The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

To Father Sven, Temple of the 1st Moon,

Please, do not disregard what you are about to read as the ravings of a blasphemer. All my life I have been naught but a man of the north. I have been a son, a brother, and a man of science. I write because I have seen things not of this world. Ask the courier who brought this to you, if it does reach your hands. He was paid in stamped gold I had to risk my life to steal. Gold bearing no mint of king or country. Naught but a merchant's weight stamped upon it.

If that were all, I might plead my case to the jarls, but the gold is naught but the currency to buy men's complicity. The warden seems to have been enchanted, bought off completely. He wears fresh boots and it seems every night he has a fresh bottle of wine or a slaughtered animal to dine upon. It is no wonder he collaborates with this stranger who has pulled wealth out of rocks.

I think this man – they call him Wanderer – truly has no interest in the gold. It never weighs down his pockets longer than it takes to hand off to an overseer. With nothing more than knowledge, he has subsumed control of the mine in essence, if not in legal fact, for he alone controls the alchemical processes necessary to purify the gold.

But he has other aims, goals which I do not quite understand. If you had asked me how deep the copper mine went, I would have answered hardly deeper than the pit of water, but that is not true. There are tunnels, far and away and deep through the mine. For weeks, we laborers were tasked with expanding a path that hardly a child could have crawled through, but now two men can walk abreast. There is something different about this stone. At times it seems as hard as granite, but at other times it chips and fractures to dust. It forms some kind of natural amalgamation.

I swear upon what remains of my life that there is some kind of living creature within the fractures of stone. It has a gritty texture like the pumice of the Ashfall mountains, but there is a pattern of life to it such that I feel as a god looking down upon a world small enough to fit in my hand.

I think the Wanderer believes it to be alive as well. We conscripts assigned to do his bidding were brought to a cave far below the surface, riddled with branching tunnels whose depth I could only guess. Tunnels which faintly echoed with the scrap of living creatures. I have had nightmares of the scaled creatures whose warren we might be trespassing upon. But, in the cave, we piled up the excavated rock until a flat surface had been created, spanning the size of a longhouse. We thought we were done, but the meat we were given as a reward was just to return our strength before we began work anew.

We thought little of it, though a certain quiet gloom stayed our tongues. The mine was never much a place for camaraderie, but we knew we were doing something illicit. Our stomachs were full and we had no fear of an overseer's whip, so it was a bargain we each accepted. Perhaps it was the fear that anyone who made a fuss about the work would be excised from our midst and this mild labor denied to us.

The tunnel he tasked us with sloped up, and he did not ask we greatly widen it. Soon it became the work of one man like a chimney sweep, sending cascades of rubble to those of us below. The strike of piton and hammer played like an eerie bard while we shoveled the stone across the pit. The man's last words were, "There's water." He didn't even have time to descend before the roof above him shattered. Black water rushed down the tunnel in a torrent, knocking men down and dashing our candles to darkness.

The Wanderer watched from across the cave, perched on a rock just high enough to not be wetted.

When we relit our candles, the water had soaked into the gravel, leaving behind rotten corpses. We had broken through to the pit the dead were disposed into, and they had come with such a force they had smashed open the man's skull and spread his brains across the floor.

The Wanderer dismissed us and not a trace of emotion accented his words. Some of us were conflicted by a sense that our comrade should be buried, but there was never burial for the dead in this pit. We left him there, with the bones of those who had died before him.

It haunted me for days. It muddled my work with the quartermaster, leading to cuts and burns as I processed the little things needed by the miners. I couldn't handle it, the sleepless nights of watching for the Wanderer, wondering if he would be there to observe another death and if that death would be my own. But, there was no sign of him, as if he had never left that bloody tomb.

Perhaps it was simply my own curiosity that pulled me back to that tomb. I have always been possessed of a child's spirit in that way, the delight to transform the unknown into the known. It is something similar to the satisfaction of learning a stranger at a distance is in truth a familiar friend. What I found beneath the mine was inexplicable. The sloping curve of the tunnel arced back to the heart of the mine, else it would not have been connected to the burial pit. Of the corpses, there was no longer any sign, nor was the floor rubble.

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The ground was as smooth as spilled wax, boiled and left to cool. I thought it might crumble and crack beneath my footsteps, but I found the surface as firm as any stone. It was so impossible I thought I had come upon a different cave, but in every other feature it was exactly as I recalled. Down to the scratches of piton and pick it was as I recalled save for one difference. One more of the tunnels had been expanded.

