Smoke and Shadow: The Fireweaver, Book 1

Chapter 30. THINGS LEFT UNSAID

CHAPTER 30. THINGS LEFT UNSAID

"Come on!" Mehlie yelled back at Santoine, who had paused for a breath before plunging down another corridor. It was harder to breathe through the masks.

"We don't even know which way the Vault is." For the past five minutes they had seemed hopelessly lost, the corridors darkened, all of them unmarked and seemingly without end. Worst of all, their wristscreens were pretty much useless underground, aside from their twin lights to show the way. And thank the gods for that. 

It 's how they discovered a different kind of hall. 

Two deeply echoing steps in and they could tell at once that it was at least three times the size of the others. Five more steps in and the entire hall lit up in a gentle fade.

Mehlie and Santoine stood gaping at the entrance of an exquisite gathering hall, a perfectly circular space complete with marbled floors and vaulted, arched ceilings; pillars and cornices. 

Once the light warmed to a golden glow, the intricate paintings on the walls emerged; floor-to-ceiling scenes of the past, done in vivid color and stunning realism. Even from fifteen feet away, you could see the thick impasto of colors. It gave a suppleness and a depth to the painting's depictions, almost as though they were windows through time. Windows showing the Truth. 

A photograph can be doctored, a video fabricated. The archives, controlled under the Rejkav's, had been edited, smoothed over, re-cast. But these images depicted a history with no lens, save that of the artist's.

"Look at these," Mehlie uttered, breathless, transfixed.

"I'm definitely seeing them." Creepy old paintings, he thought. Although he was glad for the reprieve and took quick advantage to knead at his side stitch discreetly. Mehlie, not a bit winded, studied the murals, each one broken up by darkened hallways leading to other secrets.

Mehlie swiveled around to face him, her face alight. "No. I mean look at them." Her voice bubbled over and he was easily swept up in her excitement. "They're chronological."

In that great hall's entrance, they stood within the era of the previous Emperors. The city of Chanette was displayed in full detail, but it was a rendering of the city before all the walls had been built. Before the uprising had started, and before the Rejkavs had even come into power. 

As they walked around the perimeter, footsteps clicking, echoing, the layers of time unraveled before their eyes. Some of the scenes they knew, but there were others that seemed foreign. Stories and histories that were either false or ones that the Rejkavs had never let see the light of day. 

One image stopped Mehlie. It looked like a spiral ladder, but the pieces of the ladder were coming apart. 

"It's a broken double helix," Santoine said, but Mehlie didn't know what that was. "DNA. It's what we're all made of."

Next to the double helix was an outline of a person, caught within a circle.

"Got to be the Vitruvian Man." Santoine stepped in to look closer at it. Something was off about it.

"He's got too many legs. And arms," Mehlie said. She hadn't had history lessons in the greatest schools, much less art history, but even she knew that famous drawing by da Vinci. "And the hair looks like snakes." 

She stepped back away from the painting, as if the hair spirals might reach out to grab her. Whoever had painted it had been extraordinary, the image made in sumptuous realism.

"Let's keep going," Mehlie said, dragging her fingers across the impasto layers.

Each painted scene cast a light not only on the good things that had happened in their cities, but the ugliness too. They ran past gut-wrenching scenes of storms and fires, a world thrown irrevocably into chaos.