True to Agensyx’s words, there were metallic carvings on the walls in the room that lay beyond. Most of the metal looked like bronze, but scattered throughout were bits of color that were probably other alloys. The bottom foot was obscured by the dark miasma; it looked like mostly decorative scrollwork so it wasn’t too big of a deal. The metal wasn’t corroded at all, even where the dark fog was touching it, so something definitely wasn’t natural.

  Not that Jay was all that surprised. He was in a magic palace under a giant magic city with a magic snake and several other magic people within shouting distance. Enchanted corrosiveless metal wasn’t even really worth an appearance on his oddness radar at this point.

  The murals themselves depicted a series of events that Jay would have called halfway between historical and mythological if he had been on Earth, but given that he’d already seen a vision of the establishment of some form of civilization, he was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt and call it truth. There were seven separate sections lining the walls and each of them connected to form what looked to be a clear chronology at first glance.

  Directly to the left of the entryway to the round room was the first. He didn’t spend much time looking at it; it was something he’d already witnessed within the book that had then trapped him: the first [Necromancer] paving the way for a multiple-continent-spanning road network, staffing ships with undead, and generally becoming indispensable and worshipped for her contributions. It was mostly abstract, with skeletons marching in lines across what was undeniably a world map, but it was clear enough that he felt confident it was the same event.

  The fact that this was something he’d already seen combined with the odd white thought-reading boxes tipped an idea he’d been mulling over into full crystallization. The pillar where the golem-like Asanti lived was another necropolis. That didn’t explain why they looked so different and definitely didn’t even hint at why he’d been immediately offered some sort of kingship of the other one, but maybe another panel would give that answer.

  The second panel was new to him. It started with the same woman from the first bending down to pluck a black circle from the scrollwork that the miasma rose up against. She did something unclear with it, pressing it first between both palms and then seemed to take a stylus to it. The panel concluded with her placing it on a pedestal that was clearly designed to hold it in place, with six others surrounding it that already had orbs in place.

  Coincidences didn’t seem to exist down here, so the fact that the circle of dark metal was precisely the same shade as the miasma itself had to be meaningful. Jay couldn’t say what kind of meaning it held outside of the pure fact that black orbs didn’t tend to be anything benevolent. There were decent odds it was connected to why the demon was pissed off, honestly.

  He had questioned briefly why Halean depictions of hell were downwards the same way Earth-based ones had been. If that was something prevalent and enduring, did it mean that this originator of the Class had full-on plucked some artifact – or artifacts – from the hands of a powerful demon?

  Way to fucking go, lady. Probably went off and died afterwards, leaving everyone else with the consequences from it. Including now him. In Jay’s opinion, that was an insane amount of reach for a single action’s consequences.

  Before he moved onto the third panel, he summoned the stone archway that belonged to [Crypt], letting out some of the miscellaneous skeletons he’d been able to extract from the Gray Palace’s other statues. Out of what could be called an abundance of caution, he set the group to watching the entrance of the room. Agensyx would warn him if anything went wrong out there, but it would be better to have another line of delay between himself and whatever was causing it.

  The third panel was both simpler and more complex than the others had been. The simplicity came from the single depiction, with none of the multi-scene divisions of the last two, but was abstract enough to make interpreting it an issue. It was a figure – presumably the same woman depicted in the others – standing between a circle and a cone of raised metal that was outlined in a band of rust-colored red. The cone continued across the rest of the panel as if her presence was enough to shield the round plate from whatever that cone was supposed to represent.

  Jay leaned in closer. The small piece of metal that was the circle had the faintest impression of continents on it. They lined up almost one-to-one with the maps of Halea he’d seen, even omitting Ayor where it had been forced into the ocean. This place was supposed to be old beyond belief, how was it that accurate?

  Two options came to mind immediately: either it was part of the magic of this place that the depiction would automatically update to match the real topography or it was something prophetic. Jay really hoped it was the former as someone who both spent the majority of two degrees staring at maps as part of every assignment and as someone who hated the idea of a fixed future.

  It had been one thing for the people in the afterlife to have a schedule of when people would die. That was their job. But prophecy from a mundane source? That was more than what he was willing to make excuses for.

  He moved on.

  The fourth section was disconnected from the others. There was a doorway between them, one on each side, and it had by far the most color of any of the depictions. That was thanks to the large circle divided into six slices that took up the majority of the panel. Bright gold, rusty red, and vivid teal made up the upper three portions while deep green, harsh white, and rich purple occupied their opposites.

  Around the divided circle were scattered smaller plates of metal. Each of them was colored the same as the nearest slice of the centerpiece except one: an identical disc to the one in the woman’s shadow in the third panel, this time wrought from pure black metal. If it had obeyed the pattern, it would have been the same rust-red as the other plates around it.

  Jay had no idea what this portion of the wall meant. Granted, he hadn’t had a clue about what most of them meant, not fully, but this was on a whole other level. Were each of those discs supposed to be another planet? What were the colors?

  Was this something he was going to have to remember to try to fix the Curse? He had no way of knowing. He couldn’t even speculate without understanding better what the depiction actually meant.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  *

  Back with the rest of the group, Brocia fought the urge to whip a look at every shadow that flickered at the edges of her vision. There were a lot of them in this place; it was probably something to do with that damnable dark mist. She could have sworn there were patterns forming out of its movement, swirling spirals that beckoned her closer and encouraged her to touch it.

  Her refusal was thin each time. Without Eldraz, her familial spirit, constantly whispering at the edges of her mind to bring her back to herself, she wouldn’t have even been able to offer that. It was a welcome distraction when the brusant – Didandic, judging from the fact that he had tusks – quit his muttering with a shout.

