It was too early.

  The grass was still damp with dew and pink with reflections of the rising sun.

  A thin morning mist filled every dip and valley with cushions of soft oblivion.

  One of the undulating hills was dissected down to its stump in an effort to expose the solid stone structure buried beneath.

  The dig site was evidently a large enough operation. There was a mess tent, a storage tent, and a first aid tent. Everything was arranged in a ring around the ruin.

  Simon had been to the site before a number of times during the digging, but he never quite had the place all to himself before.

  This time, the entrance inside the main chamber of the ruin was fully cleared.

  While everybody else was off celebrating the week-long festival of blood, Simon would be the first person to set foot inside the ruin in over ten thousand years.

  Simon walked all the way round the ruin a couple of times, noting how, despite the elaborate columned design, the structure appeared to be moulded from a single white, crystalline rock.

  He trailed his hand along its ancient surface, feeling no bump save for the odd nick inflicted by a well-meaning archaeologist.

  “Sorry I’m late!” Called out the plague-seeker as she carefully descended one wall of the dig site.

  Startled, the alchemist whipped around to face his companion for the day.

  “You’re not. I’m early, if anything.” He explained with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “My name is Chloe; I’m a plague-seeker from the continental capital,” she introduced herself and held out her hand.

  “I was sent to accompany an alchemist inside a ruin for safety.”

  “Would that alchemist happen to be you?”

  The alchemist shook her hand; they were both wearing gloves.

  “That’s me.”

  “Name’s Simon; I’m from the alchemist guild in Malacro.”

  He took a few steps away from the ruin and pointed to the entrance.

  “We’re only going to be having a look around today.”

  “Got it.” Chloe nodded easily.

  “I’ll test the air quality once we’re inside.”

  The excavated stairs glistened with cool condensation.

  “Careful…” Chloe felt compelled to say to the alchemist’s chagrin.

  Just as Simon was about to retort, his boot slipped on a clump of malingering mud.

  “W-woah!” he stammered as he stumbled.

  “Simon!” cried the plague-seeker as she quickened her cautious trot down the treacherous stairs.

  “I’m okay…” The alchemist groaned grudgingly but still accepted the plague-seeker’s hand when getting back up.

  “You have to be more careful, Simon.”

  “Years of water erosion smoothened every surface, not to mention the fact that everything is wet.”

  “Hey, I happen to study ruins like these nearly every day!” Hissed the alchemist defensively.

  “Don’t mistake my recklessness for ignorance!”

  Simon angrily lit his alchemist lanterns and stormed deeper inside the ruin, careful not to slosh the fluid inside too hard lest it go out.

  “Wait, Simon!” Chloe demanded, taking far longer to fiddle with her lantern.

  “I’m sorry!” she called after him, hearing her voice echo back to her.

  “Do be careful, though!” She added a moment later.

  As Chloe’s lantern went on, she heard a scream from inside.

  “You were meant to be careful!” she cried, springing into action and quickly navigating the maze of corridors to the sniggering alchemist.

  “W-what happened?” she asked breathlessly.

  “I got scared.” The alchemist answered facetiously and with a mocking smirk.

  The plague-seeker breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Please don’t do that…” she pleaded exhaustedly.

  “Do what?” he asked, progressing through the corridors at a more leisurely pace.

  “You know what,” Chloe said accusingly.

  She fished around the pouch slung from her shoulder for a toaster-sized device with a wind-up crank, a nozzle, and a handle.

  As the plague-seeker wound up the device, it began sucking in the air and subjecting it to a battery of tests.

  After around a minute, a little punch card slipped out with a detailed breakdown of every airborne contaminant present, as well as an overall rating of eight point five out of ten.

  “The air down here is surprisingly decent,” Chloe remarked, sounding surprised by her own results.

  Simon didn’t acknowledge the plague-seeker’s findings.

  He stopped before a particularly large double door made from a corroded alloy typical of the old elven military.

  He wiped an equally corroded plaque with his sleeve to the plague-seekers' quiet concern.

  “Storage”, he translated the tangled curlicues making up the elven language.

  “Are you hoping to find anything specific?” Chloe asked, watching the alchemist rattle the locked doorhandle fruitlessly.

  “I’ve got a bingo sheet of artefacts I’d love to find,” Simon answered, reaching into his pocket for his lockpicking kit.

  “Books, diaries, gadgets…” Simon listed off a couple of things.

  “I see,” Chloe replied thoughtfully.

  “Have you ever really found a diary just lying about?”

  “Oh yeah, elves are artsy now, and they were artsy back then too,” he replied, skewering the door with three differently sized pins.

  “They’re pretty grotesque reads though, despite the writers’ best intentions.” Simon scoffed.

  “I am not going to ask…” shuddered the plague-seeker, pale behind her corvid mask.

  Simon shook his head. “Come on.”

  “You should give them a read; you can learn so much about anatomy from them,” he teased just as the lock gave in to his prodding.

