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It was a quiet day in the campus library. Emily Smith and her friend Clio Pembroke had found an out of the way nook to hole up in as they studied for their upcoming finals, and there was a nearby window letting in sunlight. Outside, they could faintly hear cheering. The library was next to one of the communal Dueling courts. No doubt some people were showing off whatever spells they’d learned over the course of the year before they had to settle down and start studying.
The two girls had been in the library for barely an hour when the sound of an argument reached them. They shared an exasperated look as the two quarreling guys came over and set their stuff on the table.
“I’m just saying,” Zeke Withers protested loudly, “you’re probably the best Duelist on campus. You should join one of the local militias.”
“For the last time, Zeke, the answer is no.” Alastor Pembroke snapped back at him. He sat down next to his twin sister, and Clio patted his shoulder in sympathy. Zeke had been trying to convince Alastor to follow him into the militia all semester, and Alastor was incredibly frustrated with their mutual friend over it.
“But why not?” Zeke asked, then launched into his recruitment speech for the seventh time that week. “The militias are great! You get to travel all over the place and see all sorts of places and people. Best of all, you get to go Slime-hunting. How many jobs out there can say that they let you go monster hunting, huh? Not many! Most of the monsters were hunted into extinction back in the medieval ages, but Slimes remain. In fact, because of the increasing levels of pollution, their populations are booming! They get everywhere nowadays—into the sewers, where they cause all sorts of sanitation problems, into the roads, where they migrate en masse and clog traffic on busy highways, even into buildings, where they interrupt businesses and terrorize people. The militias take care of all budding Slime problems before they can escalate, and we end up with the sequel to the Slime Crisis of 1975. And the militias recruit people who—”
Alastor cut him off midsentence. “—who excel at Dueling, both magical and nonmagical variants, and I excel at both, so I ought to join a militia and sign my life away to monster-fighting? No thanks. Being in the militia is an incredibly boring job, Zeke. You’re just glorifying it because this is as close to being a medieval Quester as you can get in the 21st century. Not everyone dreams of being a knight in shining armor slaying a dragon and rescuing a princess, you know. I, for one, would be perfectly happy spending my life studying ancient religions.”
Zeke frowned at Alastor. “I’m not fantasizing about being a knight in shining armor! I just want to get out there and do some good for people, in a way that let’s me put my magic to use. Most jobs don’t even let you use your magic in them, and what’s the point of having it if you’re not going to use it?”
“You could join one of the Dueling Tournaments,” Emily said. “Professional Dueling is one of the most popular sports out there, you know. I’ve seen your practice matches, Zeke, you’d do great job in a Dueling Tournament. But stop bothering Alastor about it, he’s told you no several times already.”
“Emily!” Zeke turned wounded eyes on his childhood friend. “Not you too! I don’t want to join the sports industry. I want to join the militia—”
“—and fight Slimes, yes, we’re aware.” Alastor grumbled.
“Well, the militia at least has better health care than what most Professional Dueling Agencies offer,” Clio said, “and it’s marginally safer than going out and joining the regular military.”
Zeke looked delighted by Clio’s support. He beamed at her. “Exactly! And this way I can do some good for people, which I couldn’t do if I was just a Professional Dueler. Alastor would be a great fit with the militia, too. Not just because he’s good at fighting, both nonmagical and magical, but because he’s the best with barriers.”
Zeke sat back in his chair and waved his hands, trying to illustrate something to them that nobody else followed. “Did I ever tell you guys about the time that I asked Alastor to spar with me, so I could have some practice under my belt before my Offensive Magic checkpoint exam?”
“Only all the time,” Alastor said tiredly. “I regret telling you that I could use barrier magic.”
“So,” Zeke continued, pretending as though he hadn’t heard Alastor at all, “we get to the Dueling courts—not the communal ones like the one outside, but the private ones that only Magical Combat majors like me can access. And when we get onto the court, I keep checking to make sure that he’s sure that he can take an attack. I’ve never seen him in a duel before, I have no idea if he can take a Magical Combat major’s attacks because that’s a fair bit more dangerous than your standard issue student’s attacks. We’re trained to fight after all, most people aren’t. Finally, just to test the waters, and—you know, make sure that he really can take it—I lob a small fireball at him. And he sticks up a barrier, not a straight surface one like a pane of glass, no, but a full body shielding bubble barrier. When the fireball hits it, it bounces off and goes flying back at me, and I’m so surprised I fall over backwards. I mean, it wasn’t big enough to really hurt or anything, so I was fine—”
“Zeke, if you’re not going to focus on your studying until after you tell this story for the seventieth time, can you at least hurry up and finish? We’ve heard this story already. We don’t need the spell-by-spell playthrough.” Alastor asked him.
