(ELDEN LORD! SUMMER ROSE) CHAPTER TWO

Ruby pushed herself upright from her bed too quickly and immediately winced. Despite her aura, every muscle in her body ached from the tension and adrenaline of last night. The blankets her dad had thrown over her sometime during the night had slid from her shoulders and pooled onto the floor beside her.

The television was on in the living room. Muted emergency broadcasts played silently across the screen, showing shattered coastlines, confused reporters, and aerial footage that cut out whenever cameras pointed too long toward the fog offshore.

No one seemed capable of explaining what had happened. Ruby wasn’t sure an explanation was even possible anymore.

Yang sat at the table wrapped in one of her dad’s oversized hoodies, her remaining hand curled tightly around a mug of coffee gone cold hours ago. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes, while her prosthetic rested untouched on the counter nearby. Meanwhile, her dad stood beside the sink staring out the window.

Ruby was the first to break the silence.

“…Everyone okay?”

It sounded stupid the moment she asked it, so much so that Yang let out a huff that almost resembled a laugh.

“Define okay.”

Ruby smiled weakly despite herself.

Her dad turned from the window then, exhaustion visible in every line of his face. He looked older this morning.

“You hurt?” he asked.

Ruby shook her head.

Yang answered before Tai could say anything else.

“The house is still standing,” she muttered. “So I guess we’re doing better than some people.”

That killed whatever brief attempt at humor had existed.

Ruby glanced toward the television again. One of the scrolling headlines read:

COASTAL DISPLACEMENT EVENT CONTINUES TO BAFFLE AUTHORITIES

Another tremor rolled through the floor beneath them, smaller than last night, but still very much noticeable. 

Her dad noticed her expression.

“It’s been happening all night,” he said quietly. “Every twenty or thirty minutes.”

Yang looked toward the living room windows.

“…You guys hear the horns again?”

Nobody answered immediately because they had, all night. Sometimes it sounded distant, other times it was so loud the walls vibrated around them.

They were always mournful.

Ruby had stopped trying to convince herself they were mechanical hours ago. The sound felt too emotional for ordinary machinery.

A knock suddenly rattled against the front door hard enough to make all three of them tense instinctively.

Her dad moved first, opening the door cautiously to reveal Mrs. Beryl from down the road standing barefoot on the porch still wearing her night robe. Her face looked pale beneath the early morning light.

“You need to come see this,” she said immediately.

But unlike what Ruby expected, she sounded awed.

The streets of Patch were crowded, and, surprisingly enough, not chaotic. But it was silent.

Residents gathered in clusters along the roads and hillsides overlooking the coastline, speaking in hushed voices that barely rose above the wind. Some people were crying, releasing soft, helpless sounds that were swallowed almost immediately by the salt-heavy air. Others simply stared blankly at the coastline, as though their thoughts had stopped somewhere along the way. Children clung to their parents' legs, not understanding why the adults had gone so quiet. Old men who had lived on Patch for generations stood with their hands hanging uselessly at their sides, their memories offering no explanation for what their eyes were seeing.

Ruby followed her dad and Yang uphill through the growing crowd, past neighbors she had known her entire life who now looked at her like strangers. Mrs. Cinnabar from three houses down was weeping into her apron. Old Mr. Heliodor sat on a crumbling stone wall, staring at the horizon without blinking. The Kokos twins had climbed onto their father's shoulders for a better view, and even they had stopped asking questions.

The road finally opened toward the cliffs overlooking the sea, and Ruby understood why nobody knew what to say.

The ocean was gone, and in its place stood something so large Ruby’s mind rejected it at first. And as if that were not impossible enough, an entire city stretched across the horizon, fused directly into the landscape surrounding Patch as though it had always belonged there.

Massive outer walls towered over the island like mountains of carved stone, their surfaces covered in reliefs: battles, coronations, and processions of figures too numerous to count. Enormous stairways descended from colossal gates large enough for giants to pass through abreast, each step worn smooth by ages of use. Ancient buildings clung to cliffsides that yesterday had held forests and hiking trails, and towers leaned at impossible angles above domes of faded gold that caught the morning light.

Ruby recognized pieces of Patch buried inside it.

Fragments of roads disappeared beneath massive stone foundations, their asphalt cracked and swallowed. Familiar hills had been split apart to make room for towering cathedrals whose bells rang softly overhead, and the old lighthouse—the one Ruby had climbed a hundred times as a child, the one where she and Yang used to dare each other to stand at the railing and lean into the wind—was gone. In its place stood a massive statue of a woman with her arms outstretched, her face worn smooth by weather and time.

Above the city, the sky had changed.

Where open air should have stretched uninterrupted,  something shimmered overhead like heat haze suspended vertically across the sky. Looking at it made Ruby's eyes water, made her head ache, and made her feel as though she was seeing something that shouldn't exist.

The entire crowd stood motionless before the enormous staircase leading upward toward the gates.

The stairs alone were wider than Patch's main street. Each step rose higher than Ruby's knee. Looking up at them, at their sheer scale,  made her dizzy. She couldn’t even imagine how long it would take to reach the top.

Yang stared upward with open disbelief, her remaining hand gripping the railing beside the cliffside path so tightly her knuckles went white. 

"Okay, nope,” Yang muttered. “…That is definitely new.”

Her voice cracked halfway through as everyone in the area still stood there, watching their world grow larger and stranger and more frightening with every passing second.

Ruby's chest tightened painfully as she looked at the massive gates looming overhead. Something about the city felt wrong in a way she could not explain, as if something in there was watching her. And she thought she could hear whispers if she listened too closely, so she decided not to listen too closely.

Then the horns rang again.