Carved in Bone

The fight ran longer than it should have.

That was the thing Vath kept returning to, even while it was happening — the way they moved. Not fast, but deliberate. Purposeful in a way that didn't account for the missing arm, didn't account for any of it. They kept working through whatever problem they had been sent to solve.

Beau got one of them — came in at the right moment, found the angle, and the thing went down and didn't get back up. He moved on to the next without ceremony.

In the middle of it, Vath caught the eyes.

Blue. Lit from somewhere behind the socket. He had seen that color before — or something close to it — in the sewer, on the skeleton with the glow in its chest. That had felt cold, distant, like something behind glass. This was different. This was in the eyes, and it looked out at you. More active, somehow. More present.

He filed it away and kept going. Later.

They fell one by one after that, the way things eventually do.

---

Afterward, with the camp quiet and the night sounds slowly returning, the party moved through the bodies.

They had been people. That was the first thing Vath registered, once there was enough light to look properly. Someone, somewhere, had buried them or sent them off — and they'd come back in armor. Not just the armor they'd worn in life, but an additional layer of it, bony and dusty in the way that meant a long time in the ground. The bones beneath had markings. So did the armor. Glyphs carved deliberately into the material — not scratched, not worn down by friction or time, but placed with intention.

He looked at them for a while.

Victor was already kneeling beside the nearest one, parchment out, working through the symbols one by one. Methodical. He picked up the staff afterward and tested its balance, found it acceptable, and kept it.

Vath crouched beside one of the others and studied the runes in the torchlight. He didn't recognize the shape of them — not any system he'd come across. Not druidic, not the common ritual markings. Something else, from somewhere else, or from a long time ago, or both.

Someone put these here for a reason.

He stood up. The night was still. The birds still hadn't come back.

He had a feeling there was a long road ahead before any of this had a name.