Hail, Veela
Mistress of the Hunt
Mother of Rivers
Your servants ask that you
Protect us in this place of death.
“Place of death…?” I followed the path cautiously now, wary of traps. The forest scene with Veela blended into a different mural. A crowd of dragons and smaller, graceful-looking winged creatures - part gazelle, part greyhound, part bird - were gathered around a dragon of incredible size and beauty. She was cream and gold and wreathed in white mist. Her body was long and slender, her neck as graceful as a swan's. She had strange, angular horns that formed a diamond shape over her head. She ministered to the others gathered around her, radiating light from her crest. The script beside her pulsed, the engravings beckoning to be touched. Hesitantly, I brushed my fingers over the words.
“When the Black Sun rose in the south, the Chrysanthemum Queen convened with the Circle and united them with the counsel of Matir” I murmured. “To her people, they spoke: ‘We must give our land, given so that the Worldeaters should not consume it all. We must give our blood, given so that the Worldeaters might shed no more of it. We must give our Gods, so that our hatchlings might see the birth of a new dawn.’
The words were heavy upon Lahati's shoulders and upon the shoulders of all the clans of the world. With claws bleeding and heads bowed, we mourn what was lost, with great grief and great joy.”
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Swallowing, I stepped back, and continued walking until I found the next inscription. The cuneiform was engraved beside the image of a great silver dragon who stood in a ritual pose: two clawed fingers raised, his wings concealing his eyes, an hourglass in his other hand.
Hail, Veles
Miracle worker, Master of the Wind and Sky
Father of the Gods
Lord of all things known and unknown.
The door had a puzzle lock: three concentric rings covered in symbols, like a giant dial. There were nine symbols around the edge of each ring. I recognized one of them easily: it was the nine-pointed chaos star of the Matir. The others were not so familiar. One was a crude hourglass, two triangles sitting point to point. There was a symbol that resembled a long-horn bull’s skull, one that looked like a hammer - Khors - and one that looked like a four-sided diamond with rays of light coming off it. One looked like the outline of an anatomical heart, another like a sun with many arms coming off it in the shape of sickles. The last two were of a dragon with eight wings, and a hexagon with a cross drawn through it.
“A puzzle.” I looked up at the fresco of Veles. He gleamed in the magical light, the paint overlaid with peeling gold and silver leaf.
I retraced my steps and examined the paintings again, noting which order the scenes appeared. Veela was first, and the heart was probably her symbol. The second one mentioned Matir. The third symbol would be that of Veles, which would be the hourglass. Simple.
I went back to the door and began pushing buttons. I set the outermost ring to Veela’s Heart, the center ring to Matir’s Star, and the inner ring to Vele’s Hourglass, then pushed against the door.
Nothing happened.
“Uhh…” I tried the combination in reverse, but didn’t get anywhere with that, either. Annoyed, I went back to look at the paintings in more detail. Veela, Lahati – who wasn’t a goddess, as far as I knew – and Veles. I stared at each one in turn, until finally, it clicked. The dragon’s horns formed a diamond.
With a grunt of satisfaction, I returned to the door and set the middle ring to the diamond-and-light beams symbol. There was a heavy clunk inside the lock, and then it split down the middle and retracted into the walls to either side, admitting me into the biggest crypt I had ever seen.
Chapter 37
The vast, echoing vault was the heart of a hollowed-out mountain. I stepped out onto a slender spiral walkway. There was no railing, nothing to stop someone from plummeting to their death in the black abyss below. At the center of the great chamber was a tall dais lit by a single piercing beam of light from far above my head. Great carved pillars supported recessed alcoves, like nests. Each alcove contained the mummified body of a dragon. There were hundreds of them, stretching up far over my head and down far below my feet.
My mouth hung open as I took in the view. There were so many dragons here. Some massive, some small. They were posed to look like they were sleeping, just like the three I had found in the Lethos Cellar system of Taltos. Unlike the Taltos dragons, their biers were not bare. In fact, every mummy here was dripping in jewelry. The corpses were surrounded by banded trunks full of treasure, masterwork tools and tapestries, barely faded by time in this dark, dry place. They were also accompanied by smaller mummies, who were arranged around the dragons in poses of vigilance. Some of the mummies were quadrupeds larger than horses but smaller than elephants, their forms suggesting the lean, winged, horned and feathered creatures I’d seen in the murals. Others were clearly humanoid.
