image [https://i.imgur.com/CcPkn07.jpg]

Everyone in the camp busied themselves with organizing supplies, chopping trees, or hauling wood.

Murdina tended to her sheep and the torodons, who contently grazed in the pasture, oblivious to the busy humanoids around them.

Rocky and a few helpers prepared a meal.

Charitybelle, Greenie, and Ally huddled around sheets of vellum.

Vellums served as low-tech chalkboards, perfect for sketches or temporary lists. They washed clean with a wet rag whenever a designer needed to redo a sketch.

On another vellum, they moved around small rocks and pieces of wood—each bit representing furniture or part of a building. The city planners acknowledged Fabulosa and me with curt nods, too engrossed in their project to be social.

Fabulosa watched me with expectant eyes.

Realizing what she wanted, I kicked off the argument. “What? You want to hit the worm’s lair already? Don’t you think we ought to scout to keep everyone safe?”

“We found nothing yesterday. And if we’re combing the area, we ought to know what’s below ground, as well as above.”

Her logic wore me down. She considered the ward worm my kill and wouldn’t explore its treasure without me. Yula promised to scout the area, too, and I doubted the two of us could find anything the orc couldn’t. I surrendered. “Okay, let’s go to the worm tunnels.”

Fabulosa wiggled and raised her fists in celebration.

“I’ll ask C-Belle if she wants to come.”

I interrupted Charitybelle’s planning session with an invitation to join us for an underground excursion beneath Worm Meadow. In actuality—I asked for her permission.

Charitybelle waved her hands in a “go” gesture without turning her attention from her vellum. Either she gave a tacit blessing or wasn’t paying attention—I decided it represented the former and withdrew before she changed her mind.

Fabulosa and I headed north into the woods for the second time today. We blazed a fresh trail since covering new ground exposed more details on our maps. Exploration also increased our chance of discovering points of interest, but we found nothing noteworthy on the way to Worm Meadow.

Upon reaching the vast clearing, we ventured to its center—a sensible beginning.

Fabulosa jumped into a trench. “Light ‘em up!”

I cast Presence and Heavenly Favor and followed her.

Fabulosa wore a glow stone around her neck to give herself another light source if something happened to my spell. The passage’s moist air smelled of earth and made for a pleasant walk until it curved down to a steep angle. We pushed further until we risked sliding and the smooth dirt walls gave us nothing to tie a rope around, so we backtracked.

The next tunnel ramped upward into a chimney. Unless we wanted to climb, we’d reached another dead end.

I expected a maze of intersecting tunnels from all the topsoil breaches, but the worm didn’t retrace its movement underground. We returned to the surface, crawled out, and marked the explored trench with a bundle of grass.

We tried another horizontal trench that dipped downward on both ends, each too precipitous to follow. Dropping glow stones wouldn’t do us any good without sharper tunnel turns. The gradual steepness prevented us from reaching the edge to peer down to see how far the rocks dropped.

“Do you have any unspent powers?”

Fabulosa shook her head.

“Do you have Featherfall?”

“That’s a one-way ticket.”

“Maybe Featherfall unlocks levitation or flying.”

Fabulosa shook her head. “I’d hold off on that. My gaming friends and I have a saying—If you fly, you die. Being airborne makes you an easy target. I’m putting my points into melee abilities.”

We returned to the surface again and marked the tunnel with another bundle of grass. The third and fourth tunnels also looked too steep.

The fifth had steep sections, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle. An intersection with another tunnel encouraged me to go further. We followed the path until it passed through a six-way intersection. The interface map didn’t track underground spaces, so I dropped glow stones like breadcrumbs. As we descended, the chill of the earth abated, and the soil grew more compact.

It got warmer around a hundred feet down, feeling like we ventured outside our league, but the event log hadn’t informed us anything about crossing into a high-level zone.

“We’re getting deep now.” Fabulosa picked up her pace, showing no intention of going back. The three intertwining tunnels turned to six over the next ten minutes, and we rounded a corner into an open space.

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The chamber we entered wasn’t a natural rock cavern but the interior of a seashell the size of a house. The room’s off-white pearl surface swept around in smooth, opalescent curves as if a giant ice cream scoop had gouged out its interior. Spherical depressions pockmarked the organic curves like moon craters.

Loose earth spilled across the floor from five lateral openings around the chamber—each big enough for the ward worm to pass through. The strange proportions made no sense. The room couldn’t shelter the worm’s entire length, but the creature passed through it like a mini-subway station. Why would this monster visit this space?

By moving around the space, the illumination from Presence changed the shadows and highlights. The parallax of moving shadows gave dimension to the room’s wavy topography. The majesty of it made me enough to drop my guard. Yet nothing fell from the ceiling or attacked from the dirt. Only our shadows moved.

Why would anyone bury a beautiful room with five giant openings?

Black, sweeping lines crossed the chamber’s opalescent surface. Some stretched around the room in broad arcs from floor to ceiling, while others formed ovoid rings. The lines grouped and divided hundreds and hundreds of shiny gold and black dots. The metallic lines and dots flushed with the white surface that shimmered like a seashell.

We stood in awe before Fabulosa broke the silence. “Do you have any idea what this place is?”

I shook my head, studying the patterns of the lines and dots. The five evenly spaced openings made the cavern look like a hub that connected to nothing but dingy tunnels.

“Maybe something to do with ley lines?” I hadn’t based my speculation on substance. In all my research, I’d never seen a reference to supernatural power lines crisscrossing Miros.

