The cemetery was deserted if one did not include the ghostly silence amongst the browned grass and crumbling gravestones. It was all that was left of Greenville Valley. The rest of the village was burned to the ground. All she found atop the foundations of the homes and taverns were ashes and detritus. Athena found no signs of life, no transients, or mercenaries or Crimsonarion legions that might have been responsible. The village seemed to have been vanished from the face of the supercontinent. A ghost town that no one knew about. How long has it been this way? Athena questioned to herself.
Greenville Valley wasn’t exactly a tourist hotspot or a beacon of trade. It was a nowhere town where every local knew the other and most likely turned their nose up at outsiders, not dissimilar to Credence. She didn’t expect the village to no longer exist. To be abandoned and forgotten. Unless someone made it that way on purpose.
Why did Eustice send her all this way to the arse-end of nowhere? Because it’s the perfect place to hide something. The only place still standing was the cemetery and the dozens of tombs that inhabited it. A dwindling willow tree overlooked a hill of brown and dying grass. The microraptors broke the ghostly veil of silence with their squawks and hisses as their raven-black wings floated above the Deputy in circles. Was she even a deputy here? This land no longer appeared to be under any city or country's jurisdiction. Here she was, just a bitter drunk woman in expensive armour.
Athena Marion dismounted her buckskin and approached the towering white marble house of a tomb, the largest one that still stood.
The stone door had been shut for a long time and it took all of Athena’s energy to pry it open. She heaved, feeling all her muscles tighten and her veins sprout. Stone ground against marble as the doorway dragged sidewards. She was panting heavily by the time the way was clear. She retrieved a torch from her saddlebag and lit it before descending into the depths of the crypts. The microraptors sang solemnly above, as if they were warning her not to descend further.
The stairs took her into a crypt, yet there were no coffins. The walls were smooth and grey. Not even spiders crawled down here. Betwixt two marble statues of King Sigismund Greenfire hanged a plaque, nailed firmly into the centre. It was the width and length of a long scroll. Athena felt an unpleasant feeling of unease as she approached it.
Below lay the heretics that brought forth disease and tragedy to the New Jade Kingdom. By releasing their tainted souls into the aether, they shall sacrifice themselves for the good of the people.
May the Violet Light guide us all.
Athena glossed a sweaty finger over the etched writing and leapt back when she heard distant clanks turn and grind. The wall between the marble statues lifted. Stone dragged and hissed as the wall pulled upwards. Athena stared down the presented stairway beyond for a long time. She did not like any of it. During her entire excursion from New Jade City, she had always retained a grain of hope of finding Gilda Fitzpatrick alive. That singular flame of optimism had truly burned away at this point. She gingerly took a step downwards. Even in boots, her feet felt cold as she took each step further into the depths.
The passageway was narrow, so much so that the walls began to crush her shoulders until she turned sideways to fit through. Her armoured shoulders screeched against the closing walls. The dwindling flames from her torch illuminated the end of the tunnel. Somehow that did not reassure her, only increasing her dread. She didn’t believe in ghosts, the undead and other asinine fairy tales told by crones with nothing better to do. She was a woman of logic. Despite that, there was a tenacious and rapid beating in her chest, and she failed to deny that she was on edge. At best, she would find a body, at worst… What in the bloody underworld could be worse?
She escaped the thin passageway and exhaled a mighty sigh of relief. Wherever she now was, at least she finally had some bloody room to move her arms. Her torchlight caught a glimpse of a large grey scorpion crawling across the wall and Athena let out a small shriek. She cursed herself. She was a City Watch Deputy, and she just jumped back and screamed at a bug like a little girl. She was glad to be the only one down here in this cold and empty crypt.
She cast the torch about her surroundings. She was in an underground chamber. The torch revealed two statues of priests, the colour long eroded away, leaving only grey eyes staring at her. She knew they were Violet Light priests. Their indifferent gazes crept under her skin. Rotating the torch anti-clockwise gave sight to a plinth with large text carved deeply into the top of the surface. May the heretics lay in their condemnation.
Not exactly welcoming. Where were Gilda and Cynthia meant to be? She waved the torch around with one hand and felt the walls with the other in the hopes of finding a corridor or doorway. After minutes of crawling in the dark, no passage revealed itself. The only other way forward was…
Shit on that.
Behind the plinth was a square-shaped hole filled with darkness. Athena went down on her knees and pointed the torchlight towards it. She could feel the filth wrap around her fingertips and creep under her nails. It was too dark to see what she could be touching. Dust, rock, and shit, the various textures she felt could match any of them. The darkness within the square hole did not yield. It was bottomless. Please tell me I don’t have to go in there…
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Was the investigation really worth this?
She considered ditching it all and fleeing to Dunia before realising how ridiculous the notion was. She continued crawling. The flame of her torch died, and she found herself crawling in complete darkness, hoping that what was on the other side was not deadly. She could feel sharp rocks embedding themselves into her palms. She gritted her teeth and kept crawling. There was no light at the end of the tight tunnel. Athena pondered on if it was some kind of ill omen when she felt her hand slip. There was a dip. A deep one. Taken off-guard, she landed flat and found herself skidding. This isn’t a tunnel, she realised as panic gripped her chest. It’s a funnel.
