The air inside the ruins was heavy, stale, and thick with the scent of damp stone and a dust so ancient it seemed to hold the whispers of centuries. Every sound was an intrusion. The scrape of a boot against the floor, the jingle of a buckle, each breath became a sonorous event that echoed in the darkness before being devoured by a dense, oppressive silence. The only illumination came from a pair of light spheres Valerius had conjured. They floated obediently above his head, casting a pale, spectral glow that made the shadows dance upon the masonry walls.
"Fascinating..." the scholar murmured, more to himself than to the group. His usually resonant voice was a reverent whisper. He ran a hand with long, thin fingers over the enormous, carved stone blocks that formed the corridor. "Absolutely fascinating. The assembly technique is unequivocally pre-First Empire. Look at this, there's no mortar! Not a speck! Each block fits with millimeter precision, as if they were cut with a tool of supernatural accuracy."
He adjusted the glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, emotion vibrating in his voice. "This is monumental! It could completely rewrite the chronology of pre-imperial architecture. The treatises of Gildenheim would be rendered obsolete!"
"Less talk about treatises and more walking, old man," Renard's harsh voice interrupted the moment. It was a sound filled with the impatience of a man who measured time in coins. "Every second we spend here admiring rocks is a second we're not getting paid. This dust doesn't pay for itself."
Valerius started, blinking as if he had just awakened from a deep dream and remembered he wasn't alone in his discovery. Renard, the leader of "The Southern Blade," watched him with a smile that was all teeth and no warmth. His hand, bejeweled with rings of dubious origin, rested casually on the pommel of his sword.
"The mercenary's right about one thing," grumbled Grimgar, the leader of the dwarves from "The Steel Hammers." His voice was a deep rumble that seemed to vibrate from his chest. "Silence is an ally in places like this. You can better hear the things that don't want to be heard. The mountains don't keep their secrets from those who shout."
Paul didn't contribute to the conversation. He walked a step behind Hilda, his posture a mix of relaxed alertness and controlled tension. His hand never strayed far from the pommel of the sword that had belonged to Gideon, a constant reminder of the weight he now carried. He wasn't interested in the walls or the ancient inscriptions; his eyes scanned the dark corners, the seams where the ceiling met the wall, every shadow that seemed too deep. At his side, Ghislaine moved with a lethal stealth, a silence that contrasted with her evident power. Only the almost imperceptible twitch of her beastkin ears at each distant creak betrayed her state of high alert.
Hilda, however, seemed oblivious to it all. She wasn't looking at the walls, the shadows, or her companions. She moved forward with a slow, deliberate pace, her gray gaze fixed on the stone slabs of the floor. Since the incident with the dart trap at the entrance, a strange calm had settled over her. The fear hadn't vanished—it was still there, a cold, tight knot in the pit of her stomach—but it was now wrapped in a layer of intense, precise concentration. She felt the floor beneath her feet in a way the others could not. A subtle, almost imperceptible vibration, a low hum that seemed to emanate from the very heart of the mountain.
"Wait," she said suddenly. Her voice wasn't loud, barely a murmur, but in the sepulchral silence of the corridor, it startled everyone.
Instantly, every member of the group froze in place. Grimgar's dwarves planted their heavy boots on the ground, their hammers ready. Paul and Ghislaine instinctively moved closer to Hilda, forming a protective barrier.
Renard let out an exasperated sigh, rolling his eyes in a deliberately theatrical way. "What is it now? Did a rock look at you wrong? We've been walking for half an hour and seen nothing but dust and cobwebs."
"Shut your mouth, Renard," Paul snapped without looking at him, his eyes fixed on Hilda.
Hilda completely ignored the mercenary. She knelt, paying no mind to the ancient dust that stained her leather trousers. With a slow, careful gesture, she placed her palm flat on one of the floor slabs, just in front of her feet. She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration. The outside world seemed to fade away for her.
"Everything alright?" Paul murmured, his voice low enough for only her to hear.
"The floor here..." Hilda whispered, her words almost inaudible, as if speaking to the stone itself. "It doesn't transmit the vibration the same way. It feels... dead. It's hollow."
She opened her eyes, her gaze now sharp and analytical. She drew a small dagger from her boot and, using the metal pommel, tapped gently on the slab her hand was on. The sound was a dull thud, with no reverberation. Then, she crawled a few feet to the side, where the slabs were a slightly darker shade, and tapped another. The sound was completely different: a sharper, clearer tick, which vibrated through the stone and could be faintly felt in the air.
