Ignition - SCP Foundation

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5th of March, 1942

Protected Area-312, Vichy France

Alistair Vemhoff opened his eyes. He couldn't tell if he was still dreaming.

The concrete ceiling above him certainly wasn't any indicator of reality; he'd been down here for so long that he had already started seeing it in his dreams. The outside sounds of tank columns and marching soldiers had similarly grown to become little more than white noise. The only thing inside the cell he called a bedroom was him, the cold ground, and a precariously swinging lightbulb. He silently listened for a few minutes, taking in the artificial hum.

It was real, then. Not even dreams were so monotonous.

Still, he didn't stand up. There was little more to do down here than sleep. There was only so much poker he could play with Raia before both of them grew bored to death. He didn't quite feel like striking up a conversation with Bernard or Dubois, either. Even the radio, once one of his few connections with the outside, had become nothing more than a propaganda machine, a reminder of what had been lost. The only meaningful thing he could do was simply wait until Site-120 was safe enough to return to.

It has been a very dull couple of years.

Without much hesitation, he closed his eyes.

The second he did so, Raia's muffled voice slipped through his cocoon of reinforced steel doors and concrete walls: "Al! We got a visitor."

He opened his eyes again.

So this was it. After ages of radio silence, something finally came through. He wondered who it could be, with the kind of thoughts you gave only to news that could prove both catastrophic and life-saving. Perhaps it was a diplomat from the Allied Occult Initiative, telling them that they could finally return home. Or perhaps it was a survivor from the skeleton crew left at their facility, reporting that there was no home to even return to. Either way, doing anything past wondering would mean having to get up.

The part of him that was his little reptilian brain wasn't sure if getting confirmation was worth leaving the warmth and safety of his bed. But the part of him that was still an academic — the part that made him who he was — really needed to get an answer.

He figured there was only one way to get one.

Laying down and dying was easy.

Getting up and living was not.

With a heavy sigh, Alistair Vemhoff blinked twice and stood up, ready to face the world.

* * *

Area-312 was little more than a converted vegetable cellar of a townhome on the outskirts of Montpellier. In peacetime, it was a waypoint for the dozen Mobile Task Forces stationed in the region. Now, it represented the only Foundation presence in the entirety of France.

There were just the four of them: Bernard, Dubois, Raia, and Vemhoff. There used to be more.

As Alistair entered the dining room, he didn't wave off the cloud of smoke floating around the uncharacteristically sober Dubois or comment on Bernard's unusual lack of complaints over the breakfast. He didn't take the kettle from Raia's shaking hands, either.

He was too distracted by the barrel of a handgun, pointed in between his eyes.

A voice behind the gun spoke, "Does the Black Moon howl?"

"Only when it sinks below the bright horizon," he replied without a second's hesitation.

The barrel lowered and Alistair could feel his heart beating again. He could see the gun's wielder now, a crumbling marble statue burning, brilliant phoenix writhing mass of hissing snakes—

He blinked. A diminutive Asian woman smiled pleasantly at him as she holstered her gun. She was covered in the most mundane clothing he could imagine — were it not for her posture and her face, the only two parts of her that now remained unveiled, his brain would have treated her like little more than visual white noise he ought to ignore as soon as possible.

The most striking part of her was her eyes. They were the colors of late autumn, something almost akin to a hungry fire burning inside them. A hungry fire that was focused on Vemhoff, and Vemhoff alone.

"Can they be trusted?"

It took him a moment to realize she was speaking Cantonese. He had been to China only once before on a one-month vacation to Hong Kong. He considered himself nearly fluent.

"I've known them all for years. I'd trust them with my life."

Her hand refused to leave the gun alone. "If they were given amnestics, would they take them?"

"Of course, but—"

"Good. Nothing leaves this room. In fact, this conversation never even occurred. Do you know who I am?"

Alistair didn't. But the pieces were falling into place: the code, willingness to shoot before asking questions, his nearly all-consuming urge to get as far away from this woman as possible, and that hungry spark, burning deep inside her soul…

He squinted his eyes. "You're an O5."

She smiled again, and Alistair was reminded of a photograph he once saw in a nature magazine of a lion baring its teeth.

"Very good, Doctor Vemhoff. I am O5-5. I have a job for you."

