Chapter 1054: Sacrificial Ground
“Your Majesty, an urgent report from the Kingdom of Dawn.”
The guard set a thick sheepskin bag on the mahogany desk and stepped back.
Roland was already on his feet. He had been bent over a biplane schematic for most of the morning, and something about the weight and bulk of that package — not a letter, not a dispatch, a bag — made him set the drawings aside without thinking. “Open it.”
It had been nearly two months since the exploration team left Neverwinter. The last word had come when they were still crossing Graycastle’s border. When Roland confirmed the source wasn’t on home soil, he had felt the particular kind of unease that came from watching a supply line stretch beyond comfortable length — the farther the team went, the harder it would be to move ore, control access, manage problems at a distance.
But the package. Why was it so large? A mission report could be written in two pages. What could possibly fill a sheepskin bag?
“It’s full of paper,” Nightingale murmured near his ear.
He glanced sideways. “Paper? Your ability evolved to see through sacks?”
“Sadly, no.” A lazy note in her voice. “I put my hand in when the guard walked past.”
Right. Afternoon tea deliveries. Roland thought with sudden suspicion of the portions that had seemed slightly reduced lately. The chef’s tray. Evelyn’s Chaos Drinks. Is she sampling everything that enters the room?
He stored the thought.
“Your Majesty, mostly paper. Covered with ink.” The guard peered into the bag.
“Spread it on the floor. And look for a sealed letter.”
“There’s one underneath, with a wax seal.”
“Bring that here.”
Roland settled back into his chair and broke the seal. The letter was dated roughly ten days ago — and was, in itself, unexpectedly long. A dozen pages at minimum. Sean had many qualities, but verbosity was not typically among them. The sheer length of the report probably explained why he had bypassed the animal messenger system and paid for a courier instead.
He read the first line.
Your Majesty, Miss Azima has found the source you were searching for — located at the northeastern junction of the Kingdom of Dawn, near the Kingdom of Wolfheart. The locals call it Cage Mountain.
Roland felt the tension in his shoulders ease slightly.
Not wasted. The source existed. The Kingdom of Dawn meant the Quinn family could manage the mining operation, which was expensive but manageable — far better than trying to operate in Wolfheart or Everwinter.
He read on.
But the source was not in a cave. It is located inside a very old ruin. What is more incredible: the ruin was not built by the underground civilization, nor does it have any connection to the Taquila survivors. We initially suspected a link to the undersea monsters, but the witches’ investigation proved otherwise.
Your Majesty — this ruin was left behind by a group previously unknown to us.
Roland’s eyes stopped moving for a moment.
An unknown group. Entirely new. Active in what was now Dawn-Wolfheart borderland.
The Witch Union had maintained territories and investigations for centuries. If alien activity of this scale had been present, it was inconceivable they would have found no trace of it. Which could only mean one thing: this civilization predated the underground civilization. It was older than everything they knew.
And whatever they were — they had been interested in uranium ore.
He turned the page.
They left a large number of murals at the bottom of the ruin. The figures depicted are consistent with none of the known races — not demons, not demonic beasts, not the undersea civilization. After examining the contents, Lady Rother and I believe the building functioned as a place of execution.
The structure is built directly on the ore vein. They shaped uranium into bricks for the walls and floor. Miss Azima identified the same material throughout the ruins, even in the murals themselves. At the bottom: iron cages and bones. Many bones. This is also reflected in the paintings.
They appear to have imprisoned large numbers of enemies here — not only other races, but their own kind. The method of imprisonment seems to have been the ore itself. The murals suggest this was an act of devotion. A form of sacrifice.
I have copied as many murals as possible. The scrolls in the package represent only a portion — perhaps a quarter of the full wall. Given the limited number of protective suits and the scale of the paintings, progress is slow. I estimate another month or two before copies of the remainder can be sent.
Finally, I am deeply concerned for Lady Rother, who entered the ruin without protective clothing. The local people who discovered this place a century ago suffered from a strange wasting illness. Many died slowly. Given what we have found inside, I fear the danger you warned me about may still be present.
