They say the Dwarves forgot nothing. Not names, nor grudges, nor the shape of the world before men. But it was not memory that kept their secrets safe. It was stone.
— Magus Ber’odin, inscribed 6 B.R. (Before the Second Founding)
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This is the third chapter of the Series The Mystery of Etar'Das. If you'd like to catch up on the story so far, or liked this chapter and want to go back and retrace the two adventurers' steps, please enjoy the prior two installments, which can be found here.
Chapter 1 & 2:
https://hive.blog/hive-161155/@hidave/mystery-of-etar-dashttps://ecency.com/hive-161155/@hidavetoo/the-lost-ward-of-etar
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The darkness opened like a mouth below them as the lift descended into the shadows beyond the reach of their torch. Chains rattled rhythmically, punctuating the silence. The lift groaned almost as if in warning at the danger ahead.
Tagoth, leaned into the rusted iron railing, mist forming from his breath as the air cooled the further they traveled. Dravis stood in silence beside him. The weight of the unknown, like a heavy blanket draped oppressively over his shoulders, his mind still questioning his eyes. The play of shadows moments before, the hints of movement below.
The lift was a relic, wrought with Dwarven pragmatism and built to embrace eternity. Its cage framed with blackened iron and moss-covered timbers etched with cabalistic etchings of the Carvin'Dor. Its chains rattled in time with the lift's slow descent, echoing against the cavern's walls. The torch's flame swayed and flickered, fluttering gently as if its light was weighed down by the darkness around them.
Dravis broke the silence, his voice hushed, afraid of stirring the attention of whatever was waiting below. "Strange to think, no humans ever set foot down here, not and returned to ever speak of it."
Tagoth didn't look at him, his eyes fixed on the chasm below, scanning the shadows and cracks of light spilling from the ward below, alert for danger. "No human was meant to. The Dwarves buried their secrets in silence and stone..." his tone shifted, almost to a whisper, "By necessity."
"Necessity?" Dravis questioned.
"There are truths too heavy for the world above. Humanity thought they had earned their peace. This ward remembers. Stone has a stronger memory than men, longer...and less forgiving. There is much the University has not shared. You will learn Kath'ire. In time."
The lift finally shuddered to a stop, with a noise like something dying. Surrounding them, sodium crystals winked on one by one, blinking as if awaking from a slumber, illuminating the landing in intermittent shadow and light.
Tagoth raised his hand in front of one of the softly glowing whitish amber crystals, casting a warped silhouette on the stone landing beside the lift. “Sarn’Varun,” he murmured, half to himself.
Dravis squinted, recognizing ancient Keld’Tharûm, the language of the Dwarves. “Sun’s what?”
“Dawn Catchers,” Tagoth said, motioning to the softly pulsing crystal. “It’s what the dwarves called these crystals. Ancient Human traders thought the Dwarves trapped sunlight with them. They were wrong.”
Dravis stepped forward, eyeing one of the crystals as it hummed faintly in its housing, having seen them on display in one of his first-year Kath'ire class on Dwarven studies, the Lumianar had called them "Sunblight. “Then what is it?”
“They don’t store sunlight. They respond to the elements. To the magic that lives within them, their resonance." Tagoth explained. "The elves sang to magic, the humans bent it to their will. But the dwarves did neither. They did not conjure, nor command. Instead, they built with it, crafting their works in quiet harmony with the world’s hidden frequencies, attuning stone and steel until magic resonated through them, not because of them."
Together they stepped off the wide stone landing, the air thick with settled dust. In the distance, the echoing thunder of waterfalls plunging into wards basins fractured the silence. And there, looming ahead, were the gates of the ward. Twin doors nearly three stories tall of basalt and gilded in black steel.
Framing the door, a great stone arch bore the ancient script of the Carvin'Dor. Dravis' eyes followed it closely. "Kar’Vornadûn,” he worded unconfident in his pronunciation, tracing the runes with his gaze. “The Memory Vault?” Dravis questioned.
“No, Kath'ire” Tagoth said. “Not quite. It doesn't fully translate, but more like... the Deep Remembering of Stone.”