* * *

In Vemhoff's line of business, getting details about a deployment was a luxury. Tonight, it was one he could not afford.

He wasn't told anything, except the fact they had to leave as soon as possible. Obskurakorps had eyes and ears across Europe, and the less attention drawn, the better.

He packed everything he had, said one final goodbye to people who'd been his only company for the last few years, and joined Five in the cold French night outside, his clothes now matching the equally mundane attire of the Overseer.

They left at midnight.

In the Site's foyer, Raia Micheals watched the two walk into the night fog. They didn't need the senses of a mage to feel the power of the veil the Overseer cast to cover them both. Perhaps persuaded by the masquerade of the spell, they looked down at their hands, and noticed a pill stamped with "C" tightly gripped in their palm. They swallowed it.

Soon after, they wondered why their eyes were wet.

* * *

Their journey across war-ridden France was a silent one. Whether it was the work of the veil, muting both sounds from the inside and outside of its protection, or just the nature of the barren wasteland, Alistair couldn't quite tell.

Five didn't do much to break the stillness. She just walked forward, always next to him, her attention ever so slightly somewhere else. It was clear that whatever energy the maintenance of the veil required, it wasn't easy on her strength. He didn't question it. For what it was worth, neither did the everpresent civilians and German soldiers. Neither ever realized the two figures were even there.

They continued like that until sunrise; never stopping, never speaking, never as much as uttering a noise. They simply maintained their pace until the small town turned into suburbs, then a forest, and then a small, unremarkable opening somewhere inside it.

Five made the veil fall down, and the two of them once again became visible. The light that flooded onto them, now uninterrupted by the previous masquerade of the spell, blinded Alistair for just a moment. A moment long enough for Five to whisper a word in a language not even Vemhoff could recognize.

When he opened his eyes again, they were no longer standing inside a forest. Around them extended a short airstrip, a small plane parked right at its other end. Inside it sat a muscular woman in a soldier's outfit, her jacket proudly displaying the symbol of a red right hand wielding a long, black spear.

Vemhoff didn't need further encouragement to get inside the vehicle.

* * *

They were somewhere over the North Atlantic when O5-5 first spoke.

"My apologies for the secrecy." Despite her words, she spoke in Erikeshan, a language Vemhoff was pretty sure only three people on the planet spoke. Four, now, he corrected himself. "In times like these, who knows who you can trust."

Alistair snorted awake, straightening out his suit jacket and blinking twice. "O-Of course, of course. As an Overseer, I imagine it to b—"

Her head suddenly darted sideways. "Can I trust you, Alistair?" She was sitting forward now, brown-tinted irises piercing through his body. The little fire was once again burning inside them. When he blinked, he swore he could still see them through his eyelids.

"Absolutely." He felt the word leave his lips before he knew he said it. It was like his tongue and throat moved of their own volition.

A shadow of a smile touched Five's face. "Good."

O5-5 stood up and moved towards the back of the cabin. Alistair subconsciously grabbed at his neck. A few moments later, she returned, two tumblers of amber liquor in hand.

"How familiar are you with the field of archeology, Doctor Vemhoff?" she said, handing Alistair the cup.

He accepted the drink, settling in his chair. It had been so long since his training was relevant that he barely knew himself.

"I… I observed the beginnings of the Daevon excavation a few years ago. They needed someone to translate the sacred Scarlet hymns." He paused for a moment to consider. "I was briefly brought onto the Adytum and Atlantis teams, too, but I wouldn't exactly call it my area of expertise. I'm much more comfortable in a classr—"

"Excellent. This will be old hat for you, then." She put her hands together, and looked out of the windows. There was little more than the endless expanse of the ocean beyond them, now. "We're heading to Merriman. Ever heard of it?"

Alistair hadn't.

"Not many have. It's a town of about a hundred in northern Nebraska. The excavation is around half an hour south of there. Just a preliminary encampment for now, but it should be sufficient for your initial work." She looked back at him, and the itching behind his eyelids was back. "You'll be working with Foundation personnel, along with members of various branches of the American government. They'll provide you with more specific details once you get settled."

She paused for a moment, then narrowed her eyes. "This is not one of your lecture halls, Doctor Vemhoff. There is no need to raise your hand for questions."