“Fine! Fine,” Zeke snapped back at him. “Be that way, you ginormous spoilsport. So, in summary, everything I toss at him gets rebounding back at me, and I am soundly defeated by a bubble barrier. A bubble barrier of all things! A couple of the other duelists came over to watch and they insisted on getting Alastor to go a round with them, and they all got beat up by a bubble barrier. Now, these Dueling courts are where the Magical Combat majors are practicing, and the Magical Combat students are the ones that get recruited most by the militias. There’re some recruiters hanging around watching people. When they see Alastor beating all his challengers, one of them comes over to test him, and Alastor beats up the recruiter too!”
“But not with a bubble barrier.” The other three chorused in tandem with Zeke.
“Yeah! Not with a bubble barrier!” Zeke said, gesturing wildly in excitement. Emily, sitting next to him, leaned out of the way of his flailing hands. “So, this whole time, he’s only been rebounding our spells, letting them bounce of his shield right back at us. But the recruiter manages to crack Alastor’s bubble barrier, so he starts dueling back properly. And it was incredible! He just conjured a bunch of disks and sent them flying like frisbees—if frisbees were large enough to use as a turkey platter and made of steel, that is. The disks actually sliced through some of the spells the recruiter was using, like that ice spell. Or the recruiter’s shield. I’ve never seen a shield go down so fast to an attack before.”
He looked at Alastor. “After the duel, the other recruiter comes up and offers him one of those pamphlets and that whole spiel about why he ought to join the militia, and Alastor turns it down. Like, really? You could be, hands down, the best Duelist in the militia if you’d join up! So—”
“The answer to that is still no.” Alastor said flatly. “Change the subject.”
“But—”
“Change. The. Subject.”
“…Fine.” Zeke sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, sulking. Then he perked up again and leaned forwards to prop his arms on the table. “Hey, so you know how I had to stop posting stuff on my YouTube account while finals are going on? I think I found something to do for the next video! Want to hear about it?”
“What, listen to you blather on even more about your adventurer nonsense? No thanks.” Alastor said grouchily. His sister elbowed him, and he winced.
“That’s the MythBusters-esque channel you run, right?” Clio asked politely.
“It’s more like Buzzfeed Unsolved, really,” Emily said, “but go on, Zeke.”
“I was looking for urban legends, to see which ones sounded like fun to look into further, and I found this really cool myth surrounding this old mining town up on a mountain. It’s called the Burning Buried Village.”
Clio dropped her pen in surprise, and Alastor looked up from where he’d been pretending to study instead of listen. Emily looked intrigued. “Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can a village simultaneously be burning and buried? The burial would put out the fires, wouldn’t it?” she asked.
Zeke nodded. “You would think so! Historically, the town was, well, as I already said, a mining town that was mining for ore on the mountainside. One winter, decades ago, an earthquake hit the area, and triggered an avalanche. The whole town was buried under tons of rock and ice. Only the chimneys poked out of the snow. No survivors were ever found. But supposedly, sometimes if you pass by, you’ll see smoke coming up out of the chimneys.”
He leaned back in his chair again. “So? What do you guys think? Sound interesting?”
Emily, who was his skeptical cohost for the channel, tapped her pen against her lips in thought. “It does sound interesting,” she admitted, “but isn’t it dangerous? Going hiking up a mountain known for avalanches and earthquakes?”
“It’ll be fine as long as we go during summer,” Zeke assured her, “and what do you know, summer vacation is just on the other end of finals week.”
“Is that so?” Emily asked doubtfully. She didn’t look convinced.
“It’s a terrible idea!” Clio said. “Do you have any idea how often earthquakes and avalanches happen on that mountain? How many people die just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time?” She shook her head. “You guys ought to stay as far away from it as possible.”
“There are a lot of inexplicable disappearances in the area,” Alastor agreed, looking grim. “Authorities in the area believe that a lot of people who vanished near the mountain, or were last seen going up the mountain, went to check out the village and died. The whole thing was riddled with mines; any earthquake could easily have made the ground above the mine tunnels more frail than it should be, and people happened to step on a thin spot and fall to their deaths in the tunnels, never to be found again. The season doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to unstable earth opening up into a sinkhole, or if it does, it doesn’t do so in a way that’s in your favor. You’re more likely to get hurt than to be fine.”
Zeke stared at the twins in surprise. “You guys sure know a lot about this. Have you been there before? Done some research into it?”
Clio pursed her lips and shared a look with her brother. “Mom went missing in the area, looking for our grandmother. Our grandparents used to live in the mining town, back before the avalanche buried it. Grandpa Brandon died in the avalanche as a matter of fact, but…” Her voice trailed off.
Alastor picked up the story. “Grandma Irene disappeared on the anniversary of the avalanche. She’d been having dreams, before then, that Grandpa Brandon was calling for her. She went for a walk, and never came home. When it had been several hours, Mom went after her. She didn’t find Grandma Irene, but every so often, she’d go looking for her again. It was like she was a one-woman search party. But one day, she set out and just…didn’t come back. We never saw her again.”
