The glow had not been strong enough to be obvious during the daylight hours, or even during the onset of night. Seen from a distance, obscured by a curtain of greenery, and in the open air it had not been as immediately recognizable as it would have been had Jace encountered it in an enclosed environment… like a cave, or a ship’s hold.
Suddenly sure that he was right, Jace sprinted forward, crashing through the underbrush and between the tree trunks to look at the rock face beyond it.
It was studded with shards of glowing crystals, the same type of stone that had illuminated Katryn’s secret port, and that she used for lights inside the Horizon Chaser. They were arranged in some kind of pattern, but it was too large to take in from close up, and from further back the island’s vegetation got in the way. Still, he thought that it looked a bit like the letters of some kind of a script… not that he could have read it even if he’d been able to take it all in.
“Hey, Kat… I think you’re going to want to see this,” Jace called.
“See what?”
“I found your mutineers,” he said, with perfect confidence.
Who else would have left a mysterious message on the cliff? They’d followed strange writing to get to this place and their only real hope of continuing the quest was to find something to point them onward. Katryn had said that any sign of habitation would be long gone, but the rock of the island had been there long before the mutineers and would continue long after.
“Do they look angry?” she asked.
“Just come see.”
He could make out the tune of her grumbling if not the words. She skirted the edge of the dense greenery and so her first view of the exposed message was at an angle.
“Glowstone,” she said, grasping the truth at once. “Serpent’s sails! It’s glowstone.”
“Can you read it?”
“Read it?” she repeated, then stepped around closer, between Jace and the wall. “Oh, you’re right… it is writing.” She turned her head from left to right, then followed to the right at eye level until the glow stopped. “Oh, this is no good… part of the message is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
She turned around to face him, pointing at the thicket of trees.
“The trees that grew up here sheltered part of the message,” she said. “The wind from the edge wiped out the rest. It would have taken ages… but there was plenty of time before we go here.”
“But at least we know the mutineers were here,” Jace said.
“That’s not all we know,” Katryn said.
“What else, then?”
“Glowstone only forms underground.”
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