He quickly set his left hand back in his lap. "I appreciate the opportunity, truly, but I'm unsure why the Foundation is even bothering with this, especially now."

Her eyes narrowed even further. "Do you know how many Foundation Sites are within Obskurakorps' reach?"

Alistair didn't.

"Forty-three. That's over six hundred SCP objects, and tens of thousands of agents, doctors, and researchers. No one's coming to save them, when Obskura decides to break our tentative peace."

"But in the case of Foundation involvement, the AOI promises to help—"

"It is the opinion of the O5 Council that the Allied Occult Initiative is not to be trusted," she said, a silent bias of old grudges echoing somewhere behind her words. "A hundred heads pull them in a hundred directions, some wanting nothing more than to bite at us. Besides, under official terms we are still yet to take a side in the war. Following negotiations with Twelve, the American president has guaranteed that in exchange for our help with this excavation, the American forces shall ensure the full restoration of the Foundation's presence in Europe."

He took a sip of his drink. It tasted like ash and smoke. There was still a piece missing.

"But why this excavation? What's so important that you need to fly some old linguist all the way across the Atlantic?"

O5-5 smiled, revealing a set of sharpened, wolf-like teeth.

"That's why we need you, Alistair. Because I have no idea."

* * *

6th of March, 1942

Merriman, United States of America

They arrived around noon, their plane landing on an airstrip significantly larger than the one it took off from. It was surrounded by a few military-looking buildings, but just like its predecessor, it was masked right until they landed. Seeing the process from the air, Alistair recognized the work — it was almost identical to the one that had covered Site-01 when he had visited it a decade prior, tasked with translating the Fae Empire-era inscriptions and runes that riddled the palace below it.

When they got out of the vehicle, they were greeted by two things: the blazing sun and a single man in US Army clothing. He was tall and built like a a boxer, his face beaming with caution even despite its mask of neutrality. His hands were put behind his back, but somehow Alistair didn't doubt he could reach for the M1911A1 mounted near his belt before he could even blink.

When they approached him, he smiled widely, extending his hand towards O5-5. She shook it, matching the man's expression.

"Madame Overseer," he said, his voice a thundering but polite basso. "We have been expecting you."

"Good. I'm sure that Mikell has already cleared you about the… details, of our mission here." She slightly moved her head to point at Alistair.

The soldier eyed him, then nodded. "Indeed." He paused for a moment. "As requested, the transport is already waiting. We will be leaving imminently."

Five's smile widened. "Excellent."

The soldier waved, then whistled, and from the shadows of the buildings surrounding the airport, half a dozen similarly-clothed and similarly-armed figures emerged. Alistair flinched, suddenly realizing they had been standing there all along. Five remained motionless.

The man showed them to follow them with his head, and started walking forward, towards a large military vehicle parked right before them. Similarly, before the man had pointed it out, Alistair did not realize it was standing there, either.

Alistair and Five got into the car.

* * *

From the six hours Alistair had been in Nebraska, the only thing he could conclude was that it was very flat.

The journey towards the excavation site was a grueling one. Still burdened by yesterday's walk across France and the mostly sleepless night above the Atlantic, Alistair's mind was occupied by trying to take a nap while he still could. The ceaseless bumps and holes that riddled the road they rode down certainly did nothing to make the job easier. Neither did the setting sun, still blinding his eyes and burning his skin with its unusually warm rays.

Meanwhile, in the front of the car, Five and the soldier were engaged in a passionate discussion. About what, Alistair could not quite tell; not because he didn't understand the language they spoke (he doubted either of them could even think of one he didn't recognize), but because his brain was too exhausted to match the sounds of words to their meanings.

Left with no other choice, he looked out of his window, greeting the ceaseless grasslands that stretched outside of civilization and beyond the horizon, well into infinity. After a while, the monotony of the landscape seemed to mix in with the sounds of the engine, soon turning into little more than dreams.

When Alistair opened his eyes again, they were no longer driving. The car was now parked before a series of large tents, the structure of the camp organized in a geometric manner. All around them were various people, both Foundation and US Army emblems proudly displayed on their chests. He recognized some of them as personnel from the Departments of Archeology and History from previous jobs, but the vast majority of them remained unfamiliar.

