After crushing the bone under his foot, it didn’t take long for them to find more bones.

They were everywhere.

Skulls stacked against the left wall in a pile that came up to my waist. Femurs and ribs sorted into their own smaller heaps beside them, the way a person sorted parts they meant to come back to. A cluster of smaller skulls near the back.

Kira made a small sound in her throat.

I brought the torch up higher. The light reached further.

More bones along the right wall. A collapsed heap of what had once been a body still wearing the remains of a fur cloak, the leather gone black and stiff with age. Beside it, another. Beside that, a third. The three of them had died sitting up against the stone, their skulls tipped forward onto their own chests.

Kira’s face darkened.

Mine did the same.

"Keep moving, We stay together. We don’t touch anything."

Kira nodded.

We picked our way through the main chamber, careful with our footing on the loose bones along the floor. The torch light caught more detail as we walked. Old cooking pits at the centre of the room, the stones around them blackened by fires that hadn’t burned in a very long time. Wooden bowls, split and warped by age.

Past the main chamber, the passage split.

Kira caught my elbow and pointed at the wall above the split. The torch light showed the same style of ward mark cut into the stone above each branching path.

There were five arcs leading to five different paths.

Five openings in the rock, each one leading off into the same destination... darkness.

We stopped at the junction.

Kira’s dark eyes moved across the five options. She took her time. Her free hand came up to press against her lower lip in the small gesture she made when she was working a problem.

She pointed at the second from the left first.

"That one has the widest opening. The wider a passage in a worked cave system, the more likely it leads to a common area. If we want context on how this settlement lived, that’s the highest chance of finding it."

Her finger moved to the middle path.

"Or the centre. Centre paths in ceremonial architecture usually go to the most important room in the layout. If they had a headman, it’s down there."

She lowered her hand.

"The far left is angled up. Probably a lookout or a private residence for someone with status. The far right is angled steeply down. That’s storage or a burial system. And the first on the right."

She looked at me.

"The first on the right is the same width as the others but the ward mark above it is different. It has a smaller inner sigil. I don’t know what that means. I’ve never seen a ward with a nested figure."

I looked at the mark she’d pointed at.

She was right. The other four had the same simple inner shape, the angular figure that could have been an eye. The mark above the first path on the right had two figures inside the arcs, one nested inside the other, the smaller one turned at an angle to the outer.

Something about the pattern held my attention.

"The first on the right," I said.

Kira’s brow lifted a fraction.

"That’s the one I know least about."

"That’s why."

She considered me for a beat. Then a small breath left her nose, half amusement and half resignation.

"Sigh. Fine. We go where you can’t read the sign. This is going to end well."

"Trust me."

"I already said I did."

She stepped past me toward the first opening on the right. Her dagger was still in her hand. The torch light followed her into the mouth of the passage, and the dark swallowed it a few paces in.

The passage sloped down.

The torch light climbed the walls as we walked, and the walls were bare stone all the way. No side chambers. No branches. No bones. Just a narrow throat of dark rock that ran on at a slow angle for what felt like a hundred metres.

Then it opened.

I stepped out of the passage into a chamber that stopped me in my tracks.

The ceiling went up further than the torch light could reach. The walls curved out on either side into a space wide enough that the far end was lost in the dark. My boots hit flat stone that had been worked smooth underfoot.

And directly ahead of us, at the far wall of the chamber, was a gate.

A massive door cut into the mountain itself.

Ten metres tall at least. Half that wide. Two panels of dark stone set flush into a frame of the same stone, the seam between them a hairline crack that ran the full height of the door. The surface drank the light in, gave back only the faintest matte glow, and made the flame in my hand feel small.

Kira drew in a breath beside me.

We approached slowly. The floor of the chamber stayed clean the whole way across. No signs that anyone had lived in here or died in here.

Whoever had used this room had used it for one purpose.

The symbols came into view as we got closer.

They covered the door from top to bottom.

Not in any pattern I could read. Rows of them, cut deep into the stone, arranged in bands that ran horizontally across both panels. Some of the marks looked like letters from an alphabet nobody had used in a long time. Some looked like the ward outside, arcs and inner figures, but drawn wrong somehow, the angles off. Some looked like nothing at all. Random scratches that meant something to whoever had made them and meant nothing to us.

I stopped a metre from the door.

Kira stopped beside me. The dagger had dropped to her side.

"I don’t recognise any of it."