“Wow.” I whispered as I moved down the ramp, heading for the nearest funerary nook. A great dragon lay there, his dried, scaled skin stretched tightly over his bones. The scales were a brilliant scarlet, like a carpet of rubies. He was surrounded by jeweled chariots, long fans, racks of weapons, shelves of canopic jars, chests still bearing their rope and wax seals. Half a dozen quadrupedal mummies rested around him like a harem, almost. One human-sized mummy was propped up against the dragon’s forearm in a painted coffin. It depicted what was clearly a Tuun man, by his hair and features. In the painting, he was almost nude, dressed only in a loincloth and bearing a spear.
Swallowing – and keeping a close eye on the bodies – I hopped up onto the bier. There was a plaque near the edge.
Here lies Köroğlu and his Bonded, Zhatuung,
Warrior and Royal Consort, Lost in the Battle of Three Rivers.
May their art please the Gods
May their Whyme bring them pleasure for all eternity.
“Whyme? What the hell is a Whyme?” I scratched my head, then queried the ArchemiWiki.
[No such entry found. Did you mean: Winery?]
That was weird. When I hit up the Wiki, it would always tell me if an entry was locked. I’d never seen something in the game and had it tell me the article didn’t exist.
I closed my HUD and moved to gawk at the grave goods. Any gamer worth his salt would be jumping for joy at the amount of treasure in this place, but I was hesitant to touch any of it. Swallowing nervously, I sidled over to the nearest chest and reached out toward the rope that bound it closed. But in my peripheral vision, I could see the dragon’s skull pointed toward me. The eye sockets were empty, full of dust, but the sensation of being watched was overpowering.
“Better not.” I backed away and hopped back down to the walkway, neck crawling with the feeling of unseen eyes tracking – and judging – my every move.
I went down first, then up. Every plaque gave a brief insight into the dragons and other beings who had been laid to rest there. Many were warriors with bonded riders, slaves, and their grave goods. There was enough wealth here to make my hands feel very itchy indeed, but I decided to try and find a way to investigate the dais before I risked awakening several hundred pissed off dead dragons. A number of the big pillars had toppled with time, and as I went up, I saw that several of them could be used as a walkway by someone capable of leaping thirty feet from standing. I hopped across them like river stones, barely making the last one. I ended up catching myself with Spider Climb and crawling up to the stone circle above.
The altar – it couldn’t be anything else – was sized for Solonkratsu. A ring of nine straight, black, rough-hewn hexagonal stones surrounded a huge six-sided platform at the center of the dais. The sides of it were engraved with symbols of life and death: draconic skulls, eggs, wings, and Matir’s star. I hopped up onto the edge of the platform, and nearly fell face-first over the edge of it into a black void of space. I had mistaken it for an altar with a black stone top. In fact, it was an o
pen-mouthed well.
“Well, damn.” I frowned, peering down the mouth of the well to see if anything was inside. It was smooth walled on the inside, with no clue as to its purpose. So what was I supposed to do here? Anything?
“What do you usually do at wells?” I muttered softly. Even a whisper seemed loud in this place. “Draw water? Make an offering? Sacrifices?”
Given that Matir was the god of death, the sacrifice thing wasn’t out of the question. But what could I give up? Blood? Herbs? I remembered Matir toying with a stem of King’s Sorrow in his hands when last I had talked to him, a virulently toxic plant that had stalks like veins, each one full of a bright red, sticky, bitter-smelling sap. Maybe that was a suitable offering.
Restlessly, I crossed the pillar bridge and went back to the nearest bier, searching for clues. All I found instead was temptation. There were all kinds of grave goods just sitting here, just as they had for thousands of years. There were sets of armor and weapons, rings and necklaces, piles of stacked silver ingots, intricately carved skulls of dinosaurs and cattle... all of it too obvious a trap for greedy players.
“Don’t be a pig, man.” I turned my nose up and continued on.
