He raised the lantern, squinting against both its light but also in an attempt to make out the the time faded and obscured carvings.  The red haired woman stepped forward, a wooden spoon and brush in hand.  She cut and scooped at the mossy growth that had built up in a layer over much of the wall.

“You’re doing dishes before we eat tonight.” She muttered to out loud but his gaze remained fixed on the walls.  Slowly her efforts revealed what was underneath, causing him to sharply inhale.  His eyes widened, revealing his pale and pupil-less gaze as his brow furrowed.  She had glanced back at him, caught his look, and returned to the parts of the wall she had revealed.  It was certainly some kind of markings, some kind of long ago made markings, but it matched no writing she had seen.  “You know what this says?”

“Partially,” he started, pausing as his pale gaze scanned the wall.  After a moment he started again, “Landians were not prone to writing things down and so any writing tended to have been made at the given site.”  It was her turn for her gaze to widen as she saw the import of what he said.  Landian writings, much less any remnant of the Landians was incredibly rare.  After all, the man next to her was the only one left.  She glanced about them again, at the poorly carved walls, the uneven doorways.

“These don’t seem like the other Landian ruins we’ve visited, they’re,” she paused as she debated if she should find a better phrase, “they’re shabby.”

He nodded, gaze silently taking in more of the writings.  “You are correct but that’s because these were made by Landians in their desperation.”  He reached his free hand out and Keto obliged by handing him the spoon.  He stepped forward and scraped at the edges of the area she had cleared.  “I knew a few who were like this before Elhandriel and I found them.  Cut off, they no longer had the numbers nor the skills to create the works of our past.  They were thinking they may be the last of their kind, knew they would have no loremaster survive to tell their histories.”  Keto’s free hand had pulled out her scroll book, putting ink to the page as the Landian spoke.

“Were they hoping to share it for others to find?” Quartes only shook his head in answer, scrapping away at the wall as Keto quickly made a few more notes.  “Then why write it down at all?”

“Because remembering is what Landians do, we remember all that we have seen and experienced.  To think we would die and those major items would go unremembered implies a wasting of our lives.”  He paused in his work at the wall and straightened.

“What is it Quartes?”

“It’s strange to think that they wrote these stories down to fulfill that need and to realize that here there may be more Landian stories than anywhere else in Illithiust.”

Keto paused, looking at the Last Landian as his stoic gaze shifted over the wall.  “Can you tell me one?”

He pointed with the spoon at a section of the wall they had uncovered.  “This one tells the story of origin of the writer’s family line.  He states to be the fifth generation from his grandmother who led a group to slay a dragon that had taken up residence in a town named Aus Larnon.  That feat granted her the right to lead her own family.”

“Landians are a little dry in their story telling.”

“Historians versus Bards,” he quipped back and she smiled at the familiar taunt.

“You’d think he have wanted people to remember how epic of a battle it was.”

“He didn’t need to,”  Quartes turned back to look at her, his eyes briefly noting her scroll book before moving back up to her.  “It’s implied in the history, the fact that it earned the right to a family means it was an feat worthy of such and does so without conjecture that could create false legends.  It also means he was one of the last Lehnites as the other clans didn’t follow such a hierarchy.

“However,” he returned his gaze to the wall, “if you must know it does note that the dragon was corrupted from a fey of a nearby river, the Duneruen.”

“That’s…that’s the one we crossed two days ago?”  She asked, scribbling furiously as her hand tried to catch up with their conversation.  Her gaze looked up to the see the Landian scraping at another section of wall and raising the lantern to better read it.

“Yes,” came his belated reply as his mind caught up and remembered that he owed her an answer.  She smiled to see him so engrossed, to be caught up in something that wasn’t their war.  She forced the smile away after a moment.  It didn’t hide the gleam in her eyes but she knew that if he caught smiling as his peculiarities he’s retreat into his stoic shell.  To see him focused on reading something of his past was something else though.

She let him read in silence for a moment more, her writing finally catching up, and then looked back up at him.  “I’ve never really thought, but how much of your past do you know?”

“I…” he started, scraping away some more detritus, “…know the legends they had become.”  He look towards her as he finished.  “I presume they were legends and not truths at least.”

“You mean you don’t know for sure?”  Her formed dipped with the shock but he had returned to the wall and didn’t seem to notice.

“There were only a few dozen of us left last Cycle.  If the Line of Den was willing to twist a Fey it seemed to me that the other clans would be willing to twist other truths to try and survive and that the survivors would’ve tried something to give them an edge.”  He motioned with the spoon to the hilt shard at his belt, “Lehn’s strength may well have been blown up in an attempt to give some past Heir a chance at defeating the First Dragon.”

“That doesn’t seem to bother you much,” she responded but he answered with a shrug as he returned to working on the wall.  She felt her exasperation grow but she clamped it down, after all this was one of the few times she’d gotten him willing to talk about his past.  “A Landian, a creature of certainty, doesn’t care that his past is uncertain?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he answered simply.  “Whatever those changes were, whatever the actual history may have been, is left as unknowable to me.  There’s no loremasters left to remember.”  He gestured at their surroundings.  “It’s all just remnants now.  Best,” and there he paused for a moment, spoon hanging in the air before he scraped again, “…best to let all go, and move on to a new age in the world.”

She watched him for a moment longer, feeling her blue eyes tingle and then she stepped up and wrapped her arms around him.  He started.  “Keto, I need my arm free to…”

“No,” she answered hugging him tighter.  “You need to accept the hug and that it’s okay.  It’s okay to be afraid of having uncertainties in exactly what you are.  It’s okay that you doubt.”  She waited for his rebuttal or to force his way out of her grip, she knew he could.  She thought he was when he started moving without answering her but then she realized he was turning in her arms, wrapping his own around her, and burying his face in her shoulder.  A voice in her head spun, it balked at the absurdity that the Last Landian, the hero of a thousand battles, would need any kind of support.

The Human part of her shushed the voice, as she rubbed a hand along the Landian’s back.  It recognized that all those years and battles had to take a toll on anyone, that eternally fighting, being nothing but built for it, would grind up anyone.  So she held him for as long as he needed and when he was done she held took the lantern from him and held as he returned to work.  Together, they worked through the stories and took this moment for themselves.