CHAPTER 1.40 - INTO THE BARROW: I
Hugo would love to snooze, but his brain is all sharp edges. The morning’s been an uneven mix of adrenaline and inaction. The white block is now cleared, a flat rectangle of rock cut perfectly out of the regular white wall. That, or fitted so closely to the hole that it seems of a piece. Were the stone marbled or textured, it might be clearer whether the plug (which he cannot think of as anything but a door) is native or masterfully crafted.
Rian and the farmers assembled to man the pry bars have been discussing the stone since first light, to Hugo’s mind arriving at ‘that’s weird’ and a shrug for their explanation. At least it has given them a distraction from the brute effort of shifting the huge block. Whomever sealed the wall, and for whatever purpose, they intended the door to stay in place. The only real consensus on which the assembled workers and busybodies can settle is that there was purpose behind its creation.
With Anuk uninvited to their cabal, it was impossible for Hugo to ascertain if Bertak’s project was completed, until this morning. Atheran was, of course, frequently present, not to mention full of opinions. She has insisted on two things: the villagers will not seal the door in daylight, and if they do, it will remain sealed until the group delivers their password knock. The woman has again plunged him into self-doubt; a consequence of her insistence is that the village’s remaining hunters will be guarding the overhang. He feels guilty that they might otherwise have managed a day of late autumn hunting, but the elder wouldn’t be moved. Durn, on the other hand, is up and about, passing on Marek’s thanks and regards to their group. The hunter is cheerful but notably will not turn his gaze directly to the slab.
The green-haired woman is moving differently this morning. Noticeably so. He’s puzzled, however, as the change might not be for the better. He would never say it, but Atheran seems sweaty, a little breathless, tiny cracks of discomfort showing through her stern expression. Occasionally while standing, the woman would waver for a moment, as though ready to lose her balance. Hugo thinks this would be just their luck, his luck specifically. To have their best intentions twisted into useless pain.
The thought of ‘useless pain’ brings him back to the present, to his immediate future. The giant stone has been shifted sufficiently for Rian to squeeze through into pitch-blackness. Atheran’s conditions, it seemed, hinged on the possibility that the slab had been hermetically sealed. As disapproving as she was of ‘adventurers’, it seems the woman retained some of their lessons and didn’t want his band to march heedlessly to their doom. He wonders if this is an indication of some warmth in her heart, assumes instead that her role as shepherd of the village extends over them while they are in her midst.
He is increasingly antsy as it approaches time to enter. Atheran’s anti-suffocation advice insisted they allow an hour for air to circulate, negotiated down to 30 minutes. It seems his friends are eager for the off. More likely, Hugo corrects himself, they’re similarly tortured by this inactivity. He wants to swear, to scream, to shout, but the group are sworn to silence. The ingress of sunlight following the morning’s activities may have already blown any chance for stealth. And with this surge of nausea, this prickle of panic, Hugo curses that his traitorous eyelids finally feel heavy, a mocking promise of sleep should he allow it.
And then Rian is on his feet, silently gathering up his backpack and pike. Hugo leaps up, nerves jangling, feeling fumble-fingered as he tries to arrange his lute, the wolfskin satchel, the crossbow and quiver onto his back. He feels certain the others are calm, measured in their movements, that he is embarrassing them. Falls back into the suspicion that everybody else received some mystical ‘competence training’ from which he, for some reason, was overlooked. He breathes long and deep, feeling sweat on his top lip as he pictures his lungs straining, trying to draw breath in a vacuum.
For once, Rian isn’t leading their group. While contemplating this expedition, Hugo recalled a magical effect he learned early on, seldom used in his life in the shadows. Thae’s shield seemed the perfect target for the spell, his friend agreeing eagerly, if seriously, to lead their number. The half-elf doffs the shield to receive the effect, waiting patiently. Hugo unstoppers the jar supplied to him by his good friend Nina. She and the village kids were allowed to stay out late last night, as she had corralled them into capturing fireflies for this very moment.
A firefly, itself probably short on oxygen, sleepily crawls then bobs out of the jar as Hugo breaks the silence in the narrow space. It is merely a flat chant, and while his voice is as low as he can manage, the noise seems jarring. He sees the eyes of one of the hunters widen as the front of Thae’s shield suffuses with light. His friend nods stoically in gratitude before slipping into the darkness, Rian stooping and squeezing through behind. Hugo looks up at Anuk, her stare again seeming to focus through the darkness, into the heart of the world, before he forces himself to follow. As distracted as she might appear, the pale woman follows him closely, padding on quiet feet.
-x-
Hugo’s breathless nightmares seem foolish as they press into the silent hillside. His dreams were either of suffocation or of immediate assault by smokey, formless evil. Hazy shapes, somehow only their claws and teeth substantial, ripping into him. The air here is neither clean nor fresh, and it leaves his throat impossibly dry. Rather than death-cold and thin, it feels warm, as though it has been baked over ages. They are moving down a narrow passage, perfectly rectangular and cleanly bored. Walls, ceiling, floor all the smooth, featureless white stone. As Thae pitches the shield downwards, clear beam of light illuminating the way forward, the shallow slope becomes stairs leading deeper into the hills to the north of the village.
