Chương 127: Chapter 60: Laws to Mold

Barely a few steps inside, the dungeon began to reveal its nature as a perpetual warning. The entrance, a wide and low vestibule, was carved with inscriptions. They were not decorative; they were petrified screams. Selena scanned them quickly, her philological instinct leaping to life instantly. First, the Erahari, clear and direct: "Do not enter. Death here is a relief." Then, the Sahric, with its script winding like snakes from left to right: "The desert forgives. This place does not.

Return to the sand, traveler." And finally, the Volg-Thûr, the dead language carved with a precision that turned the blood cold: "Here lies agony. He who crosses becomes part of it." There were more. Many more. Worn pictograms showing humanoid figures disintegrating, geometric symbols that none of them seemed to understand, and phrases in languages Selena could not decipher, whose curves and angles felt completely alien to her, as if they had been carved by minds that were no longer human, or that never were.

It was then that Astrid spoke, her voice a tense whisper that echoed in the silent chamber. —It says here in Norrun… —she paused, as if the words burned her tongue. —"Prefer death to life." She moved the torch toward another inscription, smaller, carved with angular and elegant strokes. —And this… is Theossian, the liturgical language of the western temples. It says: "Value your life and do not enter." She sighed, a sound heavy with a fatalism that contrasted with her usual coldness. —Grim warnings.

And these are not the first. They are the ones that remained legible. Magnor did not answer. He only gestured with his head for them to continue. The warnings, terrible as they were, were already part of the landscape. They had come precisely to disobey them. They advanced. The corridor sloped gently downward, leading into the bowels of the dungeon. The air grew steadily icier, a cold that slipped through the joints of the armor and bit at exposed skin.

Along the sides, the remnants of those who had preceded them in madness began to appear. Armor belonging to ancient warriors, corroded by rust until it resembled crusts of dried blood, lay in chaotic postures. Some were covered in a whitish, glowing mold that pulsed faintly with the light of the torches, as if breathing. From the ceilings, strange vines hung down, thick and twisted, looking more like monstrous roots than plants. Their tips emitted a faint golden glow, a deceptively beautiful glimmer in the gloom.

—No one touch them —Magnor ordered. His deep voice cut through the unhealthy fascination they might provoke. —They are highly poisonous. The glow attracts… and contact dissolves flesh. Further ahead, the bodies, or what remained of them, appeared. Some were skeletons still clad in the remnants of chain mail or iron plates.

Others, however, displayed a more horrendous fate: their armor seemed to have fused, as if the metal had been melted in an instant of infernal heat and then suddenly cooled, leaving grotesque, solidified shapes. Breastplates eternally liquid, dripping toward the floor in frozen ripples. Five, six men, perhaps more, transformed into sculptures of their own annihilation.

Everyone's torches crackled with an abnormally loud sound in the oppressive silence, casting a dance of elongated and distorted shadows over the irregular stone walls. The darkness seemed to retreat begrudgingly, only to cluster more densely a few steps further ahead. Then, they spotted it. The stairs. They were a promise of depth. A wide spiral staircase, carved into the rock, plunging into a pit of even more absolute darkness.

What drew the most attention was the obstacle blocking it: steel bars, thick as a man's arm, crossed to form a gate. There was no lock, no padlock, nor any mechanism. The bars were bent, forced apart at certain points, as if something from the inside had pushed them with bestial strength, not to break them entirely, but to deform them in a gesture of contempt or warning. It was the vestige of a failed attempt to contain the uncontainable, a cage that had been spurned by its prisoner.

—This is it —Astrid said, her voice regaining its practical precision. Following the plan established at the barracks, she drew four identical parchments from her bag, each marked with a complex rune traced in dark ink. With confident, repetitive movements, like those of a priestess in an ancient rite, she placed a parchment upon the forehead of each person: first Magnor, then Alistair, then Selena, and finally upon her own.

Her fingers, slender and pale, pressed against the paper, repeating the motion for a few seconds. The parchments did not burn, nor did they disintegrate; they simply vanished, absorbed by the skin like water by dry sand. A cold tingling sensation ran across Selena's face, concentrating behind her eyes. The world did not brighten, but its contours became sharper; details emerged from the shadows as if a layer of gray fog had been lifted.

She could see the veins in the stone, the minuscule cracks in the steel bars, the trail of dust in the air. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. —Remember —Astrid warned, her tone clinical. —It will only last thirty minutes. Your sight will be sharper in this darkness, but when the effect wears off… the relative blindness will be profound. You will see things much darker than they actually are, until your eyes readapt.

It was the moment for one last gesture of courage, or of stupidity. Each of them, following the tradition of adventurers who venture into cursed places, took a long swig of a distilled liquor that Alistair carried in a silver flask. The liquid burned as it went down, a brief and fierce summons to life before submerging into the realm of frozen death. Selena felt the heat expand in her chest, a small artificial sun against the cold that surrounded them.

