A Finder's Survey Log — Vallen's Barrow, the last leaf

The excavation journal of Tobb Verrin, who led a Finder crew into the barrow the whole Vale told him to leave shut. It opens as bookkeeping — timber, rope, the price of the imperial lintel if they could ever move it — and ends as something else. The last legible entry is not about money.

Day one. Cleared the grass off the mouth. Grey lintel-stone, imperial cut, worth the whole dig by itself if we can float it to Highbridge, which we can't, so forget I wrote that. Sealed threshold behind it — walled and re-walled, five courses at least, each newer wall set a little further in than the last. Whoever kept this place kept LOSING to it and kept building back. We'll take the outer course down tonight. Old mortar. Easy. Day three. Through the first three seals. The crew doesn't like it. Wesh says the lamps won't hold a flame past the second wall — they don't gutter, they just decide to be smaller, if that makes sense, which it doesn't, so I told him to bring more oil and stop reading omens into bad wicks. Day six. We are down two men. Not to any fall or damp — they left. Walked up in the night and did not come back for their pay, which for a Finder is the same as saying they saw a ghost, because we do not leave pay. Corun among them, and Corun buried his own children and did not flinch, so. Day nine. The deeper galleries are INTACT. Not ruined — kept. There are dead down here laid out in a ring, facing IN, toward the middle, like men set to watch a fire that went out four hundred years ago. We did not disturb them. We are not fools. We went around. Day eleven. I have stopped counting the seals we've opened because I have started to understand what they were for, and it is not treasure, and every wall we take down is a wall somebody with more sense than me put UP. I gave the order to turn back this morning. Half the crew agreed. The other half want the middle room. There is a cold coming off the middle room that I can feel in my teeth from three galleries out and it is the most valuable thing I have ever not wanted to touch. [The hand changes here — larger, pressed hard, the last entry:] We should not have opened the last one. I am not writing what happened to Wesh. I am writing this so that whoever finds it walls the barrow back up and does not look for us, because we are still down here, and I do not think we are leaving, and I do not think we are entirely dead. If you are reading this you are already too far in. Go back up. Take nothing. The seals are not a lock on a vault. They are a lid on a grave that keeps trying to sit up.

This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →