Chapter 94: The Camp

They squeezed into the fissure single-file, Uriel following close behind Seraphina, his shoulders scraping against the stone. The last trace of daylight vanished within a few steps. After that, it didn't matter whether his eyes were open or closed.

Seraphina reached into her belt pouch and produced a lantern about the size of her palm. She fed it a thread of mana, and it came to life, casting a soft, warm amber glow that pushed the darkness back four or five meters in every direction. She clipped it to a metal ring on her belt and kept moving.

The passage opened up gradually. What had barely been wide enough for one person opened up into something two or three could walk abreast, the ceiling rising with it. Uriel settled into position a half-step behind her right shoulder, watching the walls over her head. The lantern light swept across the stone, catching flashes of moisture—and then something else. Straight edges. Even spacing. The walls had been worked. Someone had been in here before, with tools, with intent, and then stopped.

Not a single living thing stirred in any of it.

---

Seraphina stopped.

Uriel almost walked into the back of her head. He pulled up just in time.

The wall ahead glittered.

A cluster of crystals covered a wide section of the rock face, packed tightly together. The lantern light fractured through them, throwing blue-white shards across the surrounding stone. When the flame moved, the whole cluster moved with it — the whole cluster pulsed with the flame—bright, then dim, then bright again—like a piece of night sky embedded in the wrong wall.

Seraphina unclipped the lantern and held it back toward him without looking.

Uriel took it, baffled. "What's this for?"

She didn't answer—just crouched by the rock face and pulled a small knife and a glass jar from her pouch. The blade found a seam between the crystal and the stone. A careful twist, and a thumb-sized piece came free.

"Do you know what these are?" she asked.

Uriel leaned in with the lantern. "Something else you're here to collect?"

"No." The knife found the next seam. "These weren't on my list. You don't plan for them — you either find them or you don't." Another crystal came loose. "Ground into powder and added during refinement, even a trace amount can significantly improve the purity of the finished compound. For anything above standard grade, they're practically a requirement."

"Right." He shifted the lantern to his other hand. "So if we cleared this whole wall, what are we talking about?"

She named a figure.

Uriel's eyebrow moved approximately two millimeters. After the whole bonus-chest incident, it took a much bigger number to surprise him these days.

Seraphina dropped the three or four extracted crystals into the jar, tapped the stone dust from her fingers, and stood.

He stared at the jar. Then at the wall. Then back at the jar.

"That's it? You're leaving the rest?"

"I have enough for my own practice." She sealed the jar and put it away. "Taking the entire deposit and selling it would bring in a considerable amount of money. But I have no use for that much money right now. It would just sit there. Someone else will find it."

She walked on.

Uriel caught up and fell into step beside her. He glanced at her face.

There was something different about her expression. Barely noticeable. He almost dismissed it as nothing, but it was there. A slight loosening around the eyes. Some quality in her expression that hadn't been present an hour ago.

"Even with all the detours," Seraphina said, still looking ahead, "it turned out to be worth coming this far."

"You're smiling," Uriel said.

Her pace didn't change. Her expression didn't change. But the small curve at the corner of her mouth — barely there, almost-not-there — didn't disappear. It just stayed.

"I smile constantly at the Academy," she said. "Uriel, you've never once seemed to noti—"

"This one's different."

She turned her head slightly.

"The Academy version is a polite mask," he said. "This is the real one."

Two seconds of quiet.

Seraphina looked at him directly. The faint curve was still there. Her eyes, meanwhile, had that familiar look of someone quietly examining him.

"That's quite an intimate thing to say," she noted. "Uriel. Are you building toward something, given our current sleeping arrangement?"

His expression locked up immediately.

"No — that's not — I just meant it was the first time I'd seen you actually—"

"I see." Her tone was perfectly level. "It's just that I've heard some things. Around the Academy. Regarding your preferences, apparently there was a—"

Uriel rolled his eyes with his whole face, planted a fist against his own chest, and spoke with the gravity of a man clearing his name before a tribunal.

"Slander. Absolute, baseless slander. I am a man of complete integrity, and I assure you, I only ever let my upper head do the thinking."

Seraphina nodded once.

"Good. Keep it that way."

---

They walked on.

The passage sloped downward for a stretch, then narrowed again, then opened without warning into a chamber large enough that their footsteps came back to them as echoes. The ceiling disappeared into darkness beyond the lantern's reach. The floor was flat and relatively clear. Some current of air moved through from a direction Uriel couldn't identify — steady, faint, coming from somewhere deeper.

He raised the lantern and turned slowly.

Stone floor. Stone walls. Nothing soft, nothing useful, nothing anywhere that suggested comfort. Sleeping against a wall was viable. Sleeping horizontally was preferable. So far, the chamber was offering neither.

Seraphina stopped.

Uriel looked at her.

She raised one hand, pointing toward roughly one o'clock.

He followed the line of her finger out to the far end of the chamber, where the lantern light gave out and the dark began. He narrowed his eyes.

Two shapes. Low and conical, side by side. The kind of matte, light-eating surface that canvas makes in poor light.

Two tents. And from this distance, the silhouette felt familiar in a way he couldn't immediately place, which made it worse.

They looked at each other.

Seraphina started walking toward them. Uriel caught her arm.

"Wait." Low voice. "Let me check first. If whoever left these is still here and they're not friendly—"

She nodded, took the lantern back, and stepped aside, keeping him within the lantern's light.

---

Uriel approached slowly, leaning forward, eyes moving between the tents and the surrounding darkness.

At five paces out, the full picture came together.

A field grill — iron bars in a grid, corners propped on stones, the ash underneath grey and spent, thoroughly burned out. Next to it, a tripod of rocks cradling a cast-iron pot, lid sitting slightly askew. And beneath it: a fire. Still burning, with plenty of wood left.

A flat stone beside the pot, the right height for sitting, positioned with the kind of deliberate convenience that doesn't happen by accident.

He cleared his throat.

"Hello? We're students from the Academy — we got turned around in the rainforest."

The chamber swallowed the words. No answer came back.

He tried again.

"Is anyone there?"

The canvas on the nearer tent shifted once in the slow underground air. Nothing else moved. Nothing answered.

He waved Seraphina forward, then turned toward the tent. He'd already started building a mental list of what to expect — adventurers who hadn't returned, someone who'd stepped out, something considerably worse — when his peripheral vision snagged on the pot.

And then the smell arrived.

He stopped walking. He lifted the lid.

Pork ribs. Potato. A broth that had been going long enough to turn rich and hearty, still actively simmering, the surface trembling with small slow bubbles. No sourness. No decay. The heat hadn't even started to leave it.

This was freshly made.

This was also, specifically, his favorite meal.

The cold started at the base of his spine and climbed.

He dropped the lid back onto the pot and closed the distance to the first tent in three fast steps. Grabbed the flap. Pulled it open.

Empty.

The sleeping bag was rolled and positioned neatly in the far corner. The groundsheet had been smoothed flat. The interior was tidied with a precision that felt, somehow, more unsettling than a mess would have.

He crossed to the second tent. Same thing. Sleeping bag stowed, gear arranged, floor completely clean — not a scuff, not a stone, not a trace of anyone having lived here.

No personal effects. No food remnants. No evidence of occupation.

The camp was ready to be used.

It was also, as far as Uriel could determine, ready to be used specifically by them.

The prickling at the back of his neck wouldn't go away.