“Oh.” Zeke and Emily looked uncomfortable. “Sorry about your loss…” Emily offered, uncertain if it was wanted years after the fact.
Clio sighed, and her shoulders slumped. “It’s fine. We never met our grandparents, either of them, and Mom vanished when Alastor and I were four. We hardly remember her now. Besides, there’s not much that condolences or looking will do to help. Enough people have vanished into thin air around that mountain just looking for other people who vanished that search parties are rare. If someone vanishes, it’s practically an official policy to just leave them. You’re more likely to lose even more people in the search than you are to find the person or people you’re looking for.”
There was an awkward pause, as Emily and Zeke fidgeted in their seats and Clio leaned against Alastor briefly for support. He hugged her back. Then Clio picked up a different subject to talk about.
“So, Emily, have you read the new Nibiru Secret Gardens novel? It came out not too long ago.”
“Oh!” Emily lit up. “I’m in the middle of reading it right now! Well, obviously not right now right now, but I’m about halfway through with it. I had to put it down so I could study though. My Magitek Engineering exam is first, and I need every second of review that I can get. Have your read it?”
Clio looked wistful. “I wish. It was sold out at the bookstore, and the library doesn’t carry any of the Nibiru Secret Gardens books. It’s a shame too—I wanted to know what was going to happen next. This new one, Assault with a Friendly Weapon, is supposed to be a direct sequel to Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, right?”
“It is!” Emily agreed. “It’s—oh, I shouldn’t spoil it for you—there’s a fifteen-month time skip between the end of Heads I Win, Tails You Lose and the start of Assault with a Friendly Weapon. Suspicious isn’t it? Of course, the book is still talking around what’s happened in that time skip, so there’s no concrete information yet. But still.”
Zeke looked at Alastor in dismay. “Why does nobody want to talk about the subjects I bring up, but they’re fine with talking about sappy romance novels?”
“Because you keep bringing up subjects nobody wants to talk about.” Alastor grinned suddenly. “Besides, apparently the love triangle between Annie, Troy, and Lindsey is to die for. There are shipping wars over it. It’s been almost ten years since Heads I Win, Tails You Lose came out after all. Clio’s been anxiously awaiting the resolution of the story. She’s rooting for Annie and Lindsey.” He shrugged. “I don’t blame her. Troy is the sort of person I wouldn’t piss on if he were on fire, especially not if he treated Clio the way he’s been treating Annie and Lindsey. I don’t get why he’s so popular.”
Zeke gave him an incredulous look. “You read those books? And, just as a side note, you wouldn’t give a guy a hand if he so much as made doe eyes at Clio. That one classmate of hers thought you were going to kill him when he tried to ask her out. I didn’t think that that kind of hilariously overprotective older brother existed outside of fiction.”
“Well, now you know.” Alastor declared, then picked his notebook up again. “And don’t you have an exam to study for? Get studying, you’re never going to make it into the militias with grades like yours.”
Zeke groaned. “Don’t remind me! Oh, hey, my first exam is for Offensive Magic, can you help me out?”
“If by ‘help you out’ you mean, go back to the recruitment area and spar with you, the answer is no.” Alastor retorted.
“It’s not the recruitment area, it’s the private Dueling courts. There just so happens to be a lot of militia recruiters hanging out, that’s all. C’mon, please Alastor, my exam is in two days. I need the help!”
“No. Go find some of your fellow classmates and get them to help you; I’m sure they need the practice as much as you do.” Alastor pointedly buried his face in his notebook and tuned Zeke out.
*
“Remind me again, why did I agree to this?” Emily huffed, wiping at her forehead.
“Because we both passed our classes with awesome grades?” Zeke said, grinning at her in delight. He shaded his eyes with a hand, peering out at the landscape in front of him. “I think we’re close enough
to the village that we can start recording now. You have the livestream ready to go?”
“Yeah. I just have to…” Emily trailed off briefly as she fought with the camera for a moment. “There! Now we’re rolling. Say hi, Zeke.”
Zeke waved as she aimed it at him. “So, like I said in the announcement a couple of days ago, today’s livestreaming episode is about the myth of the Burning Buried Village! For those of you that don’t know about it, let Emily and me explain. We’re not quite there yet, but I’m sure we will be by the time that we finish explaining.”
He cleared his throat. “So, in 1725 an arcanite mithril ore deposit was discovered in this mountain. Shortly thereafter a mining operation was founded on site, and a mining town sprang up around the mine.” Zeke took the camera from Emily and aimed it at her as she started talking.
“Arcanite mithril ore, for those of you that aren’t familiar with it, is a type of fuel, like coal, that is occasionally found.” Emily explained. “Whereas coal is the fossilized remains of plants and dinosaurs and other such things, arcanite mithril ore is found at sites where massive amounts of magic were used. Whenever magic is used, it leaves behind a residue. Even we humans leave behind residue when we use our magic. That residue is what is commonly called a magical signature. Forensics scientists use it to identify who cast what spell and can even determine what kind of spell was cast. Usually the magic residue will fade away, but occasionally, in places where massive amounts of magic were used, enough will linger that it will undergo the same processes that turn remains into coal and become arcanite mithril ore.”
