Chapter 437: The Bones of Serrath

Near the ending of the third day, we crested a ridge and saw what remained of Serrath. I had seen a small part of it in my vision. But seeing it in person was different. The vision had been a small slice of memory, and it did not show me the full reality of this place, and the extent of the devastation.

Serrath had been a fortress city, built into the side of a mountain, its walls rising from the stone as though they had grown there. Now those walls were gone, reduced to rubble by the force of the enemy’s assault. The towers that had once reached into the clouds had been toppled, their broken remains scattered across the valley floor like the bones of a dead giant.

But the mountain itself was gone, and where it had once sat, there was only a crater. A massive, impossible crater, hundreds of feet deep and a mile wide. The edges were smooth, vitrified, as though the stone had been melted and then cooled. There was no sign that a mountain had ever existed there at all if not for the map in the tablet that I had carried with me that showed that a great mountain had been here before now.

"What in the..." Thurrim whispered.

Ruggah was silent, before he turned towards me. "The mountain," he said slowly. "It was there when we left, even during the battle. Whatever happened here was done recently... this is the power of a god."

A wave of fear and confusion swept through the warband, but I was not too concerned if a god had crushed this mountain. I was just a bit disappointed that what I came here to see could no longer be found... the whole purpose of coming to Serrath was to verify the vision I saw when Ruggah told his stories, but the landscape had changed in such a drastic manner that I could hardly recognize anything here.

And then it hit me. The bodies in the vision were gone, and so too was all life in these surroundings for miles.

I stroked my chin while stating aloud my observation, "The dead have been gathered."

"Gathered?" Ruggah turned to me, his eye blazing, and I was reminded that the commander may well have been related to him. "Gathered for what?"

I cocked my head. "I do not know, but let us find out."

I looked across the entirety of the area before I focused on the crater, there was an odd deformation that caught my eye, and I pointed. "Let’s start from that place."

"How does he see through that fucking blindfold?" I heard Tam whispering to Ogg, who grunted something unintelligible. If I could hear it, Tam certainly could not have, and his confused expression almost made me laugh aloud before the seriousness of the situation brought back my focus.

∞

We descended into the crater. The Drakespawn picked their way carefully down the steep sides, their claws finding purchase in the vitrified rock. The air grew warmer as we descended, and I could feel a strange resonance in my bones... it was a vibration that was not quite sound and not quite magic.

At the bottom of the crater, the odd bulge I had noticed turned out to be an entrance. It was a tunnel, wide enough for a dozen men to walk abreast, cut into the earth at a downward angle. The walls were smooth, too smooth to have been made by natural forces. They glowed faintly with a sickly green light.

I cocked my head to the side as I figured out that the entire mountain had been covering this entrance, and someone had vaporised an entire mountain to reach this place.

It would seem that the roots of Serrath were deeper than I had expected, and this battle may not be as simple as it had seemed from the start. The thrill of the unknown brushed across my mind.

"There is something down there," Coin whispered. It was the first time she had spoken in days. Her voice was soft and distant. "I can feel it. It is... hungry."

I looked at her and frowned, as I wondered if I should use my second Temporal Anchor at this point, but I did not want to waste this Anchor, because I could not change it after it had been laid down.

Previously I had attempted to change the position of my Anchor, but it seemed to have been branded into reality permanently, and any Anchor I made was thereby permanent.

I could not waste my Anchor, and I could not feel much danger from this place. With a sigh, I removed the blindfold from my face.

"We go in," I said.

Ruggah stepped forward. "You should stay behind."

I shook my head. "In moments like these, I would always be in front."

Ruggah looked at me in a strange manner, and then he nodded. "As you wish."

∞

The tunnel descended for what felt like hours. The glow of the walls grew stronger as we went deeper, and the air grew harder to breathe. I could not feel this change, but Tam and Ines were breathing harder, even though we were all riding on Drakespawn, since the tunnel was high enough for this to be possible.

The Drakespawn were becoming increasingly nervous the deeper we went, and it was getting harder to control them, but soon the tunnel opened into a vast chamber that seemed to have been carved out by nature long before anyone cut a path down to it.

It was massive, the ceiling was lost in darkness, and the floor stretched away into the distance, covered in bodies. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, laid out in neat rows like crops in a field.

Someone had taken the time to arrange all of these dead bodies, folding their hands over their chests, and even the hands that had been cut off during the battle had been sewn back into place, and though some of these people should have died weeks ago, their bodies had been preserved somehow, and there was no rot.

A retching sound came from Ines, and Thurrim began to pray to his ancestors.

I squinted my eyes as I noticed something chilling... these corpses, all of them had the faintest hint of life left inside their chest, almost as if they were not dead, but sleeping, or better... waiting.

∞

"What the fuck is that?!" Tam shrieked aloud, pointing to what may have been the center of the chamber where there was an altar made of the same vitrified stone as the crater, and on it sat a gigantic humanoid figure who even sitting was almost thirty feet tall.

Its skin was blue, there was a blank white mask on its face, and it wore yellow robes that appeared to be on the edge of decay, and in its hands was a crystal that glowed with a light that made my head ache.

"Gods preserve us," Thurrim whispered.

I glanced at this figure, and I saw that there was no light of life inside of its chest, but the crystal it held was filled with so much lifeforce it was almost as if I was looking directly at the sun.

"We need to leave this place," I said, and began turning my mount around, but then I heard sounds from the tunnel behind us... someone else was coming through the tunnel, and there were a lot of them.