Chapter 113: How it All Came To Be

Mara bent closer to the writing beneath each carved panel, searching for a symbol that appeared beside the feline or the Reapers shown riding creatures like it. The ancient script refused to offer even that much. Every line might have contained the explanation she needed, yet the meaning remained trapped inside marks she could neither pronounce nor understand.

She moved to the next slab and found the horned entity again. One of its horns had broken near the base, deep cracks divided its body, and dozens of weapons protruded from its chest and limbs. The armies surrounding it had thinned since the earlier carvings, but the creature continued advancing through them.

One enormous hand had reached inside a Gate. Its fingers had torn through one of the doors and folded the other beneath their weight, reducing the entrance to a broken frame. Souls fled through the opening in every direction. Some ran toward the Bastions, while others lay beneath fragments of the shattered doors, their bodies represented by pale shapes scratched into the stone.

The sky above the horned figure had been carved almost entirely black. Darkness covered the nearest light and continued toward the distant Skyraisers, where several of the upper Bastions had already begun to fall. One leaned away from the pillar supporting it, towers and walls spilling from its edge. Another had broken apart completely, scattering pieces of an entire city through the darkened sky.

The panels that followed had not survived intact. Mara found fragments rather than complete scenes, each preserving a different part of whatever came after the Gate was broken. One showed a Beacon surrounded by Abominations. Another depicted a road stripped of its lanterns, with travelers disappearing into creatures waiting on both sides. A third contained the lower half of a city being swallowed by darkness while Reapers struggled to guide souls through a sealed gate.

Whatever the carvings described had continued far beyond a single battle. The Underworld appeared to have been dismantled gradually, with its roads darkening, its Bastions falling, and its Gates closing until little remained of the order that had once connected them. The strangest part was the creatures. Beasts that had carried Reapers into war in the earlier panels appeared again among the ruins, now hunting the same people they had once served.

That was the story Mara could construct from the images. The unreadable writing beneath them might have confirmed every conclusion she had reached, or it might have explained that she had misunderstood the sequence entirely.

She searched the tables and cabinets for anything written in a language she recognized. Several thin books remained inside a narrow cupboard, but age and moisture had hardened their pages together. Pulling them apart would have destroyed whatever remained. Other volumes opened more easily, only to reveal diagrams of Beacon foundations, channels that appeared to carry memories, and structures whose proportions resembled the Skyraisers.

Near the rear of the archive, Mara found a stack of newer records. The pages had yellowed but remained flexible, and the ink had not faded as badly as the older documents. She recognized the handwriting from labels attached to jars in the treatment room.

The old man had written every page himself, yet his private notes used the same ancient language as the carvings. Either he had learned the script well enough to work in it naturally, or it had always been his language.

Mara opened the records one at a time. They contained sketches of Abomination cores, severed limbs, and cross-sections of remembered flesh, with lines pointing toward details she could not interpret. One page showed the feline at several stages of growth. In the earliest drawing, it was no larger than an ordinary cat, although its eyes were already too large for its skull and several bony ridges protruded from its back.

Beside the young creature, the old man had drawn his hand resting upon its head.

Mara looked through the archive doorway. The feline still lay in the hall where she had left it, filling much of the passage with its body. Its tail moved slowly across the floor, brushing dust aside with every pass, while its pale eyes remained fixed upon her.

"How long have you been with him?" Mara asked. "Were you already there when those carvings were made, or did he find you afterward?"

One of the feline's ears lifted toward her voice. It offered no answer and made no attempt to approach.

"Of course you cannot tell me. Rook is unconscious, the old man is cutting through his mind with a knife, and the only other creature here could bite me in half but refuses to answer a simple question."

The feline blinked once before returning to its silent watch. Mara decided the gesture contained sympathy, mostly because the alternative was admitting that it might be imagining how easily she would fit inside its mouth.

She looked through more of the tablets, finding the same hand with many other creatures. These ones didn't seem to have had a good result. Some were depicted growing, like a wolf type, another seemed to resemble a larger human, with several hands, or maybe it was an ape.

Through their growths in the tablets, she could see differences from what happened to the feline.

Unlike the cat which kept its form as it grew, these ones changed, they became more ferocious looking more feral, developed different appendages and shapes. Horns and even an elephant like snout. Abnormalities and stuff that shouldn't be grafted on the bodies of such creatures, the result was obvious.

Revolt against their owner, or full corruption as one of them seemed to become nothing but a blob of dark matter with eyes. All ended in one thing. Termination.

Mara removed her eyes from the rest of the tablets on this section.

She returned to the records and searched behind the first row of tablets. Several more stood against the wall, many cracked through the center or missing their lower sections. When Mara pulled one into the white light spilling from the hall, she found another carving of the broken Gate.

This version showed what waited beyond the ruined doors.

There was no light on the other side and no figure that resembled Yama. The entrance opened into a circular emptiness surrounded by reaching hands. Some extended from the edge of the opening, while others emerged farther within, growing smaller until they disappeared into the stone's dark center.

Mara shifted the slab closer to the light. Small figures stood along its lower edge before the broken entrance. Some carried the weapons and lanterns of Reapers, while others possessed bodies too distorted to identify as human or Abomination.

One figure had been deliberately removed.

The surrounding cracks ran naturally through the scene, but the stone where that person had stood was smoother than the damage around it. Someone had scraped away the figure without touching those beside it, wearing down the surface until only a shallow outline remained.

Mara ran her fingertips across the empty space. Fine dust clung to her skin, but the damaged section offered no clue about who had been erased or why their presence in the scene had mattered enough for someone to remove it.

She searched for another version of the same carving. The nearby tablets depicted earlier stages of the war or had lost the sections she needed. Some might have shown the same events from different positions, while others could have represented battles separated by decades or centuries. Without the writing, Mara could not tell whether the horned entity had broken the Gate before the Bastions fell, whether the darkness had caused both disasters, or whether she was forcing unrelated fragments into a single story.

She continued trying anyway.

The white light in the hall never dimmed, leaving her with no sense of how much time had passed. Mara moved between the tables, comparing damaged panels and rearranging fragments whenever two broken edges seemed likely to match. Dust gathered across her coat and worked into the seams of her trousers as she followed the images from the bright cities, through the march toward the Gate, and into the war that appeared to have destroyed them.

At some point, she lowered herself to the floor and arranged the most useful tablets around her. The sequence remained imperfect: the cities beneath their Beacons, the armies gathering, the horned entity rising from darkness, Reapers riding creatures into battle, the shattered door, and the first Bastions falling from the Skyraisers.

The archive offered no ordinary sounds to mark the passing time. No wind reached beneath the hillside, and nothing moved in the sealed structure beyond the faint scrape of the feline's tail against the floor. Even the old man's work in the treatment room remained silent.

His voice eventually broke through the stillness.

"Mara."

She lifted her head. The call had travelled through several empty chambers, but she heard the difference in his tone immediately. The calm patience he had maintained while explaining Rook's condition was gone.

"Mara, come here. Quickly."

She pushed herself upright so fast that one of the tablets shifted beneath her hand and scraped across the floor. Leaving the fragments where they lay, Mara ran from the archive toward the treatment room.