Irikah

She was found by the team in a chamber buried deep under the living earth.

An underground stream ran beneath it, out to join the jungle's placid river, miles away; it had carried away fragments of obsidian sediment to a place where there should have been none. The deposits were the only clue that something lay hidden there, and for years they went unseen, and then ignored, dismissed as a quirk of the landscape.

The treasure hunters - archaeologists, the expedition leader, Hughes, insisted - originally came in search of gold and gems, the mundane and arcane both. There were rumours of old cults amidst the tropics who held vast power and wealth, up until the point of their unwritten destruction. A few moldy coins and twists of gold that washed up in the riverbed spurred the investigations, initially, but the discovery by their geologist of the volcanic glass pushed the expedition into a fever. The fragments pulsed, radiating a magical energy that their magister had never before seen.

It took time to find the mausoleum; even more to carefully free it from its tomb of dirt and loam. The magic that infused the black glass had a particularly slippery quality to it, nearly impossible for Graysle to trace. Even after he'd located the anomaly, after a month's worth of peering into the places that caused his Sight to go astray, it proved to be fully impossible to move the object through relocation fields. The team bent, instead, to old-fashioned elbow grease to excavate their prize: through a combination of well-applied force and cajolery, along with a few hostages, they rounded up the two dozen men of a local tribe and set them to shovelling.

The black chamber they unearthed was simple in construction, if somewhat baffling: a shed-sized box of smoothly-joined obsidian plates, all four sides surrounded with stairs of the same stone, and with no windows nor doors to mar its surface. Graysle took a look at it with his Sight, and promptly dashed off into the jungle foliage to noisily revisit his breakfast. Hughes took the more pragmatic approach, relieved one of the uneasy tribesmen of his pickaxe, and with a few piercing strokes, cracked apart the smooth face of one of the walls. Another blow shattered the wall's upper half, and Hughes imperiously motioned to the two men nearest him to clear away the wreckage to allow them access. One hung back, dubiously eyeing the sharp shards of glass sprinkling the stair, apparently unwilling to risk his bare feet on the venture. The crack of a pistol silenced his doubts forever, and the next man that the wilderness-master, Eccles, swung the gun-barrel at hastened to help his fellow with the job.

With the most fragile hanging pieces of the wreckage cleared away, the weak sunlight revealed a narrow staircase set into the floor, leading further down into darkness. Graysle took that moment to reappear, wiping his mouth with his sleeve; his greenish cast didn't fade a bit as he looked at the wreck of the unfortunate native's head and the bloody footprints dotting the stairs.

"Light," Hughes said. Graysle hesitated a moment, but waved his hand, spinning a glittering sphere out of what sunlight filtered through the trees above. He handed the ball off to Hughes, who shoved it at one of the 'volunteers'. "Let's go. Step quick, now; no doubt those steps'll be slippy with your feet damp." The native would, of course, not understand him, but his tone brooked little argument.

The man unhappily led the party into the stale air of the chamber and down the stairs - himself, Hughes two paces behind, Graysle, and Eccles bringing up the rear. The light cast from the magister's sphere reflected off the angles of the staircase, each perfect and precise; the glass walls beneath their hands cool and smooth. They cut downwards thirty times, before the stairway levelled off into a short corridor, and opened up into another chamber, no larger than the first.

The light revealed no gold, no gems, no heaps of scrolls or ancient grave goods. Only a dias - and on it, a statuesque form. Hughes gave a disappointed tsk, snatched the light-sphere from the native, and tossed it to the magister to hold up for a better look at it.

It was a construction, chimeric in components: a humanoid body attached to equine hooves; a curving, draconic tail ending in a leonine tuft; feathered, fractured wings sprawling on the stone behind it, no tether to the body to be seen. The head was of indiscernable origin, with no lips to speak of, only teeth and fangs, the barest bump in place of a nose, and a pair of short, massively thick horns curving outwards and upwards from its crown. Shoulder-length ropes smoothed back over the skull, curving towards its temples to give an impression of ears.

It was visibly feminine, in the style of forgotten civilisations: a Venus figurine scaled to manlike proportions. Like those dolls, it, too, appeared clumsily carved in places; marbled in stone and charcoal greys, pitted and marked by maker and time. The face, however, was finely detailed - and the body and wings were marked with precisely-plotted gouges.

The statue was plastered with scattered slips of a paperlike material, marked with unfathomable, dark violet runes. Whoever had placed it in the chamber had apparently meant for it to stay, for twin stakes of stone were driven through its fetlocks, thick chains attached to their widest points, anchoring it to the obsidian stone below.