Roland set the letter down.
“Something wrong?” Nightingale asked from the mist.
“Not the Taquila witches — they can replace their bodies. But Sean and Azima.” He picked up the letter again. “They should not have stayed inside as long as they apparently have.”
He thought through it with the methodical attention he gave to mechanical tolerances.
Unrefined uranium ore, even in bulk — the radioactive decay was primarily alpha particles. Alpha particles couldn’t penetrate skin. In isolation, they were manageable. But the ruins had existed for hundreds of millions of years. Over that time, some fraction of the uranium would have decayed through a chain of daughter elements, and one of those elements was radon: a gas, colorless, odorless, with a half-life of 3.8 days. Radon was inhaled. Once inside the lungs it did its damage from within.
The protective suits he had prepared for this possibility were sealed — fully enclosed leather, filtered gas masks fitted with activated charcoal. They could block radon and most of the other particulate hazards for the duration of a careful survey. But there were limits. Extended exposure, days of it — the suits lost effectiveness. The masks’ filters had a ceiling. And copying murals took time.
Days. Not hours.
“They need to leave.” He was already reaching for paper and ink. “Send for Honey. This goes out today.”
He wrote quickly: leave the ruins immediately; withdraw all personnel who entered without full protective gear; the copying operation halts until I send further instructions and additional equipment.
At the bottom he added: Do not touch anything taken out of the ruin by prior visitors. Quarantine anything that left the site. The curse is real — it has a physical explanation, and it obeys physical limits. Those limits can be exceeded.
He folded the letter, sealed it, and set it on the corner of the desk.
Then he stood, crossed to where the soldiers had spread the mural copies across the floor, and crouched to look.
The ink was thick, labored, applied by hands copying under difficult conditions. The images distorted as the translator worked around smudges and faded sections. But the general subjects were legible enough: a large figure at the center of each scroll, rendered with detail and care, surrounded by much smaller figures in every corner. The expressions on the smaller figures — even in rough ink copy — were unmistakable. Pain. Terror. Absolute defeat.
The universal grammar of all historical documents. We are always the protagonist.
The central figures were bizarre. Some like matchsticks — limbs that seemed interchangeable with trunk and head, no clear front or back. Others like colonies of cells, all organs relocated to what might have been a brain. None of them corresponded to any race in any record he had read.
Most scrolls showed the same war in different stages. The matchstick figures flying on inflated bodies, using wind to maneuver. Striking from elevation and behind simultaneously. Walls crumbling. Cities burning. The smaller figures routed and fleeing toward the sea, pursued, killed, their bodies piling at the water’s edge.
Roland unrolled another scroll.
His gaze stopped on a painting and stayed there.
“What?” Nightingale was beside him at once.
“Have you seen this landscape before?” He pointed. “Not the figures. The shapes of the land.”
She studied it. “It’s messier than the others. More ink.”
“I know.” He straightened. “Bring me the maps of the Southernmost Region. The detailed ones — the ones Lightning and Maggie made of the Endless Cape.”
She retrieved them quickly, setting the stack in front of him and pressing dried fish into his other hand. He ate without tasting it, spreading maps on the floor beside the scroll.
He found the partial aerial survey of the Endless Cape.
He placed it next to the mural.
The silence in the room was complete.
The outlines matched.
Not in detail — the tile work and the cities were gone, the specific geography was centuries further eroded — but the boundary line between landmass and sea, the shape of the cape as seen from above: eighty percent correspondence or better.
A coincidence.
Except Roland’s engineering training had a reliable rule about coincidences at eighty percent similarity. They were not coincidences.
He was still processing this when he unrolled the penultimate scroll.
And then everything in him went cold.
The image showed a high platform. A dozen of the matchstick figures gathered in a circle. At the center of the circle, floating at the height of the platform: an irregular polyhedron covered in appendages that writhed and branched like snakes, like tentacles, like the branches of something that had grown in absolute darkness.
Sean had described the image. He hadn’t known what it meant.
Roland knew.
He had seen it before.
Every Taquila survivor who had touched one had called it the same thing: a relic of the gods.