Chapter Text
One week into the expedition and Yuuri was starting to get sick of the jungle. He was sick of how the humidity made him feel as though the air was actually weighing him down in addition to the gear he already wore. The bugs didn’t help much, clouds of mosquitoes that targeted any bit of exposed skin, centipedes as large as his hand, spiders whose webs he walked into. He’d been recording the species of whatever creature their small team encountered in a notebook and the descriptions of things that were creepy and crawly usually involved expletives. Besides the map from the previous expedition there were no signs that they were in the right place and even Phichit was losing interest in photographing the animals and plants he stumbled across or, more often than not, into.
The trees here had grown so close together that there was no other option besides hiking if they wanted to find the city ruins. Even the smallest airship wouldn’t be able to navigate the narrow spaces between trunks and they’d been forced to leave their horses with a farm while they continued on foot. The sky was hidden behind a dense layer of branches and leaves, small rays of sunlight breaking through to illuminate the way forward, and vines as thick as Yuuri’s arms hung from the canopy like snakes or wound themselves around anything and everything. Most of the jungle floor was covered in tall grasses, ferns, small shrubs, or flowers and all of these things managed to hide the roots that jutted out from the ground and threatened to trip anyone who wasn’t paying attention to their surroundings. All together the place would make for some very nice pictures, but actually trying to locate anything in this maze of flora and fauna was a whole different story.
For the most part any animals stayed far away from the small group of explorers, the noise they made scaring off all but what seemed to be the most dangerous creatures. However, it was thanks to Phichit that nothing attacked them. His presence seemed to calm whatever tried to approach them and when that didn’t work he had his inventions. When the two of them had first met in a history class about the Calamity and were forced to work together for a group project his seemingly limitless energy and enthusiasm had unnerved Yuuri, but by the time they’d finished they had already become friends.
Phichit was a cheerful man with tanned skin, black hair cut short, and mischievous gray eyes. He was an inventor, fascinated with how machines worked and dedicated to further the research on how to use magic as an energy source. Meanwhile quiet Yuuri prefered books to people, had dual-majored in both linguistics and cryptozoology. His interests lay in the magical creatures that had revealed themselves after the Calamity had struck and the languages they’d used in addition to those of ancient humans.
Fresh out of the Royal University of Archeology the two men had been surprised to be offered positions on an expedition to the ruins of a city there belonging to winged beings. A different group had attempted to locate it but illness had forced them to retreat before they got very far. Celestino, a man with a wide face and a large chin who kept his long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, was a professor at the University as well as the archaeologist in charge of their expedition but he treated Yuuri and Phichit like equals rather than students.
“Everyone sees the world differently, we’ve all experienced and learned about various topics and it's changed how we view things. What might be an ordinary rock to one person could be a geode waiting to be cracked open.” Celestino had grinned at his former students when they’d brought up the subject.
In all of the history textbooks there was a clear divide between what took place before the Calamity and the events that followed such a colossal incident where the aftershocks created earthquakes and hurricanes that ravaged the land and caused the oceans to rise. When the chaos came to a stop the world had been transformed, some cities had been destroyed while others sank beneath the water with their inhabitants, never to be seen again. Millions of people died, either in the initial blast or the natural disasters that had followed, and those left alive were forced to scavenge for anything that might have survived such destruction.
Once humanity had recovered to the point where simply existing was no longer a struggle they began to rebuild from the ashes of the civilizations that had come before them, towns forming and leaders being established as people worked to take back what had been lost. The Royal University of Archeology was built in what had once been part of Europe, but after so much of Europe, Asia, and Africa disappeared beneath the rising ocean the continental borders didn’t matter anymore, not when new maps needed to be made to reflect the changes anyway. Archeology was now one of the most needed jobs there were, the obsession with reclaiming whatever knowledge of before the Calamity driving researchers to recruit more and more people to the University. Their other obsession was with the magical creatures who had been forced out of hiding by the destruction of their homes, beings that had only existed as legends in books and stories told around campfires late at night. These creatures relocated to places undisturbed by human hands, leaving the towns where they had onced lived to be explored by the very people they were desperate to avoid.
