"C-A-O-I-M-H-E... B-Y-R-N-E That's... your name?!"
Caoimhe cringed. "Y-yes ma'am. But it's pronounced, 'Kweeva Burn'."
"What? Really? Are you a foreigner?" The teacher shifted her round glasses as she turned from the tablet in her hands to the timid looking red-head in front of her.
"I was born here ma'am... Or so I've been told." Caoimhe answered again.
Deciding not to ask any more questions to make the girl uncomfortable, the professor checked out the timid person's name from her list and handed her an electric torch.
"Here. Go find a group to join. Also, I'd recommend you take off your sweater. We are going into a cave on a hot summer day after all."
Caoimhe quickly grabbed the torch from the professor's hands and shifted away into the crowd of students.
"Thank you for your suggestion ma'am, but I'm naked beneath this top."
"Huh?" The professor rose a brow in confusion, but she could not ask the strange girl if she had heard right, as the girl had already disappeared.
It was in fact a hot summer day, yet Caoimhe had worn on a red turtle neck sweater, a black scarf and long black pants. She was out on an excursion with first year college students into a cave within a mountain, yet even with that knowledge, she was still insistent on her choice of clothes.
She always wore this style of clothes— ones that covered practically her entire body. This wasn't so because of any guiding desires or compulsion, but because there was something she was trying to hide, something carved all over her flesh like strange tattoos since birth... something like the runes around the entrance of this cave.
"Runes like these mostly appear around small caves. This is a very tall mountain, yet the runes cover practically everything on it."
Caoimhe paid no attention to the boy talking beside her. She was too fascinated by the markings in front of the caves. Those ones in particular looked more similar to her birthmarks, than the rest sprawled all over the entire mountain.
Nineteen years ago, these strange caves had suddenly began to mold from beneath the earth, possessing runes at their entrances, and old artifacts within.
Those artifacts however, were just blunt and old tools with unknown and impractical uses. They were also seemingly from a civilisation that had not been recorded by human history.
The researchers and the government had already deemed these caves harmless, and safe to explore, so people began to come to them for the sake of just exploring their mysterious and mystical ambience. Caoimhe's arts and science department was a group of such people. And today, they would be exploring one of the biggest Rune caves in the world, but one of the very few without any artifacts in it.
"Hey. Hello!"
Caoimhe was startled out of her thoughts.
She looked up at the tall boy standing beside her and exclaimed nervously.
"Sorry, were you talking to me?" She asked.
"Yeah." The boy scratched his hair and avoided her gaze as he asked shyly,
"Do you wanna partner up with me?" He found it hard to maintain eye contact with the girl. Caoimhe was a cute young woman after all.
Her fiery red ponytail, the freckles on her round cheeks and her captivating blue eyes made her a type of art herself— one that would grab people's attention when her charms are noticed.
"S- sure. Thanks." Caoimhe stammered. She was not really good at mingling with people. Although this was mostly caused by the constant stress of her having to explain why her last name sounded like an arsonist's favourite four words, and then why it was spelt 'Byrne' instead.
"I'm Kevin. What's your name?" The boy inevitably asked.
"Caoimhe." She answered simply.
"Kwiva. That's a... that's a pretty name." He gulped. Kevin knew he'd screwed up with that weak line.
In a desperate attempt to drive the awkwardness away, he pointed at a group ahead and began to walk towards them.
"Let's go meet the rest of our group, shall we?"
Caoimhe nodded and followed along.
'Nineteen years, huh. What a coincidence that I found this place on my birthday. Please the universe, give me answers."
The caves had begun to emerge on the same year she had been born. That, and her runic birthmarks always gave her things to think about. Caoimhe suspected that she was different, that she was special.
Today was the day she'd come to confirm those feelings. Because when she steps back out of that cave, her entire world would have changed forever.
***
"Runic caves, these places were suddenly unearthed during the widest range earthquake mankind has recorded. The entire planet was shaken, yet perhaps by the mystic forces that had spawned these caves, no real damage was caused. There was no apocalypse like one would expect from such an event... except some houses the caves spawned under."
The professor added that last part to acknowledge the little damage the earthquake did in fact cause. Still, not as many lives were taken in a catastrophic event of such wide range.
