Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4)
Page 45
“This…this was just all here?” Constantine asked in a wondrous tone as we all inspected the items, our eyes naturally fixating on the rings, the first of their kind that we’d ever seen. “In the nest?”
“This was just all in one pile,” Cassius answered, the man using the opportunity to wave an axe head and what looked like part ceremonial knife in his hand towards a scattered collection of bones nearby. “Berwyn and I spotted the axe head by chance as we were walking through the place, then found everything else as we picked through the mound afterward. We’re thinking that it might have once belonged to an orc warband, or maybe even the arakissi from the fens if they’ve ranged this far.”
“Given what we know, that would make sense to assume,” I said slowly, still trying to shake off the surprise and shock at all the treasures that Cassius had unexpectedly shown us, my eyes turning towards the room itself. “But if you found that all in one pile…”
“Then there could be more, yeah,” the man finished with a nod. “A lot more. But like I said, Berwyn and I lucked out in finding this, and we’re going to need a lot more help—magical help most likely—if we’re going to search this entire place in good time.”
“Oh, I’m already one step ahead of you there,” Halcyon replied, his eyes flickering with azure energy as he started to scan the room intently, turning as he spoke. “And I can definitely confirm that there are more. Many more. I can see their magic from here.”
“Well, that’ll definitely speed up the search then!” Cassius said with relief, going on to pause for a second as Halcyon wandered over to a nearby bone pile and extricated what looked like another dagger. “Anyway, before we get lost into sorting through that…there is the other thing that I wanted to show you guys. Then after that, we can figure out what we’re going to do here.”
Intrigued by the fact that whatever Cassius was referring to was enough to pull the man away from the massive loot haul that we were standing in, none of us hesitated to follow the man as he motioned to us once more. Heading deeper into the nest, the eight of us carefully climbed through the bed of bones that the behir had made for itself and through the partially blocked doorway beyond.
“I can only begin to guess at what might have happened here ages ago,” Cassius said as we walked, the doorway leading into another hallway. “But whatever did happen, it caused someone to try and pull down everything around them when they left. There’s evidence of a lot of intentional damage here, along with what looks like a haphazard job of burying a set of stairs coming up ahead of us by collapsing the ceiling above it.”
“Then they wanted to hide whatever was beyond it?” Caius asked as the aforementioned stairs appeared as we rounded a corner, the way down partially blocked by a few large chunks of debris.
“I don’t know if hide is the word I’d use. More like seal away,” Cassius replied with a shake of his head, motioning for us to descend ahead of him. “In either case though, it was a rush job, because all it took us were a couple of pickax swings to break up some of the bigger debris in the way and squeeze our way through.”
“You really think this place was sealed away? Why would any—oh.” I started to ask, only to have my question die in my throat as we reached the bottom of the stairs, entering into a square twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot room lit by two bright lanterns placed on each side of the room.
The room turned out to be completely covered with blood-red sigils and runes carved into what had to be every inch of the floors, walls, and ceiling.
“Ah,” I heard a voice call out in greeting, causing me to turn my head until I saw Cassius’s second in command, Berwyn, standing right beside what was unmistakably an altar of some sort. “You’re all finally here.”
He paused to loosely indicate the room around us before continuing. “So we found something interesting.”
“U-um, y-you could say that again,” I stuttered, staring blankly at Berwyn and turning my gaze back towards the room, then once more back at the man. “W-what the hell is this place?”
“That is something that we were actually hoping to ask you guys,” Cassius answered from behind me, his voice echoing uncomfortably through the suddenly claustrophobic chamber. “Because we sure have no idea, at least not beyond the obvious.”
“The obvious being that it looks like an evil god’s prayer room, right?” I heard Constantine ask from somewhere behind me as I stared blankly at all the sigils on the wall. “‘Cause that’s sure as hell what it looks like for me.”
“It does have that atmosphere to it, doesn’t it?” Berwyn said in a calm tone as we all took in the room. “You can imagine our surprise when we first found it.”
“Oh, I don’t need to imagine,” I replied dryly, feeling a slight sense of unease come over me as I continued to inspect the room. This was the first time that we’d seen anything like this, let alone the altar of what was more than likely an evil deity. “Um, Halcyon, Caius? Any ideas of what we might be looking at here?”
“Uh, not right off the top of my head,” Halcyon said, somehow sounding even more excited now than he did before we’d entered the room. “But if it makes you all feel better, there’s no magic in the room that I can see.”
“I can confirm that too,” Caius chimed in, not quite matching the mage’s enthusiasm but still sounding all too excited for my ears. “And actually, as for all those runes and scripts on the wall, I can tell you right now that a good chunk, if not all of them, are written in Infernal.”
“Wait, you can read these things?” Theia asked as we all turned to look at the white-haired dark elf in surprise. “How?”
“Warlock, remember?” Caius replied, pointing to himself with a finger. “And it isn’t so much ‘read’ as it is sorta recognize them at a glance.”
