Menacing, pained calls throbbed from the magma all around the submerged metal dome.
My body had frozen at the first of the deep yet fragile sounds, as if the unnatural entities might overlook me, but it quickly became clear that I’d have no such luck.
Huge swells of mana burned all about me, hotter than the molten rock, yet tortured with twisted, aching darkness.
I had to get out before-
With a fresh scream a spear of white-hot liquid rent the metal, the dome shrieking as it punctured and tore.
The floor too was pierced by the supernaturally focused, laser-like beam, leaving a deep gash with a glassy coating like blood, the wound just a few paces from the crack through which I’d entered.
In its wake boiling magma exploded into the chamber, the flood vomiting thick frothing fluid, rich in metals and gases as well as silica.
Leaping back from the sudden, lethal deluge I hissed in pain as I felt the spray sear my arm with a half dozen fresh welts.
I quickly forgot about the minor injury as I saw the damage the bubble itself had taken. The ceiling had burst open near the center, and the crack leading back down to the rift and the expanse below, my only entrance or exit, was already submerged in lava.
In an instant liquid ores had piled up a foot thick atop and around the opening, with more pouring in, spreading out over the floor, so hot it flowed more like water than lava.
Where the molten mixture touched cooler rock or metal it would cool and start to set, but there was far too much entering all at once for it to ever solidify the way previous leaks in the dome seemed to have done.
But I didn’t have to worry about being drowned in magma today. The monsters were attacking again.
The creatures seemed to blend into their surroundings, the whole lake of molten minerals alive with their awful energies, a storm of geothermal fury and deathly malice. Although I sensed another spiking concentration of mana, I couldn’t tell its source or guess where the blow would fall.
My feet gripped the stone under me, crushing it to powder as I kicked off, dodging blindly.
Baying monsters and screaming metal formed a discordant chorus as a second pillar of impossibly superheated material split the side of the dome as if it were wet tissue.
Choosing to hurl myself forward I was lucky for once, dodging the absurd attack as it cut a horizontal line like a blade, cleaving left to right at shoulder-height through the spot I’d stood a moment before.
It was as though someone had taken a laser cutter to both sides of the chamber, but these blows carried incredible physical force too, fragments of shrapnel hurled out like flechettes by the sheer power of the eruptions.
There were more coming.
If only I could have fought them in person – whatever they were, I had confidence that my strength and power could overwhelm the monsters – but I couldn’t even tell where they were.
In my immobilized jaw Echo felt both gigantic and impossibly tiny and fragile, the need to protect them stifling any chance to incant spells.
I had no idea what magic could possibly work on foes hidden in the depths of a lake of magma anyway. Even if I could incant some song to summon up the same devastating forces Aellope had once demonstrated, I would only be destroying my own shelter too.
Just defending against the attacks seemed all but impossible when they could carve through rock and metal with such ease. Ice magic might hold back the magma or freeze the spears for a few moments, but the sheer heat and volume present would overpower any such spell I knew.
Powerful as I was, I was helpless in the face of an absolute terrain advantage.
Dodging more shots I started to get a feel for the patterns of the supernatural energy, surging and focusing, intensifying until it was released like a controlled detonation… but while I could pick out the general location of the shooters and evade the attacks, there was no way to counterattack, and no out-speeding rising magma.
Forcing myself to think, I broadened my attention to take in the whole situation. There had to be some solution, some trick to overturn my disadvantage.
Yet as much as I focused on the little details of my situation, I found there wasn’t much left to analyze.
Two thirds of the cavity’s floor was already covered by the rains, the dry patches I could dodge to between magmafalls rapidly shrinking to nothing.
Escape now would mean diving into the middle of the bubbling pool, swimming to the bottom and then struggling through the setting mass that had plugged the crevasse. All under fire.
Another shot burst through my remaining island of safety, the fastest yet, compressed to a blade just an inch thick.
Mind distracted and body slowed by the untenable heat, I felt the strike brush over my thigh, the air rippling like flames from the sheer heat and concentrated essence.
It was only as the glow of the white-hot lance faded that I saw the black and red score it had burrowed along the side of my leg, pulsating with intense pain; a shallow but bloody furrow still sizzling, cloudy glass clinging to my flesh my like blood.
As the next beam flashed out at me I staggered away from the strike, but my injured leg slowed me still more. The shot bore into my gut, slamming me down into the rock and bending me double with the impact as well as the anguish!
