Chương 33: Chapter 30: Opening the Vault

Marcus stood silently in front of the vault entrance, studying it. The doorway was circular and massive – over twice as tall as Marcus was, and with plenty of space for multiple people to pass through it at the same time. Funny that dwarves would build such a huge door, but he supposed if they were storing something as massive as the body of an adult dragon inside of it, they did indeed require a large entrance.

The giant door had an intricate diagram carved into it, composed out of various animals, magical creatures, trees, constellations, and geometric shapes. The drawings blended into each other in odd ways, giving Marcus the impression it was a giant puzzle, the meaning of which eluded him. The whole thing was made out of shiny metal that showed no sign of rust or decay, despite the ancient origins of the vault. Marcus didn't recognize it, but then again, he was no expert on metal.

The door was set into a metallic frame made out of the same material, and neither the door nor the frame showed any sign of damage. They both looked brand new, despite being positively ancient, and in spite of many previous attempts to break into the vault by force.

There were several holes drilled into the nearby walls, where those same visitors had tried to side-step the door by digging through the surrounding rock. However, they all terminated in a smooth metallic plate, showing that the metal extended far into the rock wall, and was not limited to the frame of the vault door.

In the center of the door, there was a deep, roughly circular hole that looked like it could hold some kind of large cylinder. A lock of some sort. However, Beortan had made it clear that the entire area had been thoroughly scoured for anything that could fit in there and no key had ever been found. Either the dwarves had taken the key with them when they abandoned this place, or it was destroyed at some point.

Marcus glanced at Kasir's notebook in his hand. The mage had attempted to open the vault himself, and while he hadn't gone anywhere with his attempts, he was a very meticulous note-taker and wrote detailed explanations about what he had tried to do and why. It was pretty useful, in that Marcus knew what not to waste his time on.

"But would solving the diagram puzzle even mean anything?" Marcus mumbled quietly to himself, lost in thought.

"We don't have a key to slot in… surely the vault door won't open just because we said the magic words?"

As a young man, Marcus had read quite a few stories where ancient treasures revealed themselves to a worthy challenger who overcame an ancient trial. Unfortunately, his adult experiences suggested this kind of thing was vanishingly rare. When people built a vault like this, it was because the owners didn't want unknown people to get in – no matter how worthy or clever they were. The entrance required a key, not puzzle-solving skills.

Still, this vault actually had a complicated puzzle etched into it, so Marcus didn't want to assume too much. Deciphering what it meant couldn't hurt.

He wasn't sure how long he had been staring at the vault door, but eventually Beortan and Irdrith came back into the room. The two had left to secure the entrance to the vault with traps and alert spells, to lessen the chance of someone interrupting them. Marcus was a little alarmed at having Beortan alone with the dragon, but since his friend signaled that he was willing to risk it, Marcus didn't object to the idea.

"Have you figured out how to open the door?" Irdrith asked.

"No," Marcus told bluntly.

"Don't be impatient."

"Many people have tried to open the vault over the centuries my clan has lived here. None have succeeded. It will likely take a long time before we can get inside," Beortan admitted.

'If we can get in at all', Marcus thought to himself.

Irdrith didn't seem happy about that.

"The dwarves and the orcs shall not let us work unmolested for long," she said, folding her arms over her chest and narrowing her eyes.

"Once they know what I am after, this will become a hundred times more difficult."

"The dwarves don't know why you're here?" Marcus asked, surprised.

"How could they? It is not their vault," Irdrith said matter-of-factly.

There goes his idea of asking the dwarves for help with opening the vault, Marcus thought.

"The dwarves who once built this place are long gone. The ones pursuing me have no relation to them," Irdrith further explained.

"These are mysterious ancient ruins to them, same as they are to you. They know the vault is here, but do not understand its significance, else they would have set up an ambush here already. As for the orcs, they may seem beaten, but so long as the mage is still alive, they can always bring more reinforcements. There are always more orcs. That is to say, we must work fast."

"You know, if you want me to work faster, it would help if I knew more about the vault," Marcus told her.

