Chapter 508: Entries From The Past? [Bonus - ]
The cavern was filled with the quiet contented murmur of shared laughter as well as the deep breathing of the resting wolves.
The Princess sat cross-legged near the edge of the woven mat with her small belly delightfully full of warm venison and broth.
Her boots were unlaced as her tired toes were warming pleasantly in the ambient glow of Aurelia’s floating holy flame.
As she leaned back on her hands, her right palm pressed against a strange hard protrusion beneath the thick wool fabric of the mat.
CRUNCH!
The Princess frowned softly.
"What is that...?"
Thinking it was a stray piece of sharp basalt scree that had been overlooked when Silas laid out the bedding, she reached her gloved hand beneath the edge of the blanket with her fingers curling around the cold rigid object to pull it free.
Her fingers closed around long jointed cylinders and then she pulled her hand out.
"Eee—"
The sound died in the Princess’s throat and her azure eyes widened in paralyzing horror.
Held in her trembling palm... was a human hand.
It was completely lacking any sort of flesh... the ivory bones were stained a deep mottled yellow with age, the joints locked in a petrified claw-like rigor mortis, covered in a thin brittle crust of centuries-old ice.
"KYAAAAAAAAAAH!"
The Princess shrieked, violently flinging the skeletal appendage across the cavern floor.
CLATTER-CLATTER-THUD!
The bones bounced across the stone, coming to a halt right in the center of the circle, landing squarely in the light of the Argent Flame.
"Hostiles?!" Morwenna was on her feet in an instant with her hand snapping to Tidebringer’s hilt.
"Form up!" Tasmin’s void-daggers cleared their holsters with a deadly hiss!
"Wait, hold your steel!" Silas commanded, raising a hand as he stood up.
He walked over to the shivering Princess, placing a firm palm on her shoulder, feeling her smaller frame trembling violently.
"Breathe, Princess... You’re safe. It’s not an attack."
"I-It was a hand!" the Princess stammered, pointing a shaking finger at the center of the mat. "A dead person’s hand under my blanket, Lord Silas!"
Silas stepped over to where the skeleton piece had rolled, kneeling down beside the yellowed bones.
The rest of the squad gathered around in a tight, cautious circle... Eluned, Aurelia, Aeliana, and Thor all peering down at the macabre discovery.
"It’s ancient," Silas observed, picking up a twig to turn the bones over without touching them directly. "The marrow inside the radius is completely petrified so it’s obvious this person died centuries ago."
"Look there," Kadi pointed, her sharp eyes catching a detail in the light. "Tucked into the curled fingers... The hand was holding something when it froze."
Silas leaned closer.
Clamped tightly within the curled bony grip of the petrified fingers was a small, tightly rolled cylinder of ancient wax-treated parchment.
The wax seal had cracked into flakes of red dust, but the dense vellum had somehow survived the damp sub-zero centuries of the cavern.
Using the tip of his dagger, Silas carefully pried the brittle bone fingers apart.
SNAP!
The dry finger bone broke away with a soft crack, releasing the rolled paper.
Silas picked it up, feeling the dry brittle texture between his calloused thumbs.
"Aeliana, bring the light closer," Silas murmured.
The high-elf secretary knelt beside him, holding up a small polished brass reflector that focused the holy rays of Aurelia’s flame onto the parchment.
Silas gently unrolled the stiff vellum.
The paper was in terrible condition as large portions of the surface were rotted through with black mold, and decades of freezing condensation had caused the ancient iron-gall ink to bleach and fade into illegible ghostly smudges.
It was written in the form of fragmented disconnected log entries like a desperate journal scrawled in the dark by a trembling dying hand.
Silas squinted, his blue eyes tracing the broken faded lines, reading the legible fragments aloud to the silent watching squad.
"Let me see... Not everything is okay here but I’ve seen one... [ENTRY: 44]... the tremors did not cease... the breach at the lower shaft has widened... we were fools to think the [------] could be bargained with..."
Silas paused with his finger trailing across an entire sentence that had been dissolved into a dark greasy water stain.