A deep gouge spread across the ripped-open massive basalt doors as if slashed by a titan’s wrath. The jagged scar pulsed faintly phosphorescent. Dravis's eyes widened, a signature of Vor’thalak, a brutal and rare human magic known for its raw, destructive force.
Mastered only by the Magus Veridryn, the most accomplished of wizards, the magnitude of this particular casting was nothing short of impressive.
Tagoth’s eyes narrowed. “Only Ber’odin could have wielded Vor'thalak this powerfully.”
Dravis nodded, stepping closer to the defaced, mangled entrance. “I don’t think he was welcome here. He forced his way through.”
Cautiously, Tagoth stepped between the mangled doors, Dravis following closely behind. The courtyard beyond opened into a vast, semi-covered grand atrium, not built to Carvin'Dor proportions but clearly designed to awe visitors. This chamber was no mere passage; it was a warning to evoke reverence for the power and knowledge the Dwarves once held here.
Encircling the space, expansive galleries traced the perimeter. Great murals and reliefs carved into the stone told of creation and conflict. Below the murals, bronze plaques bore the patina of age, now dulled and green, held inscriptions in the Corvin'Dor tongue. Each plaque silent and nearly unreadable in decay.
At the far end of the gallery, Dwarves carved from stone guarded the portal to the wards beyond like sentinels. Solemn and stern, etched with life-like precision, their faces held the pride and weight of countless generations.
It wasn’t until Tagoth had crossed the threshold and taken several cautious paces down the wide artery that cut through the heart of the ward, leading toward a grand square in the distance, where the largest cistern cradled the thunderous fall from above, that he noticed the pattern. Along certain archways and podiums, placed at street corners and before bridges that spanned narrow sluices and aqueducts, inset at waist height were small indentations. Dravis stooped to inspect one and stepped back, startled as it hummed loudly in response.
"These are locks," Tagoth explained. "They listen. The Carvin'Dor called them Sarn'kelun. Their keys were similar to tuning forks, made of various alloys, attuned to the magic latent in the stone. Come, lets us see if we can find one."
Shimmering faintly near one of the podiums, a small silvery artifact shaped like a trident glimmered in the pale light. Tagoth held it and inspected it, smiling. "Just like the one at the University," He tapped it against the stone and inserted it into a nearby socket. A distant rumbling answered, and a door to a nearby building yawed open.
Tagoth's eyes narrowed, and he walked to the next podium, this one before a span that crossed the aqueduct. He repeated the sequence, tapping the fork, inserting it into another indentation. A nearby pole crowned with a glass orb and mirrored facets crackled once, flickering pale amber, before erupting in a sudden shower of sparks. They hissed as they fell, cascading toward the stone floor like burning flower petals adrift in a breeze. "Not every key opens every door Kath'ire."
Dravis's eyes narrowed, his head tilting just slightly. He wasn't sure if it was the breeze, the distant rush of water, or just his imagination, but for a moment, just fleetingly, he thought he heard a whisper, like a hushed conversation, slipping through the streets. Voices too quiet to catch, yet too deliberate to dismiss.
The grand avenue led them under another great arch, enchanted on it, glowing like electric blue filigree, ancient human script. Dravis scanned the sigil, muttering what fragments he could recognize: "sealed in flame" and "unbound truth." A warning left by Ber'odin. The thoroughfare terminated in a plaza strewn with fractured stone and shattered statuary.
A silence fell before them, and then from deeper within the ward, a new sound. A faint hiss like steam on stone.
Tagoth froze. "Get the light down now!"
Dravis quickly snuffed the torch's flame, dropping them into deep shadow.
They ducked behind a broken column and peered into the concourse. A faint glow shimmered, it brightness blossoming, growing. It travelled slowly at first and then suddenly faster, streaking across a wall. Then, from behind a building at the far end of the plaza, it emerged.
It moved like liquid fire, leaving a trail of molten slag in its wake, the very rock of the plaza weeping from its heat. A low crackling echoed off the stone. Its didn't walk, nor slither, it glided. Its body a swirling lattice of molten veins pulsing angrily. The air warped and bent surrounding it. It wasn't fire, not quite, more like something pretending to be fire. And then it turned, making its way toward them, investigating the plaza.
Dravis whispered, his mouth barely moving. "It knows something's here."
