Simon saw it by accident.
He had been crossing the encampment with medical supplies tucked under his arm – Therain had requested them and Simon was a helper – his mother had taught him to be kind and good to others.
He came around the column and stopped.
Sera was kneeling over Rian where he sat propped against the stone, her hands at his chest, her face close to his. Too close, some part of Simon thought, before he could decide what to do with the observation. She had leaned in – not a professional lean – one that had happened without her realizing. The kind that happened when someone was absorbed by the thing in front of them.
He watched her turn toward Rian's ear.
He watched her lips move.
He watched Commander Thern stiffen – a more deliberate stillness, the kind that was a response. Like a man receiving something he had been waiting for without knowing he was waiting.
Then she moved to stand and Rian's hand caught her wrist. Wrapped around it. She stopped moving.
They looked at each other.
Something wrong and ugly rose in Simon's chest. A sensation that he began to recognize whenever he noticed Sera. He stood there and let the feeling sit. Thinking, with a distant, flat quality, that he had asked her to tea once.
She had said no.
Simon had tried times after that, but Sera had always declined. Their sessions during the raid were the same as everyone else's. He knew that, tried to believe that. But he had seen Sera favor Yoru on multiple occasions. The gnawing, grating exception was always Yoru. Had somehow tried to make peace with that and keep approaching. But now, there was another one.
And it was Commander Thern.
Simon had told himself it was because she kept her personal and professional lives separate. He had constructed this explanation carefully, over several weeks, and had told it to himself enough times that it had started to feel like something he'd always known.
It did not feel like that right now.
Simon was angry at her. He knew it didn't make sense. The recognition of it arrived cold in his gut – not at Rian, not at the situation. At her. For her professionality. For her pleasantry. For the polite, distanced refusals. For the way she looked at everyone like they were the only person in the room during sessions and meant nothing personal by any of it. He was angry at her for being exactly what she had always been and he had chosen not to see it.
Wanted more.
Rena's voice broke across the encampment – formation in twenty – and Simon was relieved, their moment was done. Sera's eyes moved toward the sound and she left.
Simon looked at Commander Thern's face for one second.
He turned and walked another way to the medical tent and told himself the thing in his chest was nothing. But his clenched jaw said otherwise.
The battle started twenty minutes later.
✦ ♡ ✦
The door was everything Arten's sketch had promised and nothing the sketch had prepared them for.
The iconography was dense – figures in robes, a procession, a feast, the scroll in the central figure's hand covered in marks too small to read from here. The stone was old in the way that made the temple's entrance hall feel recent by comparison. Someone had spent a very long time on this door. Someone had cared, specifically and at length, about every line.
Rena's hand went to it, palm flat against the cold stone, and pushed her mana in. White mana rolled off her body in waves, traveling along the length of her arm and into the door. As the mana rolled across the iconography, the figures carved in the stone began to move, walking and shifting along its procession, as if alive. The raid watched in silence as the iconography moved and stirred, unraveling, turning, until Rena's mana covered the entire door and the iconography settled into another scene.
There was a click, then silence, and then with a heavy, grinding sound of stone on stone – the doors opened inwards revealing the inner sanctum.
The room opened up with it – no, not a room. A cavern. A space built of marble and gold that had been carved or had always been or had simply become what it needed to be over the course of a very long time. The ceiling was lost in the dark. The gilded white columns rose to meet it in two rows along the length of the space and disappeared before they arrived, each one wider than three men standing shoulder to shoulder, the stone worn smooth at the base and rough at the top where nothing had touched it in longer than the wear at the bottom could account for.
The floor was flat and seamless and very old. White marble as well.
The formation stepped through.
Simon came in mid-rank and felt the space close around them the way large spaces closed – not claustrophobic, the opposite, like stepping into something that had no interest in acknowledging your scale. There were no windows or openings toward the outside in this space, the only light coming from the door, coming from the entrance hall's opening, coming from the wrong-light of the dungeon sky. Quickly, disappearing, as the sun set. Two moons in the distance beginning to rise beyond the dungeon's wrong-blue sky.
At the far end of the cavern, the floor was built upward.
Shallow stairs. Ten, twelve steps. A dais at the top.
On the dais: a figure seated in meditation.
Simon's mind kept trying to reclassify it as architecture and kept correcting itself back to person. It was that large. Eight stories tall, around ninety feet in height – the scale of it reorganized the cavern around it, made the columns feel proportionate to something they had not been built to be proportionate to.
It was bald. The skull enormous, pulled long at the crown. The earlobes stretched and dangling – drawn down by decades or centuries or longer into thin loops of desiccated skin that reached the shoulders. The face sunken: eyes deep in their sockets, cheeks pulled inward, the skin dried to a husk over whatever structure had given it shape. Green-tinged. Taut. The color and texture of something that had been flesh and had passed through flesh and come out the other side into something without a clean name.
It had closed eyes. It had six arms folded into configurations of prayer – the lowest pair resting in the lap, the middle pair at the chest with palms together, the upper pair raised above its head. Seated, in meditative pose, with its legs crossed. It remained this way.
It had remained this way until the remaining became permanent.
The robe was white and gold. The only thing in the cavern that had not deteriorated – not touched by whatever process had taken everything else. White linen so fine it moved in air that wasn't moving, the fabric catching the scraps of light and returning it gold at every edge, the detailing along the collar and hem the work of hands that had cared enormously about the precise placement of every line.
The finest thing in the room. Worn over a body that had been dead for longer than Simon's civilization had been counting years.