"You said yourself that our goals are aligned, so why not give us more insight into the matter?"

"What do you wish to know?" She asked.

"I am unaware of what the inside of the vault happens to look like. I separated my consciousness from my body specifically so I would not get trapped there, but unfortunately that means the vault is almost as large of a mystery to me as it is to you."

Convenient."

Almost you say… so what do you know about it? Any little detail might help me figure out this door," Marcus pressed.

"It is a stasis vault of some sort," Irdrith said.

"The contents are held frozen in time, preventing things from decaying, germinating, contaminating each other with passive spiritual influence, spontaneously developing intelligence and plotting their escape, and other, shall we say, unwanted complications. In olden times, it was a preeminent way to preserve valuable powerful items and materials… and, on occasion, prisoners."

There were so many questions swimming in Marcus's mind right now. For instance, what did she mean by 'spontaneously developing intelligence'? He knew that powerful magic items tended to get individual quirks and idiosyncratic traits, especially if they were frequently used and passed down from generation to generation of users, but just how long would an item have to sit in a warehouse somewhere, completely undisturbed, before they could actually awaken intelligence and a will of their own?

Was that really a serious concern or was Irdrith just messing with them?

"Are you saying we are breaking into a prison here?" Marcus asked.

"For me it is a prison, but whether this is the vault's primary purpose, I know not. It was likely merely an improvised solution. There are not many things that can truly restrain an adult dragon like me," Irdrith explained.

Marcus wanted to press her more about this. Why she was captured like this in the first place? How long ago did this happen? Who were the dwarves that built this vault and stored her body inside? And if she had known about this vault all this time, why was she only now trying to get into the vault? From what she was hinting, this happened a very long time ago – she had centuries, possibly thousands of years to get this done, but was only doing this now?

He had many questions, but in the end he decided not to ask any of them. If he were in her position, he would rebuff any attempt to pry into his personal matters, or simply lie. The dragon in front of him would no doubt do the same. If she was interested in explaining, she would have done so by now.

Marcus glanced at Beortan's direction, but his friends was simply staring at the diagram etched into the vault door, lost in thought. He was clearly very invested in making this work. His friend was a very battle-focused mage, and usually had little patience for these kind of tasks.

After a mage achieved spirit manifestation, the next stage was the unification of spirit, body, and soul into an interconnected whole. Of course, nobody really achieved total unity of these three, but simply having a threefold nature made it exceptionally easy for a mage to enhance or transform themselves, to understand what effect magic was having on them, and to resist unwanted magic. It wouldn't be totally inaccurate to say that it turned a mage into something akin to a magical creature.

Achieving this rank typically made a mage much harder to kill, even if it didn't directly lead to an increase in power of their spells.

Unification rank was far less mysterious than spirit manifestation, but it was still hard to progress in. It required mages to work on all three components of their being in order to progress further, confronting their weaknesses. The issue was that, for most mages, the body lagged a lot behind the other two.

A lot. This meant they had to make up for the shortfall by consuming powerful magical materials to strengthen their physique, and these materials had to be appropriate for the type of technique they were practicing.

Beortan was currently at the Unification rank, and he practiced a dragon-aspected foundational technique. He might be tall and in good shape, but realistically speaking, he would have to gather dragon-related materials to truly progress through the unification stage, and those were quite rare. On top of that, there was no better material than the blood and scales of a true dragon like Irdrith. Little wonder, then, that he really wanted this deal to work.

"Here," Marcus said, throwing Kasir's notebook at Irdrith. She easily caught it, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Those are the notes of the previous guy who tried to figure out the vault. Read through them and see if you get any ideas. Pass the notebook to Beortan once you're done."

He didn't wait for her response, simply turning towards the vault and focusing on the diagram again. Behind him, he could hear the sound of pages turning in quick succession. It seemed that Irdrith had actually taken his advice to read the notebook, although she was either a very fast reader or simply skimming the text.

