Under a Stone Sky

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. But as with any new aliti site, they flocked to it now in their thousands. Wings and spiny tails shaking with the wind, making the brushy slopes of the Urosai Vale look like a wheatfield in the dawn breeze at her back.

With nothing but the rustling of paper and linen, she wound her way from the camp at the valley’s mouth. Each dragon held a shape and form entirely its own, winged, serpentine, bipedal and lizard-like. The vanagrim had been happy to allow them, so long as they did not approach the far end of the Vale. The ranks of fluttering figures thinned the further she cast her eyes, with only a few standing proud and solitary beyond the mass. Their patrons risked much encroaching so close to her work – the vanagrim had cut more than a few down in the dead of the midspring nights.

Service to a god was not without sacrifice.

Movement caught her eye, dark and earthy against the panoply of colour. Stragglers from the night’s pilgrimage. Short, and wrapped head to toe in dark robes, the dwaeren were hastily clearing the ground around their effigy. A slender biped, twice as tall as Those That Dwell Below, cloaked in dark leather and seemingly wearing a wide brimmed hat – a nod to the brightness of the world above ground where it would reside, perhaps?

All Peoples of Aeodh cast gods in their own image, laden with mortal burdens, in spite of their divinity. She smiled as one scooped up a handful of gritty soil and bent low to spit upon it.

Much like Ector had done as a boy, making muddy ranks of warriors for battles on the bank of the Eiser.

She squeezed that memory back into its box as the pale little hands of the dwaeren worked each scoop into a tiny figurine and placed them in a protective ring around their dragon. They fled through the riotous scene, soon hidden from her.

The sun was cresting the eastern wall and she resolved to dally no longer.

As the colour bled from her surroundings, and she left the dragons behind, the path became steeper and littered with scree. Here and there the fold of a cloak belied a vanagrim at rest. Not sleeping, but meditating – tendrils of awareness snaked through every rock and eddy in the air, taut like harpstrings she no doubt plucked as she made her way clumsily up the slope to where Barrow waited to escort her within the rockface. She had little need of guarding in a tomb unmet by living breath for three millennia, but Ameter had insisted. And there was no resisting Ameter – the Seat, the City, or the Empire.

It had great interest in what lay beyond the boundary of its power in both space and time. What came before could come again, and what came from without could be fomented within. Celendith, and her order of historians, geographers, and rangers, were bound to seek, to characterise and report the state of Aeodh as it was in the past and as it was beyond the reaches of Ameter’s influence. She had given much in this pursuit.

A misstep dislodged a rock and sent a wave of gravel pouring down the slope, revealing in its wake a skull, cradled tightly in the roots of the brushy bush it lay beneath. This valley, and the land it lay in, was littered with the bones of aliti. They had died in such numbers here that the bones unearthed by wind, rain, or shovel, no longer warranted noting.

She scrambled the last few feet on all fours to where Barrow met her without so much as a nod, turning quickly beneath the mountain. Celendith followed half a yard behind. Stumbling, blind in the dark with naught but a hand on the back of the vanagrim to guide her. Soon, the soft curselight of the bedrock began to light the way. Ribbons of soft golden light that shot through the sandstone – remnants of the magic that brought the Peoples to Aeodh, on the Night of the Flight. It grew stronger until it was clear enough to read by in the antechamber of the tomb, stacked high with the pallets of tablets painstakingly reformed from the shards that had littered much of the bare stone floor – once the remnants of the chamber’s builders had been swept aside. Nearly every tablet was whole again with only a few were left among the detritus. But these would be of great importance – the first to be ritually smashed. Releasing the power of their words in the breaking.

She set about her work as the sound of hammers reverberated from the bowels of the cave as the vanagrim toiled to open the great tomb that lay deeper inside the complex. Barrow set herself on a rock nearby and watched her charge’s fingers fervently sort and shape the clay fragments back into their original form, rebuilding their meaning from the aggressive, recessed script. The written language of the aliti was complex beyond even that of Ameter, the depth and angle of each recessed letter gave meaning and nuance to the word it formed on the surface. A lifetime of reading such fragments gave her the gift to discern the author by handwriting alone, as distinctive as a voice or a scent.