“Well, then that’s great!” Constantine exclaimed jubilantly, trying and failing to mask the nervous tone in his voice. “Can you ‘sorta recognize’ if any of them are going to melt my flesh and bones if I turn right the fuck around and leave this place?”
“Uh, well, without any magic in the room, we’re fine,” Caius replied with a shrug. “Plus, Cassius just left and came back in here, right?”
“Ha, that’s right, he did,” the rogue said with evident relief. “Anyway though, since this is clearly a mage and magic user thing, I’m going to nope out of here and go back outside…give you all some space to work in. Anyone else with me?”
“You know, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea,” Kilgore agreed from the doorway, the elf glancing around hesitantly as he spoke. “We can…uh, look around elsewhere while you guys sort this place out.”
“I think that is a wonderful idea,” Theia echoed, glancing over towards me and giving me a wary look. “Promise that you boys will shout really loud if something goes horribly wrong?”
“With our dying breaths,” I replied, giving the lizardwoman a coy grin before she, Constantine, and Kilgore returned upstairs amid a chorus of snorts, leaving us to try and start making sense of the strange room.
Chatting quickly to come up with a plan, we decided that our efforts would best be spent splitting up, with Caius and Halcyon inspecting the symbols that covered the entirety of the chamber while I focused my attention on the altar itself. Pushing down any sense of nervousness that I felt at the task, I forced myself to approach the roughly cut five-foot-long slab of stone with Amaranth beside me.
I said to the cat as I looked over the altar’s dust-covered surface, my eyes fixating on a large dark stain that stretched the entire length of it. But as I inspected it in more detail up close, I noticed that there was a heavy impact mark beneath the dust in the exact center of it, whatever having caused it creating a large enou
gh crack that it effectively split the altar in two.
“Looks like something happened here,” I commented, glancing over towards Berwyn who had thus far remained silent, giving me a chance to look around without hovering. “This thing looks like someone tried smashing it to pieces. A really long time ago, too, from the looks of it.”
“And succeeded to some extent,” Berwyn agreed before motioning over towards the room with a nod of his head. “Yet none of the inscriptions on the wall are damaged. Isn’t that strange?”
“Actually, no, not really,” Caius called out from nearby, the smaller space allowing our voices to carry easily. “Looking at all of these symbols and runes, it looks like they relied on the altar for power. Without it, they’re just a bunch of creepy scribbles that do nothing.”
“And I don’t suppose you’ve managed to figure out what the creepy scribbles did when they had power to draw on?” I asked, turning to look back at the warlock.
“Specifically?” Caius asked before shaking his head. “No. But with that being said, I’m seeing a lot of summoning runes, ones used for calling forth devils. Like a lot, a lot of summoning runes, more than they’d ever need.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, fully turning to look towards the warlock.
“Well, it’s hard to articulate exactly since I’m not really familiar with summonings,” Caius said, turning to indicate a collection of symbols drawn into the nearby wall. “But I recognize these inscriptions here, which if powered, should allow for the summoning of a minor devil of some sort. But if you look at this inscription and compare it to the others in the room, you’ll see it repeated constantly over and over again.”
“So then, each set of inscriptions would summon its own devil,” I stated, glancing around the room and noticing that there were easily dozens of examples of the symbols in question.
“Maybe?” Caius replied, giving me an uncertain shrug. “At this point, those inscriptions are about the only ones that I understand. The rest of them…just don’t make any sense to me. They could easily have some sort of other effect when combined with them all.”
“Either that or they used this place to summon a hell of a lot of devils at once,” Halcyon said, speaking up from his side of the room. “Pun somewhat intended.”
“Could be,” Caius agreed with a short chuckle. “This is pretty obviously a ritual chamber of some sort. So it’s quite possible that whoever built this place, built it with the intention of using it to summon devils in bulk. Or even open a portal to a different plane and just let them walk through. All it would take is a steady stream of power.”
“Which from the looks of it they got from sacrificing poor helpless souls on this thing,” I said, casting a foreboding glance towards the shattered altar.
“Not necessarily,” the warlock replied, shaking his head. “I mean, sure, that is a way to do it. But there are other, much, much less bloody ways of getting power. The altar itself is just a focus for the magical energy to build before it’s sent along to the runes here.”
“The finer points of magic aside,” Cassius said from his position near the chamber’s entrance, “what I’m more concerned about is why anyone with a lick of sense in them would want to summon that many devils in the first place.”
“Well, I can give you one big guess,” Halcyon replied in a grave tone. “But none of you are going to like it.”
“Oh, I think we’re all thinking of the same thing, Hal,” I said, breathing out a deep sigh as I considered the implications of our find and what it meant for the region. “We all know that the Irovians controlled this area during their war with the Nafarr and, of course, as we can see, they were responsible for building this place. But it looks like this ruin, in particular, might have belonged to the Ascendancy, or at least the faction that eventually became the Ascendancy after the civil war that caused the original dynasty to fall apart. All the feeds that we’ve watched so far point their ruling class to being very deep into the occult and similar dark magic.”