Emily paused and added, “Arcanite mithril ore isn’t talked about in media very often, so don’t feel bad if this is the first time you’ve heard of it! It’s even rarer than precious gems, metals and fossil fuels combined. If you have heard of it, it’s probably because it’s used to power the engines that keep the Roaming Cities of Garm’s Howl and Nibiru afloat hundreds of feet in the air.” Zeke handed the camera back to her and resumed talking.
“Just so you know,” Zeke said cheerfully, “nobody is certain why there were such massive amounts of magic being used that they ended up producing arcanite mithril ore. The leading theory is that there was some kind of war going on, and magic was getting tossed around like candy on the battlefields. But there’s new evidence that arcanite mithril ore contains multiple magical signatures, presumably from multiple people using magic in the same place, and the biggest, most noticeable signature lacks the flags that would indicate that the magical signature belonged to a human! Isn’t that exciting?”
“Anyways!” Zeke waved an arm at their surroundings. “Getting back to the purpose of this livestream, the mining village of Anaideia sprang up around this arcanite mithril ore deposit, and the miners spent several centuries mining away at the mountain trying to get at it all. The Anaideia arcanite mithril deposit was, and still is, considered one of the largest in the world. The mines were extensive and probably destabilized the ground a lot—in fact they almost certainly did.
“Notice that I talked about Anaideia in the past tense. About thirty to forty years ago, on one otherwise unremarkable winter day, an earthquake hit the area. It triggered an avalanche, which buried the town of Anaideia in tons of rock, ice, and snow. No survivors were ever found. It’s been suggested that—as the earthquake and subsequent avalanche hit in the middle of the workday—most of the town’s occupants were down in the mine at the time. Several of the mine’s emergency exits collapsed and were blocked off entirely.
“However! While the buildings are completely buried, the chimneys aren’t. To this day, they are the only part of Anaideia that can be seen. And rumor has it that occasionally smoke can be seen rising from them! Now, lots of people have tried to figure out what happened and what is happening with this phenomenon, but as I said earlier, the mine tunnels go all over the place here. And the frequent earthquakes make the ground here unstable and prone to collapsing.” Zeke reached out to the camera. “And on that note, I’ll let Emily give you the safety talk.”
“Why is it always my job to do this part?” She asked, handing him the camera. “This area has an extremely high rate of deaths and disappearances. Most of these cases are suspected by local police to a result of people trying to visit the Burning Buried Village and getting injured on the way to and from the village. I think that, in a place known for its frequent earthquakes and avalanches, it should go without saying that you should not try this at home. However, in light of the danger, Zeke and I have decided to livestream this instead of recording and posting after the fact as we usually do, so that if anything happens to us, you guys can alert the local authorities that we need help. Please keep yourselves safe and help keep us safe too!”
Emily took the camera back from Zeke, who immediately pointed ahead of them. “So! We have just arrived at Anaideia and…I don’t see any burning chimneys. Boo. That’s alright, though, because we have a plan B!”
“Zeke,” Emily interrupted him, “lets check all the houses before we move onto plan B.”
“Oh! Right, good thinking. See, this is why you’re the brains of the operation.” Zeke said.
They took a tour of the town, shining flashlights down the chimneys and narrating what they saw in case the camera didn’t catch it. There wasn’t much to catch. They made their way over to the first chimney they’d come across, the one closest to their path back.
“So, now that we’ve seen a whole lot of nothing, it’s time for plan B.” Zeke said, crouching down next to the chimney and beginning to push snow away from the smokestack. “The idea is that we’re going to clear the snow away from the chimney’s smokestack or whatever you call it and tie a rope to it. Then I’ll tie the other end to myself and go down the chimney. When I get to the bottom, Emily will give me the camera and she’ll come down. This is the part where you guys call 911 if something happens to us! But if everything goes just fine, we’ll get a tour of the old house. Hopefully there are no rotted bodies in here.”
As Zeke tied the rope first around himself and then around the chimney, Emily said, “Don’t worry. Zeke goes bouldering—that’s a kind of rock climbing without equipment—all the time at our university’s rec center. He’ll be fine going down. It’s me you need to worry about. I have no experience climbing up or down anything that isn’t stairs.”
“You’ll do fine, Emily!” Zeke protested. “Just think happy thoughts, and you’ll be down safely before you know it. Now,” he turned to the chimney and climbed onto it, “wish me luck! I’ll shout, ‘all clear’ when I get to the bottom.”
Zeke climbed over the edge and went down. For a little while, the rope reeled into the chimney slowly as he made his way down using the bricks as handholds. Then the rope stopped moving.
Emily rushed to the edge of the chimney, almost dropping the camera in her haste. “Zeke!” she called, “Zeke! Are you okay? Did you get to the bottom?”
