Chapter 1: 0.1 The tomb

Their lanterns illuminated the snow. It was untouched. They had gotten used to the ashes tainting everything, white snow turning grey before the heat of the furnaces melted it down to a sludge, mixed with the mud below it, so the pure white was a welcome surprise.

Here everything seemed much more ethereal - before they left their mark on this silent corner of the world, starting with two sets of footsteps cutting through the beautiful white sheet.

The buildings were half buried in the snow. Just the tops peeked out on some of them. The architecture was foreign to the pair. It seemed as though the shapes were soft in the middle but sharp on the top. Organic walls growing up to meet a harsh end. Pillars too lined the buildings, and upon brushing off snow, they were decorated too. Shaky lines were carved into them, running up the pillars to end in a hole.

The shorter man of the two glanced back to where they came from. The shadows swallowed their footsteps, and painted grey trees against a pitch-black sky. Howling winds made the trees dance gently, along with powdery snow that hadn’t frozen into heavy clumps just yet.

He wanted to take note of the ornaments he’d spotted, but the wind surely would make it too difficult - and they weren’t what he was looking for.

The two went further, keeping their steps light, making sure their tools wouldn’t clink against each other. The large man's eyes were glued to the ground for the most part - looking for stray branches, ice, anything to disrupt them. He looked up every now and again. It was when the large man spotted the building they’d been searching for, that he had to choke down an excited noise, and pointed to it in silence. He recognized it from the short man's explanations. It wasn’t precisely as he had explained, but close enough.

Tall winding pillars surrounded the building, ending in long spikes. They snaked around it, and marked the entry to the low tomb. They couldn’t fight off the excitement entirely - it marked their hurried steps, the energy with which they took out their shovels and began to clear the entry.

The large man grabbed the icepick from his belt, and made an effort to break up the frozen layer of snow until the short man signalled for him to stop. He took out a book of many papers, flipping through them to find the correct one. The pages were unmarked, they all depicted strange symbols - each forming a circle. The paper he ended up choosing seemed to have a multitude of copies in his collection. It had a circle of symbols, plenty of arrows, circles and shapes.

He placed the paper on the snow and in the middle he placed a lighter. Scratches marked its metal exterior. Beyond the shallow scratches, there was one deeper carving. It shared similarities to the symbols on his page.

He lit the suffering thing, and then placed the final stroke on the paper. As he placed that final stroke, the light was snuffed out immediately. The paper warmed instantly, but the lighter went ice-cold. The snow beneath the paper received all the heat. The snow melted quickly, softening up the ice around the pillars. But the water made his paper soggy and the ink ran. With a satisfied hum and a smile beneath the mask, the short man put away his lighter and crumpled up the soggy paper. The large man got to work with shovelling. The short man tried to help too, but felt himself to just be more in the way.

You are reading story The paper mage and the heart of rot at novel35.com

At last, softened with the heat, the snow was easier to move, and their ice-picks remained untouched.

They uncovered a trap door, that wasn’t horizontal - it was laid on the ground at an angle. Perhaps to keep the snow off, the short man thought. The large man only saw that the door was frozen shut, and before the short man could lay out his papers again, he simply broke it open. Forced the old hinge to snap, the ice had made it brittle anyway.

Though the short man wanted to rush in at once, the large man signalled to stop with his hand. He went in first, hand on his claymore still in its sheath. The shorter man followed closely.

The inside was surprisingly devoid of snow. The air was stale - they could smell that even through their masks. The wind instantly started to whistle and blow through the inside of the tomb, but it was far quieter than it was outside.

The light of the lantern fell upon the ground first. The floor was tiled. A mosaic out of the tiles showed a picture of a horned snake with 7 heads. Wavy lines led to the many heads, black eyes and markings on a green body. Beneath the snake laid a dark red background. The large man had to think of fresh blood, but the short man only noticed the intricacy of its scales, represented in thin golden lines decorating the body of the snake in a repetitive pattern. Beautiful handiwork, he thought. 7 beds of dirt were placed into the tiles, frozen remnants of what the short man could only think to be mushrooms littering the fields.

He stopped to examine them excitedly. Though the large man wanted to stop the short one from roaming so far into the tomb right away, he had to sigh and place his anxieties aside. He ventured further into the room as the short man crouched at the fields of dirt. He gingerly broke a cap off its stem and lifted it, examined it from all sides. He recognized gills on the underside of its cap. Mushrooms, indeed!

Meanwhile, the larger man went to explore the rest of the tomb by himself. Dozens of pillars obscured the walls. They seemed to be in a geometric pattern, making the room seem infinitely large, yet claustrophobic. As if a monster might spring out from behind the pillars, the large man thought, gripping his claymore. The short man walked through the pillars as well, abandoning the 7 fields. He took a closer look at them. There were 74 pillars overall. Each of them had carvings akin to those the short man had found outside - except these were in stellar condition. The same holes, the same slithering lines. Now he could see the intricate design carved into each. Scales within the lines - it seemed the pillars too held snakes, the way the ground mosaic did. They were not identical, each scale pattern was ever so slightly different. It seemed the artist attempted to recreate the same pattern, and yet their human hands refused them. He ghosted his gloved fingers over them, trying to understand any purpose for them. After crossing the forest of pillars, he found the walls of the room. He found comfort in the dancing shadows and lights of his companion, wandering through the pillars alongside him.

“Clear” the large man whispered to him, when they passed each other.

The walls of the room had fireplaces, the short man thought they might be connected to the pillars outside, acting as chimneys, perhaps. The fireplaces had long burnt out, leaving behind only a grimy residue of smoke on the inside of the walls. The soot hid parts of more carvings, running along the walls.

As his companion moved to the wall on the other side of the room, the forest of pillars began to make him feel uneasy - as if something was watching him, hiding just out of his sight, in the shadows his lantern painted. Shadows of pillars, against even more pillars. He fled the creepy edges of the room, back into the centre. Just then, watching his step as not to step onto a bed of dirt by accident, he noticed it.

A series of symbols etched into the tiles.

You can find story with these keywords: The paper mage and the heart of rot, Read The paper mage and the heart of rot, The paper mage and the heart of rot novel, The paper mage and the heart of rot book, The paper mage and the heart of rot story, The paper mage and the heart of rot full, The paper mage and the heart of rot Latest Chapter