Not every ruin on the road to Arn Griishank is marked on any survey. The Mound isn’t – a barrow the Agents found only by following a scream: a ring of standing stones, long collapsed and vine-choked, circling a huge domed rise of earth that Lord Valden’s own people call one of dozens of “ransacked barrows or burial tombs” scattered through this stretch of jungle. This one hadn’t finished being ransacked.
Two Dranathess soldiers were already at the entrance when the Agents arrived, freshly excavated, with two Indegee natives in tow. One native was shot on sight for whatever he’d been caught carrying away; the second broke for the treeline and was shot running, in full view of the Agents watching from the embankment. The soldiers dragged both bodies inside and went back to their work as though nothing had happened.
FILE NOTES
Inside, past the colossal stone slabs balanced overhead on tapering pillars, the mound holds what centuries of undisturbed burial actually looks like: bones scattered across the flags, a raised plinth at the center bearing a collapsed skeleton, hands still clasped on its chest, one missing every finger and thumb. Off to the sides, two long-rotted alcoves stand empty – whatever they once held was taken out, or fell apart, long before anyone currently alive arrived to see it.
What wasn’t centuries old was considerably worse. A woven basket sat near the plinth, hooded, giving off a smell the Agents traced back to a swaddled infant inside – its head destroyed by a crossbow bolt. Whether the child was a Dranathess casualty, an Indegee casualty, or something closer to a Children of the Eye pattern nobody has been able to say for certain; what is on record is that when the baby, alive and hidden deeper in the mound, began to cry as the soldiers searched for their spent bolt, the order given was blunt – “he said no witnesses” – and only a moment’s hesitation kept a second execution from happening in that chamber.
The mound’s only genuine treasure turned up in the same haul the soldiers were so careful digging out: two named swords, Kusanagi and Kort-Sanum, recovered from the barrow and carried by the Dranathess themselves before eventually passing through the Agents’ own hands.
“Agent of KemerLexi… we usually kill villagers too. Why only yesterday, Raven…”
Krusha, talking his way past a Dranathess trooper at the mound entrance
STATUS: Filed under Locations, Green Hell. Unmarked, unexplained, and evidently still worth killing over – whatever the Dranathess were actually sent to retrieve from it, a couple of swords and a burial ground’s worth of bones don’t explain the order to leave no witnesses.