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It wasn't that Ashen had come to Eld Abrathat to hide among the occultists and the shifting sands. It was that she was sick to tears of the Perennials’ spies dogging her every step and she couldn't think of a better place to lose them. The spies were mostly mortal pawns, they had expiration dates. Either they would fall prey to the Grandfather Skull’s shadow and abandon their employers in favor of psychotropic heresies or they would retreat from Eld Abrathat’s twisting marketplaces to save their own sanity.
And let the Perennials think Ashen was there to seek out some new occult power to neutralize them. Hundred-to-one odds they were doing the same about her but if any of the new magicks being birthed in Eld Abrathat actually showed that kind of promise the chances of it retaining its power once removed from the Grandfather Skull’s heretical influence were slim to none.
Ashen kept her ears open as she wandered the Screws anyway, just on the off-chance she landed on something useful.
The spies reappeared within two days of Ashen’s arrival. They were good enough to stay on her tail but not nearly good enough to escape her notice. Credit where credit was due, of course: The Screws were impossible to map; there were too many dimensional corners butting up against one another and new thought paradigms cropping up every day that changed the shape of the marketplace. The chances of running into the same faces over and over on purpose, much less by simple coincidence, was a statistical anomaly even by the House’s amorphous laws.
By day five Ashen was really missing her privacy. She couldn't disappear into the bottom of a suspiciously oily glass of liquor when there were two or three people on either side of her who knew her name. After politely — if drunkenly, waving a knife around — asking the lot of them to kindly fuck off, she determined to lose them. It would have been easier to kill them all but Ashen didn't want to get blacklisted by another prime dive bar when they weren't even assassins.
After concerted effort on her part the bulk of her entourage dwindled away, fallen prey to the dizzying explosion of commerce and madness that called the Screws home. The last two weren't just professionals, they were artists.
An impromptu shortcut through a stall selling stones claiming to be Grandfather’s teeth took Ashen past a cordoned off passageway dimly lit by a singular lantern. Ashen ducked inside and kept moving, past tents full of archeological equipment and down into crowded ruins of the city beneath.
She climbed down though three layers of digsite, each populated with a completely distinct architecture. It seemed Eld Abrathat was perpetually sinking and the city above just kept building on top of the ruins of those that came before.
Ashen passed small groups of archeologists on her way down, all too intent on their work to notice her, but her tails were nowhere to be seen. With luck they wouldn't find her for a while.
Instead of heading back to the surface Eld Abrathat, and back to dealing with spies and immortals and duty, Ashen strolled the partially exhumed sector of city marvelling that the structures hadn't collapsed under the weight of the multiple cities built on top of it. She wasn't a historian, she didn't have the head for that stuff, but it was peaceful enough walking among the dead.
One of the street corridors passed under a crumbling archway that rained dust on Ashen’s head when she placed her hand on its pillar. It opened into a wide stone courtyard lined with disintegrating stalls and piled rubble.
The cobblestones cracked under her footsteps until almost midway across the yard where they turned to powder instantly and collapsed inward, creating a steep pothole directly where Ashen was standing. Ashen swore when she stumbled and landed knee deep in dirt and rock.
When she tried to pull herself free, fine silt rushed forward to fill the space left by her foot and dragged her a few inches deeper. She tried again and even more sand rushed down her legs, practically cementing her in place, and then kept rushing.
The ground continued to crumble toward her and Ashen realized too late that there had to be an air pocket just below. She tried to drag herself out by pulling herself forward across the cobblestone street but every inch of purchase she gained dragged her down even further until the cobbles were coming loose in her hands and she was falling down, down, down carried by an avalanche of sand. It filled her mouth and nose and throat and got under her eyelids and in her ears and under her clothes until everything was packed with dirt so tightly that she couldn't move against its weight.
There was no light or sound or air where she landed, which could have been a hundred feet down for all she knew. Panicking, her body fought to breathe, tried to convulse or claw its way out or something but there was no where to go. Her lungs forced out a scream with the last of her air and inhaled dust that she couldn't cough out.
It took several minutes after suffocating for her brain to realize it was still alive and the panic mounted anew. This time there was no screaming from her body, only her mind hammering the inside of her skull trying to make her move anything to no avail. There was nothing to move, only sand and the endless dark stretching out forever.
This is what you came here for, isn't it? a small, grating voice in the back of her consciousness said. Some blighted peace and quiet?
No, no no no no, Ashen thought. If she had wanted peace and quiet, of all things, she would have thrown herself into the Mausalon River and let it carry her west until disappointed ghouls fished her out with their tombstone nets. What she wanted was a stiff drink and a way out of this ethical nightmare of a life she had stumbled into. Neither were coming.
There was no time down there either. Now and later and before were one and the same and Ashen quickly lost track of her thoughts. They wandered and got lost, leaving Ashen listless in the dark until they leapt suddenly back to mind to scratch their little tallies into her grey matter.
Sometimes it felt like she was dreaming or hallucinating. Her most frequent visitor was of course Persephone, lanced to a tree in the orchard and bleeding, always bleeding. They watched each other across the abyss of immortality, unmoving.
Occasionally the earth would shift around her as the House settled and Eld Abrathat continued its endless sinking. Ashen learned not to think about it, not to hope. So she didn't bother to think about the soft vibrations coming from above her, inching closer, until the dirt around her hand came loose and the shifting sands caressed what was left of her hair.
Stale nothingness reached her fingers and shocked Ashen’s whole system awake. She had forgotten how to move. Twitch. Curl. Something. Anything. Move!
Pain creaked between her finger joints, through her wrist, and straight down her arm when she curled her fingers against the dark like snapping desiccated twigs.
Commotion broke out just above her — footsteps, shouts, digging. Ashen coughed and vomited up dirt as soon as her face was uncovered and her eyes snapped open, wild, bleary.
“Out,” she rasped, grabbing for one of the archeologist's throats in a maniac attempt to drag herself free. “Get me- get me out!”