Tezzariel could hear the low clicking of gears as the elevator descended into the depths of the palace. Gripping the handrail to keep herself steady, she squeezed her eyes shut against the churning in her belly and prayed for the trip to end. From behind her eyelids she could see the soft yellow glow of the lights overhead, swaying like lanterns on a ship’s deck. No matter how much she had wanted to at the time, taking that second helping had a been a big mistake.
The elevator lurched to a sudden halt and Tezzariel felt the motion in her gut.
There was a brief pause, and then the doors of the elevator opened with a *ding*. As if it had been waiting for it’s cue, Tezzariel’s stomach violently ejected it’s contents all over the mat white floor.
“Uhg, it burns!” She wheezed through the taste of acid and breakfast. “I’m going to die here. I’m really going to die.” Releasing her grip on the handrail, Tezzariel collapsed unto her knees and began to heave, the arch of her back rising and falling in steady gasping rhythm.
“Well that’s… Gross,” replied a familiar voice. Tezzariel looked up. Seated immediately on the other side of the elevator doors was the goddess. Apparently she had been waiting… “Why are you being so dramatic? It’s an elevator, Tezza, not an Iron Maiden. You’re going to be fine.”
“Good morning, my divine.”
“You’re late…”
Tezzariel tried to pull herself together and muster a smile.
The goddess looked more or less like a normal young girl of around ten. Aside from her large golden eyes and silver white hair, there wasn’t much to differentiate her from other children. She was pretty, but not remarkably so. Her face was a little round, and she was perhaps a little too skinny. She always dressed in the same baggy green robes, wore her hair in the same loose bun, and sported the same round reading spectacles on her nose. There was some light freckling around her cheeks, but you had to look closely to see it, and her ears were a bit bigger than average. The goddess looked like someone who didn’t go out much, which made sense, even if you disregarded her handicap.
The goddess laced her fingers together and leaned forward in her wheelchair, it’s metal framework creaking slightly. Her expression was equal parts concern and amusement.
“Maybe we should put a bucket in there for now? Until you get over the motion sickness?” She stopped and sniffed at the air. Her small button nose scrunching up in displeasure. “What did you eat? It smells like something crawled out of you and died.”
“Cheese, eggs, and some potato,” Tezzariel muttered, wiping at her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt.
The goddess pinched the bridge of her nose and scowled.
“Maybe you have a lactose problem?,” she said, her voice nasally and high.
Tezzariel knew what was about to happen. The goddess had a tendency to talk about esoteric knowledge as if it was common, only to realize that it wasn’t and stop abruptly.
“A what?”
“Lactose. It’s a type of sugar found in… Wait… Why am I explaining this to you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to understand it anyway.” To Tezzariel, the goddess was a mysterious creature. “Apologies, my divine. I’ll make sure to clean this up.”
“Probably a good idea. I don’t want to imagine what it will smell like if left there for the day.” The goddess tilted her head to one side and frowned. “You look awful by the way. Are you sleeping?”
Now it was Tezzariel’s turn to scowl.
“The bed is too… soft.”
“You poor child.”
“Easy for you to say. The softest thing I’ve slept on until recently was grass.”
“Is grass soft?”
“Not really.”
“I see.”
The goddess released her nose and began rummaging around the compartments of her chair. Pulling out a glass flask of water, she held it out to Tezzariel.
“Go on, wash the inside of your mouth. That can’t taste good.”
Shimmying forward on her hands and knees, Tezzariel grabbed the flask and took a long drink. The water was cool and refreshing.
“I’ll get a bucket and some cloth,” she said when she had finished. “Are we in the back again today?” Tezzariel rose to her feet and tried to blink some of the tired and sick away.
“We’ve searched everywhere else. The back of the vault is only place left it might be.”
Tezzariel had figured as much.
“I’ll join you soon.”
“Don’t rush. I’m immortal, so… you know, time isn’t a problem.”