Convulsing on the end of the spear, I almost swallowed Echo in the shocking pain, as I felt the fluid tip slicing and stabbing through my insides with blades of glowing liquid obsidian.
Splattering against my flesh, the rest of the white-hot liquid glass attack cascaded down to drench and scald my legs and forearms, the leather suit I wore disintegrating wherever the flood so much as neared it, rivulets of molten glass destroying skin everywhere it touched.
The attacks were too fast for me to keep dodging and the room was already near flooded.
There was no way out, and no-one to come help me.
Liquid magma washed over my feet, and I screamed.
That scream became a roar as I squatted down into the searing morass, fighting back the pain and the urge to recoil, forcing every last mote of essence and shred of strength into my wounded legs.
The heat was burning me alive, but even so it couldn’t destroy me so easily as that. My muscles still worked under my burning skin, my flesh holding together even in the face of thousands of degrees of liquid metal and stone. For the moment at least.
I could only gamble that I’d last a few moments more too. There was only one way to save Echo – or myself.
If I could live through it.
Burying my eyes and mouth in my elbow might at least save my sight and my friend.
With a crack of thunder I kicked off blindly.
I never even felt the impact of the ceiling as it tore apart. All I felt was burning, heat greater than I could ever have imagined, as I shot like a bullet into the magma above!
Plowing through layers of liquid blindly, for a moment it seemed I might make it through on momentum alone, but all too quickly the dense material closed upon me.
Liquid agony flooded into my body, pushing up against my skin.
It forced its way into every corner of me, no exposed inch of flesh spared the incinerating hell, but worst of all was the agony as it penetrated my ears, liquids boiling inside my head, setting the world spinning as it attacked even my sense of direction.
Against this threat too I was powerless to defend.
It seemed the depths of the Underworld and all which dwelt there were united in utter rejection, moving with a single purpose to destroy me, the foolish interloper disturbing their long isolation.
Blind and disorientated as I was, I kept fighting, even as I felt magma pierce and corrode me, tearing fingers of liquid metal and rock clawing at my flesh and boring into my head.
My body’s endurance amazed even me, tortured muscles kicking my abused legs, my free arm grasping handfuls of the atrocious fluid as I started to propel myself again.
Every movement set me spinning, or so it seemed, and I could only estimate what might be up or down, but the pocket of solid safety had felt large enough that I ought to still hit it. Or so I hoped. If not, even this chamber of magma must have some end, some uppermost extent – if only I could survive long enough to reach it.
Swimming through dense, heavy magma was orders of magnitude harder than swimming through water, yet somehow I moved several times quicker, the resistance of the ruinous flood that was eating me alive also speeding my escape.
I felt patches of still hotter liquid as I swam – the obsidian spears of my enemies.
The monsters had been confused and thrown off by my absurd tactic, but they were on me once more.
Initially glancing blows grew increasingly direct, blades cutting into me from all directions, flowing glass tongues lashing and ripping at my flesh.
Fighting back within the magma lake was impossible. Instead I pushed myself harder, kicking ceaselessly against the morass that sought my obliteration.
Lightheaded from the excruciating heat and the torment of the magma penetrating the wounds growing all over my body, I was starting to think I must have missed my target shelter entirely.
Then I slammed headlong into something gigantic and impenetrable, pouring with mana and bizarrely cold.
At the shock I almost opened my mouth, but while I averted that disaster, I knew at once, despite my disorientated anguish, that this was it.
The monsters had overtaken me.
I beat my legs once more, putting everything I had into escaping, shooting myself in what I could only hope was the right direction, up towards a hoped-for surface.
Another huge shape slammed into me, then a third, even as more beams of glass carved into my back and legs.
Each time I thought I’d escaped I crashed into more still, as I tumbled and fought my way past the attackers.
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It felt as though I’d been in the magma for hours, all feeling save pain and exhaustion long since burned away, but the former was still enough to reveal to me my doom; with a final boom, felt rather than heard, I hit a barrier larger than any before. One I couldn’t find my way past.
Everything above me was solid, like the armor plates of a colossal dragon, no matter where I sought to bypass it.
My body was crumbling all over from the environmental assault and my escape was cut off.
But I wouldn’t simply let myself be slaughtered.
I wasn’t giving up and rolling over for them. If I was to die there I would make certain that my killers would regret ever meeting me.
