[ IP ] The Ruins

Tired. Sweat-lathered. Feet calloused. Delirious. The two survivors of the 5th Expeditionary pressed forward through the tangled, mossy oaks. Forty eight men lay dead over a stretch of a hundred miles. There was no medic. No radio. No navigator. No captain. Nevermind, nevermind, the mission was vital. The abbey was close by. The air smelled of dew and rot and lavender and gunsmoke. Sergeant Tyne pulled out a crudely drawn map from his breast pocket and oriented himself. The glen was disorienting, but dawn was breaking and that was helpful. It should be right here, he thought, right in this hollow. Corporal Quinn sat on a flat rock and buried his head in his knees, whimpering quietly, a trickle of blood running down from a bullet graze on his left temple. He was as tired as he had ever been, and he wished quietly for death to take him. 
 Tyne looked north, then west. He heard the march of boots coming from the south. There was no time left. If they did not find the abbey now, the Germans certainly would. They had numbers, food, a radio, and guns. Lots of guns. He checked his holster; only a single cartridge and the three bullets left in his pistol. He wanted to weep too, but he shook his head and yanked Quinn up by the collar and gave him a brisk smack and told him to snap out of it. They double time ambled over slippery rocks, speeding northward. Then they bounded. They kept their deadly pace for almost an hour, until the sound of boots was quite distant. It should be right here, Tyne thought again, his legs wobbly and his feet now surely bleeding. He squinted into the rising sun. Then, he saw masonry, peeking out over the treeline. He tightened his pack straps and heaved his body toward it, shouting at Quinn that he saw it, shouting for him to run! 
 He made it ten leaping steps before he heard a sickening wet hollow thud behind him. He turned. Quinn had slipped on one of the dewy rocks and cracked his skull open. A small pool of blood was spreading from his limp body. The sergeant fought back the urge to howl, turned, and ran hard for the tower. In five minutes he saw it: the dilapidated remains of Ayrdon Abbey. There was no door, no cross above, nothing to suggest its once pristine appearance. He bolted inside and found the locked trapdoor. Tyne pulled with all his might, but the lock would not budge. A shout in the distance echoed off the hills. The Germans were close. There was no time. He unholstered his pistol and fired three shots into the heart of the padlock. Now they knew where he was for certain. 
 A rickety ladder led down into absolute darkness for God knows how far. With no alternative and no time left, he descended cautiously. The light from above faded as he put foot after foot down the rungs of the ladder until -- SNAP -- one of the rotted tiers gave way and Sergeant Tyne fell twenty feet onto a cold stone floor. His right leg was shattered. He could not see anything. The mission had been a wash. Now he would die here, in the Orkneys, hundreds of miles away from his wife and three sons in Edinburgh. The Nazis would probably torture him when they found him. And then they would have the stave, too. And the war would be over. He reached out into the darkness to try and find his lighter for one last cigarette. His hand crept onto something cold, long and slender, and hard as stone. He felt it in the darkness, palpating the exquisite carvings. It was 2 meters, it seemed, and seemed to be a bunch of sticks tied together. Or maybe they were bones. He rolled over, pain shooting through his body, to try and get a better look at the object. It had to be the staff. And if the briefing was true, then maybe he could -- 
 `` Eintreten,'' said a cold voice from above. He heard flares being lit, boots stomping into the foyer of the abbey. He clutched his cross and the staff. It began to glow a faint amber hue. It was strung together from what looked like willow branches dyed white, and it had at its head a single topaz about the size of a quarter. Please God, he thought to himself, please god. 
 The light of the flare crept over the trapdoor. Two German soldiers looked down on the broken body of Sergeant Tyne, his hand barely able to reach the staff. The soldiers cried out to their commander, and one began to descend the ladder. With his last bit of strength, Tyne lifted the rod from the floor. The roots that had crept into the cellar of the abbey suddenly danced and twisted in the light. The ladder broke on another rung and the descending soldier fell onto his back, limp. Tyne could hear screaming in German from above, and the whap! of tree limbs against flesh. Horrified, the second German soldier got up to leave, but was snatched up by creeper vines and constricted. Great boughs burst through the top level of the abbey, smashing aside the soldiers and crushing them in a flurry of green and brown hued chaos. The walls of the abbey began to give in, and some soldiers were crushed under the heavy stone blocks. They ran in all directions, but it did not matter; the glen had come alive, and was destroying the intruders. Tyne let his head rest on the stone floor as the abbey shuddered and, eventually, collapsed, burying all inside of it. One Nazi managed to escape, but tripped over a root and fell headfirst over a gorge. The staff's light faded, and so too did Tyne's breathing under tons and tons of rubble. 
 No one will ever find this staff, he thought, as it should be. He breathed his last, and the stave went dark. Outside, forest creatures, unaware of the massacre that had just transpired, pranced and chirped gaily in the boughs and bushes.
