A tall man in an eider coat steps onto a rocky crag that pokes out from a drift of snow. His spiked boots scrape and clatter on the granite, enough to make him check his balance, holding his arms out at his sides, while he finds a solid hold. He drops to his hands and knees and creeps, moving inch by inch, until he is at the edge of a crevasse, peering down into its depths. It is blackness, frozen emptiness within. He checks something on a piece of paper, which he has sewn to the sleeve of his overcoat so he can check it without exposing skin or digging gloved hands in his pockets, then nods, satisfied he knows the way. He regains his feet – carefully, very carefully, making sure his spikes don’t slip and send him tumbling into its depths – and, through the slits in his wooden goggles he has fashioned against the threat of snow blindness, he measures the distance of his leap.

He rocks himself back and forth, telling himself it’s the wind, he’s waiting for a lull in the wind, while he gathers up the courage.

One…testing the footing, making sure his push-off point is sound

Two…checking his landing zone for hazards

Three…oomph!

He tilts himself forward and half-falls, half-jumps in an awkward head-first dive. He clears the crevasse without much trouble, but never gets his feet beneath him, and upon landing finds his upper body buried in a drift of snow.

He lifts his head, spitting powder as fast as he can, trying to get at least some of it out of his mouth before it melts and steals his body heat, and checks himself, making sure he’s still intact.

Satchel…pickaxe…anchors…cord…

Everything appears in order. He rises to his feet, dusting powder off himself by brushing with his doeskin gloves, and begins to scramble up the drift. His heart skips a beat as he approaches the top, and prepares himself to look at what his sources tell him should be there.

It is. He has to squint to see it, even through his slitted goggles, such is the brightness of the sun out here in this cloudless tundra, but it’s there. A savage, hand-hewn arc of granite, rising only a few handspans above the snow, and the darkness of the tunnel it protects. He stutters towards it, picking places where the stone rises to the surface or, failing that, stepping lightly where the crust seems thick. Within seconds he is at the mouth, digging at the crust of snow, widening the opening enough to slide his body down.

Click…click!

First one foot, then the other hits the floor, and he releases the cord down which he has abseiled. He doesn’t bother untying himself…the grotto is not supposed to be large, and the cord affords him more than enough maneuverability to explore. He does give it some curious tugs, however, yanking it sharply this way and that, making sure his anchor holds in the oblong of sunlight glistening above his head. The climb back up will not be long, only a few span, at the most, but making it without an anchor would be…challenging, to say the least.

He turns, satisfied, and strikes the torch he pulls from his satchel. Schizophrenic light illuminates the grotto.

It is small. Smaller even than he was expecting, based on the accounts he’s heard. Barely a span wide, and a fraction less than that deep. The ceiling curves steeply down from the entrance, blending into the opposite wall, into which is carved a chamber filled with desiccated human forms. A single stone sarcophagus takes most of the natural space, so much so that he cannot walk normally, instead having to shimmy sideways in the space between it and the stone. It stands, elevated off the stone by a bier formed of petrified wood, its marble sides carved with intricate scenes of royalty and godhood. Its lid is formed of tooled copper, and bear, presumably, the image of it esteemed inhabitant, sprouting from a flower budding from the tree of life, perhaps ascending to their next appointment, perhaps simply being reborn. Five lanterns surround the coffin, in a star, pentagram, circle, the tall man knows not what they mean. Even with his cold-numbed nose he can tell the bricks of neem oil they contain has been rancid for a generation.

He shimmies past all of them. The object he seeks is not in the sarcophagus, if the legends are to be believed, but rather in the lesser forms that crowd the excavated space. He does not believe them blindly. He is prepared with hand tools with which, he believes, he can open it, should the need arise. But he will let them guide him.

He steps into the chamber, spikes sinking into dust he tries not to think of what. Or perhaps it is ash, he thinks, noticing a smattering of jars amongst the corpses, at least one of which had broken open. He’d heard the dead were sometimes burned, in case of a certain wasting disease. Perhaps it is only ash.

He kicks at one of the nearer forms, which looks to be the least entangled. A child, he notes with some disgust. A girl, who never reached the age of ten. She sits, cowering, apart from the others, her arms wrapped around her ankles, her head drooped between her knees. Her skin is impossibly crepey and brown, almost leather in appearance, after so many years exposed to the dry, cold air. It has sucked back from what remains of her frame, clinging to her disappearing flesh and lending her a vacuumed look, like something drained from the inside out. Her elbows creak as he probes her arm with one of his spikes, testing to see if he can free it, and skin-slash-bone-slash-textile dust sifts free from the joint and joins the bedding at the chamber’s bottom. The elbow separates completely, and her forearm dangles in the air, tethered now by only its fingers intertwined with their counterparts at her ankles. Next he tries to lift her head, groping it with one of his gloves, digging a finger under her arm to seek the purchase of her brow. The soft piff of vertebrae disintegrating accompanies the lever upwards, and he is staring at her face. It is pale, relative to the rest of her, sheltered lo these many ages by the wrappings of her arms and legs, but it is just as drawn and dry as the rest of her. Her teeth grin up at him in the half-smile, half snarl human skulls can’t seem to help once their lips have rotted away. Her eyelids platform uselessly out across their empty sockets, looking like some sort of fungus growing, reaching out for nothing. One flakes away as he moves her, crumbles and flutters down her chin and into the bowl of the rest of her body. Her hair disintegrates, flaking off the back of her head like talcum in a powder-bag.

He lets her go. Her head bounces off her arms, falling back into its bowl. It settles in a position not quite the same as when he found it: turned to one side, ever so slightly, so one corner of one of her sockets can now peer out and into the grotto, keeping watch for future guests. The tall man briefly wonders how long it might be before she has another.

But he tries not to think about it. She is not the one he seeks. Based on her position, both her huddle posture and her location relative to the rest of the forms, he doubts she was even part of the massacre. Probably placed here after the fact. A survivor, perhaps, who passed a month or a year or two later, and somebody felt she should be with her family.

He turns his attention towards the others.