As Thae leads them down the steps, Hugo contemplates his friend. Of course the half-elf volunteered for the game of ‘throw yourself into peril to protect your allies’. Hugo suspects Thae would be all in, even if the terms were ‘throw yourself onto spikes to protect one stranger’. He can’t help but be impressed, even with his survival instincts fraying under his state of sustained alarm.
Rian and Anuk, for all he can perceive of the pale woman behind him, seem focused, alert. Calmer than he feels, his heart leaping in his chest. The light leading Thae has altered, illumination changing as the staircase opens into a larger space. This is it, he thinks, as he prepares for a new ambush to be sprung, to be fighting for his life. This time against impossible odds.
He steps out onto a level floor, walls curving away on either side to encapsulate a circular room. The wall here seems more organic, momentarily, until the shadows, moving as Thae scans the space, indicate some form of bas relief or carving on the stone. His internal storyteller, hungry for context, wishes to dwell on these, but his survival instinct is pulled to the opposite wall. Thae’s too, as the light swings to reveal a single rectangular passage obscured by a door. Or rather, the tattered remnants of one.
Thae, shield still focused forward, turns to the others, expression questioning. Rian, in silent response, approaches the half-elf, pike levelled upon the portal. Hugo feels split, his traitorous eyes scanning for hints of art or a story, of clues possibly adorning the walls. He sees that Anuk is also screwing up her eyes, similarly focused, fully ignoring the door. They come together, muttering their votes to move on or pause here, the deadlock broken when Anuk produces a pencil and the now-impressive book. It’s thrown open to a blank double page as she begins to sketch out a representation of the room’s engravings.
Hugo crouches at the centre of the room, aiming Thae’s shield for Anuk as she sketches. The warriors stand sentry across the room. He realises the division of labour is uneven, somehow. Elves’ eyes are engineered more like cats’ than humans’, as effective in low light as in full illumination. Rian and he would be in trouble without the benefits of Thae’s shield, or rather Hugo’s trick, however he senses that Anuk can more easily determine the shapes on the walls with the active light throwing shadows. Either way, the decorations on the walls are obscured somewhat by being white-on-white.
As he allows the girl to work, he tries to make sense of the shapes he is highlighting for her. To either side of the door by which they entered, series of stylised humans are posed in a story or sequence. The form of the stylisation, or possibly the amateurishness of the carvings, renders the perspectives, the poses of the figures indistinct. Then again, the arc of the light is not complete, so the gallery or display might be clear if perceived completely rather than in chunks. There are some symbols above the door, but these are equally obscure unless the carver really did wish to portray a broken plate. Or, he thinks, a reversed comma in the process of vomiting.
They have paused for less than ten minutes by his estimate, but the time is weighing heavily on him. The desiccated air is drying him out, tickling his lungs, a process he observed as they climbed down the stairs. The initial plug in the wall was not, it seems, fully sealed until dirt and roots and matter from the hill above the barrow conspired to do so. The steps down were scattered with clods and fragments of dirt, seemingly baked into dust over unknowable spans of time. The air isn’t hot but is increasing in temperature as they progress downwards into the earth. This clashes with his expectations, the even white stone surrounding them suggesting a chill.
As Anuk signals for their attention, Thae and she return to Hugo. Rian nods the half-elf away, remaining in the darkness before the door until Hugo shifts the shield to illuminate both the woodsman and Anuk’s opened book. The woman has kept her sketch simple, basic lines to define the shapes carved across the walls, but Hugo is impressed by the accuracy of her hand compared to what he could make out.
For certain, the perspective on the figures is wrong, uncanny. In whispered tones, Anuk clarifies that the figures have been drawn in profile, limbs apparently extended so as not to be blocked by their bodies. The faces even more stylised, heads appearing lengthened. It explains the strange, poorly posed look of the people, the difficulty Hugo had in visualising the subjects. Anuk, having been the first of them to see the span of the display, has some theories and clarifications.
To her, the sides of the room are separated by the door and its surrounds, themselves a single panel. A figure in robes, their head spiky, confronts a pair of figures similarly clothed but spikeless, beneath the vomiting comma. To their left from this perspective, what Hugo thinks of as ‘stage right’, appears to be a narrative, the adventures of the spiky headed one. Above the final figures on this side Anuk has written the word ‘rushed’. Hugo is entertained that she felt the need to label this, as her sketched lines are more feathered, less definite than closer to the entrance. Stage left seems to Anuk more like a record, and an incomplete one at that. There is blank space on this side, perhaps on purpose.
Anuk thinks that there is more symbolism in the composition than they have context to translate. Certainly, spiky head seems to be highest status, followed by the other robed figures then the seemingly naked ones. There are symbols, letters or pictographs picked out above the door and within Spiky’s story, but they cannot read these and could be missing some context or information. Hugo queries the anomalous look of what could be a floating bug, far stage right on the last panel of A Tale of Spikes. Anuk, looking grim, states only “It’s stained. Dark. Brownish.”
They begin to fall into speculation, the storyteller, the haunted girl and the God-botherer, until Rian silences them with a hiss. The three freeze as though chided by a parent, straining in the silence for a moment. Then Hugo’s blood chills as he detects a sound like stone scraping against stone.
It’s coming from behind the door.
And, as the sound repeats, Hugo is certain that it’s getting closer.