  “Got it!” he crowed, before looking around at the startled faces of the rest of the undead and forcibly shifting back to a more neutrally authoritative tone. “Got it. Wait. Where did he go?”

  “Wandered off. You’ve been muttering in place for like ten minutes, we were all getting bored,” the woman with eyes outlined in ochre paste said. Brocia hadn’t caught her name and honestly didn’t care.

  “I told him to stay here,” the other man growled. “Why did no one stop him?”

  The woman shrugged. “Technically we can’t. Especially if he Orders us not to.”

  “Did he?”

  “He tried,” she admitted. “Didn’t fully take, but it was enough that I couldn’t do anything. Didn’t seem like anyone else wanted to risk it and I don’t blame them.” She shuddered. “It was uncomfortable and then some.”

  Interesting. So that was how he’d gotten them to back off. Brocia had only ever raised a few things, mostly squirrels and her pet cat. Even that little bit had left its marks on her through the hallucinations that had exposed her initially.

  It was a shame. Her family had been expecting great things from her. It wasn’t every Awakening that a Corion managed to summon as complete a coronal spirit as she had. Brocia felt bad for Eldraz even more than she did herself; cutting short the life of something that could supposedly outlive worlds was worse than her own fate. At least all that would happen to her was madness and eventual undeath.

  “Which direction?” the brusant asked.

  The woman nodded further down the tunnel.

  “At least he kept going forward,” he said. “I’ll go get him.” Before anyone could protest, he walked off.

  Brocia’s gaze fell back to the mist’s patterns. There was something just so tantalizing about it.

  *

  Jay, absorbed in the art on the panels, missed the echoes of the conversation.

  The fifth panel, on the far side of the second door, was an exercise in caution to even get a good sight of; finding a way past the tide of black fog that was pouring out of the open doorway took over a minute by itself. Jay could have sworn that some of the streams of it shifted to be right where he wanted to step. At least the image was less complex than the last one had been.

  It was a large horned figure hefting a staff as tall as it was. Behind it was a crowd of similar but smaller figures that were all armed as well, though most of them had swords. They were all made of black metal with a thin rim of white around the outside to set them apart from the square of unadulterated dark metal that made up the background behind them. On one end, the exact opposite and the exact point that the large figure was gesturing at, was a single complex symbol.

  Omnilinguist translated it, but from the feeling it gave him, the trait wasn’t happy about doing it. Jay had never felt the mental gears turning for a translation quite like this. The end result it gave him was that the symbol represented three distinct concepts: vengeful omnicide, Halea’s downfall, and a glorious reclamation.

  None of it made a whole lot of sense but it clearly meant nothing good. Whether this was something that had already happened and was being recorded or another maybe-prophecy, Jay didn’t want anything to do with it. He moved to the sixth panel, delusions of this being a clear chronological account shattered.

  The penultimate scene was disjointed, made up of a bunch of smaller images with no clear lines between them. It almost felt like a metalwork scrapbook, as odd a concept as that was to Jay.

  There were nine crystals cracked open from the top to the bottom scattered around, supine humanoids packed together head-to-foot, and two figures standing in the middle without discernable features. Horrifying implications in all of that; he was pretty sure the shapes on the ground were supposed to be corpses and there were definitely too many of those for comfort.

  Maybe the last one would shed some light on it.

  The seventh and final panel was almost directly an inversion of the third. The only change was that the figure standing in front of the representation of Halea was incomplete, shot through by rays of rusty red. One of those covered the planet’s plate entirely, this iteration of it being made of red metal to reflect the change.

  There was a commotion at the door Jay had come from, the skeletons he’d set to watch shuffling into a wall.

  “Let me through you bony bastards,” Khashin swore. The undead in question didn’t budge.

  “I tried to tell them to watch out for enemies, but they don’t appear as smart as you and the rest are. Maybe because they don’t have any actual brain matter,” Jay said. “Let him in.”

  The skeletons backed off and the brusant made his way to Jay. The excitement was clear in his eyes, though it was mixed with something that was harder to identify. “I figured it out. I know what’s causing the miasma.”

  “Is it a situation where saying the name will call attention to us?” Jay checked.

  Khashin looked bewildered. “No? Is that a thing? Does that happen?”

  The necromancer shrugged.

  “If you’re representative of what people are like in modern times, I fear for the state of the rest of the world,” the brusant said. It seemed to be half joking, half actual concern. “Regardless. I figured it out. It’s coming from Ullmin.”

  When Jay didn’t respond to that, the big man shook his head. “You don’t recognize the name, do you?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “To shorten a very, very long theological lesson, Ullmin is the Archdevil of Despair. Supposedly he has a whole realm where people vanish into when he takes them.” Khashin gestured toward the metalwork on the walls as if he’d just noticed it for the first time. “You were over here just to look at a septych? I know it’s good art, but it wasn’t worth leaving the hall, was it?”

  “It might be eventually,” Jay said.

  “So no, then,” Khashin replied. “Well, I guess at least that means we can move past this room immediately.”

  “So we cycle everyone else through the left door?”

  “We’re definitely not taking the door that’s actively spewing the poison mist, no.”

  The poison mist in question stopped moving as Khashin mentioned it. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t change path, it just froze. The duo had a brief moment to notice it, to think of how weird it was, and to exchange an apprehensive glance before the movement resumed.

  Only now the miasma was gathering together, condensing spears of itself that shot directly towards them.