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The actual execution was comparably fast.
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“The corpse collectors?” Matt shuddered as he recalled a vague memory of two men clad in black, prominent hoods pulled low to cover their faces, collecting his mother's corpse.
They were freaks, sure, but they were always just there, in the background. Nobody spoke to them, nobody liked them. People died, and they would turn up shortly afterwards to collect the body. You got out of their way, and they collected the corpse. He had heard rumours, people wondering if they did anything more than just get the bodies ready for burial, but there was nothing mysterious about. They just had a different job. Admittedly, that job didn’t make them popular, but… They served an important function, and Matt had always respected that.
“Yeah,” Mia nodded at him before looking down, biting her lip. “I used to live… I worked in an orphanage. When somebody died, we would call for them. They had a building right down the street from where the orphanage was, and I used to fetch them when… They never said anything, just turned up with a stretcher and knocked on the door. We would point them towards the dead body, and… One time I tried speaking to one. I wanted them to wait, since–Anyway. That’s not important. The collector just pulled that weird cowl further down and kept going, shutting the door behind them. I thought they were creeps.” She took a deep breath before she continued. “But helpful creeps. They were efficient. Always quick to arrive, and always respectful of the dead. They’d take the dead person away and let us know where they were buried.”
“I remember,” Vic whispered, his voice just a thin slip of air. “My father… They tried to keep me away, but I snuck away. I was watching the door from the treeline. They went into the house, and then…”
Mia nodded.
“Yes, that’s how it went. They would always send us away. Ask for privacy. We were grateful, we could focus on helping the living. One time there were… A lot of dead. I’d fallen asleep from exhaustion, and I remember…” She swallowed. “I remember waking up, and when I opened my eyes there were two of them in the room. One of them holding… I thought he had just stolen some jewellery. He had a knife, and then he reached down, and his hand came back up… The sunlight caught it. Until now, I just thought he stole something. But… I remember now. I don’t know why I never considered it before. The dagger was red.”
Mia looked back up at the crystal in Vic’s hand.
“Is that it?” Thor’s voice was a dangerously low rumble as he said what they were all thinking. “Do we all leave those crystals behind when we die? Magic crystals, with essence. Are they…” Thor stuttered, not able to say the words.
Matt nodded at him. “I think they are. They must need the essence for something. Gather them up, collect them, for the nobles.”
“Fuck them,” Vic growled as he paced. “That shit needs to stop. We need to do something, now! We can’t just ignore—”
“We are not,” Mia said, putting her hand on his arm to calm him down. “We are so fucking definitely not going to ignore it.” There was a dangerous glint in her eyes, and Thor stood to one side, his face stony and eyes staring out at nothing as his fists clenched and opened and clenched again.
“What do we do then?” Vic asked. “When? Are we just going to fuck around in these caves for days? Weeks? Months? How long do we spend to get ready? How many people are dying while we are traipsing around in here? How many bodies are they going to cut open for harvesting crystals before we take the fight to them?”
Mia gave Vic’s arm a squeeze, but took a step back when she saw the fire in his eyes. Vic took a sharp step back and looked down, pacing around the fire. The flickering flames threw his shadow high up on the cave wall behind. “I…” He looked back at them, and Matt saw his anger deflate. “I know we can’t attack today, or tomorrow. But fuck. We have to strike back. Just…” He pointed to the guandao Matt was holding out to one side. “Look at that weapon. Send Matt in and keep him protected, and nobody can touch him. Thor, you can make the earth boil around them, and freeze anyone who tries to get close.” Vic caught his breath and continued a moment later, his voice calmer. “I know. We can’t do it now. Not today. But we can’t wait much longer. I can’t wait much longer.” With a trembling breath, he sat down, sliding down with his back against the cave wall, and looked up at them. “I can’t.”
Mia went over to him and sat down beside him. She said something so softly that Matt couldn’t hear, and as Vic nodded back at her, she rested her head briefly on his shoulder. Vic’s body shuddered. Thor’s face had lost some of the hardness, but his shoulders were squared and there was steel in his eyes as he answered softly, “Neither can I.”
When Matt looked over at Pete, who was still distractedly running his hand over his thigh, he was surprised to find the large man almost calm. He was standing still and looking out into the darkness, a contemplative expression on his face.
After a long moment of quiet, Pete looked back at them. “We will save them,” he said. “We can do this. But first, we need to have a solid, stable, safe base. Then we’ll strike them. Hard. I think I know how. How we can take the fight to them.”
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Vic looked at Pete with a hopeful expression. “Really? When? How?”
“Maybe sooner than you think. But it depends… On what else we find. We need to get stronger first. We need an army.” Pete breathed in before looking at Matt. “Ready?”
“Yes, let’s move–” Matt started, when he became aware of a strange smell mixing with the scent of burned meat, realising the smell had been tickling his memories for several minutes. Different observations clicked together in his mind, and he had a sudden thought.