The punch I threw carried the strength of desperation, despite my injuries and exhaustion, mind and body striking with furious energy against the terrible place and the ill fate which brought me there, as much as against my foes.
I was shocked to feel my enemy shatter from the punch, my fist penetrating through multiple feet of solid matter, more like metal or bedrock than predatory horror of the depths….
The interior felt like ice.
With a final kick of my legs I forced myself up, burrowing out of the magma and into the refuge of one of the islands of solidity for which I’d been making.
In panic and disorientation I had mistaken solid cavities in the magma for pursuers.
Overhead more metal blocked my way, but I forced my free hand into the surface, protesting, trembling fingers grabbing and tearing at it, pounding my shoulder blindly at the barrier until it gave way, coming away in one big, solid piece, more like manhole than a fracturing layer of ore.
What came next was stranger still, a flood of something more like vapor than magma, painfully cold, but evaporating away wherever it met my superheated flesh.
Finally I broke through another layer of metal, and hit open space, free of magma and stone!
Collapsing onto a hard metal surface, my first thought was to free myself from the congealing shackles that gripped my body.
Tearing magma away from my face I felt something shockingly cold and light against my skin.
It was air.
Musty and foul as it smelt, it was delicious to me, but I spared it no thought and it brought me no pleasure. My first breath in what felt like years was a ragged gasp which ended in a silent scream, voiced around Echo’s core, still in my mouth.
I tried to draw another but I couldn’t seem to inhale, my chest and lungs refusing to obey me.
Trembling at the excruciating agony, I clawed desperately at the lava still clinging to my body, irrational fears of it setting and trapping me heightening my desperation as I scraped and tore off handfuls of glowing hot rock.
Through some miracle of luck my eyes and sight had been saved in the crook of my elbow, but what they revealed was horrible.
As I pried the setting chunks and daggers of superheated metal and silica away I saw that I was burned all over, starting to bleed profusely through blackened and charred skin, even parts of the flesh below penetrated and scalded by the submersion.
My hair had totally burned away and my suit was long gone, my skin so awful a mess that for an absurd moment I wondered if my lovely appearance was ruined forever – but such thoughts were pure vanity – if I didn’t do something I could bleed to death.
With as much care as I could manage I wretched up Echo from their precarious position near the back of my throat, onto a cool clear patch of the metal floor, well away from me. I dared not use my bloodied, trembling hands, as the surface layers of my body were still dreadfully hot.
My voice shook in my throat, with pain and fear in equal measure, as I recited one of the first spells I’d created, but I couldn’t hear a word pass my lips.
The magic destabilized and my already drained essence dissipated uselessly, but I tried again, forcing myself to incant each phoneme clearly, even if they were silent to me.
Healing water flooded out all over my body, exploding into steam on contact.
As it entered my wounds I tried to scream all over again at the whole new form of torment, but my lungs felt empty no matter how much I tried to inhale.
Water filled my ears and displaced magma as it boiled, yet another fresh torture, but as the hissing lumps of setting stone sloughed away the water started to sooth the pain and repair my ruined hearing.
The phantom howling, the wails and ghastly shrieks which greeted me made me certain that the magic had gone dreadfully wrong – the terrible sounds welled up as if from within my own head.
It was only as I felt suffocation once more, and forced a breath into my abused lungs, that the awful sounds stopped.
They were my voice.
I’d been crying out in raw anguish the entire time, screaming uncontrollably even as I tried and failed to breathe.
I forced myself to stop, before the monsters heard me.
Controlling my lungs once more, with sheer will overriding the pain, I harnessed my voice. I had to conjure more healing water, to cool myself down and treat my burns.
The words of my once pretty voice sounded hoarse and ragged to my regenerating ears, but they were able to renew the magic all the same.
That second immersion was better. My flesh was reduced from thousands of degrees to hundreds, the flood at last starting to ease my suffering.
So distracted was I, that I noticed only just in time that the water was started to push Echo away. I caught them, clutching the precious little cube to my bloody chest. They would have to shower with me.
Echo never mentioned just how waterproof a Dweomer memory core was, but I reassured myself with another look at them – Echo’s mind seemed well sealed, still pulsing with languid fluorescence, moving through the many pathways within the gemstone.
I was further encouraged to see that my bleeding was slowing as I stood and bathed us both in the water of life, washing down over me from a raised hand.
