Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Twenty-Four

The ruin was, in fact, several buildings arranged in a tight circle around a central tower. Galhonen merely chose the closest of the outer buildings and went inside, followed by the others. The interior of the structures must have been beautiful, once upon a time. The stone arches were meticulously carved from top to bottom with patterns of elaborate swirls, and the hallways were lined with alcoves that might once have housed flowering plants or perhaps sculptures, although they were all empty now. The ceiling was cracked and damaged after long years of disrepair, and sections had caved in, letting in the elements.

The floor was a complex pattern of alternating green and blue stones, now covered in a layer of grime. Small piles of decayed organic mush lay all over the floor, hundreds of years’ worth of leaves blown in by the wind. Some of the cracks in the walls let in snaking vines and other plants. But despite the damage, the beauty of the original structure was evident everywhere they looked.

The Sarafan soldiers, four walking in front of them and four behind, kept looking around for any possible sign of danger. But the ruin was clearly long-abandoned, and there wasn’t the slightest sign that anyone had lived there in centuries. Even the possibility of a dangerous animal was unlikely, since the island was too small to support a large predator like a mountain lion. But the well-trained Sarafan remained focused and on guard.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mortanius admitted, reaching out to touch the wall. “None of the other ruins are so magnificent.”

“How old do you think it is?” Ellendra asked.

“No way to tell,” he answered, shaking his head. “It must have been built before the rebellion, but that’s all we can speculate.”

“Five-hundred years? A thousand?” Galhonen suggested, peering at the walls.

“A thousand would probably be a closer guess,” Ellendra said.

Janarion sniffed the air with a frown on his face, his sword drawn but the blade pointed at the floor. “Abandoned for a thousand years, perhaps. It could have been built much longer ago than that.”

Ellendra came up beside Mortanius and said, “How could we have missed this place for so long?” He got the feeling that the question she was really asking was, “How could you have missed it for so long?”

“We were never looking for it,” he said with a shrug. “And even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t have been looking in the middle of a lake.”

“It was built here specifically to keep it hidden,” Galhonen said. “This was a special place for the vampires. A holy site, perhaps.”

“Are we even sure it was the vampires who made this place?” Janarion asked.

No one answered, the question hanging in the air like a dangerous trap. The theory regarding a race of intelligent creatures that competed with the vampires was a popular one, but there was little to no evidence of any such race. Just vague hints and rumors. The most compelling piece of evidence – the magical staff possessed by Moebius – was not entirely convincing. But still, the rumors persisted.

The corridor ended in a doorway that led down a flight of stairs into inky blackness. They had no torches, but there were plenty of stones on the floor from the crumbling walls. Thesandrine cast a minor spell of light on some of the stones and handed them out. Held aloft, the stones glowed as brightly as a torch, without the smoke or risk of setting something on fire by accident.

As they descended the stairs, no one spoke. Over the years, they had found many other vampire ruins scattered all across Nosgoth. Normally, they were empty. Little more than cramped stone rooms, they resembled mausoleums, but they contained no bodies. The walls of those strange dilapidated places were painted in what might have been detailed artwork at one time, but the passing centuries made the images impossible to make out. The general belief was that the ruins had once contained records or sacred vampire artifacts, but at some point they were removed and the ruins abandoned.

This place, however, was larger than the others by far. None of them speculated on what they might find inside, but the possibility existed that this ruin still contained items or artifacts or documents or anything else. It might contain nothing, or it might contain everything. Any thoughts of giving up their search to set up camp for the night had been forgotten.

They descended down two levels. The interior hallway turned in a gradual circle, indicating that the structure was in the shape of a cylinder. Water seeped in through cracks in the ancient walls, staining them and leaving stagnant puddles on the floor. The place smelled of centuries-old decay.

Mortanius allowed his vision to slip seamlessly into the spirit world. While the others clustered in the middle of the main corridor, nervously holding their lights to illuminate the darkness, Mortanius didn’t need light to see by at all, since the spirit world was eternally illuminated in a phosphorescent green. He could easily inspect the dark corners and obscure spaces where their light did not reach.

As they reached what appeared to be the lowest level of the ruin, Mortanius stopped suddenly and looked around the wide space that greeted them. There were some cracked pillars and a pair of raised altars with strange vampiric runes that he didn’t recognize. Sensing that something was wrong, the Sarafan soldiers came forward with swords drawn, looking around expectantly.

“What is it?” Galhonen asked, coming up behind Mortanius and peering over his shoulder.

“I don’t see anything,” Thesandrine said.

“That’s because I can see things that you cannot,” Mortanius said. He stepped into the chamber and approached one of the altars. The symbol carved into it was a vertical line that writhed like a snake, inside an incomplete circle. But the symbol is not what drew his attention, it was what lay concealed beneath the altar, glowing like a beacon to his eyes.

“There are souls underneath these blocks,” he said. “Free souls.”

Ellendra asked, “What do you mean, free?”

“I mean they’re not bound to bodies. There are no corpses. The souls are just resting there, like they’re being … stored for some reason.”

“Is that possible? I mean, could you do something like that?”

Mortanius thought about it. “I suppose I could find a way to prevent a soul from moving on, but the question is why? Why imprison souls here?”

Galhonen stepped up to the altar and knelt down, running his hands across the rough stone. “Can you detect who the souls belonged to?”

“Normally I can. They were vampires, that much I can tell. But whatever magic is holding them in place is interfering with my powers. There’s some other kind of magic at work here.”

“Can you release them?”

“Perhaps. Should I?” Mortanius asked, directing his question at the rest of the group.

“You should study them at length before we make any decisions,” Ellendra said. “But I think we should leave them where they are. Who knows why the vampires put them here.”

“I agree,” Janarion said firmly.

Thesandrine maintained her shining ball of light and gradually cast her eyes upward as the others talked. Suddenly, her face lit up and she cried out. “Oh! Look!”

The walls above them were covered in paintings like the ones they found at some of the other vampire ruins. But unlike those ones, which were so deteriorated that it was impossible to tell what they originally portrayed, these murals were still in good condition. Mortanius had been so distracted by the vampire souls that he hadn’t even noticed them. Everyone looked up in amazement at the brightly-colored images that decorated all four walls of the chamber.

“What are those?” Galhonen demanded to know, pointing at one of the images.

On the wall to their left was a vast mural detailing a red sky with numerous figures clustered all around in various poses. It took Mortanius a moment to realize that the figures were fighting. Most of them were creatures with blue skin and feathered wings, familiar to all of the Guardians even though some had never personally seen one. They were the race of vampires.

But it was the other figures that Galhonen referred to: green-skinned figures with slender bodies and red eyes, lacking wings like the vampires had. They were a different race of beings, one that humans had never seen before.

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