There was no answer. Emily listened closely but heard nothing. She bit her lip, then called again, “Zeke, I’m really worried. Can I get an ‘all clear’ or a ‘help’?”
There was still no answer.
Emily hesitated, then muttered, “This was such a stupid idea. We shouldn’t have come here after all.” She turned the camera to face herself. “Listen up. Zeke went in there and there’s no sign that he’s okay or coming up. I need you guys to call the police. I’m going in after him. If I find him, I’ll scream for help. If you don’t hear anything, assume the worst.”
She set the camera on the snow, aware that it might damage the camera but not caring. As the camera continued rolling, Emily grabbed her flashlight and leaned over the edge of the chimney, peering down into it to see if she could spot Zeke. When she still couldn’t see any sign of him, she pulled back and took the second rope and tied it to both herself and the chimney. Then she lowered herself in.
The second rope slowly eased into the chimney. Then it too stopped. Dead silence followed.
*
Someone was humming as Zeke came to. He rolled over, his head was throbbing and he wanted to bury it beneath the pillow. Unfortunately, that was not to be, and he rolled straight off the bed instead, landing with a thump and a yelp.
The humming cut off. Footsteps replaced it as Zeke slowly sat up and rubbed at his head, then at his stomach where he could feel a bruise forming.
“Are you all right?” A kind-looking old woman asked him, leaning down to help him back up.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Zeke answered on autopilot. “Where am I?” Zeke looked around, then spotted Emily lying on the opposite side of the bed he’d just rolled off. “Emily!”
Zeke rushed over to her as the old lady said, “She’s fine. You both took a nasty bump to the head coming down the chimney, but she’s otherwise unhurt. You’re in worse shape than she is, what with her landing on your stomach and all that.”
Zeke didn’t answer at first, hovering next to his friend and shaking her lightly, trying to wake her. When Emily groaned and swatted at his hand, he sighed in relief. “Oh, thank God she’s all right. Emily, wake up.”
Emily opened an eye to squint at him. “Go away, Zeke. My head hurts.”
“I know. So does mine. And my stomach. Apparently, you landed on me when we came down the chimney.” Zeke pulled back to give her some space as she sat up abruptly.
“The chimney? Oh, that’s right! What happened? Your rope stopped moving and then you didn’t answer me when I kept calling.”
“That…is a good question. I don’t know. I vaguely remember hitting something but I’m not sure what. That must have been when I passed out.” Zeke turned to look at the old woman. “Where are we? You never answered that question.”
“You never introduced yourself either,” the old lady said dryly. “I’m Charity Silverman. This is my house that you so kindly decided to climb down the chimney of. Coming home to find strangers in the fireplace was an unpleasant surprise.”
Zeke and Emily stared at her incredulously. “Your house?” Emily exclaimed, “but this place was supposed to be abandoned! Nobody’s lived in Anaideia since the avalanche.”
“Yes, but they never found any survivors, now did they?” Mrs. Silverman said. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we who survived the earthquake never left our village doesn’t mean none of us survived.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose that isn’t strictly true. Miss Antheia left briefly, but she came back when she found she was having children. And her children left, but they’ve recently come back. School’s out and all that.”
There was a knock on the door, and Mrs. Silverman opened it. “Yes, who is it—oh! Hello. I suppose you’re here for the newcomers, then. Come on in.”
“Thanks, Elder Silverman. I won’t bother you for long.” Alastor said, walking inside. He looked at Zeke and Emily, clearly exasperated. “Clio and I told you guys to stay far away from here, didn’t we? You’re lucky you’re not hurt.” Alastor made an impatient gesture with his hands as they gaped at him. “Well, come on then. Outsiders aren’t allowed in Anaideia anymore, and Lady Eris wants you out asap. Clio’s waiting for us outside.”
“How did you get here?” Zeke asked, unmoving. “No, wait, what are you doing here?”
“I live here,” Alastor said.
“You live here?” Emily repeated, still bewildered by the idea that the uninhabited town was inhabited after all. And after so many years trapped under the ice and snow, too. “Wait, how would you even survive down here, if you never leave? What would you eat? There’s no way to get food down here! We had to go down the chimneys to get here.”
“And that was a monumentally stupid idea, by the way.” Alastor answered. “As for the rest of your questions, I’ll answer them when we’re not imposing on Elder Silverman’s hospitality.” As Zeke and Emily went to grab their stuff, Alastor turned to their host and said, much more politely, “Thank you again for everything, Elder Silverman. I’m sorry about them landing uninvited in your house.”
“Sorry,” Emily chimed in, feeling a little sheepish at the reminder that she and Zeke were essentially home invaders and the nice old lady—Elder?—hadn’t needed to take care of them but had anyway. She probably wouldn’t have herself. “Thank you for looking after us.”