He wondered about Irdrith's true level of power. Dragons were really not fair, as far as Marcus was concerned. Like most magical creatures, they didn't have to work to progress through the ranks – they were already born with a spirit, and simply got more powerful as they aged. Unlike most magical creatures, dragons didn't seem to have a clear limit to this growth – their growth did slow to a crawl after the first hundred years or so, but it never seemed to actually end, and dragons themselves didn't age either.

Most frustratingly, dragons could also chose to practice a foundational technique and become a human-style mage on top of all their other advantages, and most of them eventually did just that. They had a lot of time to do it, and virtually all species of dragon had some kind of innate magical affinity that made magic of a specific sort extremely easy to master. Thus, an adult dragon was probably not just a mage, but a reasonably good one at that, unless they were really lazy.

So unfair.

The question was, just how powerful was Irdrith in particular? Usually it was really easy to tell how powerful a dragon was, based on how aggressive and full of themselves they were, but Irdrith was harder to read.

After staring at the vault door for some time, two things became obvious to Marcus. First, the diagram appeared to be some kind of representation of the outer planes. It wasn't a familiar wheel with the usual symbolism and six nodes representing the six heavens, but Marcus was familiar enough with ancient ruins to puzzle it out. Many of the symbols were archaic and rarely used today, and the diagram focused more on the Pillars of Creation than the six heavens birthed from them.

Secondly, this representation of the planes seemed to be a deliberate misdirection. There were actually two diagrams here: the first one hid a subtler one, with fainter, more abstract carvings.

Marcus narrowed his eyes slightly, walking up to the door and putting his hand onto the carvings. He flooded the door with his mana. The metal was utterly impervious to his magic, but his mana washed over the surface nonetheless, allowing him to sense even the faintest carvings on the surface and the faint emanations of the logos embedded into the construct. He then activated his microcosm and reflected the resulting image onto it in perfect detail.

After the unification rank, the next advancement required a mage to form a microcosm inside of them – an inner world of a sort, to act as a representation of the greater universe around them - the macrocosm. Though this internal 'little universe' was ultimately illusory and limited by the mage's insight into the world's logos, it had a profound influence on the mage's abilities.

It made them in tune with the movement of the universe, better able to understand complex logos fragments and sense supernatural shifts in their environment. More relevant to Marcus's current situation, it allowed them to replicate spells and objects inside their microcosm and then manipulate them in their mind.

In essence, they could work on their spells without having to spend their mana and cast them – something very useful for high-level spells that had prohibitive casting costs and dangerous side-effects associated with actually casting them – and to study objects in ways that would be otherwise impossible without deconstructing them.

After creating a copy of the diagram inside his microcosm, Marcus got to work, separating the pieces from one another and combining them in various ways, trying to figure out what the first layer of the diagram was hiding. From the outside, of course, none of that was really visible, and neither Beortan nor Irdrith reacted to his actions.

Hm. Interesting… a map.

"Using a slime to conform to the shape of the lock and thus fake the key," Irdrith suddenly said behind him, followed by a slight chuckle.

"This Kasir has some amusing ideas."

Beortan looked away from the vault door at her words, seemingly inspired.

"What about-" he began.

"No. I already attempted flooding the locking mechanism with ice to fake the key or at least sense the underlying mechanism," Irdrith said, cutting him off. She didn't even bother to look up when talking to him, and instead kept her eyes on the journal in her hands, turning pages at a very high frequency. She was seemingly just glancing at the pages in order to comprehend them.

"It did not work."

"I have something," Marcus said, drawing their attention.

"The vault gate is powered by six nearby leylines. This is why nobody has ever been able to destroy it or brute force it in the past. With this much magical power flowing into the wards, it is far beyond any one man – or dragon – to overpower. However, this arrangement is not natural. If we can dispel the artificial nodes redirecting the leylines into the vault, we will cut off its source of power and the protections on it will fade."

He raised his hand in front of him and summoned an illusory three-dimensional map of the mountain surrounding the buried vault. The map was not the same one as the one in the diagram – he kept that one for himself – but it clearly showed the location of the leyline re-direction nodes.

"Unfortunately, there is no actual way to bypass the key to the vault, which we don't have," Marcus added.

