Cleo walked amongst the decay of the small town. It was not the first time that she and Winoa had come across such a desolate ruin of a town. No matter where either girl turned they would find mummified corpses in various states of desiccation. It was disgusting, but their path to the next gateway cut through this town directly.
When the two girls had come across a place like this, they could not hold back emptying their stomachs. It was like the whole town had just decided to die, a lot of the people not even bothering to finish eating their food or even finish going to the toilet. Walking through the decay became physically difficult after a while, so before the girls continued Cleo set the whole area ablaze. It was painful, but they could not bear to see the town like that. Better it burned than those terrifying corpses be left in the open for someone else to find.
They holed up in an empty farmhouse to pass the night, but neither girl was in any real state to sleep. Every town or fortress they came across that ended up like this shook them more and more. The first time Cleo had come across it there were fifteen or twenty people, but every time after that the body count was higher. The corpses were always the same, sometimes found in strange places but never holding any fluid and always with the same terrified expression plastered on their face. It was a sort of rictus grin combined with a yell of terror. They had the kind of face you can only fail to get out of your head for days after you had seen it.
In the end, both girls had hardened to the macabre sights. It was that or break and stop climbing, which was an impossibility for either of them. They kept climbing but refused to lose their humanity in the process, so at every encounter with the poor souls who had been set upon by some sort of natural disaster they would light a fire. Cleansing the place through cremation was the only thing that could stop the faces invading their dreams, but for Cleo, at least, it could only help so much. She would still cry herself to sleep in fear.
In the morning the two girls sat and Cleo prepared a breakfast of trail rations, thinking over their journey so far. They did not have much, but they had enough to feed for a few more days, so when Cleo saw Winoa pull out a stasis box full of food from her bag she could not help but gasp.
“Where’d you get that?” She said, gaping at the amount of food inside. The box was full of all sorts of meats, several bags of grain, seeds and rice, and even some fruit and vegetables. The fact that it held anything that was not rotten was incredible, as everything else they had found was either infested with bugs or too rotten to eat. What was even more amazing was a ten centimetre box held so much food. The more food that came out of the crate, the wider Cleo’s eyes became. The box was like a clown car, with more and more food coming out, until finally in front of the two girls was a pile of food that was twice the size of both girls.
Both girls stared with wide eyes at the pile, then back at the box. A stasis box was already a great treasure, but the fact that it seemed to be far bigger on the inside than the outside made it even more valuable. To find it in a small town on the fourth floor was more odd than anything else. The collapse of the Hephaistia clan had irreparably changed the face of trade within Babel. Artifacts became rarer, permanent tools became harder to find in markets and eventually anything that had a finite amount of uses was used up. Trade of rare perishables became increasingly lucrative but more and more difficult to attain in any sellable sense.
Neither Cleo nor Winoa knew much about economics, but both knew that before they had been born food had been a lot more plentiful, as well as a lot more varied. Most clans grew their own food, but it was in no way as varied as the girls had been told about before the collapse of that pivotal clan. The fact that a clan could be wiped out, especially one as wide reaching as the Hephaistia had affected the tower in ways that people were still only just finding out.
“I got the box while you were setting the town alight,” said Winoa. “I found it in the big building in the center of the town, it had the strongest aura of mana in the area”. It was like the maker of the box pumped as much mana into the box as they could, just to make sure it would last for longer than the two weeks that normal stasis boxes did when active. Yet this excess of mana, which should not have been there in the first place, was what directed Winoa to it before it had been eaten up in the fire. Winoa could be nothing but grateful for the man who had made the box, it would feed the both of them for perhaps the rest of their journey if they rationed it right.
“I couldn’t help it…” Cleo shivered. “The flames are the only way I can get the faces of those people out of my head”. Her hands rubbed together and ignited as she sat nervously. She sniffed, trying to hold back her tears. “The flames were the only way to cleanse them”. Her shoulders shook as she began to cry freely. Seeing her friend so distraught, Winoa panicked and awkwardly tried to hug the small girl. Cleo flinched but found that the comfort of another person sharing her pain eased it somewhat, at least enough to regain control over her emotions and stop sobbing.
“Are you alright?” Said Winoa, brushing her long, brown hair out of Cleo’s face.
“Fine, now that your hair is out of my face”. She laughed awkwardly, sniffing once again she rubbed her damp face with the hem of her smock. Abandoning their thoughts of the dead bodies the girls wolfed down the food in front of them and stored the massive pile of excess back in the box for a later date. They were just finishing clearing up their camping gear when the girls heard a knock at the door to the barn they were staying in.
“Hello? Is there anyone in there?” The voice was of a man, beyond that the girls could not tell. “Hello? Any survivors there?”
“We’re coming out,” said Winoa. Her time climbing the tower had made her nothing if not cautious. Both girls had found that the best way to deal with situations that could be tenuous was to make everything clear from the forefront. “We don’t mean you any harm”.
The man laughed as the girls walked out. He was a friendly looking man, though with a scarred face, and missing both an eye and a hand made him look slightly odd. His soft brown hair and skin made him look like a man in his early thirties, but his stature and the scarring on his face made him look a lot older than that.
“The name’s Zoo. I’m a salesman of goods and wares between the towns… Or at least I was until this epidemic of corpses and burning towns”. He paused, looking at Cleo and Winoa. “You girls wouldn’t know much about that, would you?” Once he saw the two people in the barn were young girls he moved back to the nearby cart and sorted through the bags there.
“No sir, we’re just a pair of children climbing Babel,” said Winoa, flashing an innocent smile that could melt a heart of iron. “Could we ask if you could take us to the nearest city to the…” She pulled out her pointer stone, then put it away again quickly. “We need to go to the northernmost point. Could we catch a ride to the most northernmost town or port in this island?”
“Alright. The northernmost town on this island is called Slipstream, after the trade route that passes through to the four great islands of the floating precipices. I can take you as far as that, but once we get past there I will have to leave you on your own”.
“Thank you sir!” Both girls said, hopping onto the back of the cart. Winoa pulled out a small bag of salted animal jerky, sharing them with Cleo. They shared a small smile, the first real one they had had in days. It had been a long time coming, but both girls hoped that the next few days would be easier at least.