“Thanks, and sorry for dropping in on you—literally, even.” Zeke chimed. He hopped up and down on one foot for a second, nearly falling over, as he tried to pull his shoe on. Alastor grabbed his shoulder to stop him from faceplanting on the ground and Zeke gave him a grateful smile even as he jerked his shoe one last time and finally got it on.
“It’s fine,” Elder Silverman said, “I appreciated the visitors if not the suddenness of it. Next time, come in through the front door.”
“Okay,” Zeke said at the same time Alastor muttered to himself, “There won’t be a next time.” Zeke elbowed him as the party of three left the house, exiting into a large, dimly lit, earthen tunnel.
“Hey,” Zeke protested, “don’t be like that, Alastor. She didn’t mean it seriously. It’s just a courtesy thing, I know she wasn’t inviting us back.”
“I’d be surprised if she was,” Emily added dryly, “seeing as we did fall in through the chimney uninvited.”
Alastor didn’t look at them, more intent on looking farther down the tunnel. “Well, I’m glad you understand that. Outsiders aren’t welcome in Anaideia.” They came to a crossroads in the tunnel, and Alastor promptly turned left. Zeke and Emily followed him.
“So,” Emily said, “you said that you’d answer my questions when we weren’t occupying Mrs.—Elder Silverman’s house. I notice that we’re no longer in her house. Care to give us a few answers now?”
“I can!” Clio said cheerfully. Zeke and Emily both flinched in shock, having not seen her come out of a particularly dark side-tunnel. “After I yell at you, of course. What were you thinking? Alastor and I told you to stay far away from here. Those statistics about disappearances and deaths around this mountain weren’t made up, you know!”
“We were careful!” Zeke protested. “We dressed for the weather and for the hike, we had extra supplies in case of emergency, and I don’t just mean extra rope for climbing with—oh hey, what happened to all that?”
“I left it up by the chimney with the camera,” Emily answered. “We were livestreaming the Anaideia episode, and when Zeke didn’t respond, I told the viewers to call the police. They could probably still see my rope stop moving when I passed out.”
“Your camera and other stuff have been moved to a better location,” Alastor said gruffly. “But you still shouldn’t have come. It’s dangerous around here for outsiders.”
“But not for you?” Zeke asked.
“We were born and raised here,” Clio answered. “This place is no danger to us, nor to the other Anaideians. But Lady Eris doesn’t welcome strangers, and she especially doesn’t welcome those whose disappearance will herald more strangers approaching.”
“Who’s Lady Eris?” Zeke asked. “You guys keep mentioning her.”
Alastor made a strange face, not quite a grimace but something similar. “She’s…I guess you could say that she’s the mayor here. She’s the one that built the barriers that protect Anaideia from avalanche and earthquakes, from tunnel collapses and from outsiders alike. When you guys went down the chimneys, you collided with the barriers in the chimneys. They’re set to knock out anyone who comes in contact with them, but the resulting fall to the ground gave you a pretty hard hit to the head to go with the unconsciousness.”
“Isn’t having barriers up the chimneys dangerous?” Emily asked dubiously. “That sounds like an accident waiting to happen. And what happened to the ropes? I didn’t see Zeke’s start reeling into the chimney quickly as he went into freefall.”
“Oh, the rope would have been seared short when you guys tried to pull it past the barrier,” Clio said easily, like that wasn’t an alarming phrasing to use when talking about something they’d gone through. “If you’d tried to pull his up, Zeke’s rope would have been burnt off him. The barriers don’t stop organic material from passing through though, just inorganic. People and animals get knocked out. The barriers also stop sound from escaping—I’m sure that you noticed you didn’t hear Zeke hit the ground? But smoke can escape. That’s why there are all those rumors of smoke coming out of the chimneys. Stopping the smoke from escaping really would be a fire hazard.”
They turned another corner and passed under a strangely blue-tinged lamp. Emily glanced up at it automatically, then did a double take as she got a good look at it. “Is this an arcanite mithril lamp?” she asked, startled. “Those are really rare and expensive.”
“Are they?” Clio asked back. Then, smiling and gesturing at their surroundings, she added, “Anaideia was a mining town situated over one of the largest arcanite mithril deposits currently known. We have more than enough sitting around here to use as lamps and for heating.”
“Emily asked earlier how you guys ate if you never leave to get food.” Zeke jumped into the conversation before they could get sidetracked by Magitek Engineering questions. “What do you guys eat? It’s not like, you know…” he gestured awkwardly to himself for a moment, and everyone else stared at him blankly.
Then realization spread across Alastor’s face and he shuddered. “Oh! Oh, gross, no. Definitely not. We have greenhouses set up in some of the larger plazas, hydroponics and heat lamps and other equipment that lets us grow food without need for sunlight. The local weather made it impossible to garden or raise livestock or get food delivered half the year anyway, back before the avalanche, so the underground greenhouses were some of the first things built in town.”
Alastor shrugged. “But as Clio said, being a mining town for arcanite mithril means that we have ready access to all the power supply we need. And as long as the greenhouses are running, we can make as much food as we need. There’s no reason to resort to cannibalism to survive down here. Thankfully.”