They were all unmoving, staring directly at the vehicle in front of them.

When Alistair and company got out of the car, one of the people — much taller than the rest, his posture lean and with the build of an athlete — slowly approached them. The cigarette that he held between his lips was already going dim.

He extended a hand first towards the Overseer, then towards the army official, and then towards Alistair. When he got to Vemhoff, he smiled ever so slightly. "Lyn Marness," he said, looking down at Alistair. Whether a slight or necessity due to height, he couldn't quite tell. "Unthinkables Division, US Army Paranatural Warfare Command."

Alistair shook his hand. "Alistair Vemhoff, Linguistics Department, Foundation. Pleasure to be working with you, sir," he added.

That broke the awkward stare. Marness smiled slightly. "Pleasure to be working with you, too. We've been anticipating your arrival quite eagerly, as you can tell." He looked around the encampment, nodding towards several of his people with his head. "We… Well. I think it'll be better if I just show you."

Without looking back at Alistair, he started walking towards the biggest of the tents. Vemhoff looked at Five, almost as if waiting for approval; the Overseer just nodded.

When they entered the tent, the first thing that caught Alistair's attention was just how tidy it all was. From the made beds to the organized clothes to even the glasses lying on the immaculately clean table, everything inside it seemed to follow the same rigid structure as the outside of the camp. Marness was a man of order, then.

Lyn stopped and turned to look at Alistair. "Welcome to your new home, Doctor Vemhoff."

He waved his hand. "Just Alistair is fine."

"Glad to hear that, Alistair." Marness smiled, and took a seat next to the table in front of them. It was riddled by maps of the surrounding regions, several markings left upon them in what Alistair presumed to be Marness' blocky, even writing.

Alistair joined him, sitting right across from Lyn. "So." He looked at the maps and crossed his arms. "What's all of this about?"

Marness looked down at the map, pointing at one of the marked areas — a town, Vemhoff presumed.

Lyn took a moment to consider his words. "About two months ago, locals started getting dreams. Talking animals, deer and the like. Stars exploding in the sky. Shards of glass buried beneath the ground. As far as we could tell, they didn't start off saying anything special. Some thought it was a byproduct of the war, but most of town brushed it off as just a curiosity. The newspaper even made it into a political cartoon about the next presidential election." He paused. "For a few weeks, nothing special happened. Until it did."

Lyn jabbed a finger at the relevant clipping: a few lines of text hastily written atop a piece of paper, put right next to Merriman's dot on the map. Next to it lay a grainy photograph of a bespectacled, balding man.

"Meet Arnold Haub, editor-in-chief of the Merriman Maverick. Don't think you two'd get along, German by way of the Polish partition. After the War, he packed up things in the old country, and moved out here. Got a wife and three kids, cushy job, real American Dream immigrant. That's why it was so surprising that he would up and disappear."

His finger moved down, following a string of twine that connected to a topographic map. "Took about four days to find him. The state barely maintains roads out here, and most don't even own a car. They found him here—" He pointed to a dot two kilometers south of Merriman. "—trying to carve a hole in the side of a mountain with his bloodied bare hands. Totally delirious, was babbling about finding a city of glass. Died of exhaustion as they tried to get him back to town."

Alistair recalled the earlier car ride, furrowing his brows. "A mountain? Here?"

Lyn snapped his fingers. "You Foundation people are smarter than you look. Took us a while to question that. See, originally we were here to investigate the dreams, Haub was just a footnote in the interviews. Then we tried to find the mountain, and discovered it didn't exist. None of the townspeople could recall seeing it before, and no surveyor had ever marked anything even close to one. The mountain couldn't even exist; the geography of this region allows for some small hills, but nothing like a mountain.

"So we packed our things and went, trying to see what the whole fuss was about."

He handed Alistair another old photograph. This time, it depicted what Vemhoff presumed to be the mountain he'd mentioned. It stood as a sore thumb against the rest of the landscape, its imposing structure somehow almost ominous in a land of grass and hills. All around it, the plantlife was dead: from malnourished, thorny trees to barren ground, it was clear that this wasn't the work of men — or wildfires, for that matter.