With that, the goddess spun her chair around and and whizzed off into the vault proper with a little wave. Tezzariel watched her divine as she disappeared into the distance.
“Another day, another chore,” Tezzariel said as she took a little stretch. “Where was the sink again?”
She didn’t have the best sense of direction, and their home was unbelievably huge.
A single room in the palace hidden beneath the Hall of Echoes was big enough to get lost in, while the palace as a whole was unfathomable. At first Tezzariel had assumed that the inside of the statue was roughly the size of a large house, but she had been very wrong. The statue was not where the goddess lived, it was merely the entrance. To what, was hard to say. Tiel called it a palace, but Tezzariel was fairly certain it was too big for that.
The scale of the palace was alien.
It was impossible.
IT was an endless labyrinth of identical winding halls and locked doors. Open spaces large enough to house cities, and strange rooms with no discernible purpose could be found around any given corner. Elevators that could take one to different floors were not uncommon either, much to Tezzariel’s dismay. Everything was symmetrical and featureless, devoid of color and personality. Whatever the original intention of the one’s who had built the palace was, that knowledge had long since been lost to time. Now it was just an extremely big house inhabited by two small girls.
Tezzariel was convinced that were she to walk off in any given direction, she could wander for weeks, maybe months, and never find her way back. Of course, the two of them did not occupy the entire space, though what they did occupy was big enough to merit Tezzariel carrying a map at all times. It also wasn’t that hard to differentiate the space they used from the space they didn’t, mostly on account of the junk.
Big junk, small junk, shiny junk, and rusty junk. Technology or writings from all throughout history could be found carelessly piled in mounds and stacked up on shelves, while priceless works of art hung next to dust ridden carpets. To Tezzariel, it felt like living in a museum curated by an immortal with a hoarding compulsion, and nowhere in the statue was this more apparent than in what her map referred to as, the vault.
One part laboratory, and two parts exhibition hall, the vault was easily the biggest room currently in use. The ceiling of the vault was the same vague white as everything else, and was so high up that it might as well have been the sky. At some point, the goddess had tried to paint trees along one of the walls, but she wasn’t much of artist, and she had quit halfway through. Shelves short enough that Tiel could reach their contents stood in vast straight rows throughout the room, intersected by the occasional cluttered table. For the past two weeks, between her studies and her combat training, Tezzariel had been helping the goddess look for something amidst all this stuff.
What that something was, she hadn’t a clue, but apparently this was her job now. Sharde had made it clear that when the goddess had the urge to find something, that something had best be found.
Tezzariel glanced over her map, and made her way towards the nearest wash closet, humming to herself while she walked. It was a slow, sad tune, but she liked it. It was the same tune she had heard during her vision. It was the song of her life, and her death. It was, in a way, her own funeral dirge.
Filling a bucket with water, she rummaged around until she found a suitably clean rag before making her way back to the elevator.
Tiel was right, it did smell like something had crawled out of her and died.
Fortunately the cleaning didn’t take too long. Tezzariel returned to the wash closet, emptied the bucket, rinsed her hands, and wrung out the cloth. It was time for the day’s work to begin.
It took almost thirty minutes to reach the back rows of the vault on foot.
Tezzariel found the goddess moving between the shelves and clutter with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to her own chaos. Undeterred by the teetering piles of miscellany everywhere, she was so focused on her search that she didn’t notice Tezzariel approaching.
“Any luck,” Tezzariel called out. She had tried to keep her volume down, so as not to startle the goddess, but…
“Wha!” cried the goddess, startled. “Please don’t scare me like that! How many times have I told you!” The goddess paused and collected herself. “Anyway… are you ready for another day of hunting?”
“I suppose,” Replied Tezzariel. “You seem pretty excited…”
“I have a good feeling about today.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I don’t sleep the same way you do, so you could argue that yesterday and today are one and the same for me. It’s not like either of us have any idea what the time of day is down here anyway.”