Half an hour later, I was starting to get worried. I found a couple more doors, some dusty empty rooms, a few ventilation shafts too small to enter. There were exactly one hundred biers. Tired and frustrated, I returned to the altar to see if there had been any change. There hadn’t.
“Fine.” I sighed. “Let’s try the obvious first.”
I pulled my glove off and lay my bare branded hand on the altar. It was cool and pleasant, smooth, like jade or soapstone. When nothing happened, I took my knife and pricked the side of my wrist until a bead of blood welled up, then ran down to drip into the hole.
Nothing happened.
“Jeez.” I stood back, and paused as a chilly gust of wind kissed my face. I waited tensely for a couple of minutes, but there was nothing except the sensation of being observed.
I took a jar with [Kings Sorrow Sap] and threw that down next. I strained my ears for the eventual crash and tinkle of broken glass, but there was nothing but velvet silence.
Fuck it. I didn’t have the carrying capacity for the treasure or enough potions to risk an undead battle royale, and I didn’t have enough time to wait here - not when the Demon was barely six days away from smashing the Prezyemi Line. Annoyed, I climbed up onto the edge of the well. If I jumped and went splat, I’d wake up in Fort Korona with the Spear and my quest items, including the Warsinger piece. Karalti and I would be free to fly back and make the corpse run. But even knowing I would respawn, it was difficult to look down into that black abyss and just… jump.
“Alright. Phew.” I shook my hands out, then spread my arms out. “Ladies and gentlemen, ghouls and gods, behold! The amazing flying Hector Park! Hold my beer on the count of three. One, two… two-and a-half… three!”
I put my hands over my head and willed myself to fall off, like jumping off a diving board – head-first, because I didn’t have to think about it any longer than I needed to.
The well swallowed me like an open mouth. The wind whipped over my body, a rushing chorus of hisses and whispers. I braced to smack into the ground, but the ground never came. There was nothing as I plummeted: a hundred feet, two hundred. After close to a minute of free-fall, I began to start worrying that the game had somehow fucked up. I barely felt like I was falling at all. Curious, I spread my limbs out like a skydiver and felt out with my hands. There were no walls to touch. There was no sensation at all, other than the sound of my own heart and an all-consuming, frigid cold nothingness. The feeling was familiar – it was like when I had teleported on the back of the Knight-Commander’s dragon back in Ilia.
The sensation of falling was replaced by a feeling of rising up, and then a flash of light as I tumbled out of a round horizontal portal and rolled to a stop on a hot stone floor. There was a low grinding sound from far below, like a waterfall of gravel. The room was plain, softly lit by violet-white mage lamps burning steadily along the walls. There was a doorway ahead. A slim woman made of shadow waited there for me. She was faceless, her form billowing off into the air like vapor.
“Hail to you Herald.” Her spectral voice was the hissing whisper of dry leaves sliding over one another, dry and sweet. “Hail to you, Paragon of the Triad.”
Chapter 38
“Uhh… Paragon of the what?” I held the Spear low and ready, the end braced against my hip. The woman’s voice sounded oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place where I knew it from.
The specter bowed her head. She was as tall and slim as a willow, with ankle-length hair that swirled around her like a cloak of flickering black fire. Without replying, she turned and vanished through the door. I blinked a couple of times, then warily followed.
The corridor beyond the chamber was a tunnel cored out of pure obsidian, lit only by the blinding white exit at the other end. I touched the wall with a bare hand, and it hummed against my skin. It was hot down here, almost oppressively so. I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure the rumbling sound was magma… and sure enough, at the end of the tunnel was a great volcanic chamber. A mana-infused crystal bridge spanned high over a seething, glowing pit of lava far below. I looked up to see beams of light streaming in through a naturally formed ceiling, the sealed caldera of the mountain where I stood. The ghostly woman waited for me on the other side of the bridge, standing in front of a massive door made of wrought gold and silver forged to look like a cherry blossom, with five petal-like segments surrounding a pentagram-shaped core. It was big enough to admit the Warsinger.
“Holyyyy shit.” I started up the bridge, barely believing what I was seeing. “It’s a motherfucking Dragon Gate.”
“No.” The shadow-woman's voice whispered through the air, ruffling over my skin. “As I once told you, the Dragon Gates are vast wells of mana, the stuff of magic. We knew them as the Great Wellsprings. The Drachan used them to travel from the last world which they ravaged to this world. Our world. The world of Archemi."