"And see we did indeed." He paused. "None of us have ever seen anything like this. Some thought it to be a ritual gone wrong, the site still remaining despite the culprits being long gone. Carver's counters quickly disproved that one." He put forward a sheet of paper, filled with columns of numbers and graphs Vemhoff couldn't even begin to comprehend. "Others said it was a military disposal site, or something of the like." He touched his badge. "My own clearance quickly disproved that one, too."

He put his hands together. "For a few weeks, we were lost. We have a cursed mountain in an otherwise barren land, somehow connected to the unlucky bastards at Merriman. No apparent connections, no leads. We were ready to give up and amnesticize the whole town.

"Enter me. Someway down the road, someone had the brilliant idea they weren't seeing something obvious in there, some missing part of the puzzle that was right in front of their eyes. And it so happens me and my men are experts at noticing the unseen." He paused. "So off I go, shipped from Washington to god-knows-where, barely anything but a telegram to tell me what to do. I arrive on site, pop a few pills, and… voilà. I give them their missing piece."

One more photograph, this time of a blurred-out, barely visible stone slab buried in the side of the mountain, the engravings written atop it almost too intricate to believably be the work of humans. "A door, just there, in plain sight. A door made from materials we've never seen, inscribed in a language we'd never heard of, but one you eggheads seemed to be familiar with."

Alistair moved a little closer. "A door? Leading where?"

"You tell me." Lyn smiled with brief amusement putting forward a whole folder. Vemhoff opened it.

Inside, there were more pictures and drawings of the runes, all just as blurred as the first one. From the strange fog effect to the letters themselves, Vemhoff got the subconscious feeling that he somehow wasn't meant to be looking at this all. Like the letters were beyond his simple, mortal reach.

He shook his head.

No matter. He was here to do a job.

The first thing he noticed was just how old the runes were — they used the immediately noticeable and almost serpentine writing manner of the old Fae Empire tounges, albeit with the addition of a few signs he didn't recognize. He considered his Ur-Fae to be pretty good these days — good enough to read and understand most texts found in the ruins of old Empire palaces — but here… here, he felt lost. Squinting, it was almost as if he could make out individual words, a few bits and bobs out of context and out of meaning, but that was as far as his knowledge went. Between this and the blur on the photos and hand transcriptions, obstructing most of the sentence contexts and letter parts, he genuinely wasn't sure what to say.

He slowly let out the air.

"I'll… I'll be honest. I don't actually know what most of this means." Before Lyn could say anything, he pointed to a few symbols depicted throughout the folder's contents and added, "A few of the words are recognizable, but only barely. They're written in accents and forms I've never seen and would need to guess the meaning of. It's mostly small stylistic choices, but if you look at the sentence ord—" He stopped, realizing this was of no interest to Lyn and of no importance to their mission. He smiled politely, and continued, "There are many mentions of starlight, of war, of the sun and the moon. Something about the planets aligning, the death of a star, and it all bringing about peace? Prosperity? I'm not sure."

He shook his head. "The quality of the photos doesn't help, either. What's with that?"

Almost subconsciously, Lyn reached into his pocket, pulling out a small tin. "Amnestic brain fog. My men call it antimemetic. Stupid name.

"The point is," he continued, propping himself up, "your brain is incapable of comprehending these symbols until we drug it up with enough nonsense that it starts to think on proper wavelengths." He smiled slightly, and shook the pill container. It was almost empty. "A camera handles it even worse. We tried to tune it with a few magic gizmos the boys gave us, but…" He shrugged. "You can see the results yourself."

Vemhoff nodded. "Right." He paused. "That's as much as I can tell you without actually being there in person and seeing it with my own eyes." He glanced at the pills in Lyn's hands. "And here I was, thinking I've quit morphine for good."

Lyn chuckled. "If it helps, they tell us they're non-addictive."

Vemhoff smiled. "Of course they do."

After a moment, Marness stood up and nodded. "Good. This is still going better than I expected. We head out at sunrise, then." He took a step towards his cupboard, bringing out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He smiled. "But that was business. And it so happens business is now done."

Alistair squinted at the bottle, catching a glimpse of the word "Chicago" on a small label, and a tag reading "Evidence" attached to its neck. "Ah, is that—"

"Aye. When we what remained of his mansion back in '38, I decided to take a few souvenirs. Apparently they stuck this one in a temporal rift to age it an extra decade." Lynn took off the cap and poured the amber liquid into two glasses. He popped off the lid of his pill container, throwing one capsule into each glass. They dissolved after just a few seconds. Alistair didn't say anything.

