Chapter 14 #3
They stopped at the edge of a valley. Sharp cliffs fell down, not even fifty feet from where they broke camp.
Across the valley, a massive stone frame and gate stood in the mountain wall, half-swallowed by the mountain itself.
A carved arch framed an opening that led into darkness, half of the gate in there, the other half nowhere to be seen.
Pillars flanked the entrance, or what remained of them, broken at different heights, their surfaces weathered smooth.
Vegetation clung to every crack and ledge, vines and moss slowly pulling the structure back into the rock it had been carved from.
Even from across the valley, Alsen could see the faded symbol of the spiral atop the arch.
Nobody slept well.
Alsen woke before dawn, staring at the valley from his sleeping bag.
The dungeon entrance loomed across the gap, its carved arch a darker shade of black against the mountain’s silhouette.
Even without light, he could feel it. The hum of old power, deep, heavy, like a bass note too low to hear but strong enough to rattle his teeth.
He sat up. The camp was quiet. Garrett sat against a tree, awake, staring at the same view. Neither spoke.
Luna descended from her rock—as no suitable trees grew here—without her usual sound. No humming, no rustling, no unnecessary noise. She landed, rope and sleeping bag in hand, and immediately started packing. The collar was still on. The leash was nowhere in sight.
Sonja woke next. She sat up, looked at Luna, and said nothing. She reached for her gear instead.
No collar jokes. No kitten. No leash.
The shift was immediate and absolute. Whatever warmth and play had existed between them, the dead man’s camp had buried it. There was a sword in the ground behind them, and a dungeon ahead, and nobody felt like pretending those two things weren’t connected.
They broke camp in under ten minutes. Theron distributed rations in silence. Marena checked her pouches and staff with the focused attention of someone mentally cataloging every healing spell she had. Garrett studied his map, tracing the valley’s contours with his finger.
“The valley’s the problem,” Garrett said, rolling up the map.
“The entrance is straight across, but the cliffs on this side drop about sixty feet. I couldn’t find any decent path down.
Last time, we followed the valley rim south for half a day before we found a slope we could manage, then doubled back along the valley floor. ”
“Half a day there, half back,” Theron said. “A full day just to cross.”
“We don’t have to take the same route.” Garrett looked down the cliff edge. “But, rocks fall in these mountains all the time. A couple of suitably fallen rocks could have made a path down for us. Would save us the day. If not, we go south like before.”
Everyone looked at the cliff. Alsen walked to the edge and peered over.
The wall wasn’t vertical, not exactly. It angled and jutted, with ledges and cracks breaking the descent into rough stages.
Trees clung to the rock face in places, their roots exposed and gnarled.
About forty feet down, a wider shelf ran along the cliff before it dropped the final twenty feet to the valley floor.
He could see the stream at the bottom, thin and silver in the early light.
Luna stepped up beside him. She studied the wall for a moment, head tilting as her eyes traced lines he couldn’t see.
“I see a path,” she said. She pointed to a section where the cliff face buckled outward, creating a series of staggered ledges.
“Down to that pine, across to the shelf. The shelf runs north to where the cliff’s shorter. We can drop the rest.”
Garrett squinted. “That first section’s a fifteen-foot drop to the first ledge.”
“Not even twelve,” Luna said. “The moss is hiding a lip about three feet down. Step onto that, then it’s a short drop to the ledge below.”
“How can you see that from here?”
“Watch.” Luna walked to the start and lowered herself over the edge. Her foot found the hidden lip beneath the moss without hesitation. She hung for a second, testing it, then dropped to the ledge below. She landed in a crouch, balanced, quiet.
“It holds,” she called up.
Garrett looked at Alsen. Alsen shrugged.
They went one at a time. Sonja followed Luna without being asked, this time paying attention to the path. Garrett went next, slower, checking every handhold. Alsen pondered how to drop himself down using magic. He could jump and slow down his fall. That had an unreasonable level of risk, though.
It was still a backup if he were to fall.
He climbed. Inelegantly, but he climbed.
Marena had the hardest time. She froze at the first ledge, staff strapped to her back throwing off her balance.
Luna climbed back up to her and talked her through the next section, pointing at each foothold, each handgrip, her voice low and steady and completely unlike her usual clipped tone.
