Chapter 468 - Needle in a Haystack (part 2)

A few minutes later, Simon heard the sounds of someone coming down the path and ducked behind a wide fir tree before the miner came into view. He could see the prospector’s aura glowing incandescently, but he couldn’t see Simon at all, and marched off muttering something about "thieving, chiseling bastard,” while he carried his pickaxe in one hand.

Simon considered killing him then. It wouldn’t do the world any harm, he reflected. Still, he stayed his hand, but only so that when Millie asked him about his trip, he could look her in the eyes and tell her that he hadn’t killed anyone.

Garekson didn’t know how lucky he was, and as soon as he was out of sight, Simon turned away from the small trail and started climbing to higher ground. He didn’t need to head back tonight. He just needed a place to sleep where he wouldn’t get his chest ventilated by an angry miner. In the morning, at first light, he could read the book he’d obtained and see what was in it that was causing all the trouble.

That night, Simon slept fitfully for obvious reasons, though his dreams focused on the book, not the prospector he’d taken it from. He dreamed that he decided not to destroy the book, and when he got home, his family had been burned down instead. It was a horrifying image as he watched the world he’d built with Millie crumble to ashes.

Simon woke with the sun in his eyes and started making a fire immediately to prevent that fate. While he waited for it to build, he started tearing out the first few pages and feeding them to the flames.

At first, the journal was mostly filled with complaints about being selected for the mission. Later, it became a report of smaller battles and failing logistics as the Magi, Larien Stravoss, began losing men. First, it was to an ill-thought-out assault on a clanhold, and later, after the retreat, it was encounters with various monsters that caused mounting casualties.

‘When it’s not the wretched people of this wretched place or the endless snow, it's the monsters that torment them that are at our throats,’ the Magi complained. ‘It's no wonder they build high walls for even the smallest farmsteads. I tell you this land is not worth conquering. Let us return home and leave them to their wretched fate.’

Simon sympathized with that before burning it. His journey so far had been blessedly free of goblins and worse. Still, he knew it was only a matter of time, which was why he could leave nothing to chance. If a bear killed him tonight, as long as this book was burned, he could come back to life and wait patiently to rejoin his family again.

The writing amused him for a time, but he saw nothing in there that would change the future, and once Simon had the gist of the mission, he started to tear out pages in handfuls. He no longer needed to read each complaint of a spoiled mage that felt he should be home tasting ‘fine wines and finer slaves.’ The scout’s notes had left out almost all these details and focused solely on the geography of the mountainous region they passed through.

Still, almost halfway through the book, he stopped when he reached a strange drawing. That gave him pause. It was a sketch where the page had been blackened, and only part of it had been erased. He couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, but it looked like a door with a statue, or perhaps a door in a statue.

“But why does it…” he wondered, trailing off as he figured out what was happening. The perspective was strange, but there was just enough detail for him to figure out why. Whatever this was was entombed in a sheet of ice, or perhaps even a glacier.

“Where the hell did they find this?” Simon asked himself as he flipped forward, looking for a map. When he didn’t find one, he realized only belatedly that he’d probably just burned it.

That made him sigh heavily. “You should burn the whole thing,” he told himself, and while he’d follow that advice in a minute, he couldn’t help but read a bit further, just to see what the Magi’s dwindling party had found.

‘Ospreth found it first, when he went out to take a piss,’ the text told him. ‘We didn’t really get a good look at it until morning, and even then, the storm hampered us. Though I melted an arm’s span into the ice, I didn’t reach the door. I was unable to continue drilling as the ice face grew increasingly unstable in the high winds, and we lacked the supplies to wait for better weather. Still, there was something ancient about it, and I was able to make out the word Aufvarum carved into one of the plinths near the door. If there’s anything that will redeem my reputation and please Veldesen, it’s this find, and I thank the God-King for leading me to it.’

There were other passages and sketches, but after that, the party continued down. Simon had no way of knowing where they were when they made this find, which irked him, since he suddenly wanted to see it with his own eyes. First, he tried to use his wand to locate the site, but since he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, the drawing wasn’t clear enough for him to visualize it. So, it didn’t work.

Simon sighed again. He’d meant to start back home within an hour of waking, but instead, he lingered for hours. If he couldn’t figure out where they’d found the strange temple or monument, he could work backward from where their trip ended. That was tedious work. He was forced to dig out the small mirror he’d brought with him, and then zoom in on his crowded map, and work backward one campsite and landmark at a time.

Eventually, Simon narrowed it down to the most likely mountain and tossed the book in the fire before hiking higher to see if he could see it from here. He wasn’t about to let his curiosity go completely unfulfilled.

“You don’t have to find this,” he told himself as he hiked up the nearest rise. “The book is burned. Your quest is over.”

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Over or not, as soon as he saw the glacier-capped mountain in the distance, he knew he was going to investigate it. It wasn’t the only ice-encrusted mountain, of course; there were a dozen tall peaks in the range that were still capped with white at the peak of summer. What it was, though, was beautiful. It was kind of on the way back, which would save him a little time.

Simon did the math in his head as he studied the best way up the trackless giant, and decided that it would take two days to reach it, four days to the top, and then two or three days back down. That would be cutting it close, but he felt confident he could still make it home and quickly started in the right direction.

