So Be It
Session: 2026-02-25
The skeletons didn't stay dead.
He hadn't expected them to — not after what the figure said — but the speed of it still caught him. One moment the bones were still on the floor of the temple. The next they were finding their feet with a mechanical patience that had nothing human left in it.
So be it.
That was what the figure said. And then, after a pause: fools. And the dead got back up.
He couldn't reconstruct exactly what had been said before that.
This bothered him in a peripheral way — the conversation had felt clear at the time, even coherent, and now it sat in memory like smoke. The figure had addressed each of them. Some version of something specific, seemingly different for each person, whatever he thought would land. Names came with it: old names, a dragon deity called Takasis and others the figure seemed to assume would mean something, the way you assume a person has heard of a city because you have heard of it. They hadn't. The figure had either not noticed or not cared.
Whatever was offered to Vath, he'd said no. That much was certain.
He'd watched Victor's face during it.
He put that aside and called for Oso.
The bear arrived. A cave bear — broader through the shoulders than he'd summoned before for a fight like this, lower to the ground, smelling of stone and dark places. He'd named them all Oso because it simplified things and the bears didn't seem to mind. They arrived when called, read the room, and moved where they were needed.
Pedro was on the bear's back inside two seconds. He had a quality, Pedro did, that translated well across species — some animal part of the world just recognized him and adjusted. The bear took his weight without complaint and began moving.
Vath concentrated.
The fight went as fights go: some moments of discipline, some moments of controlled chaos, nobody down when it was over. Cain's light held across most of it. The bear took pressure that would otherwise have come for someone smaller. Zephyr blocked a hit that was intended for Vath at a point when Vath was low enough that it mattered. He registered this and kept moving.
The knife was near a sarcophagus.
Polished humanoid bone. Uncommon work — he could tell that from the weight of it, the smoothness, the way it sat in the hand as if it had an opinion about what it was for. Something in it was oriented toward undead specifically, the way some tools are shaped for specific ground. He put it in his pack.
Pedro was examining a shroud he'd pulled from the sarcophagus — translucent, half-visible, something between cloth and light. He wrapped it around his head like a headscarf and adjusted it with the gravity of a man making a considered decision. There had also been gray funeral badges inside the sarcophagus. Neither of them said anything about those.
He found Cain near the entrance.
"Any sign of the children?"
"Nothing. He said so himself."
He had. The figure had confirmed it during whatever the exchange was — no trace of the missing kids. No trace of the hunters either. Said it the way you say a thing when you think it should prompt a different response than it's prompting.
It hadn't.
Victor and Cain moved to the stone above the entrance. The collapse was quick. The sound it made was the sound of a thing being sealed. They spent the night outside, which was an improvement in most ways.
In the morning they went the wrong way.
The terrain was flat in stretches, featureless, and the mine's position relative to the temple had felt clearer on the way in. They walked for a full hour before Vath stopped, read the sun, and understood the error. Nobody said anything useful about it. They turned around.
Around midday they crested a low hill and found it: a hole and a door set into the hillside above it. The vines and growth cut back from the entrance were recent — days or weeks, not months. Someone had cleared a path to this place and hadn't been bothered by the idea of that being visible.
The door opened into old decay. Specific and settled, the kind that soaks into stone over decades and doesn't leave. No footprints visible from outside. The metal clasp had scratches concentrated around the mechanism — not weather, not wear. Something had worked at it repeatedly.
A 10-by-10 room. A large hole. A ladder going down.
Victor cast Light on Pedro's hat. Cain raised his own. Vath brought the flame up in his palm — 10 feet of brightness and 10 more of dim beyond that — and they went down.
The north passage was finished. Unserviceable rails, rotting crates, dust that hadn't been disturbed in decades. He noted it and moved toward what wasn't finished.
The tracks were recent.
He crouched. Two kinds: small footprints — a child's size, possibly two children — and something else. Something that pressed down differently, left impressions at the edges that weren't from a human foot or an animal one. Claw marks in the grime, deliberate and irregular.
He looked at them for a moment.
Clawed humanoids. Moving with children, or near them, or after them — the sequence wasn't clear yet.
He stood up. They kept going.