"That's enough, both of you," Luxy said, stepping bodily between them.
"You're acting like children."
From what I'd seen so far, Savage ran hot and reckless, Namey ran clever and closemouthed, and Luxy held the whole fragile arrangement together through sheer stubborn patience. They fit together the way three mismatched puzzle pieces sometimes get forced into the same box anyway.
We pushed on. Past the stairwell, twelve stone sarcophagi ringed a burial chamber, with one larger, more ornately carved coffin set on a raised table at the center. The moment we reached the middle of the room, the twelve outer sarcophagi cracked open at once, spilling out undead soldiers, archers, and shamans, organized and disciplined in a way that made it very clear we'd walked straight into a trap built for this.
"Luxy, right flank!
Jon, left!
Savage, cover our backs!"
Namey shouted, and we scattered into position on instinct.
Luxy and I peppered the advancing line with arrows and floating blades while Namey wove sand into a shield against fire and incoming arrows both, and Savage held the close-quarters swordsmen off our flank. Just as the weight of numbers started to tell against us, Namey's preparation finally came together.
"Down, now!"
Sand rose out of nowhere into a screaming vortex around us, shearing flesh and rusted armor alike wherever it touched, and by the time it settled some fifteen seconds later, most of the undead line lay in pieces. Luxy and I mopped up what remained.
The last soldier fell, and the central sarcophagus ground open on its own, disgorging something considerably worse. It let out a shout that hit like a physical wave, throwing all four of us flat on our backs, and it took a long, disoriented moment to get our legs back under us.
"Savage, up front, Luxy and Jon, flank it, I'll support from the rear!"
Namey called again, and again we moved.
The mummy, when it finally stood fully upright, moved with a speed and precision that had no business belonging to something that dead. Even Savage, easily the toughest of us, struggled to keep her footing against it.
Savage soaked a long string of direct hits on her shield before releasing the stored force back at her attacker in one violent burst. The mummy staggered, confused, for exactly one second, and one second was all we needed.
I put an arrow straight at its skull. It caught the shot on an upward sweep of its own blade, deflecting it clean, but the movement threw its balance off just enough, and the shot had only ever been a distraction anyway.
Several of Luxy's daggers found its chest, legs, and ribs in the same breath, and still it refused to go down, staggering back toward the sarcophagus it had crawled out of.
Namey caught it in a rising column of packed earth and stone, wringing it tight until every piece of its armor cracked loose and fell away in ruin.
I stepped past the wreckage and took Daegon's crown from what was left of Kaldrec's remains. The ring at my wrist read just under thirty one hours, more than I'd feared and far less than I wanted, and I only noticed then how tightly I'd been breathing against the thought of watching it hit zero. For one clean minute, crown in hand and the clock still on my side, I let myself feel the specific pride of surviving a real boss fight.
Namey looked winded afterward in a way I hadn't seen from him before, one hand braced against the wall, breathing like he'd just run the whole tomb instead of standing at the back of it. Even travellers paid for what they used, apparently. That was worth remembering.
After the fight, Savage walked over and looked me up and down like she was reassessing a purchase.
"You did well, newbie," she said.
"You might actually be worth keeping around."
It was the single largest compliment I'd gotten out of her since we'd met, and I took it the way you take anything rare: carefully, and with both hands.
Before we headed back out, I took one last look around the burial chamber, at the strange curved weapons the undead had carried, forged in a style I couldn't place to any era I'd ever heard described. My grandfather's letter sat folded flat in my coat pocket where it had been the entire time, a small, steady weight I'd stopped consciously noticing days ago and never once considered leaving behind.
Something about the tomb's carvings, its long dead architecture, and the name still rattling around loose in the back of my skull all felt, in that moment, like pieces of the same puzzle I hadn't been handed a full picture of yet.
I told myself it would make sense eventually.
It had not, so far, made a single thing make sense.
I still had the good sense left in me, standing there in that cold stone room with a crown I hadn't earned the right to and a bow that had already cost me more than I'd expected, to feel the same small, cold prickle down my spine that I'd woken up with two mornings running.
I chose, again, to ignore it.
[End of Part One]
Small fingers tapped my shoulder, and I very nearly came out of my own skin.
I spun with my hand already halfway to the dagger at my belt, more instinct than sense, and found nothing waiting for me but a little girl in a plain white dress, standing close enough that I should have heard her breathing before I heard anything else. A strip of pale cloth was wound twice around her head and knotted at the back, covering both eyes completely, and yet she was looking straight at me the way you look at someone you've been waiting for all morning.
"I have a message for you," she said.
Her voice had no real weight to it, like a held breath let out slow and even.