Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1123: Underground Coffins

Rex was already at the cave entrance, waiting. He held up two fingers, pointed at his own head, then at the cave mouth. Ready?

Simbady signaled back: fine. Rex nodded and turned into the dark.

Three days of training had compressed itself into instinct: monitor the hoses, match your movements to the slack, never let a loop form. The twin air lines trailed above him through the water like a lifeline kite — which was exactly what they were. If either hose fouled on rock or pinched shut, the consequence would announce itself within minutes. You did not make sudden turns. You did not hurry.

He had learned these things carefully. He applied them now.

Throwing himself forward, he entered the cave mouth.

The sea sound vanished. What replaced it: the hiss of air cycling through the valves, and the measured cadence of his own pulse. Ahead, Rex’s shape moved slowly in the dark, barely distinguishable from the surrounding rock — a slightly blacker shape against black.

The cave angled downward, then bottomed out, then began to rise.

Seven minutes, and he saw light — not the sunlit blue he’d left behind, but a different quality of light, pale and diffuse, reflecting off a surface that was quiet rather than churning. He pulled himself out of the water and onto wet rock.

A cave. Large enough that the lamp Rex had already lit couldn’t find the walls. The dome above caught the faint glow of the water below and held it, casting everything in a cool, shifting blue — the light of something far away, filtered and changed by its passage through rock and sea.

Simbady was about to remove his helmet when Rex stopped him.

Rex produced a waterproofed oil lamp from his pack and held it lit for a long moment, watching the flame. Then he took off his own helmet. “All right. The air moves.”

Simbady pulled off his helmet and felt it immediately — a chill current across his face, faint but unmistakable. “Wind. There are other exits.”

“Which means there’s a much better chance of finding something worthwhile down here.” Rex’s voice was doing something careful with its excitement, the way you hold a match in a wind. “We’re lucky, Simbady. Very lucky.”

Simbady was thinking about the rock above them. Twenty meters of water overhead, and the cave was this size — the stone forming the dome was thin. He’d been underground enough times in the desert to know that thin stone and large cavities could end their relationship without warning. He would report this to Graycastle when they surfaced, regardless of what Rex’s salvage rights were.

“Wind comes from that direction,” Rex said, raising the lamp. “Let’s look.”

Simbady drew his knife and followed.

The cave changed as they moved deeper.

The wet rock gave way to soil. Moss thinned and grass replaced it — actual grass, soft underfoot, impossibly green in the lamplight. Simbady found himself looking around for the sky. There was only stone and the faint blue glow.

“Unbelievable,” Rex said. “I thought we’d only find mushrooms and mold.”

“We should go back,” Simbady said.

He stopped.

He hadn’t finished the sentence because the word had stopped in his throat. Next to his left boot: a flower. Small. Pastel purple petals, delicate leaves, growing alone in a crack in the soil.

“What’s wrong? What are you looking at?” Rex turned. “Oh — a flower!”

“The Flower of Providence,” Simbady said.

His voice came out low without his intending it to.

“Is it valuable?”

“No. They used to be everywhere.” He crouched and looked at it without touching it. “But I know the legend. It only grows near the coast. Like a purple ribbon along the shoreline — it was said to be the most beautiful thing in the entire Southernmost Region.”

“There were flowers in the desert?” Rex stared.

“It wasn’t a desert. Not always.” Simbady straightened. “Before the departure of Three Gods Emissary, this land had trees, meadows, rivers. The desert came after. The Flower of Providence was always coastal — it never established itself on the oases, never moved inland. By all reasoning, it should be extinct by now.”

Rex’s voice went softer. “Perhaps the desertification never reached this cave. The sea protected it.”

Simbady didn’t answer. He was looking at the soil, at the way the flowers were beginning to appear more frequently ahead of them, the purple thickening in the lamplight. This did not feel like a coincidence. It felt like a pattern, and he did not yet know what the pattern described.

He stepped forward — and something snapped under his foot.

A crack. Then a burst of light from below, flooding upward through the ground around him, sudden and pale and cold, as if he’d stepped on a lantern buried in the earth.

“What happened?” Rex whipped around.

“I stepped on something. It feels like a plank.” Simbady held very still. “Could be a trap.”

Rex came forward and crouched, pushing the grass and flowers aside with his hands. Then he laughed — a short, bright sound that bounced off the cave walls and came back changed. He laughed again, louder, and couldn’t stop.

“What?” Simbady’s neck was doing something uncomfortable. “Oi — tell me!”

“Treasures!” Rex stood up, eyes bright. “Look at this!”

Beneath the layer of soil and grass: a stone tablet, flat and rectangular, densely patterned. The light came through it from below, from within — it had no source Simbady could identify, just a soft, steady glow that made the stone look translucent, like jade lit from inside. The surface had dented slightly where Simbady stood. He lifted his foot, and the dent smoothed itself back to flat. The light faded. As though the pressure of his weight had briefly activated something sleeping.

Rex was already stomping on sections of the ground nearby. The light erupted and faded with each step.

“If I can send this to the King of Graycastle, the honorary title is mine,” he said. “I’m certain of it.”

“It’s too large,” Simbady said. The portion visible above ground already suggested a slab bigger than both of them combined. “How would we move it?”

“We’ll find a way. Maybe there are other exits — ” Rex broke off. “There’s another one here.”

There was. And another. As they moved forward, the tablets multiplied — first a few, scattered, then more, until the grass was gone and the tablets had replaced it entirely, edge to edge, a floor of glowing pale stone stretching as far as the lamp reached. Light erupted under every step. The whole cave was waking to the pressure of their feet.

They stopped trying to count.

The tablets were not all intact. Some were broken. Some slashed in half. Most were rectangular. They lay in no particular arrangement — tilted, stacked, leaning against each other — a random, chaotic accumulation that grew as they walked until it rose before them as a wall.

Rex stopped with the lamp held high.

The wall was not a wall. It was a pile — tablets on tablets on tablets, some broken, some whole, stacked to a height that vanished into the dark above. The glow from the ones they’d stepped on illuminated the lower reaches, light falling over the irregular shapes in ways that made them look like —

Simbady stared at the shapes.

The shapes were wrong. Not random. Rectangular. Consistent. Arranged in a way that was not architecture and not refuse and not storage.

The shapes were the shapes of things that contained other things. Things the size of a person.

Thousands of them.

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