  “I’ll pass,” Chloe insisted as Simon pushed the door open, disturbing a big plume of dust.

  Before she could finish winding up her air tester, Simon marched right through the dust.

  “Be careful!” she warned, catching up to him.

  “Of dust,” Simon stated, unfazed.

  “Of old, mysterious powders lying in old mysterious ruins!” Chloe corrected him.

  In response, Simon only rolled his eyes.

  “I’m an alchemist; I love mysterious powders,” he explained, keeping a straight face.

  “For your information,” Chloe began, glancing down at the still-warm punch card.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “The air quality here is a six…!”

  The alchemist didn’t look back as he dramatically ran his hands through his hair.

  “Not a six…” he whispered mockingly.

  Before long they came upon a labelled door that Simon identified as the breakroom.

  As the light of their two alchemical lanterns illuminated the living room-sized space, the first thing that Chloe noticed was the pile of empty cans.

  The first thing Simon noticed was the smell.

  “Canned food?” he questioned, his nose scrunching at the pungent aroma of decaying food.

  “Elves didn’t can food…” he said, covering his face with his dusty sleeve as a makeshift mask as he approached the stack of rotting cans.

  “What does it say on the cans?” Chloe asked, to which the alchemist could only shake his head.

  “I’m not sure; I can’t read elven fluently…” he admitted, his cheeks heating up with impotent shame.

  “Some kind of feed…” he muttered under his breath.

  “There are unopened ones in here,” Chloe said, waving Simon over to the shelves lined with neat rows of uniform cans.

  “Animal feed?” Simon speculated, plucking a can and giving it a thorough examination.

  “Doesn’t all this food seem too fresh?” Chloe questioned from afar.

  The filter in her mask spared her from the putrid miasma.

  “It should all be dust by now?”

  “Food this old should look like charcoal frosted over with mineral salts…” Answered the alchemist, only half paying attention as he used a small multi-tool to negotiate his way inside the metal container.

  “But if nobody’s been down here in ten millennia, then anything could have happened down here,” he suggested.

  “My guess is that a wild animal got trapped here as the elves were retreating,” Simon said with a shrug.

  Chloe’s thoughtful expression swiftly soured as she saw the alchemist bring his face right inside the open can of unidentified slop.

  “Simon!” she shouted.

  Instead of putting the biohazard away, the alchemist dipped his finger in the homogeneous goo before putting it in his mouth.

  “SIMON!” Chloe shouted more urgently.

  “What the— What are you doing?!”

  “You have no idea what’s in that!”

  “Tastes like pate…” Simon discovered with a disapproving grimace.

  He spat his findings back in the can and set it aside.

  “Are you insane!?”

  “You could get sick from eating ancient food!”

  “Anything adapted to living inside a can for ten thousand years isn’t going to thrive in my stomach.” He sighed and turned to leave the break room.

  “That is not how that works!” Chloe fussed behind him.

  “The seal on the can might have weakened over the years; you’re trusting ancient canning techniques and standards!”

  “That’s not even acknowledging bacterial spores!”

  “I’ll leave the gross, pulsating sciences to your lot.” Simon’s declaration earned a defeated groan from Chloe.

  “I could have been up on the surface celebrating the festival of blood right now…” Chloe sulked quietly.

  “Then why aren’t you?” Simon asked, perusing the dusty warehouse once more.

  “Hm? Oh, um, I figured the festival is a week long, and I don’t get the opportunity to go exploring ruins often,” she explained.

  “What about you? Don’t alchemists love this time of year?”

  “That’s the chemistry and pyrotechnics guys,” Simon scoffed.

  “It’s a day like any other – except quieter,” he summarised fondly.

  “Sounds lonely,” Chloe remarked, stopping to watch Simon drag an old metal chest off one of the sparely stocked shelves.

  “You think archaeology is a career for extraverts?” The alchemist asked, pulling out what looked like a terrarium.

  A big grin broke out over his face before the plague-seeker could retort.

  “Holy shit!” The alchemist set the terrarium down on a shelf and set the lantern down beside it.

  “What is it…?”

  Chloe gasped when she noticed the little humanoid silhouettes flickering across the light.

  “Magic…!” She whispered amazedly.

  “Yeah…” Simon groaned indignantly.

  “Back then magic was so easy for elves that anybody could make anything… and they did!”

  Upon closer inspection, the terrariums housed a crowd of animated clay caricatures locked in a perpetual brawl in a miniature landscape.

  Chloe watched in mild discomfort as a particularly savage-looking human tore a short, hairy lump – that the plague-seeker was forced to assume was meant to be a dwarf – in half.

  The broken clay remained gruesomely posed for a moment before getting back up to resume the eternal bout.

  “It’s certainly… elaborate…” Chloe said, her mask hiding her wrinkling nose.

  “That’s the ironic thing; these things weren’t complicated for the time.” Simon shook the miniature battlefield, making the clay warriors clash and collide.