The surreal thought occurred to me that, naked and posing as I was, I probably looked just like one of the fancy fountains that rich people liked back on Earth, right down to the glittering water gushing up from my palm and cascading back down.
I would have been a rather badly weathered and worn statue of course, and much too mobile. My body was still quivering in absurd agony, greater if anything now that I’d started to heal.
My mind was similarly pained by the menace of my pursuers. Their inorganic cries were faintly audible at times, through the rock and metal around me.
They were still hunting me.
Yet despite all that, the shower was almost refreshing after the existential degree of terror and suffering I’d so recently been exposed to.
A third casting of the spell reduced open wounds to mere surface injuries, my skin actually starting to re-grow. Even my trembling was slowly subsiding.
Finally my throat and voice were restored as I gulped down a good pint of the liquid; however I was forced to stop there. My hacked-together incantation to create the healing ‘water of life’ through brute force used a hundred times the power it ought to.
Usually I could have maintained the magic indefinitely, my natural replenishment outpacing the expenditure, but not so while I was still recovering from the Sepulchre. My recovery rate felt painfully slow if anything.
As a result the spell was rapidly eating through my limited remaining mana entirely too quickly. I stopped before I used it all, in case I should have need of it again after any more encounters with magma, or monstrosities therein.
Running out of energy and rationing my power was something I’d never had to consider before – in the past I could have sustained that magic all day and still reached bedtime with more essence than I’d started the day with – but no longer.
It was an unpleasant realization.
I hadn’t just been expecting my mana to remain inexhaustible; I’d been counting on it. My absurd basic capabilities, physical and magical, had been all that set me apart in this world – all which kept me alive.
But I reminded myself of what I’d just been through, the enormous effort I’d exerted to control the fabric of reality, and the following stresses my body had been forced to endure. The Harpies had even warned me not to use up all my essence at once, and I’d gone a lot further than just casting one too many fireballs. This could just be temporary damage from meddling with forces beyond my understanding.
I dearly hoped that was all it was, but even if I was wrong I still had to deal with my situation.
With my shower over I breathed a long, tired sigh, my body starting to ache and throb again as the waters trickled away. A quick check showed that I didn’t have any life-threatening damage remaining, my bleeding halted and my skin at least mostly repaired, and I was happy to note that even if it was slow, I could see the gradual regeneration of my natural healing going to work.
I had been stripped not only of clothing and hair, but my body-hair too, right down to my eyebrows. My regenerating skin felt oddly smooth, denuded of even the tiny transparent follicles that human flesh normally has, but that aside all seemed normal. Not a single scar or blemish remained anywhere my healing process had finished.
I could just as easily have had a body wax, as have been burned alive in magma.
I was frustrated, however, to discover that one mark did linger on my side, in incredible defiance of my recent ordeal. It was the Formorians’ ‘death brand’, the oily stain of mana that adhered to my skin to mark me as their mortal foe. Somehow that cursed mark had survived even the magma.
It wasn’t much of a problem at this point though – I’d left any pursuit far behind when I entered the ancient Dweomer lands, and even the Formorians couldn’t chase me through a lake of lava – it was just an unpleasant blemish on my body.
All things considered I was actually miraculously lucky. I’d lost my stylish mushroom leather suit and my pretty, if bedraggled hair and eyebrows, with neither showing any signs of re-growing, but those seemed the only casualties of the swim.
The rest of me was slowly returning to normal as my natural healing gradually regenerated my damaged muscles and closed over my wounded skin.
I was still covered in injuries, and it would probably be a few hours before I was in what I’d call good health again, but that was nothing given what I’d just done.
It was enough to make me wonder if I was... actually human.
I’d protested the many, many incidents of people calling me a monster or denying my species since my arrival in Arcadia, but after this latest set of escapades I was starting to think they had a point. Even with the benefit of mana and supernatural powers, was it really possible for a human to survive swimming through boiling magma?
That thought percolated in my head as I expanded my stock-taking to the space in which I’d taken shelter.
The surreal place made me question if I’d hit my head harder than I thought.
Far from another cave, or even a bubble of heat-resistant metal, I appeared to be standing in an industrial strip mine, strangely cool and filled with thick veins of raw gemstones.
The latter were the sole source of illumination, exuding a soft and moody multicolored glow like strokes of fluorescent paint shining through the rock. Emitted too was the thick and heavy essence which I’d felt from outside. Even unprocessed and mostly buried in the ore, the precious stones were alive with not just light, but mana.
