Of Tombs and Kings [1/2]

Yew faced down the three doors and felt a bit like one of those puzzle-game riddles that ask you which door you think the treasure or monster lay behind. Except, this would be an awfully boring one, on account of the answers being right on the walls in giant and hard to miss carvings. She considered them all for a moment, since no mummies ha popped out yet to force her hand.

She could directly to the left, where the treasure rooms were than had originally housed the chalice. To the right, where she suspected the mural of people on beds were neither on beds nor sleeping. Or straight ahead, into the room that screamed “someone important in here” with the throne and sheer size size of the door.

Ultimately, she chose the door with several people on it. Personal protocol dictated that she clear out and purify any undead present before she let herself meander around the place lost in the runes on the walls. The curling script of them was so beautiful, she would definitely be sticking around after her business was finished. Unless she had to wreck the place, which would be a tragedy, but needs must as they say. The prevention of further death knight level undead rising because of a rogue chalice was priority number one.

She thought Astilbe would have appreciated the effort it must have taken to create such massive carvings. Even simplified as this particular image was, it would require quite the team to accomplish. However, to her the only real significance they held was in how they suggested a mass burial or catacombs type structure lay beyond them. She brushed a hand against the rune that would cause the huge sandstone door to move aside, granting her entry to the space.

What she found there was like being on the top floor of the world’s largest library. The whole room was a giant well-shape, burrowing deeper into the earth. More staircases, broad and flat steps, spiraling downward in a vague square. Each wall had hollow spaces dug out, some empty, but most full of wrapped bodies. She could tell by the smell and her own familiarity that they weren’t the best preserved. Had likely just been cleaned, wrapped, and left to their own coves. It was an extensive shelf of corpses, dried into husks now, stretching on and on. There was no railing, which she felt was a safety hazard; if you walked forward without looking you would tumble into the center pit and almost definitely perish.

Yew might survive it, but she didn’t exactly think that breaking all her bones via falling into pits was a fun time. She would leave that for someone else to explore, if anyone must.

Either way, so many corpses promised trouble if she left them be. They likely wouldn’t be all that strong, like the puppeteer from Dame Leah’s story, but there were more than enough to give her a headache if they all reanimated at once. Thus, she quickly decided that burning them all preemptively would be the best course of action. She felt a twinge of guilt about it, but if she had to perform over four hundred exorcisms because she respected their final wishes instead of being pragmatic, she might go insane. Mass purification via holy rain only worked above ground in places with the necessary ambient moisture to produce a localized rain cloud; so basically, underground in a desert is last place it would be feasible.

However, rapid oxidation, otherwise known as fire, is extraordinarily feasible in an artificial cave system built to keep as much air flowing as possible. Holy fire was also technically an option, but Yew preferred to avoid things that might harm her as much as her targets. Thus, Yew promptly drew the runes required to ignite a giant fire tornado. Then a voice that sounded suspiciously like her professor told her to erase them and use a less catastrophic spell. Yew acknowledged the sense in not lighting a whole cave on fire while she was in it, and scuffed out the runes with her feet. It was more complicated, but she could make the corpses smolder into ash like the world’s most unethical incense instead.

She drew a lengthy string of overlapping symbols, pulling from different styles as needed, and activated it. The effect was immediate, the extremities of each body gradually blackening and turning grayish white on the fringes before falling off into piles of burnt remains. In each crevice that had been full, now only an ashy silhouette of their bodies was left as evidence that they were there.

Yew walked back into the antechamber and sealed the door behind her, now nothing would disturb the peace of the dead.

***

Yew peaked briefly in the grandest of the three chambers. It was a throne room, unsurprising, except that they were underground in a tomb, but whatever floats your boat. It held several large golden statues, the centermost statue was the tallest of them all. The figure of it screamed “king”, even to Yew, if the other statues bowing hadn’t been a strong enough hint. The walls were painted in stories, pictograms, and some ancient language Yew couldn’t name. It wasn’t related to magic, so she hadn’t bothered to learn. That was the Linguistic department’s realm. She guessed they were the life story of the statue man, and whoever was entombed here, by his recurrence in nearly every one.

The stone box that seemed like it should be his coffin was empty, though, so Yew was going to leave. But then her eyes caught on one of the images on the wall above the empty box. In one panel, the king figure was speaking to a floating shadow. It was the only image in which the king figure was the one bowing instead. He was receiving a black cup, no, a chalice, from it. She inferred that it was the very one she now carried. However, it was the dark shadow that had given her pause.

There was nothing else it could be, if not a lich. Yew, quite understandably, hated liches. Encountering them was fairly rare, given the circumstances to create one. Either a mage had to turn themselves into an undead, through the use of necromantic magic; or, someone else had to turn a mage into one. In fact, Yew had only ever seen three, one of which had been the arch-lich that started her general aversion to the creatures. If a lich was involved in the creation of this cup, she hated dealing with it even more now. It was bad enough when it was just a stupid evil artifact that refused to be purified.

Yew didn’t bother to linger any longer in the empty throne room. No kings would sit upon it anyway, so really, it was just a uselessly big and blocky chair.

She went at last to the treasure rooms. Anything left here would be in there.

She stepped beneath the mural without hesitation. Just like Dame Leah, she saw first the room full of gold and jewels. But she also noticed something else; they were under a spell, one that only made them appear as precious metals and gems. She took a moment to undo the spell and found a room full of common stones. It was a bit disappointing, she wasn’t here for the treasure, but she would have liked to see what that much money in one place was like. Instead, it was all fake; merely an illusion some mage had cast over a pile of rocks.

Yew moved on to the next room; there, she another vision of great and beautiful treasures. They glimmered and shined, not so much as a speck of dust to dull or dirty them. On second thought, Yew should have immediately noticed the treasure was fake. Ruins don’t have housekeeping services, they are always at least a little dusty, if not thickly layered in it. To be this pristine for hundreds of years there would have to be magic involved. Whether to clean or as an illusion. This was the latter case, clearly.

When she dispelled this room, it was full of more piles of stone, but various sticks and chunks of lumber were scattered around or set neatly against the wall.

Once again she moved on to the next and final room. This is where the chalice used to be, its empty pedestal resting against the back wall. There was an illusion in this room too, but cast for more clumsily than the other two had been. Yew approached it, checking for any traps or triggers before undoing this one too.

She jumped back, startled, as the missing corpse of the king appeared; leaning over the pedestal, hands stiffly splayed apart, as if they had once been clasped around the chalice that used to sit there.