Storms of Destiny by A. C. Crispin Page A

shifting the pack on its back. Everything changes.
    A port city, it had learned early on, tended to be more open-minded to newcomers. And where there were ships and sailors and merchants and those who served them, there was bound to be the need for a good physician.
    Khith’s constantly roving gaze caught a tiny flash of ver-milion on a vine weaving across the animal trail it was following, and it froze in mid-step.
    A brekiss!
    The snake was long and narrow, scarcely bigger around than Khith’s finger. But to touch its skin could result in severe shock, convulsions, even death. Khith’s people used the
    brekiss’s skin-venom in minute quantities to induce healing visions.
    Carefully, Khith stepped back, away from the creature, and took stock. Two faint animal trails led off the main one, one on either side. Khith chose the one leading off to its right, since it appeared to roughly parallel the trail it had been following.
    It hadn’t gone more than another twenty paces before it saw the shimmer of shattered, opalescent material and the half-melted spire that marked one of the Ancient Ones’ ruins.
    Khith’s eyes widened with joy at the chance to add to its store of knowledge on that long forgotten civilization. The scholar knew that exploring ruins was dangerous, but it could not pass this opportunity by.
    It circled the remains, eyeing them carefully. This had not been a large structure, as these things went. Perhaps it had been some kind of remote outpost, or way station.
    The Ancients always stored their records belowground.
    Khith picked its way carefully into the heart of the ruined structure, stepping high over the vines wreathing the ruin, searching for an opening that would lead below. When it spotted a sunken place, it nodded in satisfaction, then waded out of the ruin to locate a suitable fallen branch to use as an improvised excavation tool. After half an hour of digging and scraping the undergrowth away, Khith broke through the overlay of soil and roots into emptiness. Its heart hammering with the thrill of the quest for knowledge, Khith dropped to its knees and cleared away soil, revealing a crumbling stairway leading down into damp darkness.
    Khith had explored many of the ancient ruins before, so it knew there was a good chance that the lighting systems had failed. Hastily, it improvised a torch from its trusty branch and some moss, then set it afire with a mumbled word and a hard stare.
    The Hthras descended the stairway, torch held high. There was water underfoot, but the Ancients had been marvelous engineers, and the walls and ceilings were mostly intact.
    Quickly, Khith surveyed the rooms, many of them still containing moldy lumps it knew must have been furniture: kitchen, sleeping rooms, offices, storage rooms … and, yes!
    One of the storage rooms held, not unused furnishings, but record books! Khith was aware that the Ancients had used methods other than printed paper to store information, but since there was no power for the readers, it could not read them. Still, most of the Ancients had also produced some paper records, perhaps for quick reference.
    An hour later it fought its way up the stairs, back into the light above, three crumbling record books held tightly beneath its arm. What a discovery! Hand-scribed records, the first such ones that I have located! A true treasure!
    The Hthras knew it should push on, make at least some progress toward its daily travel goal, but curiosity and the desire to learn won out. Khith made camp a short distance from the ruin, then sat down after a quickly swallowed dinner to peruse its find.
    Translating the handwritten records was much more difficult, it found, than the printed ones it had discovered in the Lost City. The books were actually written by several individuals, it discovered, over a period of years. They were journals of the sentinels who had been posted to this remote outpost, far from the cities that lay to the east.
    The last journal was in