Page 3 of Memory of Ashes

“It’s barren,” Karl said.

“This is where we first found it. We cleared the first chamber and found more beyond,” the overseer said, scratching his head.

Karl wandered off to inspect the mineral deposits whilst the physician and scientist followed him, unsure of what to do. The physician should have been inspecting the miners, but he hovered at a distance, staring.

“Where are the skeletal remains?” Amelia asked.

“There are some over there.” He pointed. “And others we found last month when we were digging out the next cave. It looked like the entrance had caved in.”

She frowned. There’d been no new reports of remains.

“Why weren’t they reported?”

He shrugged. “It didn’t seem important. If it doesn’t affect mining, we ignore it.”

“Can you take me to them?”

He guided her into the other cave. The others trailed slowly behind, inspecting their surroundings. The mineral deposits in the rock glistened in the lights of the sconces; it was strange to think that the same crystals powered the sconces around them. She didn’t fully understand how it worked.

Then she saw them.

Bones littered the tunnel, scattered like debris. The air was thick, and sweat gathered beneath her mask as they followed the trail.

She was still trying to make sense of the fragments when the passage widened, drawing a gasp from her. The trail of bones led to a mountain of remains piled against one side of the cave.

She’d only expected a few skeletons. This looked like the catacombs that ran under their city, but more disordered.

“Were they found like this?” she asked. The sheer number suggested that something catastrophic had happened, and she doubted the sickness had caused it.

“No, we just moved them out of the way.”

There were hundreds, if not thousands. She tried to count the number of bodies but gave up after counting more than sixty skulls, all tangled together. The skeletons had become disconnected from the miners’ rough handling.

The miners were unfazed by the sight, continuing to work nearby. No one had reported this.

Karl came to stand beside her. “I thought there were only a few bodies,” he said.

“Me too,” she replied, shaking her head. “There could be thousands in here. Only a few were recorded in the archives.”

Examining the bones proved difficult in their disordered state. The anatomy was wrong. She tried to remember what the records had said about the remains’ anatomical anomalies.

Kneeling, she studied a femur that looked too large to be human. She carefully picked up a skull to study it under the glow of the sconces. The skull was large, but it was the stumps that caught her attention.

They weren’t incidental.

They protruded symmetrically from the skull, almost like the bases of horns. No one had reported anything like this. She would have remembered that. This was no ordinary human.

Wrapping the skull carefully in a cloth, she selected more bones to take back with her. The guild would want to examine them. They still needed to look for evidence linking the sickness to the deaths of those buried here.

Only then did she notice the engravings on the cave wall. They were the same symbols she had seen at Mount Ryjul, but these did not look as ancient.

How could they be here too?

She stepped closer and reached out, but before her fingers touched the wall, the ground began to shake. A deafening rumble rolled through the mine and its tunnels as dust fell.

The miners paused as though waiting for it to stop. Their calm reassured her for only a moment; as the shaking continued, they began to shout, throwing down their tools and running towards the exit.

The tunnel seemed to close in on her.