"This one... this one is solid. It's bedrock," she said, pointing to the second slab with the tip of her dagger. She stood up, brushing the dust off herself. "But the other one... it's just a plate. Much thinner. The sound is different, the vibration doesn't spread. It's a cover."
Valerius approached, his impatience forgotten and replaced by academic fascination. He crouched down, his glasses nearly touching the stone. "A pit trap, perhaps? The legends speak of bottomless pits in these ancient citadels."
"I don't know for sure," Hilda replied, her voice firm and confident. "But I have no intention of stepping on it to find out. Look." She pointed forward with her dagger. "There's a pattern. The slightly darker slabs are the solid ones. The lighter ones are the ones that sound hollow. We'll only step on the dark ones."
Without waiting for a reply, she started moving again, leading the group carefully from one safe slab to another. Grimgar's dwarves followed her without a hint of doubt. Their heavy metal boots, which would normally clang loudly, landed with absolute confidence and a muffled thud only where she indicated. The dwarves' trust in someone who could "listen" to the stone was absolute. Paul and Ghislaine flanked her, their movements equally precise.
Renard's group, however, was a bundle of nerves and whispers.
"This is ridiculous!" Renard finally said, losing his patience after ten minutes of what he considered an agonizingly slow advance. "At this rate, we'll be here all day! There's no danger! It's just the paranoia of a scared little mage!"
Before Paul or Grimgar could react, Renard acted with impulsive cruelty. He grabbed one of his own men by the shoulder, a young mercenary named Torvin who couldn't have been more than twenty, and shoved him roughly forward.
"Go on, Torvin, show these cowards there's nothing to fear. Try that one there. Don't be a chicken."
The young man, caught by surprise, stumbled forward, his arms flailing for balance. He landed with his full weight on one of the lighter-colored slabs that Hilda had meticulously avoided. For an eternal second, absolutely nothing happened. Silence once again took hold of the corridor.
Renard smirked with an air of triumphant smugness. "See? What did I tell you? Pure..."
He couldn't finish the sentence. A sharp metallic click echoed from deep within the stone, a precise and deadly sound. Simultaneously, the walls on both sides of the hallway slid inward, revealing dozens of small, sinister dark holes. A collective hiss filled the air, the sound of death in motion.
Torvin only had time to choke out a cry of panic. But Ghislaine was already moving. She moved with explosive, almost imperceptible speed, covering the distance in an instant. She grabbed the young mercenary by the collar of his leather armor and threw him backward with brutal force, as if he weighed nothing.
Torvin flew through the air just as a shower of rusted blades, each the size of a man's hand, whizzed through the exact space where he had been a moment before. The blades embedded themselves deep into the opposite wall with a series of dry, definitive thunks, vibrating from the force of the impact.
The silence that followed was heavier and more tense than ever. Torvin lay on the floor, his face pale with terror and trembling uncontrollably, staring at the blades that should have torn him to pieces. Renard stared at the blades, then at Ghislaine, and finally at Hilda. His expression was a mixture of furious anger and palpable humiliation.
"Next time," Grimgar said, his voice a deep and threatening rumble, "you listen to the mage. Or we'll leave you here to clear the traps with your face."
They continued their advance. This time, no one, not even Renard, questioned Hilda's directions. Every one of her steps was law.
After another half hour of cautious progress, the narrow corridor opened into a circular chamber so vast that Valerius's magic lights barely managed to illuminate the center, leaving the edges plunged in deep, unfathomable darkness. In the heart of the room, a colossal mechanism of stone gears and crystal lenses, some as large as carts, rotated with a hypnotic and majestic slowness. It emitted a deep, constant hum—the source of the vibration Hilda had felt since the very entrance to the ruins.
"Incredible! Absolutely incredible!" Valerius exclaimed, forgetting all danger and running forward, his caution lost to the mechanical wonder. His eyes gleamed behind his lenses. "It's not a planetarium, as the apocryphal texts suggested! It's a regulator! The energy flowing through this place is telluric, pure and unrefined! This is a discovery that will change the history of geomancy!"
While the scholar babbled ecstatically about ley lines and the manipulation of ancient terrestrial energy, the shadows at the edges of the room began to move. It wasn't a trick of the light. They were coalescing, taking form.
"Company," Ghislaine growled, her voice a low hiss. Her katana was already in her hand, the bare steel reflecting the pale magical light.