"Don't move, don't breathe too loud." Tagoth voice responded low, barely audible. "It hears."
It pulsed, then dimmed, and then flared bright again. It moved with intent. It was hunting.
An Emberkin.
Dravis could feel a tremor through the ground as it approached. No spell could reach it, no sword could pierce it. All they could do was endure and hide.
It moved.
It turned. Approaching ever closer like a predator to their scent.
Dravis's heart pounded. The creature stopped mere paces from their hiding spot. Its form surged brighter. Its flames licked the surface of a half-shattered statue in the plaza near where they couched, and the basalt began to crack.
Tagoth closed his eyes and reached into his satchel. Magic fought him here, dulled by the resonance of the Dwarven stone, but there were still strings to pull. His fingers felt the Sarn'Kelun, the tuning fork-like key, silently withdrew it and hurled it across the plaze.
PANG!
The Emberkin reacted instantly and streaked after the decoy, moving faster than any fire should in pursuit of the false signature.
"Go now! Tagoth hissed.
Dravis didn't wait. They darted from cover and ran as quietly as possible, ducking down an alley and then another, gaining distance. They didn't look back. They didn't need to. They darted across a narrow causeway and then through a window into one of the ancient abandoned buildings. And then crouched in silence.
The Emberkin shrieked in the distance behind them. The sound was not fire, but grief, and rage, and relentless hunger.
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"What was that thing?" Dravis whispered.
"A left over, a sentinel, a primordial elemental. Fae-made, or worse, Kath'ire." Wide-eyed, Tagoth peeked out the corner of the window, seeing nothing. "We are not alone in this city."
The street was clear. The elemental, whatever the Fae abomination had been, didn’t follow.
Tagoth slipped deeper inside the structure, blade drawn, his senses stretched taut, keen to whatever lay ahead. Dravis followed closely behind his shoulders brushing the narrow doorway that led to what resembled an austere living quarter, taking a moment to feel out with his hand above him and ducking beneath a stone lintel too low for any human.
Their instincts drove them through the rooms quickly. Not out of curiosity, but caution. Dravis checked the windows, almost as if expecting to see the Emberkin peering back at them. But all was quiet, except for the occasional creaks of the ancient wood remembering the duty of weight once again after an eternity of stillness.
"Let's find a back exit," Tagoth muttered, stepping over a half-collapsed table crushed under a fallen wooden beam. "Just in case."
Dravis's eyes scanned what was afforded by the faint lines of street light filtering in through the dusty film-coated windows. It was a dwelling clearly built by Dwarves, but not for them. The ceilings were high enough for elves. The doorways wide enough for a man in armor, but the design was unmistakable. Utilitarian, measured, without pretense, and honest. The furniture sat in neat geometrical order, the tables short. The chairs without cushions, made from laquered ironwood. The fabrics in muted colors, now faded with time, sat stacked orderly in recessed alcoves. "functional," Dravis finally said, "like everything else in here."
Tagoth paused in the center of the room and crouched. His brow furled, and he began another binding. Although the ever-resistant stone of this place fought him, the torch began to spark hesitantly. Tagoth coaxed the connection gently as if awakening a fire in a cold hearth in the dead of winter.
The flame sputtered once more and then bloomed. As it did so, the walls around them briefly frosted over. creeping along the walls in a delicate skin of crystalline lace, like veins of winterfrost on stone.
Dravis exhaled steam, although not cold, this binding, for his adrenaline had already dulled any sensation. Still, his eyes tracked the way the frost caught in the half-light, casting golden crystalline patterns where the light from the distant sodium crystal streetlamps spilled through windowpanes punctuated by white flashes from the growing flame. Like Moonlight on ice, He thought to himself, or the way sand glowed effulgent in the starlight along the shore.
"Humans were not wanted here," Dravis spoke softly, his voice quieter now. "But that thing. It was stationed there." He paused for a moment as Tagoth turned toward him. "What was it guarding? What was that building?"
Tagoth didn't answer him at first. He turned and gazed toward the window in the direction of the crumpled ruin they had fled from. "There was a crest, an old one. Pre-accord. That was a Vaul'trith Hall. A suppository of sanctioned inventions. Where the Dwarves kept designs too dangerous for the common guilds.
