Staring down into the lake, I winced. “I don’t really want to do this.” I said to Benny. “Like, on a scale of one to ten, the amount that I want to do this is like a negative six. That’s REALLY deep water.” Benny stared at me blankly. “I HATE deep water. Ponds and pools and shit are fine, but I don’t want to dive into a fathomless black hole.”

“We have to scout it.” He said bluntly. “And it’s pitch dark so Callie can’t use her shadows to map it. Someone needs to go down there. Someone with a special Skill that lets them see things even when it’s dark.”

I cursed my Eye of Revelation. “But why do we even need to go down there? It’s just a random cave?”

Callie stepped up next to me. “Because there might be things down there. Valuable or dangerous things. If it’s the former we can set up an expedition, or rather, Celine can, and if it’s the latter she can wish to seal up the cavern so they don’t get into the lake.”

“And I’m the ONLY person with an advanced sensory Skill?” I glared at Callie. “I’m still not sure that whole complete darkness thing is how your power works. I could have sworn you could use your information gathering abilities in the dark.”

She reached up and put her hand on my cheek lovingly. “But you can’t prove it. And that’s the important thing. Now take a deep breath honey, and take your bath.” I blinked, and suddenly my world was upside down. As I fell into the water I saw a springboard made of shadow under where my feet had just been, and then I was diving.

I’d held my breath as I dropped in, and with my Might I could inhale enough to last me for about an hour combined with my Vitality, so I triggered Eye of Revelation and began my descent.

I didn’t actually mind looking around, but if you don’t complain when people make you do things they try to do it more often. Really though, as I swam down into the depths of the lake and then into the dark cavern behind the waterfall, I had to admit this was kind of nice. The serene blue water, the sugar fine sand, the waving seaweed. It was…idyllic.

When I finally reached the cave entrance though, it was like someone flipped a switch. One second it was bright and inviting, and the next I was buried in a cascading avalanche of darkness. It was oppressive and threatening, but luckily, my Eye of Revelation punched through it to reveal…

I screamed, releasing my air as I came face to face with a chalk white face, mad eyes and a wide grin stretching it to absurd tension. I grabbed my staff, lashing out at the thing, but as I blinked it was gone, my staff smashing into the rock behind it, leaving a long crack in the wall but not doing much else.

I spun, looking for whatever the hell that had been. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see anything really, but at the same time I saw it all. Eye of Revelation had been improved by my crown, and I could see the stats that made up the walls of the cave, and even the darkness itself, which wasn’t really darkness at all. It was a creature.

The face appeared inches from mine, and I called on Mephistopheles, smashing my skull into the chalk white abomination. There was an explosion of black flame and I felt the water around me vibrate with an inhuman scream.

The darkness retreated, fleeing from the damage and leaving me in a bubble of light in the center of the cloud of black. I wished I’d had Callie at least TRY to take a look. She’d have noticed this thing. I grimaced. The dark was a monster. The face was a manifestation of it, but the blackness itself was the beast’s true form.

Sadly, Mephistopheles, while impressive, wasn’t particularly suited to this task. Large diffuse enemies were the opposite of what it was good for. I considered using Belial, but I eventually settled on a more circumspect method of moving forward.

Swimming down, I planted my feet on the stone of the shaft, triggering Mornax. My body turned heavy, dense, and nearly invulnerable at my own rank. The cavern tunnel was at an incline but it was still angled, so I could walk along the bottom, feet planted to the rock. I started moving forward.

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Based on my Eye of Revelation, the darkness wasn’t just around me, it continued down into the cave. Mornax wasn’t made to leave the earth, but since one of my feet was on the ground at all times I was able to push the Skill to function. I walked along the dark tunnel, safe in my defensive form.

The face manifested a few more times, but never close enough to reach. It had tasted pain when I gave it that headbut, and it wanted to avoid another helping.

Finally, I reached the edge of the tunnel, and, very carefully so I didn’t lose contact with the rock, I climbed out of the pond in a pitch black cavern. Once I was free, I looked around, unable to make out anything.

The cavern was too big for me to see properly, too dark for me to see much at all actually. Where earlier I could see the dark monster thing because of the light that should have been in the tunnel, now I was well and truly in the dark. I grinned, and without hesitation, triggered Moonlit Night.

A wide, dense fog filled the area, and in that fog I could see everything, easily able to make out the well lit cavern in the glowing fog. I could also see wisps of dark in the fog, but the formerly cohesive dark monster had dissolved into floating bits of wayward black, as if it was confused by the lack of sensory input.