The sun had started to set by the time their small team crested the top of a hill and found themselves unable to go any farther. They’d made it to a small ridge overlooking the jungle floor far below them but the rest of the mountain rose up at a sharp angle. Somewhere above them a pair of waterfalls flowed, the cool mist refreshing after so much climbing, and the ground was relatively clear of shrubbery or rocks so they decided to set up camp for the night. While a tent would have come in handy considering the wildlife they’d run into already, it would have been too heavy to lug around each day. Phichit had brought an automaton that carried some of their gear but the rest went into backpacks that only seemed to get heavier with each passing day. Instead of a tent the three men slept in sleeping bags with bug nets over the opening, although every morning Yuuri woke to find another mosquito bite on him that hadn’t been there the night before.
Celestino was always the first to fall asleep, no doubt exhausted from so much climbing, but Phichit and Yuuri always took more time and they often kept each other awake longer than was necessary by talking. Whether it was about missing their pets or what they thought the ruins would be like they would only stop when one of them could no longer respond, having dozed off in mid-conversation, but tonight seemed different.
“Do you think it was a mistake bringing me on this expedition?” Yuuri couldn’t make out individual stars with his glasses off, but he tried to find the constellations he knew were out there just so he didn’t have to stare at his friend. “There were better choices for something as important as this.”
Phichit blew a raspberry with his tongue, the small thbbbt loud without any other noise to fill the silence surrounding them. “Yuuri, you have got to stop listening to your depression when it says things like that. You’re one of the smartest people I know, and Celestino wouldn’t have picked you to come with him if he didn’t think you could do this; you have a double major and both of the things you majored in are needed for this expedition. If anything I’d say someone like me shouldn’t have come.”
“Except then if the automaton broke we would have no idea how to fix it,” Yuuri sighed before shutting his eyes and snuggling deeper into his sleeping bag. “What do you think things used to be like? You know, before the Calamity?”
“Well, it’s hard to say because we don’t know just how much knowledge was lost when it hit. I heard the pre-Calamity humans could go to the stars, turn coal into diamonds, and even fly, but because of all the destruction who knows what’s true and what’s just a rumor? We both took the same history class, we’ve seen the maps of how the world used to look, but because a lot of what used to be land is now underwater we just don’t have the technology to get to those ruins,” There was silence for a few seconds. “I want to see it though, I want to see the world and learn about what life had been like for people back then.”
“We still know so little, I wonder if we’ll ever learn just what happened during the Calamity or if it will still be a mystery years from now.”
Phichit turned onto his side, propping his head up with one fist as he stared at his best friend. “Do you remember that time you thought about dropping out of school? You somehow managed to convince yourself that it had been a mistake to even apply and I spent a day persuading you to come out of your room and talk to me?”
“You bribed me with food.” Yuuri placed his arms behind his head and sighed at the sky above.
“It worked, but that’s not the point. Do you remember what I said to you back then? About how I wasn’t sure I picked the right path either?”
“Yeah, it was something about ‘you can never know what the correct choice will be, but if you spend all your time trying to figure out what to do it will no longer be up to you.’”
“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone, we’ve just got to be brave enough to take the risk that all our hard work will pay off. Celestino believes you’re capable of handling whatever this expedition throws at us. He decided to pick two newly-graduated archaeologists to accompany him and I don’t want to make him think he made the wrong decision. I’m not going to lie to you, I’m nervous too, but let’s agree to do our best together,” Phichit yawned and rolled onto his back once more. “If we stay up any later I think I’ll fall asleep hiking, try to get some sleep okay?”
As much as he wanted to just close his eyes and fall into a dreamless sleep, he found it impossible. Despite how exhausted he was, parts of Yuuri aching that he didn’t know could get sore, his brain refused to rest. It felt like the world itself was holding its breath. Something big is about to happen, he thought to himself, staring into the blurry sky above as he tried to calm his racing thoughts. His anxiety had started to snowball into near panic but he didn’t know why or what had caused the feeling in his gut, that sixth sense that told him that his life would soon change forever.