Athena went from crawling to sliding, to falling. There was something profoundly haunting about falling in the darkness. Athena could not see how far she was falling or how much more falling she had to endure before perhaps splatting and becoming a pile of guts and bones. She wouldn’t even be privileged enough to see where her guts would be spilling. A thick, fresh gust of wind hit her, giving her the suspicion that she was out of the funnel and about to hit something hard.
There were a dozen snaps hissing around her as she landed. She became buried in something. Logs? twigs? Bones… She could barely see the faint outline of a small mushroom cloud of dust swirl around her. Her torch had abandoned her, the flames long extinguished. She couldn’t see anything and was coughing from all the dust and ash.
At this point, she knew they were bones as she dived her arm in to reach for her satchel. Of course, the matchbox was buried at the bottom. She could feel herself sinking and she wasn’t even sure what she would be drowning in. Her thumb and index finger gripped the match, and she struggled to pull her arm out of the pool of bones. She struck the tip across her breastplate, and she was finally graced with sight. She held the petite flame high with one arm and attempted to push herself above the bones with the other.
What was illuminated made her scream. She wasn’t sinking into a pool of bones. She was sinking into a mass graveyard. The bones stretched out across what looked like a whole mile. It was the most cavernous tomb she had seen, and it was filled to the brim with the dead. A skull was staring directly under her. She struggled to push herself into a meek paddle, keeping one arm raised to hold the match. She tried not to panic, to find the way out and not question if there was a way out.
Every time she tried to climb on top of the bones, she would find herself plunging deeper in, punching and clawing her way back to the surface. Grey dust floated into existence around her and seeped down her throat and into her chest. She coughed and retched as she swiped two skulls and a rib away from her as she crawled above the pool. She was panting, her chest burning. She could hear sharp crunches every time she desperately kicked her legs. She didn’t want to die alone in the dark. At least her father had an audience at the gallows.
Soon, the fight for survival became almost drudgery. It was a long, bleak swim to the ends of the tomb where she finally found a ledge to seek refuge on. She pushed herself atop and as she gasped for fresher air. Athena saw the ocean of bones in all its haunting glory. They were all people at once. People who laughed, cried, made love, danced, and fought. Now all they were was forgotten dust. Athena knew their ends were not peaceful. Not the result of a simple cremation. They were burned before their life’s end. Burned for sick enjoyment and a pretext of religious self-righteousness. Athena would soon join them if she didn’t find a way out soon. She had a hunch that this tomb was not built for people to leave it.
She nudged herself along the edge in search of some kind of exit. She herself would become a missing person's case. The irony was palpable. She pictured a Jade Herald headline exclaiming “Watchwoman investigating disappearance case becomes disappearance case herself.” Would it chill people to the bone? Or would they just find it funny and laugh at the headline over their morning tea? Athena refused to die as a punchline for the masses’ enjoyment.
Athena found a cracked opening after swimming through more bones. Large enough for a dog to crawl through, but a tight and perilous risk for a human.
The mud and web made a nice change to drag herself across. It smelt of rot and dead rats, but Athena was filled with too much fear and adrenaline to care. If the crawl space led nowhere, then she was sure to become spider food by the month’s end. She couldn’t see. She could only feel, and what she felt alternated between slushy and mouldy. Sometimes she would give in to the fatigue and stop for breaks, panting in darkness. She debated resting in the burrow before imaging spiders picking out her eyes as she slumbered and swiftly fought against the notion. She crawled, heaved, and stalled for what felt like hours. Perhaps it had been a full day. Time loses all meaning in darkness.
When getting to the point of debating over whether to eat a dead rodent she could feel under her leg, a small, narrow, and most welcome ray of light peaked through a crack. The ray graced her with new-found energy. Her legs felt heavier, her vision blurred, yet restored. Her regained sight was a joyous gift, only to be sharply forgotten every time she closed her eyes for the smallest of seconds. She would see the bones every time she closed them. The bodies…
She could finally tell Tilly and Greta that she had found her mother, only she would take no joy in it. Gilda Fitzpatrick was amongst the pile of the dead, among so many others. Athena wondered how deep Gilda and Cynthia Barlet were buried under the ocean of the dead.
She had to use the armoured side of her arm to break through a weak point in the tomb’s wall. Her punches were weak, her arm getting tangled in the roots and moss. The bricks inched closer to the breakpoint and fell apart in front of her. The rays of light were blissfully blinding. She found herself back where she started, at the crypt’s entrance, in front of the descending stairs. The two statues of King Sigismund appeared different to her. One statue’s face looked down on her darkly, the other stone face appeared profoundly guilt-ridden. As Athena gained feeling in her legs, she hobbled over to the plaque’s writing.
May the Violet Light guide us all.
She spat on it and took her leave.
Athena limped out into the outside. The sky had turned into a swirling orange and red dusk. She had been down in that forsaken tomb for a whole day. Perhaps two. She didn’t even know anymore. Athena could finally close her eyes in relief, but when she did, she saw the skulls. The leg bones. The stringy remains of hair. This was the man she was protecting. She started laughing hysterically. Loud enough to scar the nearby microraptors away.
Then she fell to her knees and wept until she fainted.