The floor underfoot was metal, large industrial plates laid out in a triangular grid, with inbuilt vents and mechanisms to allow access to the fluid system contained beneath. Having passed through it and felt how intensely cold it was, I concluded that it must be some sort of refrigeration and isolation system, designed to allow non-silicate life forms to safely mine the area without bursting into flames or being drowned in magma.
Examining the spot I’d broken I could see a swirling blue fluid, charged with mana, which appeared to have frozen the layer of magma a few yards down at the bottom of my ingress. A good thing too, as it seemed not only to have saved me from the molten rock, but also from my attackers.
The system appeared to be drawing power from cut gems which were installed like power-cells within the hydraulic-looking machinery, fuelling carved sapphire cores that were primitively evocative of Echo’s design.
With my safety at least somewhat secured, for the moment, I turned my attention on the rest of the room.
Even for an excavation site it was filthy, despite being oddly high-tech, grease, oil and smears of unidentifiable red and brown filth coating many surfaces.
There was a metallic bitterness to the musty air, an earthy stench of decay and putrefaction that gave me a chill quite independent of the coolness of the atmosphere.
This was more like a tomb than a mine.
Looking closer at the smears and splatters all about me I saw solid shapes of substances entirely other than rock or metal – dark and slimy organic matter, festering as it decomposed.
Awful tatters hung from the railings and heaped up on the flooring like entrails, liquefying mounds of organ and muscle clinging to deposits of glittering crystal as if they had grown from them, right in the middle of the floor.
It was hard to imagine how cut, polished crystal could come to litter the mine, interwoven with what I feared might well be the remains of the miners themselves, but with how rotten everything was, it was impossible even to tell if the remains had once been humanoid.
It reminded me intensely of the Dweomer research station, but I tried to put out of my mind the horrors I’d encountered on the way to the Sepulchre.
We were far away from the anomaly now, or so I at least hoped.
Even so, my dread was growing, simmering at the back of my mind while I examined the place. I’d hoped I might be somewhere safe – a shelter where I might rest and recover from the exhaustion and pain that were worse than ever – but there was no way I could linger here.
The monsters outside were still close too, still searching, hunting for me. I was nothing but helpless prey to them.
They must have lost track of me when I entered the mine and the magma froze behind me, but that wouldn’t last. Their echoing, grinding calls promised me that – they meant to find me.
When they did I could be drowning under magma once more in moments.
But in order to escape before that could happen, I needed to understand where I was, and how to find my way out – if such an avenue of flight even existed. For all I knew the mine had itself been buried by eons of shifting magma and rock.
One point that encouraged me was the apparent age of the place. Compared to the Dweomer ruins it seemed a much more recent structure. It might even have been in operation within my lifetime for all I knew.
In operation by whom was another question.
Defiled as it was, I could still see plainly that the design was wrong for the place to be Dweomer-built.
The technology and the location made me think of them, certainly, but the cores in the floor were too basic to be their work. More definitively, the runic carvings and off-angled cuts of the gems lacked any of the strict angularity of that people – as did the rest of the space.
Flat cliff-faces made up the edges of the chamber, where excavation had been undertaken, but other surfaces were left rounded or curved, with even the basic shapes of the plating (triangles most often) being antithetical to the Dweomer techniques.
There was also the matter of scale. While the cavern was around ten times my height and twice as wide, the twin access tunnels at the far end were so low even I’d have to crawl on my hands and knees to use them. I knew for a fact that the Dweomer had been close enough to my size that they would never have built their passages so low.
That left the identity of the miners a mystery, but not one I had time to ponder. If the monsters outside realized where I was they could attack again at any time. Worse would be if whatever had left all those remains was still present somewhere in the mine with me.
The thought made me shudder.
I returned my attention to taking a quick stock of the place, with an eye to finding a way out, or at least a way to move around that didn’t involve crawling through those tight, narrow passageways.
No such alternative was forthcoming however.
Aside from that open end where the tunnels entered, the chamber was ringed on all sides with solid rock-faces, which might well reveal nothing but magma if I were to try breaking through them. I certainly wasn’t about to start sounding them out for options as I had earlier.
