Crowned in Black: Chapter 24

The only known entry to the Tomb of the Mastersmith was through the Fol Alugut, the city's primary sewer line. Access to the sewer was through a pair of heavy iron doors at the city's treatment plant, where steam and mana-powered machines processed waste into tanning fluid and fertilizer for Racsa's crops. Last time I'd been here, the plant had been switched off. Now it was bustling with workers, many of whom paid us no mind as we headed for the maintenance tunnel to the sewers themselves. They were used to archeological teams from the university coming down here to poke around.

It felt a bit strange to be leading a pack of scholars and engineers into this place. Karhad had been occupied for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, with a history I'd barely even begun to scratch. There'd probably been Meewfolk here first, then dragons, then Aesari and then humans, and each one had added a layer of their civilization over the ones that had come before. Naturally, we humans had built a sewer line, so we could shit all over everything that had come before. Good ol’ Homo Sapiens.

The cache of priceless treasures hidden in the Fol Alugut was roughly two thousand years old, lain undisturbed right under the noses of the Khorsian cathedral built right over it. The university had apparently known about the tomb, but whatever those scholars had learned was now gone, erased when the Demon had slaughtered almost all of the professors and other teachers and researchers in Myszno.

A narrow shaft led into an antechamber, where the empty biers of dead dragons - long gone, their bones and grave goods looted generations ago - curved into smaller chambers with human graves. Most of those were empty, too, or covered with glass by archeologists to preserve the corpses within. But there was one branch of the tomb complex that was perfectly preserved and almost completely undisturbed: a narrow, unassuming stone corridor sealed with a solid silver metal door emblazoned with the symbols of the Nine.

With Nemeth, Kythias, Gar, Karalti and Mehkhet hanging behind, I confidently placed my branded hand on the entry to the vault. Matir's nine-pointed star symbol blazed with dark light, followed by the other eight symbols. There was a clunk and a rumble from deep within the earth.

"Hail, Herald," a voice hissed from the air. "We have awaited your return."

"Uhh... you have?" The door greeting message was different from last time. But there was no reply, save for the door rolling back smoothly into the wall, revealing the burial chamber behind.

"Khors’ breath… this is…. This is absolutely incredible." Nemeth hobbled into the room beyond, eyes like saucers as he took in the sights. The vault smelled of old incense and ancient paper and papyrus, bathed in warm, golden light cast by magelights that had dimmed over time, but not yet faded. The lights hung like stars around a great golden astrolabe that took up the center of the room. Kythias crept in behind him, mouth open with wonder. He set his backpack on the ground.

Gar whistled appreciatively, drawn magnetically to the aurum diorama of Erruku and Archemi. He strode over and reached out to gently spin it, eyebrows arching as he realized the same thing Karalti and I had the first time we'd been down here: that the larger of the two planets was Erruku, our moon, and the smaller one orbiting it was Archemi.

"Pretty neat, huh?" Karalti asked the room. She gestured to the shelves of books and scrolls. "There has to be something about how Withering Rose was made in here."

"There has to be. They didn't seal this vault like a bank for nothing," I replied. "The fact the door only admits someone who's been handpicked by the Nine tells me there's secrets about all sorts of shit in this tomb."

"Well... I assure you this astrolabe alone confirms something that has been speculated by sages and people of science for generations." Nemeth's voice was hoarse with emotion as he drew up beside Gar, marveling at the model of the planet and its moon. As the crank turned, they smoothly orbited each other: or more accurately, Archemi orbited the greater spinning mass of Erruku, which itself was marked with multiple continents.

"That Archemi is Erruku's moon, and Erruku is an actual planet?" I asked him, pulling up on the other side. Behind us, Kythias and Karalti began unpacking the tools the sages needed to handle the delicate papers and other artifacts in the tomb.

"Not just that. This model is evidence that the Meewfolk histories of our world are correct." Nemeth put on a soft cotton glove, then reverently caught and examined the model of Archemi. "You may have gathered that, while I am a lore master of many subjects, the history of the Meewfolk is of special interest to me. To explain why, you will need to bear with me a moment."

"Sure. We've got some time." I looked to Gar, who shrugged.

