Following a slowly descending path of hard-packed dirt and dusted cobblestone, layered in nearly a finger’s width of dust, Kaius saw the sudden transition between catacombs and Imperial ruins as clear as day.

  Ahead of them, smooth moulded stone had been shattered as a path punched into a slightly wider tunnel. Unlike the dark greys and browns of their current surroundings, the tunnel ahead was an off-cream, manufactured and highly refined. It even had its own source of light somewhere out of sight, enough that the greyscale of his darkvision was banished.

  “Bloody finally,” Kaius muttered under his breath.

  While their descent through the bones of Deadacre had been relatively unremarkable in terms of threats or excitement, it had been long and winding. The catacombs were the oldest layer of the modern city, a sprawling mess of tunnels and chambers, half collapsed and some flooded.

  The map they had was only a rough thing, based on old records and the guild’s most recent forays into the tunnels beneath the city. Unfortunately, their entrance hadn’t been one used in the assault on old Yon’s hideouts. They had to rely on his and Kenva’s skills as they diverted their path a dozen times over, stretching what should have been a few short hours into a day and a half.

  Most of the catacombs had been simple tunnels. There had been a few graves, but it was mostly just dusty and dark. They’d had the odd bit of excitement when encountering the evidence of relatively recent use: old hideouts and scatterings of pathways through the dark, though some looked like they might have been a century or more old.

  It inspired a curious feeling in his chest, one he struggled to describe. These fragments of human occupation spoke to a history of paths walked long before he had ever stepped into these depths. He wondered who they had been. Certainly, some had all the hallmarks of criminal use — caches of weapons and what looked to be the half-withered remnants of stolen goods, forgotten.

  But why had they been left? Had they been affiliated with Old Yon, or were they just simple criminals who had found a handy hideaway deep beneath the city?

  Others had been older: detritus and trash littering marked passageways that had long since rotted away to obscure whatever they had been used for. Still, he was glad to be past it. As interesting as it was to think about the lost history they walked through, there was one far grander and older ahead of them — their true target: the Imperial ruins.

  Filtering through the tunnel, they breached into a massive passageway, half-moon in profile, that was over half a dozen long strides tall. It cut through the earth as if bored by one of Ianmus’s overcharged sunbeams. Other than the rough destruction that collapsed into the tunnel from the catacombs, the entire thing was flawless.

  It even had light, lit by a strip of barred ward-lights along the top of the tunnel.

  For a moment, all Kaius could do was be glad that he had room to roll his shoulders. The catacombs had been cramped, especially when they had to pick pathways that Porkchop could fit through. Often, by some dint of construction, those had been wider but shorter, forcing Kaius to hunch slightly as they worked their way through them. Here, he felt like he could breathe.

  On that note, the air was fresh — almost crisp — though oddly devoid of scent. There was even a faint sense of motion, perhaps some artefact designed to stop the accumulation of bad air.

  For a moment, they all just watched, looking around with quiet awe at the tunnels. While austere, he had seen very little like it. Even the dwarven tunnels from their first delve had been made by magic shaping the surrounding stone. This, though, seemed to have been created whole cloth with that same off-white moulded masonry he had first seen at the ruins.

  “It’s strange to be finally setting foot in one of these places,” Kaius murmured, suppressing a wince as his soft voice resonated through the hard walls.

  “It is rather remarkable, isn’t it?” Ianmus replied, craning his neck as he looked every which way. “This construction is fascinating. It has to be magical to be built on this scale, but it doesn’t look like any shaped stone I’ve ever seen.”

  Kaius nodded and joined his friend in his investigations. Looking up, he focused on the ward-lights lining the ceiling. They were always a good place to start. Ward-lights were simple pieces of runic artifice, due to their simplicity and stability. Hells, they were the thing practically every would-be runewright started their practice with.

  More interesting to him was how many methods existed for their construction. All they really were was a way to gather, and sometimes store, mana before transmitting it into a simple emission of low-grade mundane light. Sometimes with a slight bent towards a certain colour.

  In his mind, they were a window into the general quality of artifice someone was capable of producing. From what he knew of post-Shattering history, early ward-lights had been clunky and inefficient; sprawling things that took up considerable room — far different from modern examples that were simple and elegant. Those could be inscribed on a platter small enough that he could fit a dozen in the palm of his hand.

  He assumed the Empire would be similar to more modern designs, considering how advanced they were. But who knew what had changed over the millennia. Hopefully, with a closer look, they might find some insights.

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  Unfortunately, at first glance, the lights were far more brutish than he expected. They were certainly bright — bright enough that without his true sight he’d have no chance of seeing what lay within them. With his eyes, he could see each was a blocky cylinder about two strides in length, with metallic end caps securing it to the ceiling. Yet for all the oddity of their size, the diffuse glow from within seemed oddly more vibrant than what he was used to — closer to the full spectrum of natural light.

  He frowned. “I might take a closer look at those,” he said, gesturing up with his chin.

  Porkchop grunted beside him. “Just be careful. No tampering with them. We don’t know if it’ll set off any alarms.”

  Kaius grinned as he drew his sword. “Please. I’m not that reckless.”