Their sides were lined by odd movable scaffolds used to mine gems directly from the walls, the extracted spoils presumably carried off by the many carts laid on rails around the room. The metal gantries and walkways hugging the excavated walls were supported by pistons and struts, evoking some huge hydraulic set of window-washing platforms. Huge in scope, yet tiny in scale, for the standing space would never fit human workers. The scattered tools and other equipment I could see were similarly undersized.
Even the shed at the centre was tiny. A metal structure that seemed something between a break room and an office, the doors in and out of the cabin were little more than a foot high.
Peering in through calf-height glass windows I found the first few blocked, some by what appeared like improvised barricades, others by a thick film of something dark and resinous on the inside.
Rather than expose myself to any further horrors I thought about simply beating a hasty retreat, facing the claustrophobic mine shaft, but I reasoned that I should at least try to learn something more about what had happened – to ensure I didn’t meet the same fate as whatever creatures were now polluting the air of the mine with their putrefaction.
At the other end of the building I saw what might have been an equipment store, the windows unobstructed.
What most struck me first was the uniform choice of materials – where many objects might have been mostly wood or plastic on Earth, here nearly all the fixtures were simple metal. The absence of plastic was unsurprising, but it was odd to realize that I couldn’t see a single scrap of wood or paper anywhere I looked.
The room was half-filled with all the various gear that might be expected for a mine, and parts and machines that I didn’t recognize. Some might be components for the shielding system even now holding back the magma outside, and others I guessed were parts for the scaffolds used by the miners, but many were a complete mystery to me.
Hanging along one wall were funny articulated metal gloves that seemed made to strap on to a person’s shoulder, like an 1800’s attempt at a powered exoskeleton. Befitting the scale of everything else I’d seen, the arm and shoulder to onto which the tools must have fitted would have been like that of a baby. Smaller even. They could have been mistaken for toys, but the practicality of the devices was clear, as the ends were equipped with attachment points to connect a pickaxe, shovel, jackhammer-like head, or various other tools.
Straightening up and looking about the chamber again I noticed there were even a few of the implements left discarded around the work site, some covered in more unpleasant looking piles of sludge.
Everything suggested that the place had been deserted suddenly, but my eyes also picked out hints that the evacuation had come very recently, at least on the timescales I’d grown accustomed to. Freshly chipped and exposed metal ore had yet to tarnish, and scraps of fabric and pieces of leather around the remains were yet to rot away. In the slick of one ‘corpse’ I even noticed an overturned metal tin from whose mouth grew a cluster of tiny mushrooms.
They were rooted in what must be the decaying former lunch of one of the miners, but the fungi were slowly starting to colonize the pool of horrid black sludge too.
Nauseating as the sight was, it was also instructive.
Unless they were very slow growing indeed, the sickly glow-caps couldn’t have been more than a few months old, perhaps a year at most.
But that only raised more questions, about what could possibly have happened here, and why the miners had left… or worse, what happened to them if they’d stayed.
The gristly remains had to come from somewhere. From something.
Would I be next?
With no other way to answer that question, I took another look inside the small building, at the next room over. I was searching for information, both on how I might make good my escape, and on what might have occurred here, or to whom it happened.
What I found was an entrance and changing room, filled with tiny metal benches and cabinets that might well have been lockers.
Also present were piles of dirty clothing. Some were undergarments that might have been silk or a similar fabric, but the majority were made of sheets of what I recognized as mushroom-leather, bonded into designs similar to jumpsuits or coveralls. All were proportioned for people with bodies similar to those of human children, but who stood perhaps a foot tall.
Over a bin of the dusty used suits by the entrance there hung a sheet of thinner mushroom leather, like parchment, bleached a light beige, on which runes were inked in an officious hand. As I peered at the markings through the tiny window the meaning became clear.
The header read ‘Work Orders for Mining Chamber Ese and Subchambers 92 - 117’, followed by a list of what I recognized as a timetable. It seemed to be arranged around things called ‘wheels’ rather than days, with multiple shifts combining to keep the place operating all wheel long.
If I was still as deep underground as I feared, it made sense that whoever had built and run this place didn’t pay much heed to the movements of the sun, but that also left me little to work with.
I couldn’t even make much of the message at the bottom of the notice; ‘Inscribed in the name of His Majesty King Jotunn Aldagautr, Third of His Name, Monarch of all Pharyes and Exarch of the Varangians, and approved by Second Foreman Urbor of Vitrgraf Mine’.