Along the way, he only stopped three times: twice to sleep, and once at a bottomless pond to check his mirror and confirm that the level was locked in again. After that, he reached the base of the mountain tired but unmolested, though that didn’t last.

That night, Simon did battle with hogoblins for the first time on his whole trip. He’d seen their footprints and smelled their shit before then, but this was the first time they’d crossed his path, and he made them regret it.

He’d camped that night only a few hundred feet up the mountain in a copse of wind-bent birch. It had been a good spot free from wind, containing plenty of firewood. Unfortunately, they must have liked the place too, because when one of them slunk close enough to stab him, Simon reacted by drop-kicking the thing into the dark.

After that, the battle was joined. He had to fight the first one with a burning branch, because his sword had been by his bedroll, but that was enough to keep them back until he was armed.

Hobs were bigger than gobs. They were meaner, too, which wasn’t good since Simon hadn’t had to fight in years. Fortunately, chasing around after three rug rats kept him in great shape, and he was able to fight defensively long enough to get them bunched up. Then, he just had to maneuver them so that his camp wasn't in the background, and he used the gesture of Oonbetit on all four of them at once, breaking bones and sending them flying as a wave of force rippled out from him in a small, focused arc.

Simon spent a moment stabbing each of them to make sure they wouldn’t rise again. Then, he tracked them back to their hole in the ground and used the gesture of force a second time, collapsing it to make sure he wouldn’t get gutted in his sleep.

On the second night, he only had a long flat stone to sleep behind and block the wind. It was miserable, but better than being woken up by goblins. On the third night, he found a better spot and even managed a small fire, though he dealt with flurries. Simon went to bed certain that he was on the right path, even if there was no path to speak of.

Unfortunately, certainty wasn’t a replacement for the thing actually being there, and Simon cursed aloud as he looked around but saw nothing to show for his efforts. In that moment, he almost turned and started back down the mountain in disgust. He’d spent days coming here that he could have spent getting close to home, and for nothing.

Still, he forced himself to calm, and then slowly paced across the glacier, minding his footing. The peak wasn’t that wide. He could circle the whole thing in a day if he had to.

“But no more than that,” he chastized himself. He’d let himself look around for a few hours, then find a place to camp away from the howling winds before he headed back down the mountain the following day.

While that was a short timeline, it turned out that he didn’t even need that much. He’d only walked around a third of the glacier-covered peak when he saw a suspicious dark spot ahead that turned out to be what he was looking for.

While no evidence of the Magi’s attempt to burn his way inside remained, the entrance was just as he’d sketched it, more or less. Simon stood there before the yawning black void for some time, just studying it, and when he was done, he decided it was much larger than the other man had made it out to be.

The door was taller and wider than a man, but it was the fact that it was done as a single stone, rather than with many large stones joined together, that impressed him. There was also some evidence that the jutting stone face that stuck out of the ice above him was part of whatever this was, too. He couldn’t say for sure, but it was certainly suggestive.

Simon tried to use his sight to look through for more detail, but neither the stone nor the ice had an aura, and they both effectively blocked him from looking deeper. “You could always melt the ice,” he told himself, but the memory of what he’d read in the journal was still too fresh, and he had no wish to bring the glacier down on top of him.

Interesting as they were, none of those details were as important as the writing he could only just make out through the blurry ice. The words of power were indeed carved on the stone, but it was clear that they didn’t belong there; they’d been added long after the main structure was built. They were a more complex version of the weather obelisk he’d made, but near as he could tell, they summoned storms just to keep this place cold and entombed in ice.

That was strange, but the words carved below that were stranger. Simon couldn’t say what the language was, but that didn’t stop him from reading it. Still, it wasn’t one he remembered seeing before. It looked like it had been traced into the stone by a pen, or more likely a finger that dripped acid, and it said, ‘This place is sealed for a reason.’

Is that me telling me this? He wouldn’t put such a message beyond his doppelganger, but the fact that his doppelganger had never left him such a message, or any message in such a manner, gave Simon pause.

“It might well have nothing to do with me,” Simon said to himself as he studied the statues and other blurry ornamentation.

After a minute, he leaned toward not being involved with this, which raised a couple of questions. The first, and most important one, was why Helades didn’t want the Murani to find this place, and the second one was: did he want to involve himself?

While the former question was impossible to answer without more information, the latter was a definite yes. He absolutely wanted to know what was in there. He wasn’t reckless, though; that desire was tempered by trepidation. It would have been even without the cryptic message or magic to make sure the place stayed sealed.

For a moment, he almost pushed past all of that and tried to melt his way in anyway. Only his loyalty to his family kept him from moving forward. After one last look, Simon turned and started back down the mountain. There was nothing here that he needed to see, not in this life, anyway. “I can come here next time if I want, after I’ve died quietly in my sleep at the age of 99.”

It was the right decision. He felt regret at making it, but if he started now, he could be home in perhaps eight days of walking. That was much less time than he’d taken to get here, but it would be just under the one-month deadline he’d promised his wife. Even if he had to walk through the night toward the end, that was a promise that he intended to keep.