Nemeth drew himself up a little straighter, and cleared his throat. "Historically, roughly one percent of all Meewfolk are born hairless, and these hairless individuals are considered to be inherently fated individuals. They are raised in temples as both lore keepers and living sacrifices, with the laws and history of their people tattooed onto their skin in a sophisticated, compressed cipher. These Avatars, as they are called, also serve as the living anchors for the Shield of Ancestors, the magical shield which guards their homeland, and which is widely understood to be the prototype of our Caul of Souls."

"It is known." Mehkhet agreed with him, drifting up to join the three of us.

"The Avatars inevitably die young from a slow Stranging process, and are skinned after their deaths, their hides preserved in great volumes of history. These tomes, the Mingsuu o'poe Khwām Tāy, roughly translated as ‘Books of the Ones Before Us’, have in one form or another been passed down since the dawn of civilization on this planet," Nemeth continued, his eyes dark and slightly misty. "Fifteen thousand years of history, Your Highness, preserved through the sacrifice of countless generations of Avatars."

I thought back to Samayan, the Avatar we had met in Meewhome, and frowned. "Wow."

"The Books have been passed down to us in the fragments of copies made of copies." Nemeth turned the Archemi globe to show the three continents: the two still above water, and the one that was now gone. "In the oldest of those fragments, the first record of dragons appearing in Archemi's skies is roughly ten thousand years ago. By all accounts, they arrived via great portals with a small number of humans - the humans who are your ancestors, my Prince, and the ancestors of the Masterhealer and her people. The Meewfolk knew both species as the 'People of the Moon', as they claimed to be from Erruku and claimed to have fled a great calamity there."

"I thought it was the Drachan who invaded this place through portals," Gar remarked. He twitched his fingers toward the pouch where he kept his smokes, but then backed off and grasped his belt instead. “That’s the story I saw when I first entered the damn game, anyway.”

"They did. But long before them, the Solonkratsu almost certainly descended to this world with their servants and companions," Nemeth affirmed, gesturing to Erruku. “And the continents they described, and the Meewfolk recorded, are depicted here. ‘Before the moon turned gold, masking her face from the People, it was faced with great nations’.”

"Huh." I crossed my arms and frowned in thought, still gazing at the sunken continent. When I'd first arrived in Archemi and had been going through character creation, I'd picked the Tuun because their description noted they had a special relationship with dragons. Apparently… that was because both the Tuun and the Solonkratsu were technically aliens. "Guess that answers some questions I had."

Nemeth paused to rub his chin. "Perhaps. Now, this borders on heresy, and is one of the many reasons the Meewfolk are not well-loved in Vlachia... but the Books also record that the Nine were, in fact, not gods. They were simply the leaders of the dragons who first arrived from Erruku."

"Wait... really?" Karalti's head lifted.

"There have been countless miracles performed by the Nine over their tenure here, so it is honestly unknown what, in fact, they actually 'are', Your Holiness," Nemeth said. "But as far as the Meewfolk are concerned, there are only three gods, and the Nine were, as they described it, 'dragons who were meshed with metal and magic to become the immortal leaders of their people’. Of course, all the churches deny this with the greatest vehemency, but the fact remains: in the record of the oldest extant civilisations of this planet, there was no mention of dragons until multiple records cite their sudden arrival from ‘somewhere else’. Incidentally, the Meewfolk also credit the dragons and their companions with the arrival of great and terrible technologies and magic. There are records which we speculate refer to the building of the dragon gates in the same period... which unfortunately also coincides with the fall of the grand Meewfolk Empires. All of this occurred several thousand years before the Drachan."

Karalti glanced at me worriedly. “My people didn’t bring the Drachan here… did they?”

"No idea, but I doubt it." My brows furrowed. "So the Gates were here before the Drachan invaded? The Nine being actual dragons who were deified makes... a lot of sense. Though I'm wondering about the 'metal and magic' part of that description."

"As have many generations of sages. Carefully." Nemeth snorted. "And on saying that, you heard no whisper of heresy from me."

I tore my eyes from the smaller globe, and looked up to Erruku. It was many times more massive than Archemi, at least three times the size. There were nine visible continents on the globe. "I wonder... does that mean there's still civilizations on Erruku?"

"Doubtful," Gar grunted. "Sounds like they screwed the pooch on their own world, and had to come here for some reason."