  In seconds, the alchemist broke a gadget that endured millennia, clumping the clay together in a hideous amalgamation not unlike the final stage of a lava lamp.

  “To keep all the spellwork simple, the elven inventors used giant clay golems and just miniaturised them.”

  “The magic cost was insane.”

  “I know a guy who studied them a while back – his exact words were ‘disastrous.”

  Picking the lantern back up, the duo advanced through the warehouse until they came upon another crate.

  It was nearly as big as Simon.

  “Whatever’s inside is connected to the cans in the break house,” Simon explained, tapping a specific string of curly characters that appeared on the can as well.

  “Please don’t eat whatever you find inside…” Chloe muttered, meaning it fully.

  “No promises…” the alchemist strained, prying the lid off the open crate with his trusty crowbar.

  As the heavy metal plate fell to the floor, Simon stuck his hand inside the colourful granules spilling over the edge of the crate.

  “Prismatic flux…” he said, sounding puzzled.

  “A blend of gems used to attenuate magic by converting thaumic energy into standard energy…” he mumbled, rubbing the dust between his fingers.

  “It’s so fine… whatever’s inside gave off a lot of thaumic radiation…” He explained, reaching deeper inside the shimmering sandbox.

  “Be careful; don’t cut yourself on anything…!”

  Simon lifted a small black urn from the colourful sand and gently hefted it.

  “Whatever’s inside is light…”

  “Spices?” proposed the plague-seeker.

  Simon’s curious smile stilled as he opened the urn and peered inside.

  What stared back at him was a tiny, palm-sized skeleton with a broken set of thin, brittle wings.

  “On the plus side, I’m definitely not tasting them…” he sighed.

  “Them?” Chloe questioned and peered inside the unadorned pot.

  As soon as she made out the tiny cadaver, she pulled back with a gasp.

  “Fairies,” Simon remarked, closing the urn and setting it down on a nearby shelf before reaching into the crate for another.

  To Chloe’s horror and Simon’s detached surprise, they found forty-eight urns, all but one of which were intact.

  “I guess that means all those cans were full of ‘fairy food’…” he remarked mostly to himself.

  “I thought the elves kept all the fairies in their capital before the bomb…” Chloe muttered in a daze.

  All of a sudden, the plague-seeker felt overwhelmed, alone in the dark, outnumbered two to forty-eight.

  Simon methodically checked every urn and catalogued his findings in his journal.

  Chloe cautiously picked at the pieces of the one shattered pot.

  “Fairies were an inherently magical species, like the elves.” Simon explained, “Back then, the elves saw them as ‘the best nature had to offer’.”

  “Besides themselves, of course.”

  “Their intuitive command of magic was too much of a hassle, so there were records of them being shipped padded with prismatic flux…”

  “That’s horrible…”

  “If not for the flux, some of them might have survived all this time…” Simon said, and Chloe wasn’t sure if that version of events was remotely preferable.

  “That’s history,” Simon answered and reached back into the diminished volume of flux.

  “Now… where’s the missing skeleton…?”

  As Simon dug around in the sand, Chloe distracted herself from the present corpses by scanning the outside of the crate.

  Her eye caught on a fissure in the aged metal.

  “Look, there’s a crack.” She tapped the opening.

  Before either of them could voice or, more probably, dismiss the obvious – if insane – theory, a noise like a can being knocked over came from the breakroom.

  Without exchanging more than a glance – not for a lack of Chloe’s will – Simon bolted for the breakroom, and she followed.

  As he gripped the doorhandle, it unexpectedly erupted in a burst of scarlet flames.

  The flash of light momentarily illuminated the entire warehouse, projecting long, distorted shadows across every surface.

  “A-AH!” cried the alchemist as the force of the blast sent him stumbling backward with a hole in his glove.

  His lantern fell to the ground and went dim with a momentary flash of asynchronous chemistry.

  “Simon!”

  As the door creaked open fully, revealing a dark, empty lunchroom, a skittering shadow suddenly registered in the corner of Chloe’s eye.

  “Careful!” she shouted, pointing Simon to the small, hairy ball of matted fur that hid any other defining features save for a set of crooked ears.

  “What the hell is that?!” Simon panicked, crawling backwards as fast as he could away from the tangled ball of hair zipping towards him.

  As the word “rat” came to his tongue, the sharpened edge of an antique fork pierced his jugular.

  The alchemist gasped in shock and pain as he flung the writhing ball across the room.

  “Archaeology used to be safer…” the bleeding alchemist croaked out as the plague-seeker practically tackled him with a fistful of sterile gauze.

  “Stay calm, Simon!” Chloe insisted, taking a careful look at his injury.

  The crudely sharpened fork was still lodged in his throat.

  “The bleeding is minimal.” She noted to herself.

  “Do you think you can make it back to the surface?” she asked, to which Simon nodded with a short, retching spurt of blood.