Dravis frowned. "You think it was guarding that place. After all this time?"
Tagoth thought for a moment and shook his head. "No. That place had been attacked. That was Fae conjurings. Elementals are built from residual memories, energetic traces. The building contained something that bled power once, maybe still does. That Emberkin is anchored there."
Dravis nodded only half understanding, and they lapsed into silence, the soft crackle from the torch their only company.
The back door creaked open, and Tagoth peeked his head through the threshold and looked both directions silently. His face was tense and alert. After a pause, he motioned Dravis forward. "Come Kath'ire, stay close."
Moving through a narrow service alley, they breached onto one of the ward's main thoroughfares. The polished stone street was worn smooth by centuries of traffic long since ceased. Pools of water lined the canals alongside, reflecting the amber shimmer of distant crystal lamps, their light barely reaching the tops of the stooped, corbelled arches overhead.
The whispers, again perhaps just the breeze, stirred once again. "This city. It's alike El'tras" Dravis whispered.
Tagoth stiffened. A breath held too long. Even he was listening now. "You hear it too. Good Kath'ire." Tagoth smiled faintly, not taking his eyes off the shadows ahead. "I was beginning to wonder if you were attuned yet. Not bad for a Kath'ire."
They walked together in silence. Tagoth slightly ahead. The torch's flame flickered as if in a battle all its own against the wills of the very resonance of the Dwarven ward. Here and there, subterranean stairwells jutted up from the stone. Dwarven entrances carved into the stone, leading to the world below, their mouths dark and full of shadows, littered with broken railings and slabs of masonry. More evidence of a ferocious battle.
"Down. Always down. The Dwarves buried their secrets like one buries the dead." Tagoth murmured, looking down the spiraling stairs into the inky blackness below.
Dravis stepped beside him, glancing down into the depths and then panned, surveying the street where a shattered window opened into a nearby storefront. Weapons. Armor. Tools. A Dwarven outfitter.
The two cross carefully, their boots splashing in the runoff from the canal that flanked the road and entered through a side door already ajar.
The shop was quiet, save for the crunch of dust and grit strewn from rubble and debris outside. Half-empty weapons racks and displays lined the walls. Dull armor greeted them, stout and wide-chested, wholly unusable by men of their stature. Even the mannequins stood only shoulder high to Dravis.
Tagoth moved cautiously, letting the low glow of the torch cast shifting shadows across the glass displays.
"Built to last until the Sun died. Even now," Dravis remarked, bending down to inspect a Dwarven Helm.
"They built with nature, not against it," Tagoth answered, but his gaze had fallen to the far corner of the shop counter, beneath a cracked display case. It was something small, shaped like a black triangle of obsidian. He picked it up and held it in his palm. "A Thûn’Rakk. Whisperblock."
Dravis looked at it quizically.
"A silence talisman. It muffles sound within a radius of the user." Tagoth turned it over in his palm and activated it with a mild pulse of binding magic that even Dravis could achieve. A sudden blanket of silence smothered the sound around them. The torch, the creak of the wood. All of it vanished.
"A similar enchantment to the Draceanae forged swords of the Southern Pale? " Dravis asked.
"Ai Kath'ire. Muffled footsteps, silenced cuts and screams. Built for killers and murderers." Tagoth nodded. "Here, keep this on you. It could come in handy if we need to evade another Emberkin."
Dravis held the small triangular chip in his hand, inspecting it, and then slipped it into his satchel in a place he knew he'd be able to get to it quickly if things got dire.
Tagoth grunted as if spotting something of interest and wandered off deeper into the shop, his curiosity drawn to an old cabinet nestled in a shadowed alcove that looked important. Dravis watched him for a second before his eyes wandered off to a low shelf tucked behind the counter, covered in dust. Half-buried in crumpled leather, a few odd items sat quietly.
He reached down and brushed one off. A curved dagger, lightweight and perfectly balanced, its unmarred blade reflected light like a polished silvery mirror. Looping Carvin'Dor script was etched near its hilt, unblemished by time.
"Ceremonial?" Dravis asked, holding it up for Tagoth to see.
Tagoth glanced at it almost d