“Good point. Have you remembered what we’re looking for?”
“Nope! Nor will I!” The goddess said with a bit too much confidence. Looking around the room, she glowered. “What a mess it is in here though. If someone else were to see this they might think that I were a slob.”
Tezzariel’s eyebrows climbed so high up her forehead that for a moment she thought they were trying to escape.
“Hard to imagine how you would arrive at that conclusion…”
“Very funny, Tezza. You might be my friend but I am not above raining divine judgment down on you.”
“Can you?.”
The goddess shrugged.
“I don’t know, I’ve never tried. How hard can it be?”
Tezzariel had her doubts.
Glancing around the room at the piles of stuff everywhere, Tezzariel felt little more than sadness. She tried to imagine the hundreds, possibly thousands of years that her goddess had lived in the palace, alone, rummaging through her own belongings for clues about her past.
“How did you stand it?”
“Stand what?”
“The loneliness?”
The goddess followed Tezzariel’s gaze around the room.
“I’m immortal Tezza. You’re young, so I know you probably don’t fully understand the implications of what that means, but what could I have done about it? There was no alternative.”
“Couldn’t you have left?”
Tiel looked down at her legs, and then back up at Tezzariel. The goddess shook her head.
“I’m a prisoner here, Tezza. Do you think I haven’t tried? How do you think I ended up like this?”
Tezzariel swallowed the lump in her throat.
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“Don’t be. I knew you would eventually. I’ve managed to keep myself busy at least. I have my experiments and I get a lot of reading done. Sometimes I have visions of the future but that doesn’t happen as often these days. I have no memories of the outside world, or what I was before this place. I don’t know much about myself. I don’t know how I got here, or where I came from. I don’t know why I look the way I do, or how I acquired all this,” she held out her hands to indicate the room, “stuff… I probably knew at some point, but I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten more than anyone living will ever know, probably.”
“Why am I here now then? If you’ve been alone all this time, what am I doing here?”
“Because things are changing, Tezzariel.” The goddess grinned, and Tezzariel could see her teeth. It was an expression she hadn’t seen on the goddess’s face before, and it made her nervous. “Haven’t you wondered why it was the captain of my knights that came to pick you up? Or why Sharde is the only one you ever see inside the palace?”
“I have… But you won’t tell me, will you?”
“Are you hungry?” asked the goddess, changing the subject. She reached into the pouches on the side of her chair. Withdrawing two sandwiches wrapped in paper, the goddess brandished them like precious stones. “It’s ham and sprouts,” she said reverently. “Ham and sprouts!”
“I just ate.”
“And then you threw up.”
“… Ham and Sprouts you said?”
Tezzariel knew the goddess and Sharde were hiding things from her. She had had her suspicions from the very beginning that there was more to her being in the palace than simply being a friend. However, Tezzariel was content to wait for now. Whatever their intentions were, she doubted they were malicious.
The next few hours were spent opening boxes and pushing around crates. Neither Tiel nor Tezzariel spoke much, their attention absorbed by the task at hand. Occasionally a terrible smell would flood the room when a jar was opened, and a few of the scrolls they found crumbled to dust when touched, but otherwise their hunt wasn’t too eventful. Tezzariel found some interesting blueprints of a strangely shaped boat when she was rifling through a stack of a papers, as well as a some very realistic paintings of unfamiliar and desolate landscapes. Pushing a couple of small boxes to the side, she spotted a shallow rectangular crate, about as long as she was tall.
Scampering unto the top shelf, she began to pull the crate forward so she could get a good look at it. The crate itself was pretty standard. It was made of wood, and bore a few faded engravings on it. Reaching around to both sides of the crate, she peeled off the lid, and immediately stopped.
“I found it…” she whispered. “I found it!” She called out.
It was a sword, and Tezzariel recognized it. Or at least, she thought she did… For some reason, the sight of it made her furious.