"We will still have to figure out some way to open the door… but that will be a lot easier once some of the protective wards fail and we can work on it more freely."

This wasn't entirely true. There was a procedure outlined in the diagram to bypass the key, involving a very odd collection of elemental logos – that of ash, crystal, dust, and ice. Marcus could probably pull it off, despite the rather exotic nature of the magic ritual, but he intended to play dumb for a while and stall for time. He wanted the dragon to get a bit more impatient so he could interrogate her more.

He was convinced she knew way more about the vault than she was letting on, and he needed to know she wasn't an immediate threat to them once she regained her body and returned to full power.

"Why would the dwarves leave behind a way to defeat their own wards?" Irdrith asked curiously. Marcus raised an eyebrow at her.

"Do not misunderstand, I am glad we are getting somewhere. But you must admit it is strange."

He actually did know the answer to that. The diagram had a short message embedded in it, and thanks to his new translation spell, Marcus could read it.

"They knew they would have to abandon this place and weren't sure their descendants would keep the key safe," Marcus said.

"This was meant as fallback option, so that the vault didn't become completely inaccessible once the key was lost."

Which ended up happening anyway. Frankly, the dwarves who made this vault had set a totally unreasonable standard for their descendants. If Marcus hadn't spent years of his life exploring various ancient ruins around the world; if he hadn't learned from Celer the structure of the Outer Heavens; if he wasn't a microcosm mage capable of filtering the disguise seal from the true diagram… a lot of things had to align in order to figure out what the diagram on the door meant.

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And even then, cutting off power to the vault was only the first step. There was still a matter of actually opening the door.

"I suppose that is sensible," Irdrith said, nodding. She snapped the journal in her hand shut and threw it back at Marcus, who easily caught it.

"And since all dwarves on the continent were annihilated, there were none left to return here. Some would call it sad, but I was never a friend of the dwarves. The most obnoxious race by far."

"I hate to break it to you, but there are still dwarves on the continent," Marcus remarked.

"I said what I said," she said haughtily.

"All the dwarven civilizations were destroyed. Perhaps a few tiny mountain holds survived the disaster, but they were mere dregs. Then a new wave of dwarven colonists from the southern continent moved into the ruins. These new dwarves are of a completely different culture than the ones who once lived here and built the vault. They do not even speak the same language."

"What wiped them out? The Abyss?" Beortan asked.

"No, it was the Grandfather Trees," she said casually, as if that was the most obvious thing and needed no additional explanation.

Marcus flinched a little at that. It was just a tiny, subtle reaction, but Irdrith immediately noticed it.

"Ah, so you are aware of that," she said, a knowing smile on her face.

"The gods tried so hard to erase any mention of them, but I suppose such a thing can never be fully suppressed. A true scholar of history, I take it?"

"I love history," Marcus said blandly.

"I can never get enough of it."

He wasn't discussing this with her.

"We should split up," Irdrith suddenly said.

"From what I can see, we are all capable, and the sooner we finish rerouting the ley lines, the better. It will not take long for the dwarves to notice something is amiss once we begin tampering with the local ley lines – their kind has always been good at geomancy, no matter the culture. With all three of us working on different nodes simultaneously, we ought to be done quickly indeed, hopefully prior to their realization of what is happening and interference with our work."

Marcus shared a look with Beortan. Honestly… there shouldn't be any issues with this. If they were attacked at some point, they should be able to survive long enough to flee and regroup. But really they shouldn't be attacked by anyone – the dwarves were annoying, but they'd refrained from attacking them without cause so far, and most of the orcs were killed. If anything, Irdrith was the one in danger of getting attacked without warning, and Marcus was pretty sure she could handle herself just fine.

Plus, this would allow Marcus and Beortan to talk among each other in private with long-range communication spells, with a lot less chance of Irdrith overhearing them in some way. Magical communications were fairly easy to notice and spy upon when one was within the range of both sender and receiver, but with all three of them being on their side of the mountain, the risk became negligible.

After discussing the task a bit more and assigning specific nodes to each of them, the three of them left the cave system and flew into the air before scattering in different directions.

