Chapter 2
As soon as they arrived back in the city, Amelia dashed to the guild headquarters, almost tripping as she ran through the streets.
The guild should have known about this. It should have been reported.
“Emin, you won’t believe this,” she said, rushing into his office.
“You’re back early. I wasn’t expecting you until this evening,” Emin said. “What happened to your clothes?” He frowned at them.
“There was another quake. We had to evacuate the mines. We can’t go back down until it’s secure.”
“Are you alright?”
She opened her mouth to answer, then stopped.
She nodded, glancing at her arm where the wound should have been.
She was used to the quakes, but they had become more frequent.
This one had been as strong as the one on the mountain.
They weren’t always noticeable; sometimes a room merely vibrated or something fell from a shelf.
The movement in the mine had been far more violent. Was it a precursor to something bigger?
Emin sucked in a sharp breath as she carefully pulled the skull from the storage container and unwrapped the cloth, revealing its horn-like stumps. His stunned silence said it all.
“This is from the mine?” He prodded the raised sections of the frontal bone, his fingers resting on the sharp stumps.
“Yes, and there were more just like this. Hundreds, if not thousands of them.”
He stared at her, his brow furrowed. “What? How could there be so many that we don’t know about? We only have reports of a few. I’ll check the records to see who inspected the site.”
“What do you think they were? They don’t look natural—almost as if they aren’t human.”
“Well, of course they’re human,” he said. “I don’t know what else they could be.”
His certainty disappointed her.
“But just look at the size of this femur.” She pulled the bone from her bag and held it against his arm for comparison.
“Perhaps they belonged to an unknown ancient human species. Let’s keep this quiet until we’ve done some more research. There’s no need to worry the public. People will take one look at those stumps and think ‘demon’.”
The word made her tense. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wrong. The skulls were so unusual, yet there was something familiar about them. They couldn’t be human.
He went to the bookshelves beside his desk and pulled out one of the largest record books, bound in dark leather. The pages rustled as he turned them. “Ah, here it is, but it’s an incredibly vague account. Part of it is marked as unrecordable.”
Missing records disturbed her more than damaged ones.
“Who wrote it?”
He looked up at her sharply. “It was your father.”
“Oh.”
Why would her father have left so much out? Why had he never told her? What was he concealing?
“It was unlike him to leave such a disordered account,” Emin said, echoing her thoughts.
“I saw more of those symbols down there too, Emin. They looked just like the ones I saw at Ryjul. Is there any mention of them?”
He scanned the pages. “I can’t find any mention of them either. Perhaps his full report was misplaced?”
“I need to go back to the mountains,” she said. “They could be linked.”
“They won’t assign another team to investigate it. You’ve only just returned.”
“Then I’ll go on my own.”
“It’s not safe for you to go exploring on your own without a team,” Emin said.
“I’ve done it plenty of times,” Amelia replied. “Sir,” she added as an afterthought.
“You sound just like your father.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
She packed her satchel and left within the hour.
*
Emin’s warning lingered bitterly in her mind. Everything was dark. Cold seeped into her bones from the ground.
How long had she been there?
The silence lingered.
The walls of the crevice emerged as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Pain throbbed behind her eyes. When she pressed her fingers to her head, something wet coated them. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell whether it was blood.
Emin had warned her not to go back to Mount Ryjul, but she hadn’t listened.
He would be disappointed. The pull of the mystery had been too great, and another expedition would take weeks to approve.
There had to be more evidence linking the symbols; she was sure of it. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.
The snowy mountain range had called her back. She had slipped away that afternoon, hoping to be back before anyone noticed. By now, Emin would be wondering where she was.
Her body cried out in protest as she sat up slowly, stiff from the cold. She drew a sharp breath when pain tingled through her leg as she tried to move it. It had become numb under the weight of the fallen rocks.
How far had she fallen?
She was alone. Expeditions had contingency plans and safety ropes. Teams. No rescue was coming. She shivered, but not with cold.
As she entered the cave, the mountain had trembled violently, loosening a section of stone and revealing the pale remains of a decomposing body.
Someone had been there before her.
