Lucius found Medorosa’s delaying strategy half a week after his victory on the north road. Scouts had ranged forward and brought the news back already, but he had to ride out and see it for himself to believe it. The coastal road had not been planned so much as it had evolved. Without any master architect’s hand, at times it looped around meager foothills and other times it cleaved into solid stone. Occasionally, it ran right through a pinch between cliff and the water below with hardly room to drive a carriage.

Medorosa’s men had managed to collapse the entire road like a landslide, smashing the stone down to the waters below and leaving nothing but the most jagged of cracked rocks in a useless slope down to a wet demise. The gap was longer than an animal barn, far too wide to be circumvented. He didn’t dismount, he merely bowed his head and closed his eyes as he turned over the facts and options.

A regular man would have been bested here, for there were not so many passes through the Ash Fall Mountains as one might have liked. To go into the wilderness risked more than treading over volcanic glass, but to fall through the ground itself; into sinkholes or oozing lava but half-cooled. That presumes as well that one could keep their direction without getting lost.

Regular men were not educated personally by me however.

Fortunately for him however, he was not alone. True, he had maimed his second-in-command, and Tyrion lapsed in and out of consciousness as he rode atop his horse. He had better allies than the Vassish though.

While he was trying to take measurements of the gap to construct a rope bridge, salvation came to him, of a kind. Lucky too; had he made his bridge, he would have been cursed with confusion and suspicion as to how he had known the construction of such a bridge. His plight had already been espied by the one watching over him and salivating. Fat with Giordanan corpses left out for him, Golden had been more than happy to give some extra effort, and flown ahead.

A priest emerged on the far side of the gap. Head to toe in grey robes and his head shaved, he held up a walking stick and called out to Lucius by saying, “You must be the ones they tried to stop!”

Lucius turned to face the man, shading his eyes from the midday sun. Behind him, the soldiers had begun to prep food and eat. He had yet to give any form of order about where to march, so they had all figured to get to boiling their rice and chewing strips of jerky and so on. It almost gave him privacy as he called back, “If it was a bunch of scoundrels calling themselves the Cynizia, then yeah. Who might you be?”

The man scowled and gestured at the damage with his staff. “Was the king o’ the Black Keep that did this, but he might have been with your Cynizia. Never seen so many armed men at once. The name’s Charles, I’m something like a groundskeeper you might say. Looks to me like you could use some help though.”

“Are you able to get us across?”

The man shrugged and nodded. “I reckon I can get some of the young ones to hang a bridge down off the side here. Good trees up top to tie off against. Maybe it won’t be the biggest bridge, but it’ll do. For a price.”

“And what price would that be?”

“Come on over and I’ll tell you.”

Lucius had little enough choice in the matter, and the cliff route wasn’t impossible for a lone man to get across, so he summoned some of his subordinates and delegated their responsibilities while he would be away. Entrenchment began by habit, and some fortifications were put down at the rear of the line while he clambered over the slope. It was slow and tedious, and it cut his fingers to pieces. More than once, a stone broke free beneath his foot and went crashing to the sea; he never went with it though.

The old man offered him a hand up as he swung a foot up onto the road. The grip, though his hand was withered and wrinkled, met him strong as iron. He flopped onto the road, panting for breath and glistening with sweat. Before he could regain himself, the man told him, “The name’s Charles… Charles the Crypt Keeper. I have been told that you’re not afraid of the old magics in this world.”

The ensuing offer trapped Lucius as surely as the cliff chasm had. I shant go into some of the details, for reasons which will become obvious in due time; but, Charles was a priest of a very old sect belonging to the Shepherd, and he had long since been charged with the safeguarding of a certain crypt in a certain mountain valley. The means of finding it, I will not pen here, nor anywhere.

While a clever reader might think they can locate where that road collapse was, and in doing so determine that the crypt had to have been within a day’s journey thereof, let me assure you in the last century, every exposed cliff on the coastal road has been destroyed and rebuilt. Sometimes it was volcanic collapse, others it was determined bombardment from sea. And those that survived incidental causes, I destroyed myself.

Regardless, Lucius knew he had to get to Rackvidd faster than Medorosa could account for, and the only outstretched hand was of the crypt keeper’s, so he clasped it and marched into that darkness alone. Charles took him away from the Vassish army, through the natural obscurement and into the faux mausoleum. I say faux, not because the bodies were fake, but because the bodies had been interred there to disguise the truth of the matter. Beyond all that, the priests had taken down a false wall and exposed the staircase down to the root of the mountain.