Lyn offered his companion a drink. The linguist took it, nodding in appreciation.

"So, to what are we drinking?" Lyn raised his own glass. "To victory?"

Alistair considered for a moment, then shook his head. "To peace."

Something almost like amusement flew across Lyn's face. "To peace, then."

They clank their glasses together, and drank up. They had a long day ahead of them.

* * *

Alistair thought he must've made an odd sight as the convoy made their way towards the invisible mountain, trucks full of gun-toting soldiers in full battle dress, and one string bean of a man in tweed writing in a notebook.

The truck hit a pothole and Alistair cursed, ink spilling over the page and his lap. Across from him, Lyn produced a pitifully small tissue, handing it to Alistair. "What are you writing?"

He accepted, furiously dabbing his pants to no avail. "It was the beginning of my report. We've always suspected that the Fae Empire made it to the Americas, but this is our first concrete proof. This site could be a real game-changer for the field."

Lyn smiled. "I feel honored. Think I'd get a picture in the history books?"

"You could try. Then we'd have to take it out of circulation and erase the fact you've ever existed."

He gently touched his pills. "I think you'd be surprised at how simple that task would end up being."

Alistair nodded in polite appreciation at Lyn's jab and went back to his work. It was only after a few more kilometers that he realized this was of essentially no use; maybe with a sensible driver, he could've gotten a few paragraphs done before they arrived at their destination. Suffice to say, what the United States Army considered to be sensible was very far removed from Vemhoff's own definition of the word.

So instead of trying to write he just stared across the horizon, towards the ever-closer mountain, its lonely, grim figure just barely visible beyond the thick mind-fog around it.

The first thing Vemhoff noticed was just how quiet it all was. He never considered himself a nature spirit — buried in his books and studies, he was quite far from it — but even he knew that a place like this had its own ambiance, a song strung by a thousand beings living and dead. Here, though? Here there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And like a gaping void it surrounded them whole, luring them ever closer towards its very own heart of darkness.

The feeling only got worse when they arrived next to the millennia-old door.

Alistair resisted the urge to gulp.

Correcting his glasses, he crouched down and touched the stone that now lay before them. Even with their new pills, the thing was still an itch on his senses — one he could feel behind his eyes and at the back of his head, just enough to be an inconvenience but not enough to actually stop him from doing his work. He shook his head and blew off some of the dirt that still surrounded the door, revealing several lines of letters and pictures.

"Hmm," he said, squinting his eyes. "That's certainly something."

Lyn came closer, joining his companion in crouching. "What is?"

Alistair tapped the runes. "Like I said before, this is old Fae. Very, very old Fae. And it's a grave." He clicked his tongue. "Though I suppose that 'tomb' is a more accurate translation."

Lyn arched an eyebrow. "Which means…?"

"Oh. Right." Alistair paused to consider. "I'll spare you the details, but for most of Fae history it was believed that after we die, our spirits go on to join those who came before us in… Well. It wasn't ever really clear. Some cultures saw it asw their explanation for Aurora Borealis. Point is," he said, pointing at the sky. "The Fae were very much free folk, back then. They were all about change, about fluidity, about being one with the ever-shifting nature of reality. Their death was the ultimate expression of that: their bodies were burned, their ashes and souls now free—"

He noticed Lyn's look, and cleared his throat. "What I'm trying to say is that to a Fae, being buried, moreso in a grave, was the ultimate insult. It would mean having them anchored to this world forever. And this—" He pointed at their door. "—is a very, very fancy tomb. You know what that means?"

"That it's a very elaborate way of showing someone the middle finger?"

Alistair nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, pretty much."

"Well." Lyn stood up. "Does it say anything else? Like to whom this particular insult was addressed?"

Alistair unearthed a few more of the runes with one hand, correcting his glasses with the other. He squinted even further. "Something about a Great War — in their equivalent of capital letters — a few pictograms of two butterflies, one of them bleeding…" He paused, as if trying to make out a particularly difficult sentence. "And… huh. I…"

Very gently, he touched the middle part of the door — a circular seal in the shape of a wheel, its center decorated with a large emerald. The words around it read, "'Come forward, you who live in the shadow; embrace the light and break the flame, you—'"

Alistair let out a sudden scream, his pain sharp and quick. Before Lyn or their companions could react, Vemhoff's eyes flashed with a green flame, his very own being flashing briefly visible to the men around him.