Marcus carved a series of sigils in the ice and snow around him, forming a crude magical circle, before enacting a dispelling ritual aimed at a point deep underground. Usually, redirecting a ley line was a massive task requiring a lot of power and effort, and usually took days, if not weeks. However, that was when you wanted to redirect a ley line away from their natural flow.

These ley lines were already unnaturally redirected, so all he had to do was destroy the nodes made by the vault builders, and the ley line would naturally correct itself.

The ritual circle flashed with bright blue light, and the magic around the node receded. Suppressed, but not destroyed. To deal with it for good, Marcus commanded Chompy, who was waiting beside him, to dive into the frozen rock and soil and chew through the metal mesh that acted as a stabilizer for the ancient spellwork.

His ever-faithful earth elemental did not fail him. The node enchantment quickly fell apart, and the ley line immediately surged out of its restraints, shifting out of the channel it had followed for hundreds of years by now. Nothing happened visibly. There was no earthquake, no eruption of light, but Marcus could immediately sense a change.

"I'm done with site three," Marcus said, sending a message through a long-range communication spell to Beortan and Irdrith.

"Everything is done on my end."

"I'm just finishing the last of my sites," Beortan replied.

"I'll be done in a few minutes."

"Likewise," Irdrith answered succinctly.

Marcus was tempted to ask them how they were able to deal with the stabilization meshes without an earth elemental of their own, but he supposed it didn't really matter. As Irdrith had said – they were all capable people. Of course they had some way to destroy an enchanted object deep underground.

In any case, he could feel the change in the air. The mountain was invisibly shifting. Granted, this was because he was a microcosm mage and was thus innately sensitive to these kind of environmental shifts, but Irdrith was right. The dwarves would likely be able to sense it too. They might not immediately understand what they were witnessing, but it definitely put a time limit to his ability to stall Irdrith for answers.

Then again, it might also put more pressure on her in the shorter amount of time he had, so maybe this was a good thing. It's easier to play dumb and drag your feet for a few hours than it is to do so for a few days or weeks.

"Beortan, will it distract you if we talk?" he sent his friend.

"You think we're making a mistake?" Beortan immediately sent back.

"I think she has no intention of honoring her promise to you," Marcus told him.

"The moment she gets her body back she will leave. If we're lucky she will just mock us for thinking we can hold her to her word. If we're not lucky she will try to kill us because her draconic pride was hurt or something like that."

There was a very long pause after this. Just when Marcus was beginning to think Beortan wouldn't set anything back, he finally got a response.

"Do you think we will die here?" Beortan asked him.

"No," Marcus admitted.

Irdrith made a big show of being a mysterious elder dragon from a more glorious age, but a lot of her behavior came off as theatrics rather than genuine superiority. If he had to guess, she probably was a survivor from some ancient era, and clearly knew a lot of old secrets, but he didn't get a feeling she was as powerful as she sought to portray herself.

She couldn't figure out the vault door diagram, the traps she set up together with Beortan were not particularly powerful or sophisticated, and she had been chased around by a group of orcs that Marcus would simply kill if they tried to pursue him.

A lot of that was probably related to her bodiless existence, but even once she was reunited with her body, Marcus didn't think she could overpower them easily. She wasn't a microcosm mage in his opinion, and her full powers likely wouldn't immediately return.

On top of that, Marcus was pretty sure he could draw the attention of the dwarves if he wanted, regardless of where they currently were on the mountain. If Irdrith tried to fight them, she would quickly find herself locked in combat with two different groups.

No, Marcus was not really afraid of dying here. What he was afraid of was releasing some ancient draconic terror upon the world.

"I want to give this a try," Beortan told him.

"Alright," Marcus said simply.

Eventually Boertan and Irdrith finished things on their end, and all three of them rushed back to the ruined fort where they had agreed to reconvene.

Not long after, Marcus and Beortan found themselves staring at the door of the vault.

Or, well, what was left of it. Instead of the beautifully preserved circular door with intricate carvings, they were presented with a mangled hunk of metal, marred with deep gauges left by draconic claws. It seemed Irdrith had simply torn the vault door open with her sheer strength, now that the wards were no longer protecting it.

