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(20) Sar: Old Stories

We need to get Xivay out of Rapal. We need to get Denizel out of Rapal. It's selfish of me—no personal attachment should dominate my decisions like this—but the thought of losing Denizel chokes me up inside. If we add Xivay to the list of people we need to extract, though, then it would only make sense to take Denizel while we're at it. He's our biggest ally still undercover in the palace. We'd need him to get a message to the scholar, and Ruka would never let him continue to endanger himself by staying.

I'm making excuses, but if I was anyone else, I would excuse myself for wanting to hold onto the closest thing I still have to family. I cling to that, even as I tuck the thought away. I need to confirm first whether I'm really qualified to find and read the stories we're looking for here.

I won't get anything from this cavern. Besides its unreadability, it's too old: even the calamity we suspect broke Rapal the first time has younger writing than this. Not much younger, though, so I move to the next cave and begin to search its walls. I can recognize enough words to identify when something particularly dramatic is being recorded, but in the ancient stories, the drama is everywhere. I try to decipher just what caused so much calamity in this city's early days. I find mentions of firespots and ocean-quakes, currents, storms—which shouldn't have an impact down here—and the ever-present demigods. I see the symbol for Alualu at least three times.

This was a world where Andalua sent messages, and the ocean was awake. The bad kind of waking, like it was out of balance and trying to recalibrate through acts of violence. Currents were stronger, storms longer, and sea-quakes more frequent. Rapal hasn't recorded a sea-quake in the region of Roshaka in almost five hundred years. Unless those records were destroyed, of course—there are a lot of old records lying broken and unreadable around the base of the pinnacle that supports Rapal.

I circle the room twice, but can't find any story with enough drama to capture the razing of Roshaska. The next cave is the biggest one. This is going to take a while.

It's in the last stretch of that biggest cave that I think I find the first calamity. The writing near the ceiling has mellowed somewhat from its older storytelling traditions. It's more literal, maybe, or the eel-Kels by this time had become a culture that prided itself in being weathered by the sea. Yet here among these tamer stories is one that retains the shiny language of the previous tradition. The script is chronologically aligned with the stories all around it, which means that unless a particularly colorful storyteller was assigned to record this story, the terror of it isn't exaggerated.

And I can't read it. Not properly, anyway. I wasn't really expecting to, but it's still a gutting feeling when I'm so close to the writing of our ancestors, yet still so far away. This is the first destruction-line that Taiki found outside. I watched the writing on the walls as we navigated the tunnels in here, and noticed when we dropped below that line again. The stylizations and grammatical quirks on the walls there and here align.

Which means there is a destruction-line down on the pinnacle of Rapal, where the scholars have long suspected one. Xivay would love to be here with me. Xe's even Shalda, and would probably be allowed. If the timelines that Rapal's scholars have assembled are correct, the next destruction-line on Rapal—the first confirmed one—is the same event that completely ended Roshaska.

I try to read this story anyway, and among the trials of currents and the sea, I find a theme that speaks to the current island prophecy. The ocean was at war going into this calamity. It's a confirmation of the context around the Seer's last words to Ande. Fight, and the ocean will respond. I try to discern what the outcome of the fighting was, but it's impossible. I need to find the records of the newer calamity. If there's anything written in here about it at all.