Chương 22: Ch20- Ancient Cave

The Portkey, a battered suitcase scarred from years of abuse, lurched violently, yanking Cassian and Bathsheda forward. A heartbeat later, Cassian's boots slammed onto solid ground, the sharp, frigid air of Norway biting at his face. Bathsheda landed gracefully, adjusting her bag like teleporting to another country was just another Thursday. Cassian stumbled, catching himself with a muttered curse.

"Still feels like my insides rearranged every bloody time," Cassian muttered, brushing off his coat and trying to look like he hadn't just been spun through a cosmic blender. He casually kicked a patch of grass off his boot like that would undo the disgraceful landing. It was his first time. Old Cassian experienced this before, both Apparition and Portkey travel, but this was the first time he blinked and ended up thousands of kilometers away. Reading memories was one thing. Living them was a whole different beast.

Before the trip, he checked over the old Cassian's memories. How Portkeys twisted through the gut like a sinkhole of suction, how Apparition punched behind the eyes and pulled at the ribs like a tug-of-war between dimensions. Old Cassian remembered the sensation as something like being folded in half at the stomach, then siphoned through himself in two violent directions. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't magical. It was mechanical terror masquerading as transportation. Simply, awful.

Best Cassian could describe it, imagine being turned to spaghetti at the edge of a black hole and spat out the other end like some smug, indifferent white hole had coughed you into a different universe. Not that he experienced either. Magic was no different. Cassian saw the flashes of memories, Old Cassian's attempts in charms and hexes. He knew how it should feel. Knew the muscle pull of a proper charm. But knowing wasn't casting. It wasn't instinctive, not like it had been in those memories.

The best he could explain it was like trying to describe how breathing worked. Could words ever capture the feeling? If anything, they only made it worse. Humans, when made to think about breathing, often lost the instinctive ability to do it. Something they did even in their dreams. Most just covered it up with snoring, but still. This Cassian had to learn what breath was again. Old Cassian's reflexes weren't transferable, not that he had many to begin with. The raw knowledge? Sure. Minimal, still.

But it was there.

"You will survive," Bathsheda replied dryly, scanning the dark horizon.

"Come on. Camp is this way." The site lay just outside Trondheim, shielded from Muggle eyes by thick layers of enchantments. The magical outpost was busy with movement already, witches and wizards darting between tents and rune-carved stones, parchment rustling in the cold wind. Some bent over artefacts, others whispered furiously over scrolls as if the words themselves might bite back. Bathsheda moved to join the fray, cutting a line through the bustle.

Cassian followed at a slower pace, hands in his pockets, eyes flicking lazily over the surroundings like he wasn't cataloguing every detail. A man in thick furs waved them over.

"Professor Babbling, I presume?" His accent was heavy Norwegian, wand tucked in his pocket like an absent-minded quill.

"And you must be Professor Rosier." Cassian gave a polite smile.

"That would be me." Erik Aasland, lead researcher and clearly the kind of man who would stab someone with a quill if they mishandled a rune, led them to the dig site. A partially unearthed mountain wall sprawled before them, its walls lined with carvings Cassian didn't recognize. The air brimming with magic, so heavy that even he felt it crawl across his skin. Bathsheda crouched immediately, fingers tracing delicate lines over the stone.

"Not Elder Futhark," she murmured.

"Or any known derivative." Cassian knelt beside her, his eyes narrowing.

"These shapes…" He murmured... He wasn't just a historian by trade… he was obsessed with ancient languages. Hieroglyphs, cuneiform, proto-scripts, anything scratched, inked, or carved millennia ago… he researched. He still had the image of a Sumerian tablet burned into his mind, a sliver of a fragment he once owned. He once even owned a small limestone from Gobekli Tepe, worn smooth by hands that had used it over ten thousand years ago. Simple tools, maybe. But they spoke of people…

rituals, lives, things that outlasted words. Those two relics weren't just treasures. They were proof of how far his obsession ran. He had spent a fortune to acquire them, burning through savings and sense alike, unable to resist the pull of the ancient. Forgotten scripts, dead tongues, markings barely anyone could piece together… he craved them all, chasing them like a man possessed, enough to call himself a proper historian and almost believe it. But the carvings in front of him? Not Old Norse.

Not even Younger Futhark. Not anything he recognised. The shapes twisted like they wanted to be a language, but if they were, they weren't one he'd ever seen. And he'd seen plenty. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. He brushed some loose grit away. The edges of the runes were knife-sharp, untouched. Anything this old should've worn smooth long ago. Most scripts this ancient were worn down, half-erased by wind or water or careless hands.

These looked like they'd been cut yesterday. He reached out and touched one. The instant his finger met the stone, the world tilted violently sideways.

A storm hammered the coastline… black waves crashing against jagged rocks, sea spray lashing up in icy sheets. A small village lay in the crook of a fjord, its houses hunched against the wind like beaten animals. Sparse firelight trembled behind a handful of windows. Beyond it, high on the cliffs, a woman stood at the mouth of a cave. Barefoot. Arms streaked in runes, didn't seem like inked, but carved. Her hair clung to her skin, soaked and tangled. Her eyes weren't human… too bright, too sharp.