"The Drachan, maybe." I recalled the intro movie I'd seen when I'd first joined the game.

"Perhaps. Or perhaps they simply Stranged their world with fell magic," Mehkhet remarked. "Much of the Shalid region is desert for that reason."

"Well, that's all interesting as hell... but speaking of magic and technology and shit, we need to start searching this place for information on Withering Rose, heartstones, and whatever the heartstones are made from." I stepped back, looking around. "The burial chamber has all kinds of murals and writing on the walls. How about we split into two teams? Me, Nemeth and Gar tackle the burial chamber, and Kythias, Mehkhet and Karalti stay out here and start looking through papers."

"I'll stay back with these idiots," Gar replied, pointing at Karalti and Kythias. Both of them scowled.

"As you please. I myself should be very interested to see this burial chamber," Nemeth mused. "Lead the way, Your Highness."

"Hector is fine. Or Voivode, if you can't help yourself." I resisted the urge to hunch my shoulders in. I'd only just started getting used to the 'Your Grace' stuff... 'Your Highness' still felt like too much bullshit for me to be comfortable with it.

I led the way through the treasures of the outer chamber to the burial chamber itself. It contained more funerary goods, along with a sarcophagus that looked to be made of pure gold. The walls and ceiling were painted and engraved, as rich as any Egyptian tomb, and murals told the story of the man who was buried here. He was tall, with a red braided beard that fell to his waist, dressed in the blue robes and tool belts that priests of Khors, god of the forge and crafting, still wore to this day. In some scenes, he praised the draconic god in front of what looked like a massive volcanic forge; in others, he oversaw teams of humans constructing parts of the Warsinger that was his magnum opus. Directly ahead of the door, almost looming over the coffin, was a painting of Withering Rose in her full glory.

"Incredible..." Nemeth drifted over to the walls, his eyes scanning the elegant right-to-left script that had been carved into the stone.

"Any idea what it says?" I asked, peering over his shoulder. "All we were able to figure out is that this place had to have been constructed during the time of the Fifth Triad."

"Oh, yes... this is a variation of Old Agaric, the language of the humans who were once enslaved by the Drachan." Nemeth pulled a pair of glasses from a soft pouch, and set them on his nose. "Let me see... Yava pariyosuru bya'ho... hmmm..."

I stood by, waiting restlessly as Nemeth continued to read the scripts. When it came to decoding ancient texts, I was about as useful as tits on a bull. After a couple minutes of feeling awkwardly unhelpful, I broke off from him to poke around the burial chamber, looking for useful items or pictures. Most of the documents were out in the other, larger room, but as I moved around the ornate sarcophagus, I noticed that it had pictures and script, too. Each of the four sides had a different image, but the one that interested me the most featured what had to be the last Triad. Sachara, tall and powerful, dressed in the raiment of a queen. The beautiful Mercurion twins, Zarya and Phaedra, holding hands and winding around one another. Grigori Skyr, depicted as a brawny, clean-shaven man in armor, and above and curled around them, the towering presence of Lirenian, the Diamond Queen. She had been slimmer, taller, and more gracile than Karalti, almost delicate in her features and physique. Instead of Karalti's backswept crest of seven horns, she'd had two long, curved, smooth horns that arced back from her narrow wedge-shaped muzzle. In this image, she had her mouth open, head thrown up. Rays radiated from her jaws, like the rays of a sun. In front of her, a familiar-shape hung suspended in the air, surrounded by more rays and spirals.

"Uhh... Nemeth? Mastersage?" I called to him. "You might want to come here and see if you can read this."

"Hmm?" Nemeth paused, looking back. "Did you find something?"

"Sure did."

The old man didn't argue. He bustled over, leaning on my shoulder as he crouched. Groaning softly, he peered at the text.

"Oh... oh my goodness," he exclaimed, after a few minutes. "I daresay this is what you've been looking for."

"Why? What does it say?" I jittered in place, wondering if I was interpreting it right. "Did... Lirenian use her Queensong to create a heartstone?"

"Not quite," Nemeth replied, his voice absent-mindedly soft. "Go out and wait in the antechamber for me. I will explain once I have finished decrypting this text - and its words of power."