The tribesman flinched and shook his head as Graysle drew closer to inspect the figure, and rounded on Hughes in anger, speaking too rapidly for the man to follow. "I beg your pardon," he said, his lip curling in disdain as he cast a glance at Eccles.

The guide, for his part, shrugged. "Usual protests. Shouldn't have come down here, shouldn't have gone looking for this, blar blar blar and suchlike." The man's speech grew more animated as he switched his focus to Eccles, unwilling to be further cowed by the gun that was quickly levelled at him. "Says it's cursed. Hah! All the same, aren't they? Doesn't matter what back-water tribe, everything that's the least bit skiffy's got a curse on it-" He cocked the pistol's trigger, and the tribesman swallowed and backed away a step, repeating a section of syllables. "As if we haven't heard it all a dozen times, and our heads not been caved in yet by angry gods or demons or mewling kittens, eh?"

"Fellows-" Graysle broke in, straightening up sharply from his inspection. "It's warm. I don't know how, but-"

"Everything is blasted hot here, Graysle," said Hughes.

"The staircase weren't," Eccles pointed out - and as his attention was divided, the tribesman knocked away his gun-arm and made a dash for the stairs. "Shit!" He steadied himself and fired a shot after the man, missing, but which reverberated deafeningly in the small room. Graysle ducked; Hughes went for the guide's collar.

"Enough! Damn you, you'll bring down the ceiling yourself," Hughes said, giving the man a sharp shake. "Put it away, do you hear me? We'll need more than him to carry it up, besides - his getting away doesn’t mean squat to us at the moment.”

"I don't know that we have to worry about that," Graysle said in an unsteady voice. He'd moved away from the statue, slightly; as the light from his sphere receded, it became evident that parts of the stone had begun to glow, emitting a faint indigo light from the gouges marking its form. "It moved."

"What?" the other men spoke in chorus. Eccles started to pull his weapon around at it until Hughes gave him a sharp look; he holstered it reluctantly. “What do you mean, ‘it moved’?” Hughes continued, circling warily around to the left corner of the dias, across from Graysle. “An automaton?” He grinned, more triumphant than he’d felt a few moments ago - there were always buyers willing to pay top dollar for a piece of gear-work that still functioned.

“I don’t know yet, but I didn’t hear any works. The tail…” Graysle said, gesturing futilely at the appendage. Even as his hand moved, the thing gave a twitching lash, and indeed, no sign nor sound of the screeching, rusted lurch that usually accompanied a gear-work. “It’s nothing I can place by Sight, Hughes - the glow, d’ya see that? Registers nothing!”

Hughes folded his arm, appraising the statue with gleaming eyes. “Now, what have we found here, lads…?” Eccles was silent, but also calculating; these matters were not his expertise in the slightest, but still provided his paycheques.

Its eyes opened, a pale, sky-blue light dazzling forth for a moment, almost blinding the men in its intensity. At their startled cries, the light dimmed, modulating itself to the same faint glow














soooo in the end everyone's dead except for Graysle - he thinks it was because he was kind to her, but she is pretty 'meh' about that when he starts acting a little heroic. also goddamn this needs heavy rewriting because it is brick-like as fuck

"Please. Do not be ridiculous," she chided him.

"All three of them wanted to be remembered long after their deaths. It is the highest accolade for a scientist, is it not, to have one's work never be forgotten?"

He slid his eyes to their inert bodies, and swallowed. "...But you've just- they can't tell anyone about their work when they're rotting into the soil! How could-"

She rose, and his words died in his throat. "Nonsense. You will tell them," she said, gesturing outside of the camp. "You shall tell them exactly what went on here - what they did to their 'find of a lifetime' after finding it, their carelessness with the village, their depravities. They will be disgusted; your compatriots' names will be reviled and forgotten, for a time." She carefully picked her way through the carnage, never missing a beat. "But many a year from now, your writing will be taken as an example for those who follow in their footsteps of what very much not to do." She paused. "Ethics, I believe you call it?"

(could I drop anvils any harder seriously)

He had risen to follow her without realising it, his hands shaking at his side. "I'll never be believed; they'll pin the blame on me-"

"I will go with you," she said, patiently, as if she were explaining the facts to a very small child. "And you have their notes. Your magistrates' magics will recognise that it is the truth." She considered something silently for a moment.

[what he wants is the fellow who owns a shop that he's a customer of back home; she lets him know said fellow is interested]