Page 105 of Crossbones
“Don’t ever fucking scare me like that again.”
I smirk at him. “I’ll try my best.”
After getting bandaged up and having a quick few hours of rest, we move off again. We’re all extremely conscious of the fact we don’t have many supplies left, especially with my pack now lost above us somewhere. If we don’t find the vault today, we’ll have to go back to the ship, resupply and try again.
We’re not walking long when the passageway opens up into a vast chamber with towering vaulted ceilings. Bookshelves run up the walls to a staggering height. Bookcases line the room in a circular pattern, leaving the middle open with comfortable seating and long communal tables. Everything is perfectly encased in ice as clear as glass. Half the ceiling has caved in across the room, but most of it remains untouched by time or decay.
We break off to wander among the stacks. I run my hand along the spine of a book. The history here is unimaginable. What secrets of the world live here? This city was said to exist thousands and thousands of years ago, so whatever is written here is most likely something we know nothing about.
A thrill rushes through me at the amount of knowledge sitting here in this room. Blackwell is slowly trailing behind me through the stacks, looking like he’s paying more attention to me than these valuable artifacts. I hide a smile only for it to drop the moment I round a corner of bookcases and see the body.
The man is hunched over a table and I walk around to see what he’s doing. A quill is in his hand, the frozen action is eerie in how alive it looks. I lean over for a closer look at what he’s writing. It’s in one of the old languages. The last line is hastily scratched into the parchment, viciously and with urgency. His script deteriorates to scribbles at the end, barely legible.
It’s coming—it’s here—woe unto us the sorry fools who did not heed the warning of the stars….
I run my hand over the ice covering the previous page and begin to read aloud:
It matters not if it is daylight or darkness, it is an ever-present omen in our skies. The scale of it devastates the mind, while the speed at which it must be traveling I am equally unable to truly comprehend. Thisis to be our destruction. Whether it comes in an explosion of flames, or flurry of ice, I know not. What is clear, is we should have heeded the warnings. I tried to warn them. We tried to make them understand. But no one listens to ill omens when the abundance of our civilization is filling the vaults. Now they see. Now they look up at the sky and tears of wrath, fear and grief trail down their faces. They trail down mine as well.
Will history remember us? Or will we be utterly destroyed beyond immortalization. I’d like to think something of us will linger—
I look up and realize everyone has gathered around us.
“Some sort of meteor strike?” I say thoughtfully.
“Wouldn’t that eliminate everything?” Harrison asks.
“Not if it explodes in the atmosphere over all this ice,” Van says. “It would have caused a massive thermal drop, blocked the sun—if this was the epicenter, everyone would have been flash frozen.”
“At least they didn’t suffer,” one of the men states.
“I don’t know,” I muse, looking back at the man before me. “Seeing that thing in the sky every day knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it? Before the bear interrupted me I found some sort of invention that looks like it was used to read the stars. Maybe that’s how they found out about it.”
“All I heard is an abundant vault,” Harrison states. “Let’s let the dead lie.”
They all walk off but I stay, studying the man a moment longer. The one who tried his hardest to warn everyone he loved of their impending doom only for it all to fall on deaf ears. The look of pain on his face, frozen for all of time disturbs me. What must that agony feel like? To know the end was coming and be unable to do anything about it. Now I know why so many of these people have been looking up—they’d been ominously watching death come for them, not able to do anything but pray.
JAMES
I watch Caspian stare at the iced over body. I can tell he’s in pain—he’s favoring one of his ankles, and those bear wounds have to hurt something awful. Seeing him under the bear, thinking he was dead—I don’t ever want to feel that way again. I touch his arm and he blinks rapidly, coming back to the present and follows behind me out of the library.
“All that history,” he says almost wistfully.
It is pretty incredible, the amount of information contained in that room—part of me wishes we had time to explore it further, but the other part wants to get to the treasure as quickly as possible and leave this tomb behind. I don’t want it to be our tomb as well.
It’s like Grythmoor wanted us to see what happened here before revealing its secrets because not even an hour later, we round a corner and a fully intact door stands before us. What makes us stop and stare apprehensively at it is because it’s not covered in ice.
Harrison walks up to it and puts his palm against the worn grain.
“Why isn’t it iced over?” Van muses as he puts his hand next to Harrison’s. He yanks it back in shock. “It’s warm!”
Harrison grabs the handle but the door doesn’t budge when he tugs on it. He gestures for the axe. I grab one, he takes the other and we hack at the door. It splinters easily beneath the assault and warm air rushes through the slowly widening crack we’re making. I catch a glimmer of something and our efforts escalate, our energy ramping up in excitement. Harrison yanks at the boardsand all at once, we fall back from the opening.
I step through, leading the way into the massive vault. I see a bowl of kindling next to the door and grabbing the torch from Van, I touch the flame to it. Fire quickly fills the bowl and then spreads down a network of channels, filling the room with light.
Van gasps. “Oh my God.”
The ceiling disappears above us in the shadows and all around us are mountains and mountains of gold. It’s more gold than I’ve ever seen in my life. Coins, chests of bricks and more jewels and gold ornaments than I can comprehend fill the space.