"...[ENTRY: 46]... Beasts... they are not wild... they move with divine intent... Her wrath has turned the northern canyons into an abattoir... but the cold... the unnatural cold came from behind..."
"Beasts?" Morwenna echoed with her brow furrowing deeply. "The Goddess of Beasts?"
Silas continued reading, his voice dropping into a somber steady rhythm.
"...[ENTRY: --]... a clash of primordial horrors... Beasts and Ice fighting against each other... the heavens shattered... the frost did not fall from the sky, it erupted from the deep crust... strong... very..."
Another massive scorched tear ran across the center of the vellum, obliterating three whole paragraphs.
The next visible entry was jagged, written in violent frantic scratches.
"...not a battle... a slaughter... Ice... the glacier swallowed the entire place... they did not freeze, their souls were suspended in the crystal... a lot of people died... thousands in the span of a single breath... the screaming stopped when the whiteout descended..."
The air in the cavern seemed to drop by ten degrees as the women listened in dead silence with the weight of the ancient tragedy hanging heavy in the warm light.
Silas reached the very bottom of the paper where the final entry was barely two lines, scrawled right before the writer’s hand had locked in death.
"...fled to the upper shelf... the mist is leaking through the stone... no escape... do not look for the treasure... the seal was never meant to hold her... the seal was meant to contain the [------]... beware the deep mines..."
The text abruptly terminated.
The last stroke of the ink trailed off the edge of the vellum in a long, erratic scrape, where the dying expeditioner had collapsed onto the basalt floor.
Silas lowered the paper, staring down at the faded, disconnected words.
"Beasts and Ice fighting each other..." Silas muttered, his tactical mind racing through the fragments. "Thousands of people dead in an instant. A freeze that erupted from the crust, not the sky and a warning... about the deep mines?"
"It doesn’t make sense," Tasmin whispered, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared at the bones. "If the Forever Ice was forged to seal the Goddess of Beasts... why does the log describe the ice fighting against her? And what were thousands of humans doing in the deep northern trenches centuries ago?"
"The mines," Morwenna pointed out with her gray eyes dark and serious. "The letter ended with the mines. Whatever was down there... people were digging for it before the basin fell into darkness."
Eluned stood motionless, her emerald eyes locked onto the ancient parchment with a deeply troubled shadow crossing her divine features.
"Silas..." Eluned spoke softly, her voice barely a whisper against the crackle of the flame. "The entity trapped in that trench... may not be the only thing waiting for us beneath the ice."
Silas slowly rolled the brittle vellum back up, securing it carefully within the interior pocket of his tunic.
He looked toward the sealed root wall, listening to the muffled relentless scraping of the necrotic fog outside.
His blue eyes hardened into cold resolve.
"Whatever is down there," Silas declared, his voice echoing cleanly off the granite walls, "we crack the ice, we take the goddess, and we find out the truth."
The rolled vellum in Silas’s hands felt like thin layers of brittle slate.
His gloved thumbs pressed down along the edges to prevent the parchment from curling back into its long-held cylinder, and every time the fiber flexed, tiny flecks of black iron-gall ink flaked away into the woven fabric of the floor mat.
Beside him, the Argent Flame hung motionless in the cavern’s vault.
Aurelia’s holy fire threw clean, cast-silver light into every crack in the granite, making the shadows behind the stacked crates sharp as cut glass.
The yellowed hand bone that the Princess had hurled lay resting on its knuckles four feet away, looking less like a terror from the deep and more like an abandoned chisel forgotten by an uncaring mason.
Silas took in a lungful of the dry, pine-scented air that the silver fire produced.
He let it out slowly with his shoulders dropping half an inch inside his dark coat.
’So people were breaking rock down here before the borders were even marked,’ he thought, his blue eyes drifting back to the fragmented script. ’Long before Aeli’s original Lord came here and centuries before my core ever touched an altar.’
He had known the Umbral Basin had an appetite.