I recalled no other team of laborers brought down to the pit, nor could I believe a single old man could have carved the path. The stone did not bear any scraping of metal either. If anything, it reminded me of the undulating walls of a moulin wavering through the heart of a glacier. The tunnel was stone to the touch and I can offer no explanation how it was formed.

That was where the Wanderer had been. He came walking out of the tunnel, his walking staff clicking against the stone like an echoing chime meant to scare away animals. I was transfixed by the noise, though I had no means of defending myself. He emerged from darkness into the light of my candle, as though he could see as nocturnal creatures do. I had the misfortune of seeing his toothy grin when he recognized me – seeing the blood staining his teeth. "The curious one," he called me.

I retreated from his approach, inadvertently standing in the middle of the cave. "Was this some work of yours? The effect of a stigmata?"

He laughed and walked a circle around me, dragging the butt of his staff. Though I was distracted by the curious groove it cut through the stone, being naught but a stick of wood such an effect should have been impossible, I have nonetheless transcribed his heresy.

"You must not have the mark of the gods yourself, if you would ask such a thing. We are not touched by Iono's light here. Indeed, we are hardly even in the world at all. You people think this is nothing more than a fortuitous mine, the fruit of the earth as if the gods dragged it up for your pleasure. Ah, perhaps that's a bad turn of phrase. It quite torments you, does it not? I saw you skulking about my devices. Engval told me about you. You're a curiosity, you know? It's not often a man is arrested for blasphemy. Renegade thinkers typically have the common sense to move to the central kingdoms where the force of government has been neutered, where they lick their wounds and preach the wonders of secular rule because their god is dead. Their god gives no mandate. You are thus a singular anomaly of wit and mind, among a crowd of thieves and thugs."

He had completed a circle around me. The moment he finished inscribing the circle, his staff began to tap and slam against the stone as if he were playing an instrument but what he was doing instead was imprinting runes into the stone. I know not what language they were in, but I let instinct guide me and can only be grateful he made no move to stop my retreat. He only grinned.

"There are sailors that fear to venture beyond the Misty Isles in the south, because they expect to find the edge of the world, a cliff where the ocean plummets away into an abyss. Few would guess they stand so close to the edge of the world every day. Just a small pit in the right place and you can tread upon that barrier which separates the land of the gods from the darkness. It is closer here than elsewhere, but nowhere is it particularly deep. You see, here we are just on the edge of the northern sea. It's shaped like a bowl, holding all this water, and the barrier runs through that stone. Where we stand now… the great devourers tend to squirm against it. The beasts that are drawn to the gods, but cannot pierce the barrier that defends them. They can push though. Push and push and push, until the metals have been compacted into the stone and shoved through the ward. Would you believe these are corpses? Shells of creatures so ancient even my people have no name for them? The traces of gold were once their rudimentary brains and held all that was their will. Now, their bodies are smashed and smeared with their shells. They are nothing but the digested, calcified excretion of the devourers now. Isn't that funny? Did you ever imagine you were toiling your lives away digging through the waste of an animal? It's much the same as the apocryphal jeweler whose dog ate a precious gem."

"And what does that have to do with stigmata?" I pressed.

He stopped walking around the circle and faced me. "Stigmata only work within the domain of the gods. The domain of the gods ended a few feet over our heads. You passed right through it and didn't even realize. You felt nothing as you walked through the crumbling corpse of a god and now you stand in the darkness. Brazenly shining your light of knowledge into the void with no notion of what the unknown holds. This is not a land where the will of gods reigns. Here, nobody reigns."

The Wanderer struck his staff on the ground and the other tunnels closed themselves. They moved as if they were alive. The peeling in of organic apertures until nothing but the way back to the mine remained. Once they had closed, they were again nothing more than stone. He had cracked the layer of stone covering the cave floor. He frowned and looked down when he saw my ghastly reaction. The ground was nothing more than a facade, like papering over a hole in a building's wall. The corpses were all there, mashed between the rocks and seeping in blood that glowed through the cracks in his inscription.

I fled the cave, but he did not pursue me. It took some time for me to collect my thoughts and furthermore to steal the coinage I needed as proof. Please, I beg you, see this not just as an appeal for my freedom, nay, for my rescue, but as a plea for intercession for all that is good in this world.