August 29th, 761, 6:52 PM; Day 165 of the Menetnashte Expedition
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The door did not respond.Rock wrote:"Goodbye then, father," Lia says, giving the door a pensive look. "I will not say that I shall avenge you, because frankly, we never liked each other. But I will endeavour to find out what happened to the rest of the family. And if I find a chance to see Cavendish dead ... I will. Would you like for me to have Ezran priests say your last rites as well, should I find any?"
You weren't exactly sure when it had happened, which seemed odd, since the door had been raving madly since you had approached it. But after it had been given its final rites, spoken by Kuzan and requested by Lia, the door that had been Algernon Mournswaithe... wasn't. The "ribs", you could now see, were elephant ivory; the "flesh" carved marble, and nothing more. The outline of the man had faded into the doors design, to the point where you wondered if you had just imagined it. Whatever might have been residing within was gone.
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As the last of you passed through the doorway, you heard something stir behind you. It was a rustling, coming from the pile of noxious red sludge. As you watched, little shapes appeared in the toxic stew, darker red outlines that burrowed out of the mess. There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands.
Scorpions. You couldn't make out their eyes.
The door closed behind you.
The Tomb of Menetnashte
August 29th, 761, 10:04 PM; Day 165 of the Menetnashte Expedition
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The next room was cold. This was your first impression upon entry, of a place of chill cold, covered in snow and surrounded by frostbitten winds. The second impression was that of death, a stillness that precluded the possibility of life, or joy, or any kind of vitality whatsoever. Both impressions were accurate.
It was snowing.
The room was not any larger than the previous ones, but it had the feeling of the outdoors. The distant walls and ceiling were painted stark white, and the few columns that held up the ceiling were nearly invisible in the half-light. And in the center of the room was a field of coffins.
They sat on funeral biers, a few feet of the ground each, a block of carved stone with an outwardly-bulging center, covered in snow. The carvings depicted scenes from their occupant's lives. Scenes of battle, scenes of love. Scenes of commerce, scenes of art. Scenes of life, scenes of death. All arranged into neat rows, each coffin... no... sarcophagus... four feet from either of the ones on the side, and three feet from the one in front. A neat, orderly arrangement of the dead, all lost beneath the snowy morning light.
At the edges of the chamber, like silent sentinels, six statues lined the walls. They were identical, tall blocks of grey stone, as bleak as their surroundings. A tall, muscled man with the head of some great hound or wolf, with a breatsplate and a war-kilt upon him, and a large mace held in one hand. A bow and quiver were slung about his back. At the base of each statue, words were written in the old tongue of Har'Akir. Ancient AkiriThe Opener of the Way
A single element broke the morbid tedium of the place. A boy not older than sixteen years of age lay curled on the ground between two of the gloomy sarcophagi. He hugged his ragged knees to himself, and cried, a few tears running down his bronzed cheeks. He was dressed lightly in the burned and ragged tatters of what had once been a fine, sensible suit of Lamordian clothing. Now he was dressed far too lightly for the snow, but the boy took no notice of the cold.
The reason for this soon suggested itself, as you looked more closely at the boy only to realize that you found yourself looking through the semi-transparent waif.