She recalled the gleam of the silver item clutched in the corpse’s hand before she raised her arms to protect her head from the falling rocks. The mountain had roared, opening up and swallowing her whole.
“I shouldn’t have come back.”
Pain flared when she tried to move.
“Is anyone there?” No one answered; she was miles away from civilisation, but she had to try. Her lungs ached from yelling, and her throat was raw from the dust suspended in the air.
A deep rumble echoed through the crevice. She paused, listening. Everything shook again.
She strained against the rocks, but her leg was well and truly stuck.
“Shit!” she screamed.
She was about to be buried, like a broken artefact, crushed beneath the pressure of the earth.
Her panic could wait until she knew what she had. She grabbed her satchel and opened it, trying to find something that would help. The smooth metal of her dig tools was cold against her fingers. She felt for the small pickaxe.
She wedged it beneath the rock and used it as a lever, prying her leg free with a moan of relief. The bent tool remained trapped beneath the stone.
The rumble came again. The deafening roar surrounded her as the mountain shuddered. She clasped her satchel and scrambled backwards over the rocks and debris until her back hit a wall. Her arms throbbed from holding the satchel above her as a shield while rocks and dust fell all around her.
Suddenly, the shaking stopped.
She slowly lowered her arms and exhaled, coughing as the dust settled around her.
She was still alive.
Something was different. Through the settling dust, silhouettes emerged in the faint blue glow. She’d scrambled over more than just rocks.
Bones.
Hundreds of bones and skulls surrounded her. They were cold beneath her palms and clattered beneath her feet as she scrambled away, hoping they were animal bones, but the shape of the skulls made her think otherwise.
There shouldn’t be bones down here. She swallowed hard. This was no natural cave. It was a burial ground, with no order to the remains. They covered the ground like shattered stone.
There was too much death. Not just here. It had cruelly taken her father and her mother. His face, frowning in disapproval, flashed into her mind. “One day your curiosity will get you killed.” The words echoed bitterly in her mind.
She couldn’t even recall her mother’s face.
There was no escape.
Light seeped through cracks in the rock.
No, she wasn’t going to just lie down with the bones and accept it.
Desperate, she followed the light, hoping it would lead her out. She squeezed through the narrow gap, wincing as her clothes ripped and the jagged rocks tore at her skin.
The impact knocked the air from her lungs as she fell into a large chamber, her clothes damp from the wet ground. The stench of stale water surrounded her.
It wasn’t daylight, only a phosphorescent blue glow illuminating the chamber. How foolish of her to think it was daylight this far down. She deserved to be stuck there.
She threw back her head and screamed. It echoed tauntingly, and tears blurred her vision. If she had any chance of surviving, she needed to keep moving.
The echo of her scream faded, leaving only the rhythmic drip of water as it bounced off the rocks.
The faint blue light illuminated the tunnels.
She scrambled up to inspect them, hoping one would lead outside.
Unsure which to follow, she paused, staring into the darkness.
A gentle breeze caressed her face from one of the tunnels.
She clambered over the rocks into its darkness.
The walls narrowed as the passageway climbed higher, and the blue glow disappeared behind her.
Had she chosen the wrong one? But with each step, the gloom dissipated.
A sob escaped her as she climbed up the piled rocks towards the sunlight that filtered through a small opening overhead.
Carefully, she tore at the earth overhead as dirt crumbled onto her face and into her hair and eyes. The hole was now big enough for her to fit through, and she emerged from the ground, gasping for fresh air.
Collapsing onto her back, she squeezed her eyes shut and exhaled. Every ache her body had ignored reawakened. Blood and dirt soiled her clothes, and her shoulders and back stung from the sharp cuts from the jagged rocks. She was free.
Tall, twisted trees towered over her, hiding the sky. Their huge, gnarled roots sank deeply into the surrounding ground, partially concealing the hole from which she’d emerged.
Behind the trees, the mountain loomed. Boulders that had long since fallen from the mountain face were now covered in spongy green moss. There was no snow. Ice and snow had coated the mountain when she had climbed it, yet neither was visible now.
This wasn’t Ryjul.
But that was impossible.