It had been my first time back in this graveyard since the final encounter with Arius Mephisto, and the place was still churned up pretty badly.Quote:
The carnage left by our magic, and Arius's portals, had only just started being cleared up. I could almost picture the astonished expressions of the groundsmen of the cemetary as they wandered back into work, the whole place littered with craters, potholes, debris and charring that wasn't present the night before. I imagine being greeted with this scene would have driven deep concern as to what happened here into the mind of any rational person, and would certainly have some people looking over their shoulders.
Nonetheless, I had come back for one reason and one reason alone. Arius had been looking for something here, and I had never been fully satisfied that he had found it before being wiped out. I was not comfortable at all with leaving loose ends with regards to him or his machinations, perhaps out of fear that doing so would inevitably come back to bite us. I had to assume the worst, that whatever it was he was searching for could create more problems for us. I had seen enough of Arius and his sorcery to be justified in being paranoid of ruling anything out, even some sort of inexplicable ressurection or some post-mortem vengeance.
Nothing was impossible. That's what I had to assume.
So, here I was, standing now at the grave Arius had been looking at when we found him.
It had taken me a little while to find again amongst the chaos, but now I knelt in the sodden grass before it. My knees sank into the mud slightly, and as the morning wind whipped my face I tried to read the faded text on the headstone, shielding my eyes from the sun with a scarred palm. There was no ink within the worn engraving, which was set on white stone. This, along with the glare of the Coronian sun, made it much harder to read, but there was at least a little of the original inscription left. At least, the bits that had survived the erosion caused by weather and time.
G-I-…-E-…-N X-E-…-…-E-S
Annuit Coeptis.
Beneath “Annuit Coeptis” were a couple of rows of unrecognisable symbols, in a language that meant nothing at all to me. If I were going to guess, I would say that the script resembled something eastern, but right now it wasn’t translatable. That would come later. For now, my task was to find whatever it was that Arius had been scouring this cemetery for before Storm Veritas destroyed him.
I stood up, and grabbed the shovel that was impaled in the soft turf next to me. A quick glance left and right reassured me that I was alone in the graveyard, and not being watched, so I thrusted the shovelhead into the mud below and stomped my foot onto the flat of it. The curved end penetrated the earth and, within a few moments, I had ripped through the grassroots and started to churn through clean, but compact, mud. It was clear that this grave had been dug deeply. A few minutes more of hard toil produced no results, and no impact with any wooden or stone sarcophagus.
The unearthed mud continued to pile up behind me, and the moist dirt underfoot was starting to get slippy the further down I dug. I had to be a bit more careful as the shovel started to reach layers of clay like substance, and so chiselled out bits from the corners in a more precise way. Suddenly, after what seemed like an age, there was a clang and a harsh vibration that reverberated up my sweating arms. I retracted the shovel, and gently started to tease the earth with the shovelhead’s edge to feel out the shape and location of the solid mass below.
Scraping the head back and forth across the object, I scoured the mud and clay from what appeared to be the black granite lid of a box. It wasn’t a large box, though; certainly not one large enough to contain a full body in state. I knelt down, using my white coat to wipe off dirt from an obscured brass plate.
More gibberish, although the etching was clearer than that on the headstone. On more careful examination, I recognised a sentence in clear tradespeak below, in smaller typeface.
THE KINGS OF TOMORROW BOUND BY FORTUNE AND GLORY FOR THE WATCHERS OF YESTERDAY
The message meant nothing by itself, but a quick count of the letters confirmed that the sentence seemed to be a character for character translation of the gibberish above it. I realised that I might be able to use the sentence as a cipher to reverse-engineer a translation of the symbols on the headstone. It might be an important clue, or it might be a complete waste of time, but with nothing to write on and it being only a matter of time before someone wandered into the graveyard to pay respects to a loved one, it was irrelevant. I’d have to get the box out of the grave and back to the safehouse at Tylmerande sooner rather than later to do this, and come back later to translate the headstone.
Carefully, I began to lift the box from the ground. I expected it to be far heavier than it actually was, but easily lifted it out of the grave and onto the grass verge as its contents rattled around inside. On further inspection, there appeared to be no obvious way to open it. Another quick glance left and right confirmed I was still alone, and so I used the opportunity to wrap the box in my stained coat, before lifting it onto the waiting Slepnir.
“Sorry for making you wait,” I said, patting his side reassuringly, “We’ll get you fed and watered soon, I promise. Then we’ll find out what’s in this little item.”
It took a few minutes to shovel the dirt back into the grave. There was now no disguising that it had been disturbed, but the likelihood was that the only person interested in the contents was no longer on this mortal coil anyway.
With this, I climbed atop Slepnir’s magnificent white form, slid my boots into the stirrups and headed for my house in Tylmerande.