  If he wanted a decent inspection, he’d need to hang from the ceiling. Thankfully, with the new durability and sharpness of his blade, he was confident he could sink it cleanly at an angle into the ceiling and use it as a handhold. It would have been easiest to make his ascent with an expedient shunt, but he had little interest in using a spell this early into their exploration.

  For all they knew, this compound had sensors looking for the discharge of mana that came with casting. While Rieker, Ro, and their strike team hadn’t run into anything of the sort, it was entirely possible that Old Yon and his men had managed to disable such functionality around their bases — or that they had simply gotten lucky with local decay of any runework. No need to take the risk.

  Crouching low, Kaius exploded upwards, feeling the shudder and burn through his legs as he leveraged every scrap of force he had. Rocketing towards the ceiling, he lanced the point of his sword at an oblique angle into the wall of the tunnel. Deep within the smoky glass of its fuller, runes burned as he shunted stamina towards his Initiate’s Glyphic Bladerite. The skill empowered his blade’s enchantments. Backed by his strength and its epic construction, it should have been more than enough to punch through mundane stone like unfired clay.

  The blade jolted as it slammed home, the force of the collision nearly ripping it from his hand. Rapidly halting his ascent by pushing against the ceiling with his free hand, Kaius started to fall as he stared at his blade in shock.

  It had punched through the stone, but only three-quarters, and the resistance was impossible for something mundane. Yet he could see and sense no mana indicative of an inscription inside the material, nor did he have the sense that it was a second-tier material. Whatever alchemical process had been used to create it, it was unbelievably tough.

  Hanging by his pelt, he dangled from the ceiling, backlit by a ward-light, the angle of his blade allowing torque and friction to keep it held fast.

  “Are you okay?” Kenva called up. “That was rather loud.”

  “I’m fine,” Kaius called back. “But the wall is way tougher than it should be. Can any of you take a closer look?”

  Ianmus nodded, crouching as he tapped the floor, made of the same material. “Strange. There’s nothing I can tell — no elevated mana that would suggest an inscription with some sort of fortifying effect. Perhaps some alchemical process? Or a manufactured material? What about you, Kenva? You have the best senses. Can you see anything?”

  “Not quite,” the archer replied, eyes sharp as she looked around. “Not in the stone itself, but there's a faint glow somewhere within it. Pathways of something magical criss-crossing this tunnel. A few of them link up to the ward-lights, but it’s not suffusing the wall, as far as I can tell.”

  Kaius cocked his head. Those pathways sounded interesting — conduits for runework, perhaps? Regardless, if no mana was suffusing the material, then it wasn’t an enchantment, at least not one he knew of. Still, if the conduits were connected to the ward-lights, maybe he could find answers there.

  Shifting his grip, Kaius spun, cautious for any sign of his makeshift piton coming loose. The ward-light was uncomfortably bright — Truesight let him pierce its brilliance, but it wasn’t pleasant. This close, he found more strange details. The blocky glass cylinder seemed full of some sort of luminous gas. He could just make out swirls and eddies, creating almost invisible differences in illumination — a shifting pattern only visible at this distance.

  There were no runes he could make out, and the light itself, oddly, seemed to be magicless. Only the metallic end caps that anchored it to the wall had any sense of mana flowing through them — lines he could trace, now that Kenva had brought them to his attention. They punched through the strange moulded stone to join what he assumed was one of the flows Kenva had sensed.

  He could barely make heads or tails of it. It was utterly divergent from any form of artifice he was familiar with.

  “Anything interesting?” Ianmus called from below.

  Kaius let out an inquisitive hum. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s a ward-light, but I think there’s some sort of alchemy involved, and there are no visible runes. The end caps are definitely supplying something, though.”

  “Neat,” Porkchop said, head tilted at the light.

  Beside him, Ianmus looked voracious, viciously interested. “We should take one apart. See if we can find examples of the runes they’re using—or how it’s put together.”

  Kaius laughed. He was eager too, but the light was just a simple fixture; it was hard to justify the risk of interfering with Imperial artifice to assuage simple curiosity.

  “Let’s wait until we’re on our way out. Don’t want to accidentally trigger anything.”

  Heaving on his handhold, Kaius pulled himself until he lay flat in the air, parallel to the floor, engaging his core. Hooking his legs upwards, he braced them against the ceiling before pushing out, withdrawing his blade along its angle of entry as an uncomfortable groan of crystal on stone filled the air.

  He dropped in a shower of dust, twisting to land on his feet, a slight crouch all he needed to bleed off the impact.

  “Shall we? As interesting as this is, I’m sure there’ll be more to occupy our attention further in.”

  His friends grinned and nodded.

  They set off, winding deeper through the passage as more routes opened on their flanks. Some were as large as their current tunnel, but others were small access corridors, ranging from ten strides across to some so narrow that Porkchop wouldn’t have been able to fit inside them. Thankfully, on their current trajectory, they were heading on a straight shot.

  With how poorly mapped the Imperial ruins were, this expedition would likely take weeks. Their first port of call: find the central regions, where they would likely see more evidence of defences, critical infrastructure, or potentially sealed entrances to deeper levels.

  If they were lucky, they might even find a broken light they could scavenge to study when they made camp.

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