"Well," Marcus finally said.

"I have to say I didn't expect this."

It didn't take long for Marcus and Beortan to realize something had gone wrong. Irdrith didn't show up at the ruined fort after her last communication with them, and no longer answered their messages. After that, they hurried towards the vault entrance, only to realize that the traps she and Beortan had set were all activated and turned against them. That wasn't really a big threat, as Beortan knew where they all were, but it did slow them down.

By the time they reached the vault, the door had already been torn open and Irdrith was nowhere to be seen. No doubt she had already gone inside.

In any case, Beortan didn't say anything. He simply stepped through the now unobstructed gateway and entered the vault.

Marcus hurried after him.

They both soon found themselves inside an absolutely gigantic hallway. For a bunch of dwarves, they sure loved building things big. The hallway was made of polished stone, smooth and free of dust, despite its advanced age. It was very wide and tall, even more so than the entrance itself, and was lined with many doorways on both sides. Curiously, most of them didn't have any doors, and those that did were often flung wide open rather than locked.

Did Irdrith really have enough time to open a bunch of vault chambers in the short amount of time she'd had to explore the vault before they reached it? It didn't seem possible…

A draconic roar of pain sounded from somewhere deeper into the vault. Marcus started to move towards it, but Beortan stopped him.

"Wait," Beortan.

"Something is wrong."

He seemed to be staring at a corpse of some unknown humanoid in the distance. The body was completely desiccated and ancient, and much too big and oddly-shaped to be human.

Beortan took out his trap-detecting lantern and thrust it in front of him. Its ghostly blue flame shone brighter for a moment and the lantern released a faint pulse of blue light across the entire hallway.

As it passed though the hallways, more and more spots became outlined with floating blue embers. The entire space seemed to be riddled with traps, hundreds of them. The worst thing was that Marcus couldn't actually sense anything with his own senses – if it had been just him, he would have doubtlessly stumbled into some of them.

He glanced at the lantern Beortan held in his hand. Truthfully, he'd been starting to think his friend's prized treasure wasn't particularly impressive, as it hadn't proven all that useful until now. It seems he had been too quick to judge.

"I want to confront her too," Beortan said.

"But we've got to do this right. Stay alert and follow my lead – I'll find us a path through these traps, and hopefully you'll catch anything that my lamp has missed."

As they slowly progressed through the hallway, the true horror of the traps gradually became clear to Marcus. He tested a number of them by triggering them at a distance and was treated to the sight of his test dummies being pierced by similar crystal spears as the ones he often wielded, being enveloped in temporal acceleration fields that aged them hundreds of years in mere moments, and being crushed into fine dust by incredible gravitational pressures. This… this was no joke!

Any one of these could kill him instantly!

The worst thing was that all of this lethal arsenal was mostly pointless, because it soon became clear that most of the rooms lining the hallways were completely empty. That was why so many of the doors were visibly open. The builders of the vault seemed to have cleaned out most of the rooms before sealing it, taking most of the treasures with them when they went.

'Why not also disable the traps if you've already removed all the valuables?' Marcus silently lamented as they carefully maneuvered through a field of thin, razor-sharp wires strung across this section of the hallways.

'Why keep the vault locked down so tight? What is the point? Is keeping that dragon really so important? And if she's so dangerous, why did you leave instructions on how to bypass the lock?'

However, near the end of the corridor, Marcus realized that some of the rooms weren't completely empty. The dwarves apparently didn't have time to take everything, it seemed. He scanned the rooms from the outside whenever he encountered a room that wasn't empty. Everything was remarkably well preserved, as if it was stored just yesterday – this was probably due to it being a stasis vault, as Irdrith had called it.

Most of the remaining contents were not too exciting. There were several rooms full of financial records, lineage maps, or other documents. Interesting to historians, no doubt, but despite Marcus's words earlier, he didn't have much of an interest in this. There were also a number of containers full of moderately expensive materials – the sort of thing that would be worth to claim and sell, but was bulky and would clog up his storage bracelet and slow them down if he started grabbing everything he encountered.

