Chapter 61 Ancient Bones
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Ancient Bones
Saffron followed Levan through the dissolved archway, her ribs heavy with dread. They were walking to their certain doom.
Did he not feel it, did he not know? Or did he not care?
The knowledge of their imminent demise was so overwhelming, so clear, that her blood coursed with ice, with something more electric still, the feeling of lightning an inch from striking earth, and yet there he was, strolling ahead, unbothered, resolve etched in the stoic lines of his body.
Miret followed, though Harrow was still slumped on the floor in the previous cave, clutching his healed hand to his chest and shaking his head violently against the savage tide of sorrow.
The next chamber was larger than the first, and far darker.
It took Saffron’s eyes several moments to adjust, even when Levan illuminated his wand tip.
The proportions of the space defied logic and reason, the ceiling so high that it surely protruded past the top of the cliff above, while the floor was a circle so perfect it was surely hewn by mage instead of nature.
An outer ring of rocky land surrounded another pool of inky water—round as a brand poker and deathly still—with a raised platform of circular stone at the center.
The entire chamber was arranged like an Augur eye, and Saffron was struck with the suspicion that if any of them set foot in the dark water, it would swirl like the pupil of an ancient prophet.
“What is that?” Levan muttered, squinting across the pool. “On top of the platform? Hells, I think I need glasses.”
Saffron’s vision was sharpening. “A deminite chest, and a set of ancient bones.”
“Oh my.” Miret shuddered viscerally. “Someone who tried to steal the prophecy and failed?”
“Or Sarcane himself,” Levan suggested. “It seems like the sort of dramatic thing an Augur would do. Seal themselves in a cave and die next to their life’s work.”
“Are you sure it’s deminite?” Miret asked. “The chest. It seems the malevolent energy is emanating from there, and deminite shouldn’t have such an effect.”
Levan frowned in genuine confusion. “What malevolent energy?”
Trying to ignore the fresh peal of sadness, Saffron turned to Miret. “I’m fairly sure it’s deminite from the hue and lack of luster. Though that doesn’t make sense—why would a prophecy need to be sealed inside a chest that dulls magic?”
Levan rubbed at his jaw. “I suppose it won’t be as easy as walking through the water to retrieve it.”
“Your healing is at full power, you say?” Miret asked.
When Levan nodded, the old scholar sank to his knees beside the water and lowered a forefinger into it.
Levan yelled his warning, and Saffron lurched toward the blue-cloaked academic, but when his skin touched the ink-dark pool, nothing happened.
Miret shrugged, withdrew, and said genially, “The water seems fine to me, though deeper than it looks. We might have to swim.”
“I can’t swim,” Levan admitted.
“You can’t swim, mil?” Miret seemed horrified by this confession, as though Levan had confessed to enjoying the flayed skin of newborn babes as a snack.
Levan stiffened. “Most people learn as children, and my childhood was rather…busy.”
“Ah.” Miret shuffled awkwardly. “Salron?”
It took Saffron a few minutes to realize the borderline-senile old man meant her. “Oh—no, I can’t either. My mother was overprotective—she was a Healer who’d failed to save a child who drowned in the river. Wouldn’t let me near water.”
“A certain irony to her argument, is there not?” Miret said. “Surely teaching you to swim would have reduced the chances of a fatal accident.”
“I’ll be sure to share your parenting feedback with her,” Saffron replied dryly.
More awkward mumbling from the old man. “Well, shall I?”
Saffron and Levan exchanged a worried glance.
Saffron felt they should study the scenario in more depth, put more thought into the best path forward, and yet she also acknowledged that the old man was several orders of magnitude smarter than her, and they were battling for time against the imminent high tide.
“Have you checked for magical frequencies in the water? On the rocky platform?”
Miret nodded sagely. “Other than whatever’s inside that evil chest, there are no other enchantments in this cave. The water is just water.”
Saffron raised her wand. “Et ascevolo,” she incanted, hoping to levitate the chest over the water, but the spell simply sank into it like a body disappearing into quicksand.
There was a thirst to the vanishing magic, as though the malevolent spirit inside had drunk it like a tonic.
“Does the chest have locking charms on it? A password, perhaps?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Levan shifted his weight. “Sarcane wouldn’t risk a password—such a thing could so easily be lost to the sands of time. He didn’t hide the prophecy so that nobody could ever find it. He would have just destroyed it, if that was his aim. He wanted the right mage to find it.”
