The sound of his voice echoed through the Weald, bouncing off the ancient trees and fading into the oppressive quiet. The moment it left his mouth, he regretted it. Goosebumps prickled along his arms, and a sinking feeling settled in his gut, heavy and cold. It felt wrong to raise his voice there, deeply wrong, like he’d just broken some unspoken rule of the forest.
He scanned the ground for tracks, but found none at first glance. The underbrush was just too thick. Fawkes could just have gone to squat behind the closest bushes, he tried to tell himself. There was no reason to get alarmed, he knew that. Still, the tightness in his chest refused to loosen, no matter how much he tried to push away thoughts of low-dwellers and slaughtered Brennai.
He reached out to his raven familiars. He could feel their presence somewhere to the west of the glade. They were excited about something – excited, but not alarmed.That was a small comfort.
“Guys? Everything alright? Are you with Fawkes?”
Their response came in a torrent of excited chatter, overlapping and chaotic. He caught fragments about a “big hole in the ground” and little else, their enthusiasm making it hard to piece together anything coherent.
“Great,” he muttered. “That’s helpful.”
With a sigh, he started heading west, toward where he could sense the ravens. Their chatter grew louder in his mind as he walked, guiding him in their general direction.
Soon, the trees around him grew sparser, and Hunter emerged into a clearing where a small rocky mound rose from the forest floor. Its surface was jagged and dark, speckled with moss and lichen. An ageless-looking oak grew on its side, its gnarled roots twisting around the stone as if claiming it for its own. Around it, younger – but still ancient-looking – oaks and firs grew in an almost perfect spiral pattern, each one spaced with uncanny precision. It was too exact, too deliberate, to be a natural formation.
The very sight sent a chill down Hunter’s spine. It was as if the forest itself had arranged the mound as some kind of marker or monument. Even the air around the mound felt heavy, charged with a presence he couldn’t quite name. He was close now, but he still couldn’t see a sign of Fawkes, Fyodor, or even the ravens.
“Guys?”
A cacophony of excited caws filled the clearing, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The sound echoed off the trees and the rocky mound, disorienting and unsettling, as if the forest itself had joined in their chatter. Then, out of nowhere, Biggs and Wedge burst forth, as if they had emerged from inside the rock itself. They circled the clearing once, twice, then swooped down to perch on Hunter’s shoulders, talons digging into the fabric of his poncho.
“Down here,” Fawkes’s voice called out, cutting through the clearing’s still air. “There’s a crevice on the side of the outcropping. Watch your step.”
Hunter doubted he’d have noticed the crevice if he hadn’t been actively searching for it. The way the contours of the rock’s surface blended with the shifting shadows cast by the great oak’s leaves made it almost invisible. It was like an optical illusion deliberately designed to conceal it from wandering eyes. Biggs and Wedge pointed it out, too, eager to help.
“Ow – hey, don’t caw in my damn ear!” Hunter gave Wedge a light swat to silence him.
The opening was a tight squeeze, but it looked like it became wider a foot or so deeper into the rock. From the gloom below came a faint, flickering light – soft and warm, like the glow of a small oil lantern. Fawkes, no doubt.
Hunter gritted his teeth and descended down the crevice. The hard edges of the rock pressed uncomfortably close to his ribs as he maneuvered his way through the narrow opening. Even when he made his way into the slightly wider passage below, the claustrophobic feeling lingered, the weight of the rock above and around him impossible to ignore. The air felt heavier underground, cool and still, carrying the faint scent of damp stone.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to delve too deep under the surface. About twenty feet from the opening, the narrow passage took a sharp left turn and opened into a larger space – a wide circular chamber. Thick, gnarled roots twisted through the walls and wove across the domed ceiling, their tangled forms resembling veins in the stone.
As Hunter stepped into the chamber, Fyodor bounded over to greet him, tail wagging furiously. After a quick nuzzle against his side, the direwolf trotted back to a corner of the room, nose to the ground, sniffing with gusto at what looked suspiciously like piles of bat guano.
At the center of the room, Fawkes was hunched over a rectangular stone altar. She held a lantern in one hand, its flickering light casting long shadows that danced across the root-riddled walls.
Stolen story; please report.
“You got me worried to my stomach,” Hunter told her, his voice carrying a mix of relief and exasperation. Seeing Fawkes unharmed helped him breathe easier at last, though that was a small comfort. The air down there felt like a damp rage pressed against his face.