Suddenly, the voice clicked.
“Wait. I know you. You’re the Narrator, from the first cut-scene I was shown… before I even reached character creation.” The hairs on my neck and arms rose as I crossed the lava and came to a stop in front of the woman. “You showed me the Drachan. You told me about the Caul of Souls.”
“Yes,” she replied sadly. “It is I.”
“What is this place?” I looked past her to the seal, then around the rest of the chamber.
“A mirror.” The woman gestured gracefully to the soaring vault above us. “In the age of the Dragons, the Solonkratsu built great cities all around the world. By speaking the names of the stone, they could create and destroy mountains, shaping and beautifying them. The greatest of them was here, Herald. The city of Hava Sahasi."
"Hava Sahasi," I repeated softly.
"I was queen of this city. Lahati the Black and White, the Chrysanthemum Queen, beloved of Matir, Mistress of all the Words of Life and Death, Guardian of the Great Wellspring," the shade intoned. "This city was the domain of my bloodline. It spanned from the Tashkars to the Sea of Swords, from the Brontan Range to the borders of what is now Napath. Such was the scope of Hava Sahasi."
“Wait.” I drew a sharp breath. "Are you telling me that the entirety of Myszno was a city? One city?"
"Yes: a city serving ten thousand Solonkratsu, fifty thousand Tulaq, millions of Meewfolk and Aesari... a great city teeming with prey and artistry and trade. Until one day, the sky darkened, and the Great Wellspring began to disgorge horrors into our world," the shade replied. "As soon as the first Trauvin dragged itself from the Great Wellsprings, our fate was sealed. We fought, Herald. Oh, how we fought. With tooth and claw, our magic and our breath. Rival clans forged binding pacts. We birthed the Mercurions from sand and steel, breathed life into them with mana, and pitted them against the Drachan and their armies of the dead. We stole their technology, improve
d it, and turned it against them. We stole their twisted souls and bent them to the yoke, using them to power great war machines. But none of it was enough. In the end, there was only one way to defeat them. The sacrifice of our gods."
The shade flickered, blowing away on the wind. There was a deep ‘crunch’ from somewhere in the chamber, and then the door began to rumble. The petals twisted away as they drew back, the core sinking down into the stone. Beyond it was an antechamber, where another, dragon-sized door gleamed. A black and white door, half of it forged from meteoric iron, the other half from gleaming platinum. I lifted my head and walked toward them, and as I mounted the steps, the doors opened on silent hinges into… nothing. The space beyond seemed to suck the light from the air.
"The Nine made their sacrifice willingly. It was their suggestion, in fact,” The Narrator’s voice curled around my ears as I steeled myself and entered, boots ringing off hard stone. “They knew that if we did not win this battle, that we would end up like the Drachan's last conquest. Dead. Desiccated. Extinct."
The corridor ended in a third door, which opened out into great mirrored chamber the size of a small stadium. The ceiling and walls were curved but faceted, shaped like a geodesic dome, lit by a diffuse white light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. The floor was a great, smooth, featureless plane, impenetrably black and as smooth as glass. The shade was waiting for me in the center of this final chamber, her back turned, her hair dancing in an unseen wind.
"The first Dragon Gate was built over our Great Wellspring: here, in Hava Sahasi,” she continued. “Four thousand years ago, Veles, the father of the gods, climbed the grand steps and walked into his tomb with his head held high. Then the Triad came forth - Paragon, Artist, Warsinger - accompanied by the greatest of the Aesari’s maegi. They sealed Veles’ sarcophagus with their bond and that Spear you carry, and with it, they sealed the fate of my city. The world moaned as Hava Sahasi and its wellspring was pulled from the earth like a rotten tooth and lifted into the sky. Every Drachan was bound into the magic of the forming Caul, but it resulted in the city’s complete, utter destruction. Thus is the story of the raising of the first Dragon Gate, the Gate of Serene Eternity, to the airless space between Archemi and Erruku. Thus did Veles create the framework of the Caul of Souls, and ensured that no Drachan could ever reach him to destroy it."
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 114
