MYSTober 2024

31 vignettes based on single-word prompts. One story.

10. Ruins

As the sun beamed down on the lonely island, a group of archaeologists explored what appeared to be the remains of a small town.

"What do you suppose happened here?" asked Marie, the woman leading the expedition.

"Is this a test?" answered her apprentice, Stuart.

"Maybe. What do you think?"

"It looks like the town was taken by fire. I see evidence of soot and char here."

"Very good. That's my conclusion as well." They slowly made their way past what may have been a central garden, or a fire pit – it was too soon to tell.

"What I don't know is how there were people here at all. This island is a hundred miles from its nearest neighbour. How did a society form here?" Just then, a doe deer raced out from behind the remains of a building and into a wooded area. "And where did the wildlife come from?"

Marie pulled out her scanner in one hand and swept it across a wall. "There are traces of glass and steel here. I doubt an island this small has the factories and foundries required to make them."

"Hmm. The mysteries are mounting."

"That's why it's our job to solve and explain them. This island was unexplored until a few years ago when an aeronautical expedition found these ruins on it. It's up to us to explain how they got here."

Stuart squatted down to run his scanner over the ground. It detected a clear difference between two types of surface. "It's pretty clear they had roads, but they weren't paved."

"What kind of society develops steel but doesn't pave their roads?"

"There's no brick here, either. It's just wood, steel, and glass."

Marie ran her fingers through her hair in bewilderment. She got hired for jobs like this because her team was able to figure out the un-figure-outable, but she was rapidly finding more questions here than it made any sense for there to be.

"Marie, you'd better come take a look at this." Stuart was ahead of her now, at the burned but still standing doors of a large building. She hurried to join him.

"From the large open room and the rows of ash, it looks like this was a church."

"Yes, I got that," Stuart confirmed. "But what do you make of this?"

She examined the spots on the doors he was indicating. It looked like they had been gouged by some large, sharp implement. Each one had four deep divots taken out of it, almost as if they were claw marks. "What happened here?"

MYSTober 2024

Table of Contents

10. Ruins