TIME August 13th, afternoon LOCATION The ziggurat, Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
An enormous wall – repaired far more recently than the temple ruin they had just left – stood between the Agents and whatever waited on the plateau beyond it.
WHAT HAPPENED
They broke camp the next morning and followed the trail on, hours of hard jungle travel putting the old temple ruin well behind them before a second, entirely separate structure came into view.
An enormous wall, 30′ of plant and vine growth wrapped around stonework repaired far more recently than anything at the site they’d just left.
A section had been smashed inward from the outside.
A skeletal hand and forearm, picked clean, worked its way free of the tangled vines and dropped to the ground as they approached – one more set of remains nobody could put a name to.
Climbing the rubble to the breach, the vines themselves turned hostile – tendrils lashing out, a heavier branch slamming Krusha flat before Raven cut it back with her blade in a spray of green-white sap.
All three eventually hauled themselves over.
Something was already watching the breach by the time they climbed down the inside of the wall – an orc, following the same stomped trail they were, guttural shouts and grunts carrying through the trees without ever quite resolving into a direct attack.
The Agents picked their own way toward the ziggurat instead of chasing it down, unwilling to spend the daylight on a fight nobody had started yet.
Beyond the wall stood a ziggurat – centuries old by any reasonable guess, a couple of hundred steps climbing to a boxlike structure at its apex, strange needle-like spires jutting from the top.
Thunder rolled overhead as the first drops of rain began to fall.
Ash and Raven worked the ancient doors open at the summit while Krusha kept watch, and the three of them slipped inside – into a high, vaulted hall lined with carved pillars, and a smell of decay that had nothing to do with the storm outside.
Something had died in that hall, and stayed.
Krusha felt it before anyone saw anything – a creeping wrongness that had nothing to do with the weather.
A disrupt undead spell aimed at a broken statue got no response beyond an echo – but it was enough to wake something in the shadows above.
Half a dozen ragged, black-eyed corpses dropped from the ceiling pillars onto Ash before anyone had a chance to react.
They fought hard for dead things.
Three turned and fled from Krusha’s call on KemerLexi, but the rest tore into Ash before Raven could cut them down one by one.
As the last of them scattered, a new sound rose from the stairwell below – the scrape of metal dragging on stone, and something that hadn’t yet shown itself, climbing toward the light.
It came up chuckling, a dry rasp like crackling parchment. Leathery, sun-tightened skin wrapped in corroded vestments over reptilian scale armour, a heavy flail dragging bone fragments across the floor, and a cloak marked with the same eye symbol the Agents had seen on monsters twice before, in Chuza and now here.
It walked straight past Raven, seemingly dismissing her as no threat – and when she raised her blade to strike, its shape flickered and became an old woman shuffling harmlessly by.
Raven couldn’t bring herself to swing.
By the time the illusion dropped, the creature had already reached the broken statue at the hall’s centre – twenty feet of carved stone that seemed, the longer anyone looked at it, to be emerging from the rock rather than cut from it. A hooded cloak. A mask across the upper half of its face, with a pair of eyes worked into the empty sockets where its own should have been.
It fought like something that had done this before – a bull-strength charm before the first blow landed, scaled armour turning aside strikes that should have staggered it, dark magic gathering in one clawed hand toward Raven before she deflected it clear.
Under its breath the whole time, a dry, monotone murmur in Elven that Krusha caught in pieces between blows – cleanse the intruders, secure the door, the sleeper must awaken, a war is coming.
Ash’s fireballs finally started to tell, catching it square as it tried to duck behind a pillar for cover; a silvered blade from Raven did the rest, opening a wound deep enough to draw a genuine shriek of pain out of it for the first time.
Cornered and burning, it went down under a last combined assault – Raven finishing it with a stroke that took the head clean off.
It carried a cloak of resistance stitched with two watching eyes, a masterwork chainshirt of reptilian scale etched with a name – Priest Vasille of Fenmarel Mestarine, Ward of the Sleeper – a bone-inlaid flail, a tooth on a cord that served as a holy symbol, and a hunting horn carved from tusk and inlaid with onyx, most of the stones pried loose and the silver wire long since stripped from its mouthpiece.
The roof came next.
A flat, vine-covered platform ringed by strange needle-topped archways, one aligned north, one south.
Both scorched at their base in a way that suggested they’d been used, or fired through, rather than merely built.
Coming back down, Raven spotted a figure clambering headfirst down the outer wall of the courtyard below.
And below that, the temple’s lower level held Vasille’s own quarters, locked, and reading more like a cell he’d built for himself than anything else.
Bookshelves stripped bare.
A scatter of jewellery – three rings, a pendant, a brooch, most of the settings pried empty – and, half-buried in dust, a small gold disc carved with the lifelike face of an elven woman.
Three heavy silver bowls beside his instruments, one cut clean in half.
Above a stone basin against the far wall, thousands of tiny scratched lines crosshatched the stone – a tally kept far longer than any one lifetime should have allowed.
The bed hadn’t been slept in for decades.
A stone slab held two more of the creature’s kin, long dead. A drawer nearby held a rather more gruesome collection: bones bleached white and sorted by size, largest to smallest.
Working back out through the temple’s rear doors, they found several hours’ walk of overgrown jungle between them and a wall of smooth, unnaturally cut rock.
A rushing waterfall to one side, and set into the rock face, a vast circular depression that looked deliberately carved rather than natural.
A smaller hole punched through its lower half led somewhere dark, lit only by a faint bluish glow.
Reaching out to brush the vines aside, Raven found them reaching back – and stepped away rather than test her luck twice in one day.
EXTRAS.
THE EYE SYMBOL
Section 18’s own records – compiled by Agent Sam – date this mark back at least thirty-five years, to a series of unexplained murders and disappearances traced to the sewers beneath Chuza. It has turned up since as a brooch, a tattoo, embroidered into a cloak, and scratched into stone – always on or near something that doesn’t belong. Nobody in Chuza has confirmed what it actually protects, or from what. Finding it out here, thousands of miles from home, answers one question and raises several worse ones.
