Chapter Five. The Bones.

Read by Celith Wraine

            Down the slope a little from the farming area, just behind the tall white wooden clock tower in among the swaying trees stood a maze of an old graveyard. On closer inspection the graveyard was a series of graveyards, some of them crumbling with headstones that no longer were readable. The old headstones and pockmarked sarcophaguses lay scattered seemingly randomly in a maze of half destroyed stone fences and decaying stone buildings covered in moss and vines. Large trees now grew in and among the markers, sometimes thrusting up through the displaced stones of the destroyed buildings themselves. Passing the area earlier on their way to the windmill, none of the group had paid more than a passing glance at the old graveyard because they were all focused on the windmill and the large sky ship anchored above the town’s gardens.

 

Looking up at the clock Lucy exclaimed, “Four in the afternoon! We’re missing tea!” She grumbled a little, “I hate missing tea. It usually means I’m doing something that I don’t want to do, like going to a graveyard to look for a half-drunk storyteller to hear the end to a very frightening story that he heard decades ago and none of the story might have anything to do with our mission in the first place.”

 

Hot tea currently unavailable, she continued grumbling under her breath even as she rummaged through her bags and eventually pulled slightly squishy packages of leftover cheese and mostly fresh bread from her seemingly bottomless pack and a stoppered flask of cold tea.

 

“I was hoping to be back at the inn, but these will have to tide us over for now,” and she offered the food and drink to everyone.

 

The group sat under the shade of the clocktower to eat their food and everyone had a moment to have a good look at the graveyard where they were to find Ivan.

 

“I didn’t realize Jade Valley had been here quite long enough to have so many old graves.” Zyrina noted thoughtfully while she chewed the last of her bread slowly. “Some of these are hundreds of years old.”

 

Brushing the crumbs away she waited until everyone had finished eating to suggest, “Well let’s get started. He’s got to be here somewhere.” 

 

Phlebus started walking toward the nearest section to look for signs of Ivan or a gate with a skull but was easily distracted by reading the graves he passed. Zyrina followed him. Lucy was already distracted and excitedly digging up a plant that she found near one of the crumbled walls and Torgin left to start looking at the other end of the graveyard area.

 

Torgin was the first to spot the old graveyard with the skull on its gate. “Over here.” He stood near the road, waving.

 

As the others found their way over, Lucy stared at an old set of bones close to where Torgin waited. It looked like a massive dragon had died here some ages past. Torgin was beckoning the others to take a path that snaked from the road past the dragon bones.

 

“I remember passing these,” Lucy mumbled. “D’you think these are the bones that Jenny was the keeper of? Some are missing.” As she inspected the skeleton of the dragon she took stock of several missing rib bones.

 

She ran her hands along the massive row of ribs sticking out of the ground as she caught up with her brother. They felt warm to her touch. The sun must have warmed them, she thought to herself and nervously laughed a little.

 

“This way.” Torgin indicated a small overgrown stone path that led behind the dragon bones, right to a small, fenced graveyard. The metal skull gate was obvious, and the yard was surrounded by a rusting spiked metal fence and some kind of prickly hedge that appeared to be dead.

 

“I wonder why this part is fenced.” Lucy mused.

 

Phlebus peered around at the many graves that were not enc...