Keeper of Life - NaPoWrMo Entry

“Solar, hey, psst, Solar!” Clover said hovering outside her window. Sol ran and threw open the glass to let her friend in.

“What in the... what are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be in the archives?” Sol asked, her friend just laughed.

“Yeah I am,” she said, “but forget that, listen.” Clover went over to the table and emptied her saddlebag. Then she looked around. “Where's your dad?” she asked in a whisper.

“Out,” Sol answered. “So what's so important you're willing to get yourself kicked out of the archives?”

“Okay, so that map you brought me right, it got me thinking. I asked the other scholars if they knew where I could find similar source material, but all I found along the same lines were zoning maps, and old surveys, though the zoning maps gave me some interesting stuff, but that's something else. Look, so,” she tried to frame her words, and tried to get past the excitement.

“Breath,” Sol told her.

“So I started to wonder why there wasn't more resource materiel. I looked up tons of old archival notes, scrolls, books but all the historical ones were all minus BL.”

“So everything was after the war started,” Sol said.

“Yeah, exactly, essentially, weird right? I mean how much other stuff do they keep in the library there in that little room? Maybe all the other old stuff, but why? The archives hold on and preserve tons of old art, great fiction, poetry, some dating back way before the last age. Anyway it happened that I stumbled upon an old botanical reference manual, the kind of thing they give new gardeners assigned to a plot of land.” She pulled a torn and taped book from the pile and opened it. “See right here!”

“Thornberry,” Sol read.

“Yeah, exactly!” Clover exclaimed.

“What's a thornberry?” clover asked.

“It's poisonous,” she said, her voice filling with awe and excitement again. Sol just looked at her, a blank slate. “Why would we garden a poisonous berry? Now look this book dates back to the beginning of the war, about five years after the first declaration, not important, but what is important are the zoning references I pulled up. Well it turns out that a crop of thornberry was given three plots of land, even their own zone, that's huge for a berry we can't eat, and why a separate zone code?” she said. Sol shook her head, dizzied.

“Right, right, so why would we grow them in the city? Well, not inside the city as we know it now, the boarders were actually pretty far out according to this,” she said pulling another scroll apart. It was filled with even more jargon and lines Sol didn't understand. “But get this, old population estimates put us past our current population. I thought maybe we're just smaller now but no.” Again another scroll was loosed on the table. “Look at this,” she said.

“Old blueprints?” Sol said. “Wow, the houses are huge.” Clover pulled another one. “Hey it's an apartment,” she laughed when she read the planned occupancy of ten families. Now their apartments were long, and at least four stories high.

“See what I mean? If you relate this to the zoning plans you can see there isn't enough zoning allotted for enough houses to fill that kind of population, so where are all the others? On top of that, there's this reissue I've found that remaps the zoning structure of the city. Here,” she pointed to somewhere near the skirt of District five, next to the clifftop the castle sat on. “Why was it just empty I wondered? It must have been kept empty for a reason because I can't find any city plans, or permits relating to that area.”

“Well I'm sure other city areas are like that,” Sol said.

“There are large gaps missing, and there was a lot that slipped through the cracks during the war, but then why is this all zoned off? Because somebody was there and using that land and whoever they were, there was a lot of them, and they ate poisonous berries.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Sol said. “It's probably something simple that they don't have the documents for, I think you're over thinking this.”

“Don't believe me?” she asked. “Then common, follow me.”

The trolly was empty when they left it, this part of the city being too quiet for normal traffic. Houses lined the edges, no lawn, they exited right into the street. 'I hate this part of the city,' Sol thought and was thankful there was no one else around. The sun seemed to touch everywhere but this place, and it stuck Solar as not only odd, but creepy. If there were monsters hiding about, they would be here she thought. The shadow from the cliffside seeped into her bones.

“Clover, we shouldn't be here, I hate this place,” she said.

“Maybe it was made District five for a reason?” Clover said and fluttered ahead, Sol followed until they reached the rock wall.

“See?” Clover said, but Sol saw nothing. Only the small cliff side with a patchwork house that seemed almost stuck to the side.

“See what?” Sol asked.

“Didn't you notice? The depressions, and they're not on any topo map.”

Sol looked down at the rock under her hooves, there was no cobblestone out here and only now noticed how she walked in a large dip. The rocks seemed to pool in here, the larger ones at the bottom. Clearly something had been here before. It was almost as if a house had been drug through the ground. Sol wondered how deep it originally was.

“What made this?” Sol asked.

“Collapsed tunnels,” Clover said. “At least, it makes sense right, look at the patterns, look at the cliff face, and why is there one house just right there?”

“You mean from when they tried to burrow into the city? I can't see that. I mean it's a cliff face, it's solid rock. Besides this dip ends way over there. Clover these can't be collapsed tunnels. Besides the texts say they tried digging to The Tree, not the castle. And these don't even come from the outside, they start at the castle. That can't be right,” Sol said.

“It's not,” Clover said. “Maybe they weren't trying to invade the city?” she asked inquisitively, drawing Solar out.

“Then what were they doing? Why were...” Sol's eyes lit up, and Clover smiled. “They were already here, the berries, the city zoning! But that's...” She paused and looked around. “That's impossible, how, they would have had to be-”

“Allies?” Clover cut her off. She opened her saddle bag and threw a piece of parchment at Sol, who caught it and floated it toward her. She unrolled it and looked over the old words, written with a style she didn't recognize. “The Cantolise Pact,” Sol read. “These are outlines for the rules of war,” she said reading over the treatment of POV's. “These symbols,” she said pointing out the sun that made up the seal of The Queen. Clover hovered over Sol. “The flame must be the dragons then, the claw the grif-” Her eyes sunk into the page and ran over the crossing lines, the ones that looked like snakes. “The changelings,” she said under her breath. “Eternity!” she screamed and Clover had to hush her.

“Now you know why I snuck out,” Clover said taking the scroll back.

“But that's impossible, it doesn't make sense, none of this makes sense. They tried to invade the city, they tried to kill The Tree.” Clover nodded to her words. “Why then, why did they betray us? If they lived in the city they lived under the barrier, why would they want to destroy that?”

“Maybe they wanted the city for themselves?” Clover said with a shrug.

“If that was the case wouldn't they want The Tree alive? Without the barrier we would have been slaughtered, they would have too. This doesn't make sense,” Sol said again.

“Well you've got that right.”

A bell struck in the distance making Clover jump.

“Oh no, no, no, I uh-” she looked around, then to Sol. “I gotta go, I'm so sorry, bye!” Sol didn't even have time to say goodbye. Her friend dove into the air with lightning ferocity leaving Sol behind in the wake of her own questions.