From the surrounding darkness emerged several imposing figures. They were not creatures of flesh and blood. They were statues carved from an opaque, milky crystal, vaguely humanoid in shape and standing nearly ten feet tall. They had no faces, only smooth, polished surfaces that reflected the light in a strange, distorted way. They moved with a discordant grinding of stone against stone, a sound that made the hair on the back of the neck stand up. They were slow, but they moved with a relentless purpose and an overwhelming sense of weight.
"Guardians," Paul muttered, drawing his own sword. "How original. Seems the ancients didn't like visitors."
"For the pay!" Renard shouted, seeing a chance to redeem his earlier humiliation through violence. "Whoever takes down the biggest one gets a bonus! Get them, Southern Blade!"
He and his remaining men charged with a war cry, their swords held high.
The sound of their weapons striking the guardians was a sharp, frustrating clink. The steel blades bounced off the crystalline surface, unable to leave the slightest mark. One of the guardians raised a massive arm and brought it down with deceptive speed. The mercenary attacking it was crushed against the floor with a nauseating crunch of bones and a choked scream that was cut short abruptly.
"Fall back, you idiots!" Grimgar roared, his face a mask of fury. "Common steel is useless against earth magic! Dwarves, to me!"
The Steel Hammers advanced in a tight formation, their heavy two-handed war hammers held high. "Strike the joints! The elbows, the knees!" Grimgar ordered. "Every rock has a weak point! Find it and smash it to pieces!"
The impact of the dwarven hammers was a thundering CRACK that shook the chamber. They managed to chip away at the golems' joints, but the process was slow and dangerous. For every heavy blow they landed, they took one in return. The dwarven armor, forged by masters, dented and groaned under the relentless force of the constructs.
Ghislaine lunged forward, a flash of speed and steel. Her katana traced an upward arc, searching for a fissure, a stress line, any weak point. The sharp screee of the highest quality steel scraping against the magic crystal set everyone's teeth on edge. The beastkin woman leaped back, a growl of frustration escaping her lips.
"It's like hitting a mountain. It won't give."
"Hilda, get to cover!" Paul shouted, placing himself between her and a heavily advancing guardian. The creature didn't seem to notice his presence; its target was the only source of active mana in the room. "Ghislaine, with me, let's form a defense! Valerius, stop drooling over that machine and think of something! We need an idea, and we need it fast!"
Hilda watched the chaos of the battle, her mind working at a feverish pace. Brute force, useless. Sharp steel, useless. Speed, useless. The dwarves' hammers, barely effective and too slow. The image of a page from the book Gideon had given her appeared in her mind. Illustrations of wave patterns, notes on harmonic structures. Every structure, no matter how solid and magical, possesses a fundamental frequency, a sympathetic vibration. If you can match that frequency, you can amplify the internal tension to the point of fracture...
"It's not force!" she shouted, her voice surprisingly clear and authoritative, rising above the din of battle. "It's the vibration! The book mentioned it! I need time to concentrate! Cover me!"
A fleeting smile crossed Paul's face. "You heard her! Give the boss some time! Let's buy her a few seconds!"
He and Ghislaine created a formidable defense around Hilda. They didn't attack to destroy, but to control. Paul, with his fluid and adaptable style, didn't try to harm the guardians; he deflected them, used their own weight against them, causing them to hinder and collide with each other. Ghislaine moved at a blinding speed, a deadly distraction that drew the attention of three golems at once, her velocity an enigma the slow, programmed creatures couldn't process.
Hilda knelt again, ignoring the battle raging just feet away from her. She placed both hands on the stone floor, closing her eyes. The world of sound and chaos disappeared, replaced by the pure perception of vibrations. She felt the deep, powerful hum of the great mechanism in the center of the room. She felt the heavy, shuffling steps of the dwarves, the dull impact of the hammers, the pounding of crystal fists against the floor. She felt her own racing heartbeat... and something else. A high-pitched, almost musical hum, a pure, high frequency originating from the guardians themselves. It was their internal frequency. Their "song."
She focused on that note, isolating it from all the background noise. She drew on her mana, not to form an energy projectile or a shield, but to shape it into a wave, a pure, sustained note. She sent it through the stone of the floor, an invisible current of power, tuning it with pinpoint precision to the frequency she had isolated from the guardians.
For a moment, nothing happened. The fight continued. Paul deflected a blow that would have pulverized Hilda, feeling the impact shoot up his entire arm.