The girls immediately made disgusted faces and retching sounds. “Gee, thanks, Zeke!” Emily said, “I’m never going to get that image out of my head now.”
“Neither am I, and I have to live with it.” Clio grumbled, then perked up as natural light began filtering into the tunnel. “Oh, hey! Look, we’re almost to the exit!”
She sped up, jogging to the entrance and the others followed her. Zeke and Emily wandered out of the tunnel entrance, turning to see that it was almost completely obscured from sight only a few steps away.
“Wow,” Zeke said, impressed. “I’m only barely five feet away from the entrance and the tunnel already looks like it’s just a slight discoloration in the rock. If you two weren’t standing in the entrance, I’d lose sight of it!”
“It is camouflaged pretty well, isn’t it?” Alastor asked proudly. “Hundreds of people trek past here, going hiking or sightseeing or even looking for the missing, and not one of them has ever spotted it.”
“Huh.” Emily said. Rather than turn to look at the tunnel, she was looking around at the rest of the mountainside. “I think we passed by here on our way up the mountain. Zeke, look!” She grabbed her friend’s arm and pointed to a rock in the distance. “We stopped and turned the camera on over there.”
“Oh, yeah!” Zeke leaned forwards a little, shading his eyes with his free hand as though that would make the rock clearer. “It still looks like a giant pair of—”
Emily let go of his arm to slap at it instead. “Don’t say it! Nobody needs to hear that.”
“But it does!” Zeke protested, pulling his arm away from her and giving her a wounded look.
“I both do and do not want to know.” Alastor said. They turned to see the twins still standing in the entrance. Alastor gestured to the rocky outcropping they’d been talking about, now that he had their attention. “We stashed your camera and equipment over there. You’ll have to fetch it. That’s a pretty well-known landmark around here, so the police or whoever comes will go there on the way up to find you. You weren’t out long enough for the inevitable search party to miss you.”
Emily frowned. “Why would you leave it there? Wouldn’t it be easier to just take everything inside with you?”
Clio gave her an apologetic smile. “No, not really. Like we said earlier, Lady Eris really doesn’t like outsiders—in fact she’s killed everyone else that’s tried to visit Anaideia and, like you, had the bright idea of going down the chimneys. You’re our friends, so,”
Clio spread her hands out in a ‘what can you do’ sort of gesture. Next to her, Alastor traced something out in the air, and flicked his wrist. A pale blue bubble barrier appeared in the tunnel entrance, locking the twins inside and Zeke and Emily outside.
“We convinced Lady Eris to spare you two on four conditions.” Clio said. “The first is that you leave as soon as possible. The second is that neither of you ever come back, either together or separately. The third is that neither Alastor nor I ever leave again. She hated it when Mom left to have us, you see.”
Alastor gave them a sad look. “I suppose what my sister is trying to say, is that this is goodbye. It was nice knowing you.”
He traced out another symbol, one Emily didn’t recognize but Zeke apparently did, because he yelled, “Get down!” and shoved Emily onto the ground.
A flash of light blinded Zeke and Emily, and underneath them, the earth began to shake.
*
When Emily awoke, it was to the incessant sound of beeping. She stared blankly at the ceiling for several minutes, trying and failing to scrape her mind into some semblance of order. It didn’t help much; her thoughts remained foggy and out of reach.
The sound of footsteps startled her, and a nurse came over to check on her. The nurse—Nurse Brown, according to the nametag—seemed surprised to see Emily awake. She quickly called the doctor over, and Emily finally managed to shake the fog in her mind enough to answer some questions. A groan off to her right heralded the awakening of the other patient in what Emily had belatedly realized was a hospital room.
The doctor repeated the checkup on Zeke while Emily sipped at a cup of water Nurse Brown had handed her. When the doctor had finished with Zeke, he said, “I suppose you two are fine—remarkably so, even, for two people who got caught in an earthquake. I would suggest that you stay here overnight, though, just in case. The police will want to talk to you anyway, something about where you were found.” He nodded to them, then turned and left.
“Visiting hours are still going on, but I don’t think your families have arrived just yet. They have been notified, of course.” Nurse Brown said, and then followed the doctor out of the room.
Zeke stared at his cup of water in confusion. “Do…do you remember what happened?” he asked Emily. “How did we end up in the hospital?”
Emily shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
They lapsed into silence.
After some time had passed, enough time in fact, that Emily might have fallen back asleep at one point without noticing, the doors opened.
Both Emily and Zeke startled awake as their families poured into the room, and they were besieged by anxious relatives. There was a lot of shrieking and crying—Emily’s mom, already red-eyed, burst into tears at the sight of her daughter, awake and safe and okay—and Zeke’s six-year-old sister insisted on giving both the Heimlich maneuver. She had learned it recently in school and seemed to think that it was the medical version of a hug and dispensed it now in order to ‘heal’ them.
