Curio Curiosity

As seen in

A Trick of Fortune

“Sir, maybe we should turn back. The magic in these ruins is making my skin hum.”
Pejan Seguant ignored the retainer’s voice. Beads of sweat trickling down the back of his worn leather tunic, Pejan pushed a curtain of sickly yellow vines out of the way and crept further into the ruins where none had tread in centuries. The retainer’s voice faded as Pejan inched further into the darkness; pale blue light from a piece of lumynarea he held in his hand lit the way.
Several chambers lay empty behind him, but Pejan needed to find something… anything to bring back… or he was finished. Done. No one would finance another expedition he led and he’d spend the rest of his existence stuck in one place, bored and laboring to pay back the debt he owed to his investors.
Another opening in the corridor appeared at the edge of the light. Pejan’s heart began to beat in excitement—as it always did when approaching the unknown—this room would be the one to yield something new, interesting, and highly profitable. Soft boots scuffing detritus on stone floors, Pejan entered the new chamber. At the edges of the light, the copper gleam of an unknown artifact beckoned. Pejan rejoiced and rushed into the room. He stood over the item… bulbous on one end and flared out like a horn on the other… when an ominous groan sounded behind him. Snatching up the artifact, Pejan turned just as a stone slab crashed down over the entrance, trapping him inside.
Pejan shoved the thing into his pack and rushed the door. No seams, no cracks, no egress appeared as a result of a quick search. Shouting through the door did nothing and Pejan had little hope that his cowardly retainer would locate him anytime soon.
Another, slower search of the chamber didn’t reveal much. This appeared to have been some sort of common area. The remains of a stone table and chairs were along one side of the room. On the other side, some sort of ceremonial bowl or brazier lay on its side in the rubble and decaying plant matter that was so prevalent in these ruins. Pejan kicked some a stone towards the bowl and started when it ricocheted against stone and then dropped into deep water. The kerplop noise distinctive.
The explorer knelt next to the hidden opening in the floor and peered down. The lumynarea held over the water. Some sort of tunnel seemed to head into the dark. If only Pejan could widen the opening, maybe he could swim out of here. He pawed at the edges of the opening. Maybe some of the stones were loose. His fingernails caught on a slight protuberance. Pejan dug in with the tips of his fingers. Rough stone abraded his skin, but he only pulled harder. Muscles straining, tendons in his neck standing out, Pejan fell backwards when the stone suddenly came loose.
“Yes!” Pejan rejoiced. Prematurely. Water began to rush into the chamber from below. The force of it drove him back from the opening. He didn’t understand how the physics of this worked, but undoubtedly, the water rushed in and if he didn’t find another way out of this chamber, he would be dead and drowned in icy water within the hour.
“By Drell’s teeth…” Pejan swore. He felt sure that the artifact he’d recovered would be the artifact that would put his name in the history books of great explorers. He had to make it out of here alive and with the thing he found or he would be forgotten like hundreds of other explorers throughout the ages.
Frantic, Pejan looked around again. Nothing new revealed itself to his gaze. Nothing new sounded in his ears above the rushing of his watery death into this forgotten chamber in these unnamed ruins in the middle of the jungles of Eruvia.
As the water levels increased to cover his calves, Pejan yelled for help. To the gods with his pride. When the water rose to cover his knees, Pejan climbed onto the ruins of the table. Water swirled around his ankles. At this point, even if his retainer found him, there wouldn’t be enough time to clear the blockade. The only thing left to do was pray… and the gods were notoriously fickle about interfering in the lives of mortals.
Pejan looked upward, running through a mental list of gods, trying to pick the best one to pray to in this situation. Mummified vines covered the surface of the ceiling. Snaking in and out of the shadows cast by the lumynarea Pejan still gripped in one hand, a deeper darkness lurked above his head. Pejan grabbed the vines with his free hand, uncaring of the scrapes and cuts the fibrous material made in his skin, and he pulled. The darkness above him grew and had edges. A hole in the ceiling? An old chimney or smoke hole of some sort?
Pejan shook his head. The water flooded the rooms to his knees. He had no time to satisfy his curiosity. He tucked the lumynarea away in a pocket. With both hands, he frantically pulled at the vines above him. When the opening was big enough, when the water tugged at his waist, when he was gasping from the exertion of it all, Pejan gathered himself and jump-pulled himself upward into the narrow opening in the ceiling.
Little to grip in the deep dark, Pejan nearly slipped back into the water tomb. Pejan gained bruises and scrapes in his desperation to keep moving upward rather than slip back. But, sweat slicking his skin and pain cramping the muscles in his hands, Pejan inched upwards. He didn’t know how long he wormed upward before he felt the tunnel turn.
Able to finally rest on his knees, Pejan pulled out the piece of lumynarea. Vines, greener and livelier than the ones below, twisted across the narrow tunnel. Pejan pushed through, and off in the distance, sunlight beckoned. A different kind of magic pulled Pejan ahead and on to the next adventure.

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A throwaway line about Pejan in my manuscript draft, A Trick of Fortune, inspired me to write a new flash fiction. Enjoy.
Lumynarea