Now that I could think and see properly (and wasn’t surrounded by randomly appearing creepy faces), I was able to get a good look around as I slowly walked through the cavern. It took me a good thirty minutes to look around. At one point I got a worried pulse from the bond, but sent back reassurance so Callie knew I was fine. “I’m all good, love.” I mentally informed her. “Something weird down here, but it can’t hurt me.”

Which was true. In fact, with Moonlit Night up, it couldn’t even find me. The radius of the fog was a bit wider than usual, about fifty feet, and because of the stealth the monster didn’t seem to be able to navigate or even stick together.

After looking around for a while, I finally found the center of both the chamber and, if I wasn’t mistaken, the monster.

Lying in the center of the cavern was a small black building. Well, calling it a building wasn’t really accurate. More like a roof over a an altar with no walls. In the center of the altar were three things. One was a knife made of black metal, one was a metallic red disk the color of fresh blood with a bird on it, and one was a silver cup, which appeared to be spewing black smoke out the top.

The smoke rolled across the altar, not quite high enough to obscure the other two, and onto the floor where it spread out into the cavern. I was able to drop the fog when I got close to the altar, because aside from the creeping carpet of the stuff on the floor the smoke didn’t appear within about a ten foot radius of the thing.

“Gods damn it.” I said to nobody. “This is a shrine.” Which was bad. Because shrines meant gods. Hopefully not in any important or urgent way. This was probably just a REALLY old place. The god or gods being worshipped were hopefully dead. Permanently dead. I kept telling myself that until I almost believed it.

Walking up to the altar, I stood over the cup, peering down into it with a grimace. I had nothing for…whatever this was. I considered trying to blow it up, but that might backfire. So I decided to call in an expert. “Callie, do me a solid and send my sister down here. She can bring Callen if she’s worried, the…whatever it is that’s down here can’t hurt a D-ranker.”

She responded quickly in the affirmative, and after about ten minutes I heard footsteps approaching from the dark. I was standing in the light zone around the altar, and when Chelsea and Callen emerged from the dark.

My sister stopped, staring at the shrine. “Gods damn it.” She unknowingly echoed. “That’s a shrine, isn’t it?”

“Your powers of deduction astound me.” I said dryly. “But I mostly want to know if you can stop…that.” I gestured vaguely at the cup. “I considered blowing it up, but I wasn’t sure what would happen.”

She snorted. “Monkeys and typewriters I guess.” She shot me a grin to let me know she was teasing and we both snickered. Chelsea was trying to relate to me the way she saw Benny and I interact, and the friendly teasing was new, but I didn’t mind it. Striding up to the cup she leaned over and sniffed it. “It smells like watermelon.”

“Is that important?” I asked eagerly. Did she know what this was? Maybe it was some powerful ancient artifact.

She shot me a confused look. “No. It’s just weird. I like to read, I’m not a walking library. These artifacts probably predate the Empire settling on this planet. It would be insane for me to know what they do or mean.” She pointed at the cup. “THAT, however, I can tell is…bad. Not how bad, but my power doesn’t like it.”

“Well it’s an evil dark smoke monster.” I said casually. “It makes sense that your flame of purification wouldn’t be a fan.”

She shook her head. “Not that power.” My eyes widened. My sister’s alternate ability was one inherited from our grandmother by way of her own mother, the goddess Black Sorrow. I didn’t know what it meant for that to be the case, but it was probably important.

Holding out a hand, a white flame flickered into existence on her palm, shimmering with an opalescent array of colors around the edges. Without hesitating, she shoved it into the cup.

There was a shudder and then a sort of pause, and then a scream issued out from the cup. White flame ignited the smoke, rolling over the altar and then down across the floor. I had to cover my eyes as the darkness in the whole room ignited like gasoline after someone dropped a match.

I felt heat around us for a flash and then it receded. When I opened my eyes, I could see the cavern clearly, and I gaped at what I found. Up on small plateaus of rock, I saw a dozen or so buildings made of black stone. They all looked to be in perfect condition, untouched by time or wear, without even any dust.

“I have good news and bad news.” I told my sister. “The good news is that you’re going to be getting out of the library for a while. The bad news is you’re the closest thing to a historian we have, so you’re going to be looking into this.”

Fate sense guided us all, but it seemed to guide me more than most. While this clearly wasn’t some imminent threat that needed dealing with right now, I couldn’t shake the instinct from my Fatewalker class that this was an important place. The thing that was worshipped here probably wasn’t Hatescream, but it might be one of the other gods he was bringing back. We needed as much information as we could get. Thank the gods I wasn’t a researcher.