The storm circled her like a loyal beast. Voices shouted beneath her. Men climbed the path, weapons drawn. Runes glowed on her arms. The stone around her began to shake. The men shouted warnings. Threats. Prayers. She didn't answer. She raised both arms, the runes carved into her flesh bleeding crimson radiance. A dragon's roar split the storm. Then… The cave mouth folded in on itself, stone flowing like molten wax, hardening with a sound like a thousand bones snapping shut. The storm died. Silence.

Then the woman was gone.

Cassian jerked back like he touched fire. His fingers stung. The rune he touched was warm. Bathsheda was kneeling beside another stone a few feet away. She didn't notice his reaction. A few other researchers were murmuring nearby, too distracted with their own translations to look up. Something stirred deep within him. Same feeling as when he learned Lumos Noctis. Like the world had tilted slightly and no one else noticed. Something shifted. He couldn't say what, but it was there…

tugging at the back of his mind like a loose thread waiting to be pulled. Cassian stayed crouched, fingers still hovering near the rune. The heat faded, but the memory didn't. A torrent of memory… hours of someone else's life flooded into him within a heartbeat. The smell of salt, wet stone, her eyes. He blinked, then quietly sorted through it. It wasn't like a seer's vision. It wasn't like learning an ancient spell. This had weight. A presence that wasn't his but clung to his bones anyway. And the name…

he hadn't heard it in the vision, but it dropped into his mouth like it had always been there, carved behind his teeth.

"… Yrsa," he muttered. His chest tightened. A sudden shriek cut through the wind, so sharp, it silenced the entire camp. Heads snapped up. Tools hit the ground. One of the younger researchers bolted toward the source, already shouting something in Norwegian. Cassian was already running with Bathsheda, boots slamming against the uneven ground. His stomach twisted the moment he recognised where the sound had come from. The cave. It was exactly the same one from the vision.

Before, he only saw the cliffside, the mouth of the cave blocked by the slope and thick rock. Now, the way was clear. And he didn't like it. Another researcher caught up beside him.

"That sounded like Hilde!" Cassian didn't know who Hilde was but the air around the cave felt wrong. Too quiet. Even the wind seemed to have pulled back. He gripped his wand tighter and ducked inside. The entrance widened for two people to walk side by side. The stone underfoot was damp, the cave lit only by the flickering glow of their wands. The rest of the group stayed outside, shouting, calling names. Further in, something glittered faintly in the dark. Then they saw her.

Hilde, one of the junior researchers, collapsed on the floor, eyes wide, body frozen in a twisted, half-curled shape. Not unconscious but stiff. Completely rigid, like she'd been turned into a statue mid-fall. Her wand lay a few feet away. Bathsheda crouched next to her, fingers already moving over Hilde's arm.

"She's breathing." Cassian looked around. The walls of the cave were carved with the same runes, but deeper in, they started to shift. The shapes bent, angles sharper, cuts cleaner. More recent, somehow. It didn't make any sense...

"She was doing a rub of the inner wall. I told her not to go in alone…" Another German scholar stopped, eyes narrowing.

"This isn't ordinary paralysis." Cassian looked further in, following the line of runes as they formed a spiral. Definitely leading somewhere. The damp stone underfoot gave way to a smoother surface, as if the spiral had been carved to guide a particular kind of traveller. He crouched to trace the faint grooves. Bathsheda hovered behind him, wand lit, her breath puffing in little clouds.

"It is leading," she said, as though stating the obvious. She knelt, pressing her palm beside his, the runes glowing faintly in response. They crept deeper. The spiral wound tighter, turning until it pointed straight down a narrow corridor. A faint draft curled around Cassian's neck, cold and wet, like a breath that didn't belong to him. He glanced over his shoulder at Bathsheda. She gave a small nod. A single torch flickered ahead, casting shadows that danced with the runes. Cassian tipped his head.

"That— is not natural."

"Or it's an invitation," Bathsheda said. Her grip on her wand tightened. Quickly, they passed the torch. The circle of illumination steadied on a shallow alcove. There, set into the wall, was a block of stone, its face blank except for a single rune, a symbol neither of them could recognize. Cassian crouched again. The shape reminded him of a curled serpent, mouth open, fangs bared. He tapped it lightly. At once the runes on the spiral flared, and a low hum reverberated through the chamber.

Something moved in the shadows, soft, subtle, like a whisper brushing the back of his neck. He turned instinctively to check. Nothing. Just Bathsheda watching him, brows drawn low. He met her gaze.

"Did you hear—" He cut himself off, moving forward before she could answer. He tapped the serpent-rune once more. The wall shuddered. A panel slid aside, revealing a narrow shaft. The runes throbbed faintly from within, like veins carrying blood beneath ancient stone. Cassian slid his hand around Bathsheda's arm.

"After you," Bathsheda murmured, but her wand hand tightened slightly as she said it. He stepped into the shaft first. It sloped steeply downward, the damp mist clinging like cobwebs. Stone slick underfoot, Cassian moved cautiously, scanning the runes one last time for familiarity. There was none. The spiral had drawn them here, but what waited at its end?