Chương 152: 11. People of a Millennium Past 1

I woke the next morning in that special purgatory between "well-rested" and "might as well not have slept at all." The sea wind was still cold. The shack was still a ruin. The only thing genuinely worth celebrating was that Ignicia hadn't incinerated me in my sleep, nor had she decided, upon waking, to settle last night's accounts by burying me face-down in the sand. By that metric, our partnership was proceeding with remarkable success. She was leaning against the wall.

Her color still wasn't great, but compared to last night's "actively negotiating with death" look, she'd stabilized considerably. A Fire Dragon Princess's recovery rate was, frankly, unreasonable. Yesterday she'd looked like a curse was dragging her toward the grave; today she was already deploying that imperious gaze at full capacity—as though the person who'd been huddled in my cloak whimpering about the cold was some entirely different individual.

"Keep staring," she said evenly, "and I'll remove your eyes."

"I'm merely confirming Your Highness is still breathing." I stood and knocked the sand off my trousers.

"Given that my entire political future, personal survival, and whether my older sister spends the rest of her life mocking me all depend on one dragon's continued existence." She made a dismissive sound but didn't argue. I picked up the empty canteen and tilted it toward the door.

"I'm going back to that spring. Another look, and we need water."

"I'm coming." I turned to look at her.

"Your Highness, I can't guarantee your current condition won't make you want to kill someone after two steps, but you definitely don't look suited for mountaineering."

"Are you worried I'll slow you down, or worried you won't understand what you're looking at?"

"... The latter, honestly." When she stood, her brow creased visibly—the wound still pulling—but she compressed every trace of weakness back down without a crack showing. If I hadn't personally dragged her out of dragon form and held back the first wave of curse-erosion through the night, I probably would have been fooled into thinking she was merely under the weather. So we set off together, single file, toward the back of the island where I'd found the spring. The place had hidden itself well.

The path wound through low scrub, wind-bent tree shadows, and salt-crusted ground that crackled underfoot. If I hadn't taken an unplanned detour yesterday while searching for fresh water, I never would have thought to look behind terrain like this. But when we actually arrived, even I—a man with no particular expertise in fortifications—felt it immediately. The artificial quality of this place was so dense it might as well have been a riddle carved directly into the stone.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The spring's mouth was ringed by a low stone lip, its edges worn smooth—not the uneven fracturing of natural weathering, but the deliberate rounding of worked stone. Beside it ran a half-ruined drainage channel, angled toward one side. At first glance it suggested water management, except the direction was completely wrong. It didn't lead toward flat ground where collection would be easy.

It curved back into a thicket of vegetation that grew with suspicious density. More telling: several stone slabs around the spring's edge were almost perfectly level, and standing on them felt more stable than the surrounding ground, as though someone had deliberately prepared footing here long ago. Ignicia crouched and ran her fingers along the stone lip, then studied the drainage channel.

"Well?" I asked.

"Not the work of ordinary fishermen." She said it flatly, but I could hear the shift—she was taking this seriously now. I crouched beside her and examined the half-ruined channel.

"Could this just be an old temporary resupply point?"

"It could be," she said.

"But that only explains how later people used it. Not why it was built in the first place." I looked up at her. Her golden pupils were fixed on the depths of the spring—the expression of someone scrutinizing an object that had no business existing in this era.

"The stone. The cut. This channel." She spoke slowly.

"It doesn't look like it was designed to draw water out. It looks like it was designed to send water somewhere else. People came later, found a spring, built shelter nearby, and started using it as a waystation. They were just borrowing infrastructure they didn't understand." I processed that, and my stomach quietly began its familiar protest. Which meant my observation yesterday—this doesn't look natural—had been a significant understatement.

I followed the drainage channel toward the dense thicket and crouched to push the tangled branches aside. I really shouldn't have. The moment the vegetation parted, I said something thoroughly unsuitable for inclusion in any chivalry manual. Behind the thicket wasn't an earthen slope. At least, not entirely. Where vines and soil had covered the surface, a section of dark grey material was now exposed. It didn't feel like rock.

It was cold and flat to the touch, its edges carrying a straightness that was simply too precise. I scraped away a layer of compacted dirt with my knife, and the outline became unmistakable—a recessed panel set flush with the ground, with a narrow seam running around its perimeter. A door. Or rather, some kind of buried entrance. I turned back to Ignicia. She'd come to stand beside me, looking down at the seam half-concealed by soil and roots. Two heartbeats of silence.

"Your Highness, if you tell me this is just a normal spring on a normal deserted island, I will lose whatever remains of my faith in the fundamental coherence of the world." She ignored the commentary and pressed her palm against the dark grey surface. A moment later, her brow furrowed slightly.

"Not stone," she said quietly.

"I noticed."

"Not ordinary metal either." I went still. When she specifically added that second sentence, it meant this thing was considerably more wrong than I'd assumed.

"Do we go in?" I asked. Ignicia straightened. The movement clearly pulled at her side—a brief flash of coldness crossed her expression—but she shook her head.

"Not now."

"Agreed." I nodded with the sincerity of a minister seconding a motion in court.

"One of us just crawled back from curse-erosion, and the other's only notable assets are a functional brain and reliably terrible luck. Crawling into unknown holes under these conditions typically produces very undignified causes of death." She gave me a look that suggested she found my rare display of good sense marginally acceptable. We covered the entrance back over, pretended we'd seen nothing, and returned to the shack with full water containers. Neither of us mentioned the door for the rest of the day.

I just had a very bad feeling.