They found slightly more than half of the horses together most of a mile from the campsite. They were surprisingly easy for Los'en and Ci'an to coax back towards the camp, since they seemed to want to stay together. Sophia kept searching and found a few more, while others returned on their own. A number of stragglers were eventually tracked down by members of the hunting team on horseback.

Within a few days, they had found all but three horses. The dead bodies of four others were found, as well. The goats were recovered after the horses; they were more scattered and harder to gather, but having the horses made it far easier and it could be done without needing to fly.

Sophia hadn't even known they had goats, though it did make some things make sense, like the presence of milk and butter. There weren't any cows, which was what she was used to, so she'd assumed they'd brought it all. Bringing goats did make more sense, as long as there was something for them to forage. There was no way they'd be able to feed them through the winter otherwise.

Sophia was glad that the food situation wasn't her problem. She was even happier that there was someone handling it; she liked to eat. She already knew she'd be eating a lot of meat as the winter wore on.

With the animals returned, their efforts turned to repairing enough of the upper level that they could do what needed to be done. As much as possible was moved downstairs, but some things needed the open air. Sophia chafed at the delay, especially since she was little more than an unskilled pair of hands, but she knew better than to argue. Exploring the ruin was their goal, but it did no good if they didn't survive the winter.

It was more than a tenday after the attack when they were finally ready to cleanse the first two levels and head down to the third. In that entire time, no one saw the figure that grabbed Sophia's attention, but they still planned to use the staircase it had led them to.

Like the stairs on the upper level, the stairs were closed off by a large, heavy door that was almost certainly a fire door. It opened easily when Horus pushed it open carefully, ready to slam it closed and reinforce it.

Once he could see, he relaxed and pushed it open the rest of the way. Sophia had to wait her turn before she could exit, but even before that, she could see the reason: the stairwell opened onto a corridor that went to the left and the right. There was no large area for ruins apparitions to gather.

For some reason, everyone went left when they left the space at the bottom of the stairs. Sophia found out why when she got there: the right side of the corridor was blocked with ancient debris. It looked like old furniture, mostly tables and chairs but Sophia thought she saw a bed near the bottom. It was probably possible to get through the blockage, but Sophia didn't want to try.

Realistically, she didn't think she'd need to. There was dust and dirt on the pile of junk and no sign that anyone had tried to go that way. If they wanted to follow the person Sophia saw, it wouldn't be in that direction.

"There's a trail in the dirt on the floor," Horus stated from somewhere on the other side of the gaggle of people in the hallway just as Sophia finished examining the barricade or trash heap. "I didn't see it on the stairs, but there are some scuff marks here. It looks like more than one creature."

"Any sign of ruins apparitions?" Lan'ti made his way towards the shield specialist. "Are you sure they're not what made the marks?"

Horus snorted audibly. "They don't travel any real distance. I can see the marks all the way down the corridor. See there and there?"

Sophia assumed Horus was pointing at something, but she wasn't close enough to the front of the group to see what.

"Almost looks like a fight, there," Lan'ti commented. "But you're right, this is either one creature a number of times or several creatures. Let's move forward carefully."

The third floor was different from either of the higher floors. The corridors were similar to the first floor, but many of them were blocked off with wreckage. They skipped those directions; it was unlikely that anything dangerous was going to come from any of them and none of them looked like they'd been disturbed. They'd probably come back and search them if they ran out of other places to look, but they were at the bottom of everyone's list.

It was the rooms that were different. Instead of small rooms in two sizes, the rooms that came off of the corridors on the third floor were huge and filled with shelves that went nearly to the ceiling, over twenty feet in the air. Most of the shelves were empty, but there were a number of things that looked heavy on the bottom and some smaller things towards the top; it was the stuff that was easy to reach and light enough to move with one or two people that was gone.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Sophia couldn't identify any of what was left. All she could really say was that it was in boxes and bags that were completely covered in dirt until it was impossible to tell if they said anything. This was something Sophia was certain Xin'ri would want to spend a lot of time investigating, but it still wasn't the reason they were there.

The marks continued down the corridor, not into the rooms.