“So Sarcane would have wanted the right mage to kill those wardholders?” Saffron asked quietly, knowing the question would hit like a hammer, but needing the answer anyway. “Or was there another way we didn’t see?”
Levan took several steadying breaths. “I think he would have known the right mage would have done whatever it took. Your father wrote that he had foreseen many of your heinous deeds leading up to this point. Sarcane would have known you’d take a handful of lives to potentially save many.”
“Assuming this does foretell me preventing a war,” Saffron countered, that feeling of dread in her belly knotting tighter now that they were right up at the coal face of the future.
“Yes,” Levan said quietly. “Assuming that.”
He did not meet her gaze—because Miret was already stripping off his clothes.
Miret’s body was narrow, wrinkled, covered in skin tags and several scars unbefitting of a scholar who spent most of his time in a library. Saffron had the acute sensation of looking at an old map.
In naught but his knee-length underwear, he waded into the water.
“Haleen’ah!” he gasped—the Eqoran cursing equivalent of fucking hells.
“What? What is it?” Levan dashed forward, kneeling by the edge of the black pool and extending a hand.
“It’s cold.” Miret’s teeth chattered violently as he kicked off from the edge.
He made clumsy paddling motions toward the rocky platform. His progress was slow and stuttering, and Saffron thought it was a bit of a stretch to call himself a swimmer, but given that he was risking hypothermia for the sake of her mission, it didn’t seem polite to criticize his technique.
Eventually the old man reached the platform, hauling himself up with a surprising amount of upper body strength.
Though his arms were slender, the brown skin wrinkled and papery, there was the unmistakable cording of muscle and sinew beneath the surface.
His shivering intensified upon the dark rock, and Saffron worried he might expire there and then.
“Et ascevolo,” she incanted again, hurriedly this time, levitating his clothes over the surface of the water and landing them in a heap beside him.
“In retrospect,” Miret muttered, clumsily wrapping his raiment back around himself, “perhaps I should have tried to levitate myself.”
Saffron laughed. “If it were that easy, magekind would have mastered birdlike flight many centuries ago.” It was theoretically possible, but most were afraid to try—if the caster’s magical well emptied halfway through, or they were otherwise distracted or wounded while holding the enchantment, the flier would plummet to their death.
Once Miret was dressed, he tremulously knelt to examine the chest. “Deminite, indeed. Explains why it couldn’t be levitated. Kaf juriat…”
How curious.
The dread inside Saffron deepened, darkened. The urge to run, to never look back, or perhaps to curl up in a ball and perish.
Thanks for this, Dad, she thought bitterly.
“It would appear,” Miret said mildly, after running his palms over the chest one more time, “that I can simply open the clasp and lift the lid. Shall I?”
No, screamed some primal instinct inside Saffron.
“Yes,” said her mouth, because what else could they do? “We only have a quarter of an hour before the tide comes in, and we cannot levitate the chest out of the cave, let alone up a sheer cliff face.”
“Very well,” Miret said calmly.
Too calmly—eerily, supernaturally calmly. As though being…coaxed by something.
Something unseen, something terrible.
That voice inside Saffron kept screaming no.
She tried not to listen, not to hear. Not to believe.
Miret flipped up the silver clasp with a casual thumb, seemingly hardened to the crushing waves of sorrow and despair washing through the air. Somewhere in the first cave, Harrow still moaned and muttered.
The whole world seemed to slow, time treacling and congealing until seconds no longer felt as rigid or boundaried as they used to. Entire lifetimes, entire universes, could fit into a lone minute.
The lid opened slowly, and then all at once, as though shoved from within.
All the air sucked into the center of the room, like an enormous invisible creature had inhaled.
And then—
—a shadow.
A shape, a blur, a smear of pure darkness, soared from the chest.
It swirled through the air like a tornado.
Miret threw himself backward, wrists slamming into the rock, but did not cry out. None of them did. Sound had ceased to function normally, at once deathly loud and unearthly silent.
The shadow plunged into the set of bones.
And the bones leapt to life.
Monstrous, ungodly life.
They blackened to soot, assembling themselves in the approximate shape of a wolf standing on hind legs. The skull filled with dark smoke, eyes glowing white in cavernous sockets.
Saffron thought her bladder might empty, thought her body might simply cease to stand from the sheer depth of her terror.
All at once, she knew—without truly knowing—what she was looking at.
“I always thought it might have something to do with the Sordai.”