“Apologies,” she said, not looking up from the altar. “Figured the birds would tell you where to find us. The mutt got excited chasing a damn bat, of all things. I followed him and stumbled across this place. Decided to have a closer look – seemed like the kind of thing you’d be interested in.”
“What the hell is this place?”
“Place of Power. It has got to be.”
“So I see.”
Hunter stepped up beside Fawkes, his curiosity piqued, and began examining the weathered surface of the altar. Faint, cryptic petroglyphs covered every inch of the surface, etched into the stone. They must have been centuries old. Hunter was certain he’d seen something similar before.
“It’s like that other place we stumbled upon,” he realized. “The one with the owlbeast.”
“Yes. It has the same kind of markings – though, I believe, this is just the antechamber of a larger complex.”
She cocked a thumb at the deeper end of the chamber, where a corridor-like passage led further down the gloom.
“Is it safe?”
“Seems so. Though I’d advise against going down any deeper. These places are ancient. There’s no telling what could be lurking down there.”
“Let me take a look.”
Hunter moved cautiously across the chamber, where the passage yawned like a dark throat descending into the depths. The narrow corridor sloped downward, walls slick with moisture and tangled with stray roots. He hesitated at the threshold. The air was colder there, carrying a faint metallic tang that prickled at his senses.
The moment he stepped across the boundary, leaving the relative openness of the chamber behind, a notification blinked into view in his HUD.
Hunter froze as the message flashed before his eyes. Only once before had he received a similar one; when he’d first set foot inside the lower levels of the Halls of the Cor Ancestors, where Sister Finch and It That Whispers had awaited. He took a quick step back, frowning at the oppressive gloom that seemed to swirl in the depths below.
“We’re not going down there,” he told Fawkes.
She looked up from the altar.
“Smart lad.”
“I got a warning from the System. This is a dangerous place. It’s called the Tomb of Nevnassir, I think. Ever heard of it?”
“No, but that doesn’t surprise me. The world is old beyond reckoning, Hunter. Empires have risen and fallen, their stories lost to time. All that’s left are places like this – forgotten, buried, and better left alone.” She gazed at the opening as if she half-expected some unnamed horror to burst out of it. “We should get going. Will you do your thing with the Place of Power?”
Hunter considered it for a moment.
“If something bad happens to me, I’ll reappear at the Place of Power I last communed with,” he explained. “Right now, that’s the totem pole in the center of the Sacred Training Grounds. If I anchor myself to this place, though…”
He trailed off, letting the implication hang in the air.
Fawkes’s lips pressed into a thin line as she studied him with obvious concern. After a long pause, she sighed.
“Your call,” she said, a hint of resignation in her voice. “I guess we’ll have to make extra sure nothing bad happens.”
Hunter nodded and stepped up to the altar. It was suspiciously human-sized, he noticed. The thought sent a cold shudder down his spine. He closed his eyes and touched the stone slab’s weathered surface.
He reached out with his mind and found the tangle of primal energy running through the stone. From the depths of the altar, something stirred and reached back, brushing against his consciousness. It tugged at his core, sending ripples through his Essence, disturbing its flow for a brief, disorienting moment. A whooshing, rasping sound filled his ears, then faded back to silence.
Fawkes raised an eyebrow and swung the lantern toward his face, the sudden brightness making him squint. Behind her, Fyodor let out a low whimper, his earlier excitement suddenly gone. The sound echoed through the chamber, bouncing off the walls in eerie, distorted tones. It made the hair on Hunter’s neck stand on end.
“Are you alright, lad? You look like someone walked on your grave.”
“Yeah, just… As I said, this is not a good place. We should get going.”
“I’m not arguing with you on that one,” Fawkes said, already turning for the exit.
As they made their way back to the surface, Hunter couldn’t shake the eerie sensation of someone – something – breathing down the back of his neck. Fyodor and Fawkes slipped through the narrow crevice with ease. When it was his turn, though, he had to wedge himself through. For a fleeting, heart-pounding moment, he felt as if he’d get stuck, that unseen hands would claw at him from behind, dragging him back toward that dark, suffocating tomb. Then, with a final shove, he slipped out, and the moment passed.
Fresh air flooded his lungs, crisp and cool, tasting better than it ever had. The oppressive weight in his chest lifted, and the fear melted into something that felt almost silly.
Just a scare – nothing more.
Or so he told himself.
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