The group encountered two ruins apparitions wandering the halls and one in a room they checked as they followed the marks on the ground. It was more than the number Sophia would have expected for the same distance on the first floor a tenday after the area was cleaned out, but it was far less than they'd seen in any area that hadn't been recently cleared. By the time Horus stopped in front of a door and declared that whoever or whatever they were following had gone in there, it was pretty clear that a lot of people were starting to think Sophia really had seen something real.

Even if they weren't saying it to her face. No one liked to be wrong, so Sophia just grinned to herself in the knowledge that she'd been right after all. She'd point it out if she ever needed to get Lan'ti to believe her in the future, but otherwise there was no reason to speak up. The people who mattered knew.

When Horus opened the door and found another set of stairs, Sophia pushed politely but firmly towards the front of the group. This time, she didn't intend to be at the back. If they'd followed the plan correctly, she wouldn't have been; Dav was supposed to be right behind Horus, but she wasn't supposed to be much farther back.

They were most of the way down the stairs when the door at the bottom of the stairwell opened. The light from Sophia's magelight made it easy to see the woman framed by the doorway. Sophia's first thought was that she was wearing a metallized jumpsuit, but a moment later it was obvious that wasn't true; her mind was just not expecting what she saw.

The woman in the doorway looked like a metal android with a human head. It worked surprisingly well; he body was well-proportioned to her head the half-helmet she wore over her dark hair seemed to aesthetically connect her head to her body, just like the clear wire bundle that ran from the helmet to her body did in reality.

Her eyes were strange; instead of whites, they glowed a soft aqua color, the same color as the glowing part of the tattoos that covered her forehead and cheeks. The tattoos were clearly intentional and looked oddly functional. There were some darker portions that did not glow, but they were similar enough to the parts that did that Sophia had to guess that all of the lines and curves could glow if they were needed for whatever they did.

The woman stopped in the doorway and looked up at them with a blank expression. It wasn't the expression of someone suppressing surprise; instead, it looked more like it had never occurred to her to be surprised. Her blank expression was by far the creepiest part of her appearance.

"Oonpingedu," the woman at the bottom of the stairs stated. "Ymbsprae wit. Folgia." She didn't wait for an answer before she stepped back and let the door close as she turned away. Her expression didn't change the entire time.

Sophia heard her words, but she also heard their meanings, which didn't exactly line up with the words that were said. The translation she heard was, "You are unexpected. We should talk. Follow me."

She hadn't expected her Innate Communication Ability to be useful here, but perhaps she should have. There was no reason to expect that people living in isolation would speak the same language as the locals, after all. At the same time, she wasn't entirely certain she could even call the other woman a person; sure, she was shaped like one, but that didn't mean she wasn't a robot any more than having a starship as your body meant an an artificial sapience wasn't a person; the body wasn't what mattered.

Sophia had never heard anyone speak in such a completely unaffected tone of voice.

"Who is that? What …. How is there someone here?" Lan'ti was definitely not completely unaffected.

"She wants us to follow her," Sophia told him. "Maybe we'll get some answers if we talk?"

"You understood her?" Ci'an asked before Lan'ti pulled his thoughts together. "What language is that?"

Sophia shook her head. "I don't know. I'm also not sure how good the translation is; it's from an Ability, not a language I ever learned." It was better to admit that before they depended too much on her translations.

"Better than anything else we have. But if you don't know, I can only guess, and that means…" Ci'an muttered, then turned towards the top of the stairs. "Volat? Someone send Volat down here."

Sophia frowned for a moment, then nodded. Volat was the expedition's language expert, and even if he was only an expert in Old Kestii, he was probably a better person to figure things out than anyone else.

Ci'an's guess that the maybe-android spoke Old Kestii was probably pretty good; maybe she was a piece of leftover technology or magic from the Kestii Empire. Sophia didn't really expect much to survive, but maybe they triggered something when they started exploring the place. That seemed unlikely, but it still seemed more likely than ancient technology activating for no reason.

Sophia waited impatiently for Volat to come down, but when he finally arrived and Sophia went to open the door to finally follow the android, she found Horus in her way. He was already opening the door. The moment he did, he stepped out into what turned out to be another corridor and looked both ways before turning right.

This time, Sophia was the third person out the door. There was another undisturbed barricade to the left, but this time Sophia kept a slightly worried portion of her attention on it. Androids were well outside what she'd expected of the Broken Lands, and that meant she had to allow for other magitech surprises. If Kestii was anything like Earth, there could be a lot of those.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.