“Oh, shit, that’s right!” Cassius cursed, raising a knuckle to his forehead as he spoke. “I’d forgotten about that. How long ago was that again? Their civil war, that is.”
“A little less than five hundred and fifty some odd years ago, give or take,” I confirmed, recalling the rough time frame from my conversations with the Nafarrian security system in the ruins at Crater Lake. “But beyond that, we don’t know when exactly it first started. My guess would be after they destroyed the Nafarrian city at Crater Lake.”
“Hrm, that’s just great, then,” Cassius grunted. “And now that both they and the Nafarr are gone, we get to trip over all the potentially deadly things they left behind. Speaking of which, I don’t suppose either of you can tell if someone has used this place to summon their own horde of demons recently, can you? I suddenly feel like I need some extra peace of mind so I’m not jumping at shadows.”
“Devils,” Caius corrected. “This room is set up specifically to summon devils, which are something entirely different from demons. But to answer your question, though, no. I’m pretty sure that no one has summoned anything here in a very, very long time.”
“Demons, devils, whatever,” Cassius said, shaking his head dismissively. “It’s all the same to me. But how do you know exactly that this place hasn’t been used recently?”
“For one? The lack of any residual magic,” Caius replied confidently. “And the fact that I can’t sense any dark aura or energy in this place. Summoning devils or demons isn’t exactly like conjuring an elemental or something. It leaves a tangible stain on an area, one that takes a long time to fade away. It’s been so long since this room has been used that it has.”
“Hrm,” the Hallowguarde guild leader grunted, pausing to rub his chin and glance around the chamber before speaking again. “Fair enough. But where does that leave us with this place specifically? Given what you guys have just said, I’m not sure if I’m exactly comfortable with leaving this room intact, and we don’t exactly have the time or ability to mind the place and keep the orcs or even the Dread Crew from finding it.”
“No, me either,” I replied, glancing around the chamber slowly before coming to a decision. “I think our best bet is to make a copy of the inscriptions in this place for our own reference and research, then see if we can’t finish the job of whoever tried to destroy this place ages ago.”
“I agree,” Caius stated. “If nothing else, it’ll make sure that no one can come back here once we’re gone and potentially repair or learn something from the place.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Cassius said with a relieved nod. “Hell, I’ll do it myself if I have to.”
“Yeah,” Halcyon added in agreement. “Normally, I’d be against destroying anything magical or ancient, but given what we’re dealing with here, I’m more than happy to make an exception.”
“All right, then,” I said, happy to hear that everyone was on the same page. “How long do you think it’ll take you guys to take notes on this place? We have a bit of a schedule to keep if we can help it, not to mention get some rest while we’re here, too.”
“Not too long, I don’t think,” Halcyon answered. “A lot of the inscriptions here repeat themselves, so once we can get the basic notation down, we can make notes on the patterns we see and replicate it from there. Worst case from there, we also can re-watch our feeds for any gaps in detail.”
“All right, good,” I replied, taking a step away from the altar and towards the entrance back upstairs. “I’ll leave that to you two, then. I’ll go get started on sorting through all the bones in the nest and see what else I can find.”
“That works for us,” Caius replied, the warlock’s earlier exhaustion having vanished in the face of something new to explore. “We’ll call you if we run into any problems in the meantime.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, giving the pair a farewell wave as the four of us moved to exit the ritual chamber and make our way back up to the bo
neyard that was the behir’s nest. “Now let’s see what other treasures we have waiting for us in this place.”
Chapter 35
Sunday, April 21st, 2047 – 12:55 a.m.
“All right, everyone,” I called out a little tiredly, trying to stifle a yawn as I spoke. “One last camp check. Has everyone got everything they came with?”
“Everything except a good night’s sleep,” Constantine grumbled sourly. “And I don’t care what you guys say. If whatever creature that’s making that screeching sound attacks us once we get moving, I’m just gonna let it eat me and be done with it.”
“And let you respawn back in Aldford where you wouldn’t be suffering with us?” I asked, glancing over towards the rogue and catching him in the middle of a yawn while simultaneously rubbing his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re an evil man, Lyr,” Constantine said with a sigh as he finished his stretch and glared at me with a tired expression. “Just pure evil.”
“I try,” I replied, turning my attention towards the room that we’d camped out in for the last few hours, doing my own scan of the area to make sure that we hadn’t accidentally left something behind.
“You guys both know that the critters making that noise are those lizard-bats flying outside, right?” Kilgore queried, the white-haired scout looking irritatingly fresh as if our trek through the Hartwyld and lack of sleep thus far hadn’t even affected him. “They’re barely larger than your fist and definitely can’t eat you.”