Chapter Four - Beneath the Tomb
# Chapter Four: Beneath the Tomb
The Frost Tomb's entrance was even more concealed than legend suggested.
Victor followed the map provided by the visitor, traversing the Old Quarter's underground pipe system for six hours. The pipes dated from the Second Age, originally built to transport magically powered public lighting energy, now long abandoned, leaving only rusted supports and occasional seeping chemical wastewater.
The marker at the thirty-seventh junction was a stone slab carved with an eye symbol. Victor pressed his palm against it, feeling faint magical scanning—the system confirming his identity, or at least that he bore the correct key. The bone fragment given by the visitor grew hot in his pocket, resonating with the slab.
The stone door slid open silently, revealing a descending spiral staircase. The air immediately grew cold, carrying an ancient chill that did not belong to this world. Victor donned the neural interference cloak and activated the resonance drill's warm-up sequence.
The staircase seemed endless. Coldfire crystals embedded in the walls provided illumination, their blue flames tilting slightly as Victor passed, as if watching him. He recalled the guild archive's warning: the Frost Tomb was not merely a cemetery, but a prison. Certain mages interred here had their deaths designed as part of the seal itself; anyone attempting to disturb them would become new sealing material.
Finally, the staircase ended at a massive bronze door. Upon it was carved the portrait of Merlin Crystaltongue, founder of Memory Alchemy, holding an enormous memory crystal containing countless struggling human forms. Below the portrait was inscribed:
"Memory is existence; existence is responsibility. Entering, you shall bear the weight of all you witness."
Victor pushed the door open.
The tomb interior was a vast circular space, the ceiling so high it vanished from sight, only blue coldfire crystals floating in the void like an inverted starry sky. The floor was arranged with hundreds of crystal sarcophagi, each preserving a mage's remains. Some were transparent, showing peaceful faces within; others were covered with heavy black cloth, indicating the contents must not be viewed.
He found Silas Morningstar's location: Seventh Ring, Number Thirty-two. The sarcophagus was transparent, the old man within white-haired, hands folded across his chest, clutching a charred notebook. His expression was unusually peaceful, even smiling, in stark contrast to the pained or fearful faces around him.
While setting up equipment, Victor noticed anomalies. No other sarcophagi surrounded Silas's, forming a three-meter radius of empty space, as if other remains were avoiding him. The dust distribution on the floor was also unnatural, forming a certain rune pattern—a continuously operating seal formula.
He carefully avoided these patterns, aligning the resonance drill with the corpse's temple. The drill's needle was forged from voidstone, capable of resonating with neural crystal threads in the dead brain without disrupting the temporal field.
The startup sequence required ten minutes. Victor used this time to examine the notebook in Silas's hands. The cover was charred, but the inner pages were miraculously preserved, written in ink he had never seen before—the ink seemed to flow, characters constantly reorganizing into different sentences.
When he concentrated, the ink fixed, displaying a clear line in Common Tongue:
"If you are reading this, Eleanor's prophecy has been fulfilled. Beware the masked one—he is not who he claims to be. —S."
Victor's blood froze. He continued turning pages, finding that each page displayed different content for different readers. One page contained warnings about the Door of the Void, describing entities called "Children of the Void"—they had no fixed form, wearing human memories like clothing to "put on" personalities and move in the material world.
Another page held technical notes, detailed records of Eleanor's "pure information state" theory, and how she "encoded" crucial knowledge into Silas's memory structure. The final page held only one sentence, the ink so fresh it might have been written moments ago:
"Victor, choose the third path: merge my memories with Ayla's, but give the masked one nothing. He is already outside the door. —S."
Victor looked up sharply. From the tomb entrance came footsteps. Not one person, but many, wearing uniform soft-soled boots that absorbed sound.
He had three minutes.