Sylva kept on until the last vestiges of the dark sky had turned to the honey glow of dawn. Then, finally, they began to spiral down into the wet heat of the jungles below.
“There,” Fletcher called, pointing as Athena’s sharp eyes focused on a gap in the canopy. It felt better to choose a clearing, where they would have a line of sight in case of approaching predators when they landed. It was not unknown for hunters to lie in ambush within the undergrowth.
Yet, as the hot air wafted over them and their destination neared, Fletcher saw a flash of white in the glade they were headed for. White stone, bright in the morning light.
“What the hell is that?” Sylva said as Lysander swooped toward it. He landed in a skitter of scraping claws, slipping over smooth marble.
Fletcher tumbled to the ground with a hard thud, the flat rock bruising his knees. He struggled to his feet and looked around him.
Pale stone pillars stretched up to hold a roof that was no longer there, turned into humps of shattered rubble on the cracked marble floors. Broken statues, worn by years of neglect, stood arrayed in a crescent before them. Creeping vines cascaded from the edges of the jungle, curling around the columns and ruined walls toward the meager light that filtered through the broken ceiling. There were sweeping symbols engraved upon an arch that curved between two pillars, but they looked like nothing he had seen before.
“Who built this place?” Sylva whispered. “The orcs couldn’t have done this. Could they?”
Her voice echoed around them. It was deathly quiet, the walls seeming to block the noise from the jungle. It felt like a sanctum, built for long-forgotten gods.
Feeling vulnerable, Fletcher summoned Ignatius. The violet light flashed eerily in the dim temple, and the Salamander appeared on the ground.
Ever curious, Ignatius scampered ahead of him to explore. Fletcher followed him, until they neared the half-moon line of statues. The light streamed in from the canopy to illuminate them, acting as a natural skylight.
There were ten statues, standing upon pedestals. Each was a different size and shape. Fletcher approached the five on the far left. All had the upper bodies of a human—two women and three men. Instead of legs, the first man had a finned tail of a fish, complete with carved scales and barbs. The woman beside him was similar, but with the flippers and lower body of a seal. They were beautiful to look at, and each had a crown of shells on its head.
A slit-nostrilled female followed, her legs like a snake’s tail that curved around its pedestal. She wore a crown in the shape of a coiled serpent, and the hair beneath was thick and lustrous. Her steely gaze made Fletcher shudder and move on to the next.
It was a man with the horns of a goat poking from his head, with the same cloven feet and hairy, strangely jointed legs. Beside it, a long-haired male with the lower body of a horse, and a human torso erupting from above the animal’s front legs. Both had crowns of thorned branches.
“Are they … demons?” Fletcher whispered.
There was a huge statue beside a tiny one in the center, the first the great, hulking figure of a giant with a misshapen, ogre-like face. His arm had broken off, lying on the floor like a felled tree trunk. Beside, a tiny woman stood proudly on the pedestal, with minuscule features and the wings of a butterfly.
“I know what these are,” Sylva breathed, pointing along the line of the statues Fletcher had examined. “A Merman, a Selkie, a Lamia, a Satyr and a Centaur.”
“That’s a Giant, and a Fairy,” Fletcher added, nodding at the two in the center, though he had never heard of the creatures Sylva had just named. The two he knew were from Berdon’s childhood stories. What were they doing here, in the depths of the ether?
“They’re from my people’s folklore. My mother used to tell me about them, but they were never supposed to be real,” Sylva said, her eyes wide with surprise. “Do you know what that is?”
She pointed at a large humanoid, standing as tall as an orc. It appeared as a long-haired gorilla that could stand with the posture of a man. The creature’s eyes were gentle, and it wore no crown.
“No … but that … that’s an angel, right?” Fletcher said, peering at a statue on the second-to-last pedestal. It was a man, but this one wore a skirt and breastplate. His crown was studded with what might have been jewels. But what stood out were the enormous wings that erupted from his back, with long, elegant feathers like that of a swan.
“From the creation story of your religion,” Sylva said, raising an eyebrow at Fletcher.
“Nobody remembers that stuff anymore,” Fletcher said.
Indeed, the religion of Hominum was little more than a shadow of its former self, the old stories faded from memory to leave a vague concept of heaven and hell. The priests preached, and the old flocked to their congregations, but the intricacies of the sins and covenants that the holy men laid out were beyond Fletcher’s comprehension.
There was little that remained of the final pedestal. All had gone but the misshapen lumps of what must have been two feet. Something or someone had hacked at the statue, and the fragments that lay on the floor had been broken again into gravel.
“If we ever get back home, you can bet Dame Fairhaven would want to know about these,” Fletcher said, thinking of the kindhearted librarian.
“I think everyone would,” Sylva replied, tracing her fingers along the carved fairy. Though wind and rain had worn it away, the detailing was still fine enough to see her tiny fingers. She was so small, barely taller than a handbreadth.
“I say we rest here,” Fletcher suggested, pointing at the corner of the temple, where a piece of roof and the two walls still remained and the light was dim from their shadow. “It doesn’t look like any demons shelter in this place; there’s no leavings or bones on the ground. It’ll be safe.”
Sylva nodded absently, still unable to take her eyes off the statues in front of her.
“Do you think they existed?” she asked, nodding at them.
“Maybe. But this place hasn’t been touched in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years,” Fletcher said, thinking aloud. “Whoever built this place, they’re long gone now.”
They walked together to the corner and settled down, using the backpack as a makeshift pillow and draping their jackets over themselves like blankets. Lysander curled up at their feet, his large frame cocooning them in. Athena kept watch, her broken wing too painful for her to sleep.
For a moment Fletcher thought Ignatius would try and curl his now-larger body around his neck, but then the demon burrowed between him and Sylva, which annoyed Fletcher more than he would like to admit. He was keen to be close to Sylva, even if she was not as warm as the growing imp.