When the hubbub had died down some, Emily asked, “What happened?” She gestured to the room at large. “How did we get here?”
Her mom wrung her hands. “Well, after you guys went looking for that urban legend and—oh, I’m so glad you thought to livestream it. We could have lost the both of you and never known until it was too
late.” Emily’s dad wrapped a comforting arm around his wife’s shoulders and pressed another tissue into her hands.
Zeke’s dad continued, “When Emily told the viewers to call the police, they did so en masse. Local authorities set out to find you two. The camera continued rolling, but someone came up from behind and turned it off after a while. We don’t know who, but they were presumably the ones who saved you. Shortly after the camera was switched off and the livestream ended, an earthquake hit the area. When it was safe to continue, they found you two at some place they called the, uh, ‘Great Nipple Rock,’ named for its…unique formation.” He looked kind of like it hurt him to say that in front of his daughter, who thankfully did not see what was so interesting about the landmark and did not ask.
“Oh.” Zeke said quietly. He swallowed hard, and glanced at Emily, before trying for a smile. “I guess we’re really lucky, then!”
“You are.” Emily’s dad said fiercely. “Whomever it was that moved you away from the village saved your lives. The earthquake triggered another avalanche not too far from the village, and while it thankfully fell away from you, you could have died if you’d still been stuck in that building.”
Emily said softly, “I didn’t know that avalanches could happen in summer.”
Zeke’s mom replied, “Neither did I. But I’m glad you’re both safe.”
There was a moment of silence, punctuated by Emily’s mom sniffling and then blowing her nose into the tissue. Finally, Zeke’s sister poked him in the side and looked up at him. “Are you going to get a cast?” she asked seriously.
“I don’t think so?” he said, confused.
“Oh.” she looked disappointed.
“Why?”
“Mandy Reeves from my ballet class fell out of a tree and broke her arm. She got a cast and we got to draw on it with her. I wanted to draw a flower on you.”
“Well, maybe we can stick some paper to my arm, and you can draw on that.”
“But its not a cast!” she protested.
“Yeah, well, I’d rather not get a cast.”
“But—”
A knock on the doorframe startled them all. Nurse Brown poked her head in the room. “I hate to break up the reunion, but visiting hours are over in five minutes.”
“…Right. Thank you for the warning.” Zeke’s mom said. Nurse Brown nodded and left, and Zeke’s dad went to pull his daughter off her brother’s bedside.
“Right, down we go, princess. Let’s leave your brother alone for the night.” Zeke’s dad said.
“Is he going to get a cast?”
“No, sweetie. He’d have to be hurt really bad to get one of those. I think your, uh, Heimlich hug took care of that.”
“Oh.” she looked pleased. Then she turned to her brother and announced, “I healed you too well.”
Zeke tried not to laugh. “Yeah, you sure did. Thanks a lot, crabapple.”
“I’m a clementine, not a crabapple. You’re the crabapple.”
“I feel like a black- and blue-berry pie right now,” Zeke muttered. Then he added hastily, before his sister could argue further, “see you guys later. Goodnight!”
They said their goodbyes and left.
Emily’s dad gave her one last kiss on the forehead and made to follow them out the door before he stopped short and turned back. “Oh, wait, we have something for you!” He patted at his pockets for a moment, then looked beseechingly at his wife. “Michelle, where’d I put it again?”
“It’s by the chair, dear.”
“Oh, right. Thank you. What would I ever do without you?”
“Lose your head, probably.”
“Probably.” Emily’s dad agreed and stooped to grab a package off the ground. Turning to his daughter, he said, “This came in the mail shortly after you two left for your little adventure on the mountainside. Your friend sent you something.” He handed it over, and Emily set it on her lap, then gave her parents another hug.
Once they too had left, Zeke leaned over and tried to see what it was that Emily received. “So, what is it? Who’s it from?”
Emily opened it carefully and pulled out the letter. Unfolding it, she read aloud,
“Hey, Emily! Thanks for loaning me your copy of Nibiru Secret Gardens: Assault with a Friendly Weapon. It was a great read. We’ll have to chat sometime about that ending! Sorry I didn’t get this back to you before the end of finals week, but I hope your exams went well! Please don’t go on that trip, I just know something terrible will happen. I’m sure that Zeke can find something else to do his episode on. Love, Clio
P.S. This is Alastor. I hope you passed your exams. As for your trip, I hope you find nothing and get home safely. Tell Zeke he’s an idiot and I’m still not joining the militia.”
There was a pause as Emily lifted out the copy of Nibiru Secret Gardens: Assault with a Friendly Weapon. Her name was written on the inside cover, proving it was hers. When she looked up, she found Zeke staring at her in confusion.
“So,” he said slowly, dragging out the word. “You know anyone named Clio or Alastor?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“Not at all.”
They stared at the letter in silence.
*
“And the fourth condition is that you two forget you ever knew us.”