Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Ward stood at the mouth of the chamber. The humid air clung to his skin like oil, his headlamp casting long shadows across the rocky floor.
He could feel the weight of the mountain above him.
If he ignored the fact that there were metric tons of volcanic rock suspended above his skull like a hammer waiting to drop, then he’d be fine.
Fine, my ass.
It’s a hole in the ground waiting to swallow me whole… no pun intended.
He knew he really should be more cautious. He should wait for a team to be with him, and he most definitely should have left the island with étienne. But logic had abandoned him the second he confirmed the symbols were there, and thus far, they looked legit.
They aren’t just similar to the ones in Ireland. This first one, at least, is identical to one of them.
Now, he was two hundred meters in, surrounded by rock that, besides the people who had called him here, another human hadn’t seen in—what?
A thousand years? Two? He didn’t know. That was the point.
This place wasn’t in any records or on any maps.
There were no oral traditions or environmental logs to go off.
Yet, the symbols were here. Laid out on the stone like they had been waiting for him.
Or waiting for someone dumb enough to read them.
He turned on his scanner, adjusted the light for an oblique angle, and studied the next section of the wall. The carvings weren’t etched in a straight line, but spiraled inward along a narrowing tunnel that followed what appeared to be an old lava tube’s path toward the island’s core.
He crouched in front of the next symbol and compared it to his photocopy of the pages from the copybook he’d used for the impressions in The Comeraghs. The same three-spoked swirl. The same hash through the stem. The same tick at the base.
Impossible.
This is impossible.
It has to be.
He traced the ridges with one finger, gentle, reverent. There was no soot, no carbon residue, and just like in Ireland, no tool marks. It was as if the stone had accepted the symbols willingly—as if it had grown them.
This isn’t decoration.
He considered the possibilities as his brain rushed into overdrive. Behind his eyes, as if it were a holograph that existed only in his mind, the symbols jumped and moved as he sought patterns to make it make sense.
It’s language.
It had to be a language. There was no other reason to have these symbols alongside Triskeles.
No, not just language. It’s a statement of some kind.
None of this makes any sense.
No sense at all.
He latched onto that idea, and in his head, moved the symbols he’d already found into a different sequence.
A warning.
It’s a fucking warning.
But for what?
Had some ancient seafarer gotten blown off course in a storm and somehow ended up here?
While not likely, that idea at least had a tiny—no, not tiny—a minuscule iota of possibility attached to it.
He pulled out a graphite pencil and carefully copied the symbol into his field journal.
He flipped through the photocopies of the old impressions to match their place in the sequence.
Then he stopped, his gaze going from the wall to the pages and back again.
Five of the symbols in this cave appeared in his notes from Ireland. The same structure and the same orientation. He’d thought they were isolated glyphs—outliers of an undocumented tradition in southern Munster. But this? This appeared to be a complete set.
A phrase.
Maybe even a spell.
He laughed at himself.
Jesus, Ward. You’ve been on the island less than twelve hours, and already you’re talking like some fantasy role-player game dropout.
But his laughter died fast, and the cave’s silence swallowed its echo as he moved deeper into the system.
He paused long enough to dig his emergency light sweater out of his Indy-pack before moving to the next symbol.
The sound of each step he took bounced off the curved basalt in strange ways.
As he moved deeper into the tunnel, he knelt to match each symbol against the ones from Ireland.
We are five for five.
He stopped at the next symbol and frowned as it looked different from the rest. Its lines were sharper, less organic. It almost felt like a boundary marker or a line drawn in the sand.
He whispered as he wrote: “We bind your power to the bones of the earth…”
The phrase had been tumbling in his mind for the last ten minutes.
It came in pieces, like something whispered across time.
He really didn’t think the symbols were just writing.
Were they functions? Or maybe ancient commands, meant to be spoken aloud or memorized.
The Irish language was born in the oral tradition of druids, not the written language of the monks.
He translated another. “With the wind’s voice…
” And another. “And the tears of stone…”
Each translation felt more oppressive than the last. He paused to track the images of the symbols in his journal, then glanced up and down the tunnel.
Realization struck, and excitement unfurled in his stomach.
The symbols weren’t scattered as he’d first thought.
They formed a path. He raced back to the beginning of the tunnel and once more walked the path that pulled him deeper, past sense and safety and any remaining logic.
He read each full line he’d written in his journal as he paused at each symbol.
“Behold, son of Cumhaill, true king.
Under starlight blood, beneath the heart of the sun,
We bind your power to the bones of the earth,
With the wind’s voice and the tears of stone.
There is no path home,
Unless you turn back upon your own heels.”
Ward wrapped one arm across his chest and pressed his closed fist to his mouth as he considered the options of what he’d read. A chill ran across his neck, which had nothing to do with the coolness of the underground air.
They’re not talking to Fionn.
They are talking to anyone who dares try to break some sort of seal.
What seal?
What is the chant a key for?
He stared at the final symbol, tucked into a side recess deeper into the curve of the tunnel.
It was different than the rest—less eroded, yet almost more deeply cut.
A spiral with three arms, each tipped in small circles that had once been inlaid with something—metal or pigment that long since leached away.
Ward didn’t touch this one. He stared at it as the words of the chant echoed in his head, no longer in translation. They were speaking for themselves.
There is no path home—unless you turn back upon your own heels.
Was it some sort of failsafe, a warning, or maybe a curse?
Ugh, think.
Think.
Damn it.
He stood in front of it with his heart pounding so hard he almost expected it to jump right out through his rib cage as he racked his mind, trying to remember the legends he’d heard around a Seanachí’s fireplace close to Dungarvan, about twelve miles from the stone at Coumshingaun.
The Irish legend said Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna had gone west into the fairy mounds, into Tír na nóg.
But no one ever said what had happened to Fionn himself.
Not clearly. Not definitively. There were whispers in Irish oral traditions that Fionn never crossed over, maybe even that he was betrayed and separated from the rest of the Fianna.
Was he taken here?
What if this isn’t a myth?
What if Fionn wasn’t a king who died, but one who was locked away?
What if this chant and these symbols are the key to his tomb?
Ward’s head spun. The archaeologist in him demanded caution. The scientist in him wanted proof. But something older—some buried part of him, the memory that had dragged him through field after field in Ireland as a teenager—whispered:
You’ve found him.
He didn’t speak the words aloud. But he looked at the chant again, written line by line in his notebook, the symbols aligned to each translation. The chant was complete. The circle was unbroken. So why did the air feel like it was waiting for something to happen?
His entire body ached from hunching over his journal as he backed away from the final symbol. His breath came in shallow huffs as if the oxygen had gone thin. He turned back toward the entrance, paused, and glanced once more over his shoulder.
I should go. Now. Before I do something stupid.
His lamp caught the edge of the wall, and for a moment, just a flicker, the glyphs shimmered like veins of obsidian catching firelight.
Then the ground beneath his feet hummed, a long, low, subsonic sound.
Ward stumbled and braced himself against the wall.
“What the hell—” A small tremor ran through the floor like a pulse.
He held still, waiting to see if anything else happened.
But thankfully, there was no collapse, smoke, or sound.
He closed the notebook and packed it with shaking hands.
It’s fine. Probably just some kind of seismic echo.
That happens in lava tubes all the time.
He didn’t believe himself and turned off the scanner, switched his headlamp to a lower beam, and started retracing his steps toward the exit.
The closer to the exit he got, the more he stopped thinking like a scientist and started feeling like a trespasser.
Not a visitor, or an observer. A trespasser.