Fabulosa followed my gaze. “Criminy! Are those what I think they are? Silver and gold coins?”

The room’s abstract seashell features made me doubt the likelihood that the dots were coins. I tried pressing one, but it wasn’t a button. I brushed the loose soil with my toe until I exposed the floor. Excavating more, I uncovered a strip of dark metal and several more metallic dots—all flush with the surface.

Casting Detect Magic set everything in the room glowing except the dirt.

Mineral Communion opened a channel of communication with the nearby minerals. The coin-sized circles were gold and tarnished silver, while the geometric lines used lead. Oddly enough, the room’s pearl substance wasn’t mineral, so perhaps resin or an organic compound formed its features.

Mineral Communion revealed these dots to be thick cylinders, not flat coins. I chipped away at the resin around the metal using a sharp knife. After a minute of work, a cylinder plopped into my palm. The shape wasn’t perfectly circular. The oblong cylinder felt as heavy as a pound.

I communed with the gold cylinder, which projected mental images of an aquatic species. This room once lay underwater—explaining the organic surfaces.

The creatures that built the room looked like elongated lobsters, except they had a pair of armored tentacles instead of two big front claws. They bore a row of horizontal fins where their legs should have been, and undulating them propelled the creatures gracefully through the water. Their gills looked like open books whose pages shuddered, perhaps generating underwater sounds. When their gills vibrated, the metal morphed into cylindrical shapes. If the cylinders powered a magic system, it wasn’t recognizable.

The black and tarnished cylinders once shone like silver. Vignettes showed the green worm swimming through the arches, although its size wasn’t as big as the creature I slew yesterday. Were these images of a young ward worm?

I checked my map interface for a more specific location name, but the unhelpful moniker “Below Worm Meadow” remained unchanged once we ventured underground. It seemed the game felt no need to explain the purpose of this place.

While handing the gold cylinder to Fabulosa, I told her about my Mineral Communion visions.

Fabulosa laughed as she felt the weight of it in her hand. “You’re telling me no one buried this place? It once stood on the surface?”

“Not exactly. Someone built it underwater. But the water drained away, and erosion buried it. Maybe from the mountains.”

“Oh. So you’re talking old—as in, really old.”

I counted the dots. A third of the dots were gold. I estimated around 1,000 dots. If each cylinder’s thickness measured at ten coins, I estimated over 3,000 gold pieces’ worth of metal surrounded us.

Fabulosa rubbed her hands together. “We are so going shopping for magic items.”

“Let’s get a silver one too.” I plunged the dagger between the metal and resin. The resin crumbled as I dug out the silver object, prying it into my hand. Its thickness matched the gold cylinder.

“Do you have a dagger as sharp as this one?”

Fabulosa shook her head. She tried her short sword but couldn’t make it work, ultimately smashing its hilt against the edge of the metal dot. The resin holding it wasn’t tough—it cracked and crumbled with each swing, breaking enough away that she could pry out another gold cylinder. She turned to me. “Does this make you feel a little weird? I kinda feel like a barbarian defacing a cathedral.”

I understood her sentiment and nodded.

She spun with upraised arms. “I mean, would you look at this room? It’s gorgeous. And I feel like we’re somehow spoiling it. Even if there’s no one around to see it, it feels a mite underhanded.”

“Is it worse than quarrying stone from Hawkhurst Rock?”

“But someone made this.”

I pushed aside Mr. Fergus’s archeological lectures about looting versus preserving history. “But they’re long dead. Besides, we can do something with this gold. No castle would be as unique or exotic as this place, but they’re beautiful. Let’s try not to wreck it. If we become rich, we can come back and restore it with copper and nickel and maybe spackle it back together. Or we’ll use the medieval equivalent of spackle. Who knows? Maybe it’ll become Hawkhurst’s first tourist attraction.”

“There are a lot of beautiful magic items we could buy with this, too. It’s not like the worm took care of this place. It’s filthy.” Fabulosa gestured to the dirt covering the floor.

“Come on. Let’s get a few more of these before we leave.”

Fabulosa tossed the cylinder into her inventory. “I’ll give you one thing—this is better than the goblin mine. Wouldn’t you say?” She bent over and pantomimed the act of bumping her head.

After pulling out a few more cylinders, we heard a popping sound near the room’s center. A stalactite-shaped cone in the ceiling cracked—even though neither of us stood near the thing.

“I think we broke it.” Neither of us laughed at the joke. I half expected our lights to dim or a deep shutting-down sound effect, but nothing changed. The cracked cone didn’t fall to the floor.

I cast Detect Magic, but the cylinders remained the only things glowing. I replaced a cylinder in its hole, but the room’s magic didn’t return.

“The room is no longer glowing with magic.” A guilty feeling returned, and we averted eye contact.

It reminded me of breaking my aunt’s favorite lamp. My aunt claimed it to be her favorite, although she never used it. She kept stuff like that in her house—antique chairs that no one could sit on, tables too precious to eat on or use for risk of scratching. She kept all kinds of junk to remind everyone that the house and furnishings belonged to her. The lamp served only territorial purposes.

Without knowing this room’s function, the familiar guilt returned.

I sighed. “It doesn’t look like we can undo whatever we did. I’ll keep prying out cylinders unless you think we shouldn’t.”

Fabulosa held her tongue and dug at another gold dot.

We resumed a steady pace of removing the free gold from the walls. No more cracking sounds interrupted our work, and our mood lightened.