“Erh… guys,” he began, bending down. “Hold on. We are standing in dirt, not on slabs of stone or a cave floor.” He scooped up some of the dirt in his hand and brought it up to his face. Breathing in deeply, he squeezed some between his fingers. “And it’s not dirt. It’s soil. Loamy, damp, fertile compost…”
His voice trailed off as he let his fingers trace through the loose soil. It had perfect consistency and smelled earthy and full of life. He grabbed a handful and squeezed it, noting how it held its shape. “It has moisture,” he whispered to himself while slowly getting to his feet, his thoughts racing as he turned in a slow circle. Soil didn’t just appear in a cave. Sand and gravel, sure, but compost, fertilised soil, came from plants breaking down. And there was moisture here. If the soil was wet, it stood to reason that…
“Everyone, quiet.” He said and stood still, focusing on his senses. It did not take him long to hear it. There, not far away, a familiar sound. He grabbed the torch from Pete and followed the sound, walking along the wall until he found what he was looking for.
The smooth wall of the cavern came to an abrupt stop where someone had carved a space into the side. Reminiscent of the kitchen alcove in the common room, the space extended like a room out from the side of the cavern. Matt walked inside with a big grin spreading on his face as he looked around; seeing the stone trough hewed out of the cave wall, glittering with water. A thin stream poured out of the wall, feeding the container which was overflowing onto the floor, saturating the soil with water. The other side of the small alcove held a wide workbench with a rack of familiar tools hanging above. Sickles, spades, hoes and buckets.
Matt’s mind kept working. This place has soil, farming tools and water. All it needs now is–
“Wait,” he called out to Mia, who was standing nearby with a torch. “Walk back towards the fireplace and shield the light.”
As he waited for her to move away, Matt extinguished his torch and closed his eyes to force them to adapt to the dark. With his back to the fireplace flickering somewhere in the darkness, he opened his eyes and looked upwards.
Oh…
High above, thin tendrils of yellow light played across the ceiling of the cavern. A dance of faint, glowing threads created an almost invisible mesh that covered the entire dome.
I should have seen that before. Now, where is the plate?
He looked around, and soon saw a dense strip of symbols tracing a line down from the ceiling, ending in–There!
Goosebumps prickled across his skin, and he felt the hair rise on his head as he looked at the almost invisible metal plate that was embedded into the cave wall. As his hand touched it, the threads of energy inside him reached out to complete the connection.
In a rush of energy, a wave of intense light broke across the ceiling, illuminating the cavern.
“What the…” Pete began as a sudden and harsh radiance suddenly flooded through the cave. A dense network of brightly lit strings of power criss-crossed the ceiling, bathing them in a light that was uncannily reminiscent of sunlight.
The five of them turned around slowly, taking it all in. Dark, loamy soil in tidy rows stretched towards the centre of the underground cavern. To Matt, it looked like they had been prepared for sowing just yesterday. Towards the far wall, several rectangular raised beds were arranged in a grid, with tall supports ready for climbing vines. The field was easily the size of a small farmstead, and Matt was already running calculations in his head to estimate how many people the area could feed.
Matt bent down to inspect the strangely thin, perforated metal pipes that ran down between the rows, all connecting with a wider pipe that ran along the stone wall and extended to the alcove where they were standing.
Matt smiled as he took it all in. Everything they needed was here. Soil, light and water. Now all they needed were seeds.
Mia smiled over at Matt. “So, farm-boy, how does it look?”
“Perfect,” he grinned back and gestured. “The light, the soil… The irrigation system! I’ve seen nothing like it. At our farm, we used hollowed-out logs to move water from our cisterns down to the fields, but nothing like this. Look here,” he said and pointed to the plugged hole in the water trough's side. “You see that pipe over there? I’m sure it connects to this plug, and then water will flow through the network of pipes.”
He really wanted to experiment with some crops, and had a hunch that the relatively dense network of dark, green threads he could now see filling the cavern would do wonders for the growing conditions. “We should run back to the kitchen and get a bag of buckwheat. Even if it's dried, it’ll sprout easily enough. I want to see how quickly we get seedlings, and how they grow here. If we get them in the–”
Thor smiled back at him. “We absolutely will do that later tonight. With what we have found up here so far, I want to see what else is waiting for us. Let’s keep exploring.”
“I guess,” Matt said, lifting his fingers to his nose and drawing in the soil's scent.
“Ok, let’s get moving then,” Mia said a moment later, and pointed to the white corpses still laying on the ground not far away. “Weapons out, and be ready for anything.”
She received nods back from everyone, who hefted their weapons as they turned back and retraced their way through the tunnel and back into the main corridor. They hadn’t travelled far when the corridor ended in a set of large double doors.
Without the need to speak, Pete and Matt moved up to stand abreast in front of the door as the others spread out behind them. Pete looked over at Matt, who nodded back, before he pushed the door open.
A collective gasp went through the group as they stepped through the door.
They had arrived in Sanctum Citadel.