With a collective sigh, deep and heavy with the certainty that there was no turning back, Magnor pushed the deformed bars. They groaned with a metallic, agonizing sound, but they yielded enough for them to pass through one by one. They began to descend. The spiral staircase was narrow, the steps worn down in the center by unimaginable traffic, and the air grew denser, older, with every turn. At first, there was only silence, broken by the echo of their own footsteps and their held breath.

But then, little by little, like a rumor rising from the subfloor of the world, they began to feel it. It was faint at first, barely a whisper at the edge of perception, a low-frequency hum that made their eardrums vibrate. But as they descended, it grew louder, more defined. It was… weeping. A deep, tenacious, heartbroken weeping.

A sob multiplied by thousands, by tens of thousands, a cacophony of despair so vast and ancient that it seemed to emanate from the very stones, from the freezing air, from the darkness itself. It was the sound of pain made architecture, a collective and eternal lament that turned the blood cold in their veins. Furthermore, it reminded them, with brutal eloquence, that they were entering not a ruin, but the womb of an agony that had never ceased. Even so, they did not speak.

The plan was clear; fear was a luxury they could not afford. They continued descending, the weight of the lament soaking into every step, until the staircase ended abruptly and their boots stepped onto flat, cold ground. They had reached the first level of the dungeon. There, the first thing they noticed, even before their eyes adjusted by Astrid's spell could explore the space, was the second phenomenon: the light from their torches no longer just illuminated. It had become tangible.

The beams of light did not lose themselves in the distance, but instead seemed to densify, turning into milky, sluggish columns that cut through the blackness like knives of phosphorescent milk, revealing a panorama that chilled the soul more effectively than any scream. They left the torches behind and walked down the hallway, a tunnel of smooth, white sandstone that glowed with a light of its own, cold and diffuse, like that of the moon filtered through ice. There were no cracks, no moss, no signs of erosion.

It was strangely preserved, as if time had decided to bypass this corridor, leaving it suspended in an eternal, sterile instant. They followed Magnor's footsteps, one by one, their strides echoing with a muffled and unnatural resonance. The dungeon was revealing itself, layer by layer, and the most unsettling thing was its apparent normalcy. There were no monsters rushing at them, no traps activating with a crash.

The threat was more subtle, more psychological, as if the place were measuring them, adjusting them to its presence before showing its true face. They reached a circular chamber, not very large, whose walls were completely covered in paintings. They were chaotic abstractions, splotches of color that seemed to pulse with a life of their own. But what turned the blood cold was not the images, but the movement. From the frames emerged spectral, translucent, and trembling hands, wielding invisible paintbrushes.

They painted with obsessive fury, tracing lines and shapes that, upon completion, immediately vanished, as if the canvas rejected the image. Every time a painting disappeared, a deep sigh heavy with infinite resignation filled the room, a sound that seemed to arise from the very walls. And then, the hands began anew, in an eternal cycle of frustrated creation and annihilation. There was no desperation in the act, only a monumental sadness, the echo of a mind condemned to repeat a meaningless act for eternity.

No one carried lit torches anymore. In this place, the natural light, if it could be called natural, was sufficient, and besides, the flames seemed to grow lazy, their tongues leaning toward the spectral paintings as if they wished to be caught and vanished too. Magnor merely gestured for them to move on, without stopping to contemplate the artistic torment. It was not the time for compassion, nor for philosophical questions.

They crossed into a truly large hall, a vast nave that in another time must have been a barracks, a storehouse, or perhaps a meeting hall. The trace was given by the rusted remnants of metal bunks fused to the floor and marks on the walls suggesting shelves or pegs long gone. But what occupied the space now were chests. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of chests of rotted wood and rusted ironwork, arranged in untidy rows across the entire floor.

By instinct, or out of a morbid curiosity that the place seemed to foster, Alistair approached one and, with caution, lifted the lid. What came out of the chest was immaterial, but overwhelmingly real: a wave of hunger. Not the simple craving for food, but the desperate hunger of weeks, which twists the entrails and clouds the mind. Alistair recoiled, turning pale, bringing a hand to his stomach. Astrid, more cautious, opened another from a distance with the tip of her dagger.

From it emanated pure anguish, the oppressive sensation of imminent failure, of an irreparable loss. A sob escaped her before she could contain herself. Selena, feeling a tug in her perception, approached a smaller, more ornate chest. Upon opening it, she was flooded by a burst of overwhelming joy, an ecstasy so intense and pure that for a second it erased the cold, the fear, the pressure of the place. It was like bathing in warm light.

But just as quickly as it arrived, it vanished, leaving behind an even deeper void. Magnor did not open any. He only observed, his face serious. —Emotions —he murmured, as if to himself. —Trapped. Like memories too potent to dissipate. Do not touch them anymore. You will become contaminated. But it was already too late. For a few seconds, the air in the room had grown thick with the phantom of foreign feelings: pain, love, thirst, euphoria, despair.

They mixed within them, confusing their own emotions, reminding them that in this place, even feelings could be a relic, a cursed treasure kept in a chest. But it only lasted an instant. An instant where the dungeon reminded them that even what they believed to be their own, like feeling, was nothing more than another law it could mold with its will.