The geography itself had the feel of a place that had swallowed several successive civilizations without bothering to chew but finding a hand clutching a warning about deep shafts was an entirely different matter.
’Does this mean every strike we’ve driven into the shale is sitting on an ancient tomb?’ he wondered, the strategist in him immediately calculating risk ratios. ’If the mines are cursed, we’re digging our own basement into a furnace...’
He shook his head with the fur collar of his traveling cloak brushing his jaw.
’No. The letter specifically pointed downward... "Deep mines" and "Lower shafts". What Thora’s teams have opened so far are mere surface scratches... quarries and open-pit faults barely twenty fathoms into the limestone. If there’s something buried under the deep bedrock that made thousands of armed men die screaming in a single morning, it’s not going to be solved by reading moldy vellum and the only person who would actually know the layout of the basin before the frost locked it down is the one who was there when the glaciers slammed shut.’
The Goddess of Beasts.
The tablet had called her a sovereign presence and the bird’s erratic panic confirmed she was an ancient pillar.
If she was entombed in the deep northern rift, she had watched whatever calamity unfolded before the ice took her limbs.
’I’ll ask her myself when we crack the shell,’ Silas concluded, his fingers rolling the vellum back into its tight crease before sliding it securely into the interior pocket of his tunic. ’Until then, speculation is just dead weight...’
He turned away from the bone, looking toward the living barricade that sealed the mouth of the cavern.
Thick emerald-veined roots of the World Tree were knotted across the entrance like massive intertwined pythons.
They formed a solid petrified wooden plug eight inches thick, completely sealing out the draft.
Through the microscopic gaps between the bark, sickly white threads of moisture clung to the perimeter, twitching like blind maggots.
"Elu," Silas called out, his voice quiet in the hollow stone space. "What’s the mist doing out there?"
Eluned, who was still lounging against his side with her cheek pressed against his bicep, didn’t bother opening her eyes.
Her emerald hair spilled over his forearm, the tips faintly glowing as they tapped into the moisture within the wood.
"It’s swollen to the ceiling of the gorge, Silas," she murmured, her voice thick with lazy warmth. "The pressure is immense... The little leeches from before have multiplied as hundreds of them are writhing in the vapor, and several larger abominations are scraping their bone-plates against my outer bark. They can smell the wolves’ blood through the stone, but they don’t have the weight to split my grain so they’ll blunt their teeth until the cycle breaks."
High on a basalt protrusion near the fire, the obsidian bird let out a sharp sequence of clicks.
It bobbed its crested skull three times, its dark feathers rustling as it tucked its beak back beneath its wing.
"The bird confirms it," Eluned added, shifting her weight so that she was leaning more heavily against Silas’s ribs. "The high tide of the fog lasts three hours, perhaps four... It will churn through the narrow canyons, choke on its own and then sink back into the deep fissures. We have nothing to do but wait."
Silas exhaled, looking around the cavern. "Then we take the downtime. Nobody moves until the air is dry..."
He reached down to the iron platters that had held their meal.
The empty wooden trenchers and bone broth flagons were scattered across the edges of the mats.
With a thought, he summoned a gentle circular current of raw water mana to his fingertips.
A thin film of warm water lifted from his palms, wrapping around the wooden bowls, scouring the grease dried tallow, and marrow remnants from the grain with a soft circular shhhhhk before the moisture was expelled into a small dark crevice near the rear wall.
VUUUM!
The cleaned lacquer containers dissolved into blue light, filed neatly back into his inventory.
’We still have enough salted venison and cakes to feed twenty men for a week,’ he calculated, closing his interface with a silent blink. ’Kaelia over-packed as usual, which means we won’t have to hunt now...’
Around the perimeter of the chamber, the Blessed Wolves took their cue from the silence.
Valkyrie turned two slow circles on the hard floor before collapsing with a heavy floor-shaking whump, resting her chin across her front paws.
Beside her, Titan let out a long shuddering sigh that blew the loose dust away from the wolf’s snout, closing his eyes as his ribcage rose and fell in deep slumber.