Perhaps unprofessional, the guide warned her that nothing was there to be found, but they went anyway. The guide was professional enough that Ivory could ignore him pulling booze from a flask hidden in his coat pocket every time she looked away. He asked no questions, he answered promptly, and he told her everything she needed to know about where he was going and what he was seeing on the road ahead, allowing her to feel prepared for every twist and turn on the path before they came to it.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, the ruins were of little interest. Tumbledown stone columns wrapped with ivy and choked with weeds, had there ever been anything of value in this place, it had long since been carried off. Still, there was a hole leading down into a half-buried interior, further ingress to the sunken remains blocked by the debris of caved-in walls and ceilings. Through the cracks of fallen beams she could see nothing but darkness within, and motes of dust dancing beyond her field of vision, but she had no way of telling how much lay exposed behind the rubble. It could, for all she knew, just be more rubble.<br/><br/>It was not a total loss, however, for some of the fallen pillars depicted graven images of a local god who had long since moved his sanctum farther into the hills. Perhaps she could seek out this god and ask him herself about this place?<br/><br/>As she pulled herself from the hole and emerged into daylight, she briefly felt it again, the feeling that she was being watched. Then her guide hailed her from the road, waving, the mule braying as if to echo his joy in her safe return. Still, by the time they left the ruins she could not convince the guide to travel to one of the more distant locales on her list; the trip back to town would take them long enough to see twilight and he had no interest in being out after dark.<br/><br/>So Ivory got to spend the night knowing another kind of frustration.