"I'll pick this stuff up with my clansmen later and split the profits when I sell it all," Beortan assured him.

"Don't get distracted."

Despite the admonition, Marcus grabbed a number of items he had found in the rooms that he deemed powerful, using telekinesis and threads of magical force of drag them towards him and avoid entering the rooms and triggering more traps.

A shiny black feather in a crystal case, a necklace seemingly made out of petrified eyes, a plain golden ring, a dagger of clearly dwarven make, a hexagonal green crystal, an intricate mechanical beetle seemingly made out of ivory, a metal bracelet covered in intricate runework, and a small glass bottle decorated with silver leaf patterns. He didn't know what any of them did, except for the bracelet – that was clearly a storage bracelet similar to the one he was wearing – but they all emanated a powerful logos.

This was the kind of item you found or inherited from someone, not something you could buy.

"We'll split these between ourselves once we get out," Marcus assured Beortan.

Thankfully there were only the two of them here, and they both trusted each other. Division of treasure could get pretty heated in large groups.

The hallway was long and not actually straight, but curved and slightly angled downward. It seemed to descend into the depths of the mountain by spiraling down in a long, gentle spiral.

Eventually they reached the end of it. There was another door here, but much like the entrance to the vault, it had been ripped open and mangled. The floor around it was melted and riddled with cracks and scars, as it the place had been the sight of a magical battle. Either Irdrith had triggered some of the traps while she brute-forced her way in, or the door had some active defenses that couldn't be easily avoided.

Either way, the path was open, though the space beyond the ruined doorway was poorly lit and emanated incredible cold. This deeper vault was even colder than the mountain on the surface!

Marcus and Beortan stepped into it anyway. A little cold wouldn't stop them, and Beortan's trap-detecting lantern was also an actual light source which easily illuminated the space in front of them, bathing everything in soft blue light. Beortan used the lamp to detect traps in this new area, but he failed to find any. It seemed that for this particular area, the vault builders didn't feel the need to use any.

The place was overall very different than the smooth, orderly hallway that preceded it. The walls and floor were rougher, more crudely made. The layout was labyrinthine and strange, and Marcus suspected this was more of a natural area repurposed into a vault than a purpose-built facility.

Despite the lantern indicating there were no traps, the two of them proceeded slowly and with great caution. The place was freezing cold and dark, but not silent. There was no sign of Irdrith, but Marcus could hear faint singing in the distance. It was melodic and oddly familiar, but when Marcus focused on it, he found it incomprehensible. He also couldn't pinpoint the direction it was coming from, and it didn't seem to get any louder or quieter no matter where they were.

Marcus tried to use a translation spell on it and was immediately assaulted with a blinding headache, his vision going white for a moment. His legs gave out and he collapsed to his knees with a strangled cry, clutching his head.

"Marcus!" Beortan called out to him in worry and knelt down next to him, wary of approaching too much. His eyes swerved around them, trying to spot the trap that Marcus stumbled into.

"What happened!?"

"I…" Marcus said, breathing heavily. The incident was thankfully over quickly, and he was already recovering.

"I think I'll be alright. Don't… don't try to figure out the song, alright?"

Beortan gave him a strange look, but for Marcus this was no laughing matter. The truth was, while the feeling he got from trying to translate the song permeating the place was painful and incapacitating, it wasn't completely alien. He had sensed something like this before, back when he had experienced the diving vision so many months ago.

He'd felt like his mind was being brought to the breaking point by trying to process the thoughts and senses of something so much greater than himself that even a fraction of it was too much for him. This song, although not nearly as bad, felt very much the same.

What… what on earth did the dwarves trap in here?

Beortan helped him back to his feet and they continued searching for the ice dragon. The area, they eventually realized, was some kind of prison. There were no rooms here, but rather large blocks of ice embedded inside the walls, and inside those blocks of ice were a variety of creatures.