When Marena slipped on a wet root, Luna caught her wrist before Marena even finished gasping.
Even Alsen noticed how fast that catch was. One hand braced against the rock, the other closing around Marena’s forearm in what was practically an instant.
Garrett noticed. Alsen saw him notice. His eyes lingered on Luna’s grip, then moved to her feet, planted sure on the narrow ledge, then to her face, which showed nothing at all.
“Thanks,” Marena whispered.
“Don’t look down,” Luna said. “Look where your hand goes next.”
Theron came last, the cliff groaning under his weight. He moved with surprising care, choosing his holds deliberately, never rushing. A chunk of rock broke free under his boot and tumbled into the valley. Everyone watched it fall. Nobody commented.
The shelf Luna had spotted ran along the cliff face for about two hundred feet before the wall shortened enough to manage. They dropped the final section one at a time, Luna going first again to check the landing.
Dense foliage covered the valley floor. Tall pines crowded the stream, their trunks close enough to block sightlines past thirty feet. Ferns and undergrowth choked the spaces between. The air smelled different down here, colder, damper.
They followed the stream north, toward the entrance. The walking was slow, the undergrowth fighting them at every step. Theron took point, using his size to push through the worst of it. Luna moved behind him, her feet finding paths through the brush that shouldn’t have existed.
They reached the base of the mountain within two hours.
The entrance rose above them, massive up close.
The carved arch stretched thirty feet high, its stones fitted with a precision that made Alsen’s academic heart ache.
The pillars—or what remained of them—showed geometric patterns worn almost smooth by weather and time.
Vines had claimed most of the facade, but where the stone lay exposed, the carvings were unmistakable.
The spiral.
Same as the temple ceiling. Same as the shrines on the mountain. Same design language, different scale.
Alsen pulled on his power and fired a scan into the entrance. The results came back layered, complex, and deeply unsettling. Life forms, small ones, scattered in the upper sections. Faint ambient energy, old and settled, like dust that hadn’t been disturbed in decades.
And beneath it, threading through everything like veins in marble, a signature he recognized.
Void energy.
The same signature as the goblins and the animated priestess in the first temple. Faint here, ambient rather than concentrated, but present. Woven into the structure itself.
He said nothing. His jaw tightened, but he kept his face neutral. This wasn’t the time to start a discussion about void corruption with people who had no frame of reference for it.
“The architecture’s ancient,” Theron said, running his hand along a pillar’s base. “I’ve read travel logs from over a century ago, and this place was already mentioned as old in them.”
“It wasn’t burnt out, though.” Garrett studied the entrance. “Was it?”
“This feels like a temple,” Alsen said. That wasn’t a guess.
The spiral alone confirmed it, but the proportions of the arch, the pillar placement, and the way the entrance oriented toward the valley all matched the design principles of the smaller temple he and Luna had explored on their first day.
“Luna and I saw a few on the way to Ambervale.”
Theron nodded. “They wrote of this place as the main temple. Let’s hope the old gods are as dead as they should be.” He entered.
Everyone else followed.
The transition from daylight to dark slapped Alsen in the face. He summoned a floating orb of light, which pushed away the blackness to reveal a broad corridor that sloped downward. The ceiling arched high overhead, supported by remnants of pillars that lined both sides.
Half the pillars were shattered. Scorch marks blackened the walls in sweeping arcs.
The ceiling had collapsed in two places, rubble choking the passage and forcing them to climb over mounds of broken stone.
Alsen’s light caught the remnants of carvings on the walls, geometric patterns split by cracks and obscured by soot.
The air stank of old fire. Dragon fire, most likely, or at least that of their followers. They burned the temple down.
Alsen ran his hand along a scorched wall.
Beneath the soot, the stone was smooth, almost polished.
The geometric patterns continued into the darkness, the same interconnected lines and shapes he’d sketched in his spellbook margins.
The carvings here were more intricate than the first temple. More detailed, larger in scale.
He scraped soot from a section of the wall with his thumb. Underneath, the carving was intact. The fire had blackened the surface but hadn’t destroyed the stone itself. Whatever this place had been built from was tougher than it looked.
“Don’t fall behind,” Garrett called from ahead.