"This left thinking minds all around the world confused.
The universe does strange things, yet man had always been able to at least explain those things with carefully placed logic. The caves are not a part of them.
These rune caves are mounds that had appeared from nowhere, and housed alien tools and unrecognisable technology. The tools and technology however has no real practically. Take this large sword for example."
A projector made an image of a long sword appear on the cave's wall. It was an approximately eight foot long weapon, with hollow lines drawn all over its rusted surface. It had a square tip that could not be used for stabbing, and a round guard that was curved up like a bowl.
"Is this even a weapon for killing prey? Or some sort of art piece?" The teacher showed more slides of such an artifact, and the shapes gradually became more bizarre as the artifacts were shown. Some of them looked like statues of creatures that people hadn't even thought of yet, except the one that looked like a giraffe. It didn't seem too out of place from the others though, giraffes were strange creatures.
The professor continued on with her long lecture when Kevin suddenly came up with a joke about the giraffe statue. However, as he turned to the girl supposedly beside him to tell it, he realised that she wasn't there. Caoimhe had run off.
Kevin sighed. "Darn you, you corny bastard. You've been telling stupid jokes all day, of course she'll run away."
He cursed at himself, thinking the cute girl had run off uninterested in his advances. True.
Caoimhe was too curious about this place to try an awkward conversation with people she didn't know.
The overdressed redhead had gone deeper into the cave to explore.
Focusing her torch on the runes on the walls, Caoimhe's sense of familiarity with the cave grew.
She had seen one strange letter from the walls, on her own body, but what part? She folded up her sleeve and exposed an arm almost completely full of tattoo-like birth marks. The marks were organised to flow into one another, making use of clearly deliberate shapes.
Some familiar ones looking like crescents or seven pointed stars and even snakes and other creatures. These markings covered every part of her body hidden under her clothes.
Her biggest rune was an arrow with a fiery tail, hiding near the left side of her chest, where her heart was.
There were so many of these markings on her body, most of which looked specifically like the ones on these cave walls, and existing in no other rune cave she had visited.
Letting the runes guide her through multiple tunnels, Caoimhe finally got to a wide space, a tomb.
At least she thought it was a tomb. There was a large casket at the center of the room after all.
An eerie gush of wind blew past her ears, but she was too awed by the sight before her, to question where the breeze had come from.
Caoimhe had gotten close enough to the thirteen foot long casket at the center of the tomb. It was tall and very wide, giving her the feeling that it was perhaps not the corpse of a man who had been placed within the massive resting box.
But what else would a grand casket such as this have been made for? Maybe it was another mysterious artifact, and not even a casket at all. There were no signs of it having been open, despite this place being an already explored region.
Caoimhe pointed her torch at the casket and ran her fingers along its uneven surface. By now, it had been wiped clean of dust by those who had been here before, so the girl could clearly see the runes drawn on it.
Over the black casket were quotes in a language she had never seen before, all carved around a large white rune of an arrow with a burning tail.
Caoimhe felt the carved surface of the inscribed arrow in awe. This was exactly like the one on her chest.
The wind brushed by her body again, this time catching her attention. She looked behind her, but then thought she had heard a knock coming from within the casket.
"Hm?" Caoimhe's curiosity grew even more. She slowly bent her head down to the tall casket till her ear touched its warm metallic surface.
Why was it warm? She thought, while her consciousness slowly waned as she suddenly began to feel sleepy. The hard surface was strangely comfortable to her.
Caoimhe rested her head on the casket as her tensed muscles loosened in bliss, and her hair was caressed with tender pats.
The pats soon stopped however, and soon the entire mountain shook.
Caoimhe's eyes sprung opened as her reasoning came back to her with a sharp pang in her brain.
"Who's there?!" Her head sprung up from the casket as she turned to look behind her.
But the tomb was empty, and the mountain was still. Perhaps she was only hallucinating.
The eerie ambience the dark room and the gigantic casket created filled her with ominous premonition. She felt like something bad was about to happen, or had already even happened.
The hair on her skin stood up with discomfort and Caoimhe had decided she'd had enough excitement for one day.
So shuffling her hands across the casket, she looked around warily and the red-head reached out for her torch before quickly running out of the tomb.