Lyn blinked, trying to let the image of his companion's soul fade away from beneath his eyelids. He found it less than simple.

Vemhoff took a slow breath. His hands were shaking. Beneath one of them — the one that previously lay on the seal in the doors — there was now just a broken jewel, the words around it pulsating with very old — and now, once again very real — power.

"What the hell was that?" Lyn finally said, looking at Alistair. "Are you all right?"

Alistair shook his head, then nodded, and slowly lifted the metal slab that lay before him. It was as light as air. "Yeah, I'm fine. It was just a sting of magic. The door had a linguistic lock on it. Not exactly the magic type myself, so how my words activated it, I don't really know," he said, revealing a dark, looming corridor behind the door. It led deep into the mountain. "But I suppose there's only one way to find out."

Lyn flashed a light forward, illuminating a series of stairs made out of what looked like dark, orange wood. They terminated at a pair of large archways at the bottom of the staircase. The light didn't reach far enough to make out what lay beyond them, but it did show that the walls of the complex were ridden with a very intricate line of runes. A very intricate line of runes that repeated on and on, forming a single sentence, written a thousand times.

Lyn looked at Vemhoff. "What's it say?"

"'Gaze at the works of Radiance, and Pale before its sunlight.'" He furrowed his brows. "Radiance and Pale are again capitalized."

Lyn raised an eyebrow. Vemhoff gave him a look, and said, "Like I said — no idea. We need to go deeper."

"Don't we always."

Lyn showed two of their men to follow them downwards, instructing the other to patrol the mountain in case of any further irregularities. They nodded and went off, leaving their commander with a foreign linguist and just two guns to protect their backs.

Before Lyn could say anything, Vemhoff took out his own light, shining right at the staircase before them.

Carefully, bracing the stability of each step, he slowly but surely made his way downwards, Lyn and the two men always creeping just a few steps behind him. He was surprised to see no damage done to the stairs — or any part of the structure for that matter. He'd seen a few tombs in his life, and if there was one thing that united them all, it was their sorry states — here, though, he could notice no cracks in the walls or the ceiling. The only thing that indicated any age was dust, which formed a thick carpet beneath their feet.

The archway that greeted them at the bottom of the stairway was the first deviation from that pattern; at its highest point stood a broken mosaic depicting a moon and a sun, the former almost entirely covered in broken, pulsating green runes — just like the ones from the entry.

"Thoughts?" Lyn asked.

"Fae culture is rich in depictions of duality, of Seelie and Unseelie. Think Augustinianism but less pretentious." He pointed at the two images. "A moon and a sun are very frequent interpretations of the motif. Especially for people the Fae considered to be true harbingers of either — of creation or destruction, depending on the affiliation." He paused for a second. "Whoever this belonged to, it's clear they weren't a nobody."

Lyn didn't reply, instead flashing his light forward, beyond the archways. Its rays landed in a small room. It contained heavy-looking doors. They were very plain and contained no runes, except for a single word: "'Blight'," Vemhoff read, squinting his eyes. He too moved his flashlight to focus on the antechamber before them.

With the rest of the room now visible, Lyn and Alistair could make out more of its walls, noticing they were absolutely filled with various images and letters, interweaving to form a strange gem-mosaic that was difficult to look at, even moreso than the rest of the memory-itching tomb. The whole place had no order to it, no real symmetry aside from the fact that all of its parts terminated in the center of the chamber: a cubical opening in its floor, almost like a keyhole, looking as if it was waiting for some central, missing element to open it up and activate something.

Lyn and Alistair looked at each other, then nodded. Each of them headed towards a different wall, trying to see if there was anything worthwhile there, or if it was all just artistic chaos.