Now, I shall endeavor to make up for my omitted detail, for if someone has made it this far in their thieving quest, there’s little else to confound them.

Steam. What characterized those depths the most was the steam. Lucius had descended well below the level of the sea floor, but the cavern had not flooded. Any water that intruded through the aquifers had to contend with the volcanic heat that gripped the stone. All the moisture was driven to a gaseous state, whereupon it blasted up through cracks and fissures no larger than a piece of hair, baking the dark chamber.

When they took the false wall down, cold, by comparison, air began to flow in and gave the surface a chill. Soon, beads of water ran down to the floor like the walls themselves sweated. A great stench of sulfur was disturbed by this process, giving such revolt that my pupil nearly had to stop and retch. It was his fortune that the only smell was sulfur; that the stench of rotting corpses had ended some centuries ago.

The room he entered was nothing other than a mausoleum, just as the falsehood above. The bodies were of my race however; the soliedar. Very few remnants of them survived the great scouring the divines wrought upon us, and had that mausoleum been in any territory but Shepherd’s, it too would have been crushed to dust. As I have earlier mentioned; she is the least odious of the divines.

Two other things had residence within those sacred walls, one of which was why Lucius’ help had been so desired. Even as he ventured in, one creeping step after the next and with lantern in his left hand, sword in his right, the priests had already begun their side of the deal. The workers were casting down ropes and fashioning boards and securing the makings of a bridge. Some few of the Vassish fancied themselves engineers, and they were hoisted up to cooperate with the affair while the more nimble men crossed over the gap to start a camp. The process was slow, but not stopped merely because of Lucius’ absence.

He had to pass through several phases of construction to find the problem. At the foot of the steps, the stone had been crudely carved out. Hacked away with pickaxes such that cracks and fissures spiderwebbed the whole structure. Space had been of utmost importance, and every inch taken up by golden urns too heavy to be moved. Robbers would have rejoiced and dashed the contents across the floor to get at the gilding, and likely not given a second thought to the bones inside.

Lucius passed that all by. The door to the next region was as the priest Charles had described; a splintered thing of fragile wood jammed in the frame. He put his shoulder to it and forced his way inside. This was where the keep had been intentional, though not always intended for bodies. The stone had been smoothed and polished. Pillars of stone had been fashioned into the middle of rooms and prevented the crush of stone from flattening it all. There had once been an effort to carve the stone filigree, but it had not been completed. Left behind were crude transitions from stone knotwork to raw marble.

Burial urns filled the space here as well, stacked upon one another and covering up the ancient tapestries and mosaics. The centuries of steam had bleached the color from the threads, but the mosaics retained their vibrancy. Beautiful depictions of the cities of the soliedar were down there, along with historical accounts and scientific principles.

Sadly, my pupil had not the liberty to inspect them, not while his foe sat within the treasure vault. The last door of the mausoleum was primarily of iron, but coated with gold to protect against metallic decay. There had been a locking mechanism to it, but the friction of pins and gears had worn through that shell and exposed the inner material. No amount of repair– not from any engineer they could find– would have been able to restore it once damaged, so the caretakers had long ago opted to leave the door unlocked. Thus, Lucius was able to cover his hands with his cape to protect them, and shove it open.

Therein, he stepped foot into the treasure room of the ages. He was not confronted by gold, for such petty wealth had been in abundance in those days. Indeed, he had been surrounded by it already. It was not some secret of science nor magic, for such things were always shared openly. What the ancient soliedar had hidden away from the world, from even the gods, was nothing other than the core of the mountain.

The crystalized heart of a giant sat upon its pedestal. As large as a carriage and all through the glistening color of ruby. It soaked in the heat of the geyser fissures, drawing the water from the air and returning it in streams that puddled around mossy masses, grown thick with the very same elements that enriched the ash soil above.

In the right hands, such as my own, that gem could have torn apart the world.

Had it been so empowered however, the light would have blinded Lucius the moment he opened the door. No, what he found was diminished, emaciated, a shadow of greatness.

A leech sat upon it, suckling the stone and drinking the water. It gnawed at it with needle-like teeth that shattered with every bite. Blood dribbled from its worm-like mouth, and barely a speck of damage would be inflicted from its bite. And yet, that was enough for it to steal some of its power; enough to heal itself and bite again.

For the second time in his life, Lucius had to confront a godling without my help.