Then, a high-pitched hum began to fill the room, layering over the hum of the mechanism. The Crystal Guardians stopped dead in their tracks. Their movements became erratic. They began to tremble, at first with a slight, dissonant vibration, and then with an uncontrollable, spasmodic violence. Fine, luminous cracks appeared on their crystalline bodies, spreading at an incredible speed, forming intricate spiderwebs.
With a sharp, deafening, crystalline sound, all the guardians shattered simultaneously. They crumbled on the spot, turning into a shower of millions of glittering fragments and a dense, milky dust that slowly settled on the floor.
The silence that followed was absolute, so sudden and total it was painful. Only the ragged breathing of the combatants could be heard. Everyone, without exception, from the dwarves to Renard's mercenaries, stared at Hilda. She was still kneeling on the floor, extremely pale and covered in a thin layer of sweat, but her gray eyes shone with a fierce, unbreakable look of triumph.
Renard stared at her with his mouth agape, his jaw slack. His usual envy and contempt were now tinged with a palpable, poorly disguised fear.
"Incredible..." Valerius whispered, breaking the spell. He approached the remains of one of the golems, picking up a fragment with almost religious reverence. "The molecular structure has been destabilized from within... Pure genius."
He dropped the fragment and ran towards the central mechanism, which was now unguarded. "I knew it! Inscriptions!" he exclaimed, running his fingers over some barely visible glyphs at the base of the machine. "It's not just a regulator! It's a Seismic Regulator! Designed to calm or cause earthquakes! A marvel of a lost age! And look at this! The power source!" He pointed to a series of crystals embedded in the heart of the mechanism, which pulsed with a soft light. "Geodesic crystals that absorb and store ambient mana! This is... this is a Heart of the Mountain!"
The mention of that name made Paul's and Hilda's eyes meet instantly. The Cockatrice's mission. The objective they had almost died for. It was all connected.
Valerius picked up one of the largest fragments from a fallen guardian. It glowed with an internal light, pale but persistent. "These very guardians... are made from an impure form of the same material. They are a secondary crystallization of the Heart! The value of this discovery is incalculable! It could change our understanding of ancient magic and energy forever!"
Renard listened intently to the words "incalculable value." His expression, which had been one of humiliation and fear, hardened into a mask of cold, calculating greed. He exchanged a quick, meaningful look with his remaining men. The decision was made; it could be seen in the way their hands drifted toward their swords.
"Alright, job's done," Paul said loudly, stepping over to help Hilda to her feet. She leaned on him, feeling her legs tremble from the effort. "We collect our pay, get out of this hole, and go get the drunkest the city of Creston has ever seen."
"I completely agree," Valerius said distractedly, already taking notes in a small notebook. "We must catalog all of this preliminarily and return at once to organize a full-scale expedition."
As the group began to reassemble to head back down the corridor they had come from, Renard offered a smile that didn't reach his eyes. It was a fake, sharp smile.
"We'll cover the rear," he said, his tone falsely helpful. "To make sure nothing follows us. We don't want any more surprises."
Paul gave him a long, distrustful look. Renard's change in attitude was too sudden, too convenient. But before he could protest, Grimgar nodded with a grunt. "Fine. Get moving. I don't like this place."
They headed toward the corridor entrance, with Grimgar's dwarves in the lead, followed by Valerius, Hilda, Paul, and Ghislaine. Renard's group stayed behind in the circular chamber.
Hilda took a few steps into the hallway and stopped suddenly. The vibration under her feet had changed again. It was no longer the rhythmic, constant hum of the mechanism. It was something sharper, more unstable, erratic.
"Paul..." she murmured, grabbing his arm. "Something's not right."
"What is it?" he asked, his hand instinctively going to his sword.
"The vibration... the rock... it's not the mechanism. It's something else. It's... screaming."
"Wait!" she shouted, her voice now filled with urgency. "Stop! Something's wrong!"
Her warning came too late. A blinding flash of orange light shone from the far end of the hallway, from the chamber they had just left, followed by the deafening roar of an explosion. The floor shook with incredible violence, throwing them all off balance. The stone ceiling above the corridor entrance cracked, the fissures spreading rapidly across the surface. With a crash that seemed to tear the world apart, it came down.
The last thing Hilda felt was Paul's hand shoving her with all his strength, throwing her to the side to get her out of the path of the falling rocks. Then, she only felt the weight of the mountain falling upon them, plunging the world first into a deafening roar, and then into total, absolute darkness.