Before it – at the base of the dais, spreading outward across the cavern floor in a configuration that Simon's eye kept reading as a crowd before correcting to something else – stood the robed figures.
Human height. Human in proportion. All mummified, the same green-husk quality, the same taut skin and sunken sockets. Bald – every one of them, the skulls visible through the stretched skin. Robed in white linen and gauze that had deteriorated into wisps – not clothed, haunted by the memory of clothing, the fabric surviving only where it had been protected from the air by something pressed against it. Ribs apparent and stomachs sunken in. All of them standing with their heads inclined toward the floor. All of them with their hands raised in prayer around what they held.
Staves. Beaded necklaces. Swords. Flutes. Fans. Daggers. And other implements Simon didn't have modern names for – shaped for purposes unknown to him, but the forms indicated aggression.
He couldn't count them. His eyes kept sliding off the individual and returning to the mass. So many mummies and all uniquely individual.
The formation stopped moving.
Nobody had called halt.
They had simply stopped – the collective body of the raid force recognizing something that the tactical mind hadn't caught yet, something the body knew before the briefing arrived.
"Formation holds," Rena said – flat and immediate. "Prepare to engage."
A quest interface detonated across their vision:
The High Priest of the Cataloguewelcomes you.
The robed figures did not move.
The figure on the dais did not move.
The raid did not move.
The cavern held its quiet and the wrong-light from the far distance moved through it and the gold detailing on the white robe caught the light and returned it.
Rena's hand gave a signal.
They moved forward. Slowly. The formation spread into configuration as they covered the distance – espers forward, guides mid-rank flanked by defense, healers back-positioned. Sixty feet to the dais and the robed figures. Fifty. The formation tightening, weapons ready, mana cycling up to working pressure.
Forty feet.
Simon was cataloguing the threat vectors – six arms, configuration of the hands, which of the robed figures were closest, what direction their weapons were angled. Standard raid logic. Identify the attack vector before it fires. He was doing this and simultaneously watching Sera from his spot on the right flank and telling himself he was doing the former and not the latter.
Thirty feet.
The figure's eyes cracked open.
Just a slit.
Through the slits: light. Effervescent. Iridescent. Blindingly white. A strange luminescent quality that spoke of knowing. It poured through the cracked lids slowly, the way light poured through a door left open in a dark hallway. In a flash, the cavern brightened, light appearing from nowhere yet present all around. As if the room had awakened from slumber.
Simon flinched and shielded his eyes – adjusting to the sudden change.
The giant figure – the Priest – had been aware. Awake.
The whole time.
The closed eyes had not been absence.
They had been patience.
The formation slowed without Rena calling it. People instinctively recognized, with apprehension, in their bodies before their minds, that something was changing.
Something was coming.
Twenty feet.
The figure's effervescent gaze moved through the cavern.
It found Sera in the midst of the raid, gaze fixing on her form.
It stayed.
Simon watched her stop walking.
Not a stumble. Not a flinch. A freeze.
A complete, total, involuntary cessation – both feet planted, both shoulders gone rigid, her head tilting by the smallest degree toward the source.
The priest opened its mouth in a yawning arc, skin cracking where it once had long set.
And spoke.
The sound arrived like pressure – not loud, not quiet, but so unshakeably present it vibrated through his core, down to his toes, and into the floor. The syllables had no shape Simon's mind could catch. Dense and old and structured language – he could tell it was structured, that there was grammar, that it was saying something specific – but the meaning slid off him entirely. It was speaking in a tongue foreign to Earth. He caught nothing. Not a root. Not a cognate. Nothing.
Around him the formation held. Uneasy. Hands tightening on weapons. Eyes moving to commanders for a read. No one could understand what it was saying.
Simon was watching Sera.
She understood it.
He knew this with the flat cold certainty of someone who had been watching a person more carefully than he should. He didn't know how he knew. He just did – the same way he had known, watching her lean toward Rian's ear, that something was happening he wasn't part of. He was very good at recognizing things he wasn't part of today.
The figure was speaking.
And Sera was listening.
Ah, it said.
How interesting.
The beast inside moved. Like a predator, low and slow, a pressure behind her sternum that she pressed back against without moving her face.
A fellow guest.
Fellow. Not prey. Not intruder. It knew Sera – that she was the same as it – something not from this world. Something that existed in the architecture the way she existed in the architecture. Present and unaccounted for. Planted on this earth, each from their own particular trajectories.
Ancient thing, have you come to listen to my tale?
She kept her face forward. The entity purring. Her body still, quickly cataloguing her next move.
Have you come to face your fate?
The beast pressed against the window.
Let me out, it said.
No, Sera thought firmly.
The priest's slit-like eyes widened a little more.
Or will you run away?
The beast pushed. Harder. It had heard something in the question – it knew the answer and it wanted to give it and she was in the way.
She pushed back.
The figure's lowest pair of arms – the bottom set, resting in the lap in the deepest configuration of prayer – began to move. The right one lifted, slowly, rotating outward from the wrist with the patience of something that had never needed to hurry. The fingers unfurled one by one until the palm was open and flat and extended.
Toward the center of the formation.
Child, it said, what shall you do?
The robed figures raised their heads. Eyes opened, glimmering white pouring from the orifices.
All of them. Simultaneously. The heads lifting from the inclined position with the wrongness of mechanisms engaging after long dormancy – not a person waking, a thing activating. The sunken eyes opened. The staves shifted. The weapons came up from prayer to something else.
Something else that had a name.
Ready.
Rena shouted. "Prepare yourselves!"
A shockwave thundered out like a pulse.