Mostly poetry. Grandiose, full of dire warning, and exalting the wisdom and strength of the aliti who built and sealed this place.

She sat back on her haunches when a shard, smaller and filled with far denser script slipped free of the pile. On it was a single word.

Trespasser, or perhaps wanderer.

The words on either side would give it context if she could find them. Before she knew it, she was gently sifting through the mess of clay, looking for the author. The more she found, the more she revealed about their emotional state and the intent of the tablet’s shattering. This was not poetry, but proclamation. Of victory and prohibition. This seemed to her the last act in a centuries-long struggle. Closure for the aliti over some foreign force.

Below her breath she began to murmur the fragmented proclamation aloud, and in the common tongue of Ameter.

“… those who step between… stride no further in the name of… Homet…”

At the name, Barrow leapt to her feet. Celendith ignored the distraction or did not notice.

“… what lies beyond is bought in blood…”

The hammer strokes from the deep beneath the antechamber were mixed now with the cracking of stone falling upon stone.

“… she is bound here… let the keepers of this tomb… be time and unknowing…”

“Celendith…”

“… Homet begs you… leave now… and open not the door beyond…”

Barrow fled from the antechamber, down the stairway to where her companions had been breaking through the final stone door. She had never seen a vanagrim so rattled and the wiry warrior’s panic spread like a fire through Celendith’s core.

She barrelled down the gallery after her escort, as the curselight turned from gold to blood red. Noticing, only now, that the warriors carved in relief on the sandstone were facing in, and not out. Their spears lowered to face whatever they had trapped below.

“STOP!” She screamed. She had not heard a sound since the falling of rubble. Perhaps they had stopped.

But why?

She reached the bottom of the flight and slammed headlong into the three vanagrim. Cast in a sickly red light, but well enough.

None faced the portal to the tomb, as though a wind tore from it that they couldn’t countenance. Feeling no such reluctance, and oddly ashamed of her outburst, she settled her robes and crossed the threshold.

A sarcophagus of great size and weight lay head to toe within the ornate tomb. A black stone casket as tall as she and five times longer. Curselight spread from it through the floors, radiating out in a pulsing, shuddering wave. A light that she had never known not to be steady.

She swept her gaze over the rest of the room.

Context. Give me context.

Bodies. Piled in their hundreds, heaped four deep at the walls. Desiccated, and fused, contorted horribly. The bones she could see were sagging, like a candle left in the sun, and the dried, leathery flesh appeared mottled and blistered somehow. Each corpse carried with them a bronze hammer and chisel, placed roughly in their hands by their compatriots. Some measure of dignity but done in haste.

The dull red of this twisted world beneath the Vale strained at her skull.

Turning to the black slab in the center of the room she saw it was inscribed along its middle, the seam of the sarcophagus keeping the words intact. To the aliti, whatever was written here would be made real if the thing were to be opened. The words would become truth.

These aliti had given their lives to carve that ward. A thousand hands and a thousand voices. The depth of the engraving, the sharpness in the letterform, it all spoke to a collective desperation. Great fear and flickering hope. Whatever was sealed in here was done so at great cost.

She traced the first few letters writ larger than her hand. A tingling spread from wherever her skin touched the cool, slick stone, and a metallic taste filled her mouth.

She kept on as the tingle grew into a burn.

A curse, repeated. Blunt and unadorned by aliti standards.

She dragged her robes across her lips, only dimly aware of the blood that spilled from them.

Her Kin cannot know of Aeodh. She is the one who Followed. Break the seal of stone and part the veil to Deodh.

No aliti would dare break that sealing ward.

Over the pounding of the blood in her head, came a pained grunting.

Barrow was not ten feet from her, heaving with all her might, shoulder straining at the stone.

What was she doing?! Could she not see this was madness?!

Celendith tried to call out, but merely coughed black blood into the air.

Reaching, she stumbled and fell onto her side.

The pulsing curselight was frantic now.

With a shriek of stone grinding on stone, Barrow’s weight shifted and Celendith’s eyes rolled up the black edifice of the sarcophagus.

The words unmade. The seal broken.