There were many humans, dwarves, and elves trapped in ice here, but also what looked like a giant octopus, a worm-like creature with a mouth that split open like a flower, a half-man-half-horse with horns of a ram and a demonic expression, a furry elephant, and a sphere covered in eye-stalks. Based on their emanations – or rather, the lack of them – they all appeared to have perished a long time ago.

Marcus wasn't sure why that was, given that this place was supposed to be in temporal stasis, but he suspected the odd singing that permeated the place might have had something to do with it.

"Maybe the stasis fields around these just failed," Beortan offered.

"This place has been running for a long time. Most enchantments would have failed a long time ago. It's amazing that anything survived at all."

Maybe. Marcus was about to say something when a third voice interrupted him.

[Am I imagining things in my final moments? Are you really a fellow servant of the Lords?] a voice suddenly rang inside his head. It sounded feeble and tired.

Marcus quickly focused on the source of the communication. There, in one of the blocks of ice nearby, was a tree trapped in ice. A strange sight on its own, but Marcus could feel signs of life on this one, unlike the various other creatures they passed by so far. It was faint, but it was there.

"What is it?" Beortan asked.

"The tree is talking to me," Marcus said.

"Can you hear it?"

"No," Beortan said, narrowing his eyes.

[I waited for so long, and no one ever came… How many years have passed by since I was imprisoned here? Alas, the Leviathan has all but eroded me away. My time is all but spent,] the tree lamented. It didn't seem to register Beortan's presence. [Come closer, brother. We are both soldiers of the Grandfather Trees. What Lord do you serve?] Marcus hesitated for a moment, but then decided to play along. He stepped towards the ice block that held the tree.

[Sacred Oak,] Marcus said.

[Sacred Oak?] the tree said slowly, seeming confused. [I don't remember that Lord… but, ah, so much time has passed. No matter. I'm just glad our legacy endures. When nobody came for me, I thought… I feared… no, it doesn't matter. Here.] The tree, seemingly completely trapped in ice until a moment ago, suddenly thrust one of its branches straight out of the ice, cracking and breaking it seemingly without effort.

Marcus hurriedly jumped back to evade the branch, but the tree had no intention of hitting him and made no other moves after getting the branch free of the ice. He signaled to Beortan, who had been alarmed at the movement, to stand down and not attack the tree.

Before Marcus could ask the tree what the meaning of this was, a fruit suddenly started to grow on the branch, rapidly swelling in size and emanating powerful and complex wood-aligned logos. At the same time, the tree's already faint emanations started getting even weaker. It was as if the tree was pouring all of its remaining life into this fruit.

Marcus and Beortan watched the process in fascination and silence. There were a lot of strange plants out there, but Marcus had never seen a fruit mature this suddenly and rapidly. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

[It is done,] the tree told Marcus, its voice incredibly faint now. [My… my everything. Use it well, brother. May our crusade scour the universe of any sign of artifice and civilization! Glory… glory to the Grandfather Trees…] Then the tree was silent, and would speak no more.

Marcus took the fruit in his hand and plucked it off the branch. Just holding it in his hands seemed to fill him with slight vitality, and the patterns on its surface threatened to pull him into a meditative trance as he longed to study its rich wood logos and add it to his foundation…

But no. Now was not the time for that. He put the fruit into his storage bracelet, and they continued onward.

Eventually, they arrived into a giant hall, much larger than anything they encountered so far. It could hold a small army inside, and the walls were all lined with more ice prisoners. However, their eyes were immediately drawn to the biggest one which dominated the entire space. There was a massive creature of immense size frozen inside of it, a dark shape somewhat reminiscent of a whale, but with too many fins and ridges. Something that was either barbels or tentacles hung from around its mouth, four in number.

They stared at the trapped leviathan for several seconds, speechless and more than a little afraid. Despite being trapped here for god knows how long, despite so many other creatures perishing around it, there were powerful emanations coming from the whale-like creature. It wasn't just alive, it seemed to be bursting with vitality and magical might.

Before any of them could say something, a gigantic eye opened at the side of the creature, unimpeded by the all the ice around it that should prevent such a motion and looked at them with detached curiosity.

The song permeating the place grew louder.