Softly, Alistair caressed the mosaic before him. A single ruby, glowing red despite no apparent source of light; a medallion formed out of a metal he did not recognize, its form always seeming to shift into the shapes of different animals; a broken hilt of what he presumed to be a sword, its structure molded into the wall like it was carved out of the same wood that entombed it whole; a—

Meeting a sharp object, his hand suddenly stumbled, the pain forcing him to drop his light. Right there, right below him, there was a barely visible crack, almost entirely hidden by a thick layer of dust. He reached for his fallen flashlight, then paused, scraping at the walls with his fingers. A bumpy, mottled surface of pebbles greeted him. There was another mosaic here.

His heart stopped beating.

Lyn's voice echoed behind him. "See anything, Alistair?"

A beat. Alistair's voice echoed back. "Yes. I need you to come see this."

Lyn turned towards their remaining companions. Alistair spoke again. "Alone."

One of the men looked at him and said, "Look, I have orders Alistair, I—"

"Doctor. It's doctor." Alistair looked right into Lyn's eyes. "Please, just trust me."

Lyn found Alistair pacing up and down the length of the antechamber, quietly muttering half-remembered abstracts and theses to himself. All things considered, Alistair thought he was handling everything quite well.

"You alright? You're shaking."

He very suddenly stopped in his movements. "How much do you know about the Fae Empire?"

"I— just what you've told me. I've asked Washington to get copies of—"

Alistair grabbed Lyn by his shoulders. "Here's the short version. The Empire ruled over Earth for a quarter million years with humans as their chattel. And for all of those years, they had one ruler: Queen Mab." He pointed to the mosaic, dull gold lines intersecting at geometrically impossible angles. "This is her seal. If this place is in fact her grave, we need to tread lightly. Anything we unleash here could not only kill us, but also those troops outside, and half the damn country."

Lyn blinked twice, then blew out the air. "Christ. All right." He paused, looking around the room, then turned to face Vemhoff again. "What can I do?"

Alistair eyed their surroundings again. "Don't touch anything. And stay with me," he added, seeing Lyn already trying to walk off. "I can't risk more information leaking onto them." He pointed with his head towards the two soldiers.

Lyn raised an eyebrow. "I thought your Overseers agreed to a total information share?"

"Aye, they did. Just not with people whose allegiance can be bought with money."

Very, very slowly, Vemhoff squatted again, turning his light away from the Queen's seal and towards the lower portions of the wall. There, the mosaic seemed to shift from artistic nonsense — its forms still maintained their characteristic chaos, but at the same time felt more streamlined than their neighbors. More importantly, there were also more words written there.

He started reading silently, his words making the movement but not the sound. Lyn couldn't make out what he was actually saying, but from Alistair's face, it was clear he was struggling with making out the meaning of what he was looking at. He scratched his chin, and eyed his companion.

"I… This is unlike anything I've ever seen." He shook his head. The rest of the tomb was just a very archaic dialect of Ur-Fae, but this…" He threw his hands in the air. "I don't know. It's all jumbled up with weird adjectives that don't actually mean anything, put in between words that contradict each other. We have a lot of mentions of fire — fire that is somehow beyond the grasp of humans, fire meant for immortals, as the text emphasizes — and… death? A timeless war? What would that even mean?"

Lyn shrugged. Alistair paused for a moment. "In any case, the war both is and never was. The text talks about sacrifice, about a broken wheel, and… I think that's more mentions of butterflies. Except for them, how this all relates to Mab, I don't know.

He squinted his eyes. "Here's a few bits about a 'fool flowing in crimson'… we have mentions of a chained… I want to say kraken? A banished soldier— no. Knight. A banished Knight of Winter, again capitalized. And in the center of it all, we have a missing key — a key that, when put into its hole, would… open this tomb, sparking the dormant star ablaze, bringing about calamity and the end of a Reign, and…"

Sudden realization rang out inside Vemhoff's mind. "Oh, dear god," he uttered and took a step back.

"What?" Lyn eyed Alistair, the words before them, and Vemhoff again. "What's going on?"

Vemhoff gulped. "This isn't… this text isn't literal. I was thinking too straightforwardly. This isn't a tale, or an instruction. We aren't inside Mab's tomb."

Lyn raised his eyebrows.

"All of this…" Vemhoff pointed at the wall his hand trembling. "This isn't a grave, it's a weapon. We're standing on a bomb."

{$previous-title}

Alistair Vemhoff and the Curse of Mab

Detonation