuett couldn’t name. The light was warm, and Anuett tilted her face toward the sun, sure that her skin would still smell of light even when night fell.

There is darkness ahead, said someone, and Anuett opened her eyes, turned. The man who had spoken was a stranger, his features unusual, but not so unusual that Anuett didn’t see the man from the fresco in him, the man bathed in sunlight; this was Cador.

You have warned me of that, and we have all prepared for it, Anuett heard a voice say, a voice that wasn’t hers. Yet the voice moved through her, spoke with her tongue twisting strangely against her lips. Tell me you can anchor the energy for as long as we might need. Tell me your plans still hold.

Cador smiled, then nodded. They are not plans. They are what has to happen; I told you I would get you your victory.

Anuett felt her head shaking. Your alien mechanism, Cador, is not something I happily rely on. Nor is your luck.

Cador reached out his hand, ran it over Anuett’s cheek. His skin was so smooth against hers, so warm. And yet you trust me. I think you love me too, he said.

Take care, Anuett heard herself say. It’s not for you to read your emperor’s mind.

But it is for me to help her craft her dreams, Cador said, and then their lips met.

Anuett woke to darkness, trembling and hot.

The darkness seeped away, slow as flowers turning toward the sun. It was almost as if her ship knew she had woken and turned on the light for her, except this was not the ship.

Anuett realized where she was, and she noted that she had barely taken the gear she needed. With only her oxygen mask in place and her shirt still wrinkled from sleep, she was standing in the center of the circle in the room she had discovered, and the darkness that had lived here had abandoned the place. Instead, a soft glow emanated from the floor, and from the walls that were now visible. The four blocks of stone also shone. Around the room, at its very edges where the alcoves had been, Anuett could see slabs of stone, clearly fitted over the hollows at a later point. The stone was dark, ash-gray, thrumming.

There was still a rumbling here, felt and heard through every bone in Anuett’s body. Earthquake... she thought, knowing she should move. But Anuett’s feet were frozen where she stood, and with every breath of air she sucked into her lungs, her knees trembled until finally, they buckled, and Anuett was kneeling there, genuflecting. She felt tired, drained, like an empty oxygen tank.

The noise grew louder until another sound broke it. Anuett looked to her right. One of the blocks... shifted, and in the moment the shadows shifted into something alive, Anuett realized what she had found. Are those... suspension chambers? They had them, before the armies, before the Waste. I didn’t know...

The rumbling subsided and ebbed to a low hum. Anuett’s eyes were glued to the suspension chamber, which now stood open. As she watched, a hand reached out from within, and then, a person sat up.

Anuett’s mouth fell open, and she broke out in a sweat even as all the muscles in her body began to tremble and ache, burn with fire.

Cador! The stranger from the tunnels!

Now that his face wasn’t hidden in shadow, Anuett could see he was still beautiful, though not as pristine as she had seen him. He has slept for hundreds and hundreds of years! Nothing should be able to sustain a body for that long, Anuett thought.

Cador turned his head, and their eyes met, the archaeologist and the emperor’s guardian of the shadows; the truly ancient and the searcher of ancient truths. Cador licked his lips, then grinned. He said something, but his voice was rough, and Anuett didn’t know the language.

“What...” she said, but she felt too weak for this, for speech, for anything. With the past coming to life around her, Anuett tumbled off into unconsciousness.

Voices drifted in the darkness like lapping waves against a waiting shore. Anuett blinked her eyes open, and she could sense someone was leaning over her, speaking to her. She didn’t understand a word, but her eyes focused on the austere face of Mascar, Tullur’s polyglot.

“What happened?” Anuett asked.

“The seed has grown anew,” Mascar said. He spoke with a jerky catch to his words, with uneven rhythm. It was hard to say whether the language was new to him or whether he had grasped it from a patchwork of the ones he already knew. Behind Mascar, a soft voice Anuett recognized spoke, and the polyglot snorted. “We didn’t think you’d live, but since you do, you have our thanks,” Mascar said, eyes narrowing on Anuett. She felt very exposed all of a sudden. They didn’t think I’d live?

“Where’s my—” she said, and her hand flew to her mouth when she noted the absence of her mask.

“This helps,” Mascar said slapping the side of the suspension chamber. Anuett was lying inside the chamber, she realized with a sudden jolt of cold down her spine.

Another voice floated over to Anuett. This voice was commanding yet calm, but it was the calmness of an ocean in which sharp-toothed creatures circle beneath the surface. Mascar nodded at the words, and as he did, the speaker stepped up to the foot of the suspension chamber. Those who had claimed Tullur was not a beautiful woman had been liars, in their spite speaking of her ugliness long after her death.

Except she isn’t dead, Anuett thought. Next to her, Cador stood, eyes deeper than the emperor’s, expression unreadable.

Mascar spoke again. “Your life force tripped Cador’s contraption. You are his token of luck.” He stopped, considered. “Or triggered his contraption, rather. I’ve been learning with your ship’s computer, but things have had to happen fast. Tullur has decided to grant you her favor here, but your body needs to relearn to breathe the air on Sakar. This—” he slapped the suspension chamber again, “—will help.”

And before Anuett realized what was happening, before she could move, the chamber closed over her, the stone-slab-like lid covering her and closing off the sight of Tullur and Cador like a darkening sky. For a moment, Cador smiled at Anuett in the slanting light, but then he turned to Tullur, and their eyes met. They were two victors, ready to seize their prize.

Anuett received darkness, but just before it took her like an unexplored tunnel, a vision drifted upward, blurred though it was.

She saw the chamber again, the alcoves around it, half of them filled with people, eyes wide but bodies frozen either through meds or a force Anuett couldn’t see.

Once this is done, we will need something to keep the door open, something halfway across the threshold, but never truly crossing it, Cador said.

Tullur laughed. Let us pray for your luck to bring us not just a living person, but also one whose mind waits for your soft, sweet touch.

No, Cador said. All I need is a lonely mind, and what other mind would come to the place of ashes this will become after the first step toward our victory?

Tullur said nothing in reply, and in the absence of words, the darkness came.

It lured Anuett, beckoned her to follow, this darkness. Somewhere in that blackness, there were dreams of blood and bone, a threshold Anuett knew she could never cross, would never cross, a door she kept open with her body and mind and everything between. In the embrace of the darkness, Anuett saw Tullur rising in gold and white, a comet’s tail of conquest behind her.      Anuett, on the other hand, was left to the darkness, tunnels that led nowhere, the absence of color. If there was another seed buried in the darkness with her, it would not ever grow, not without light, not without water, not without breath.