The cavern came into focus slowly, Enhanced Vision pulling detail out of what should have stayed total dark, the first real look he'd had at anything since Ant had fallen through the gap.
He saw the bones first.
Old ones, scattered rather than laid to rest, gone grey-yellow with age and half swallowed by drifts of ash that smelled faintly of dust and something older underneath it, mineral and dry at the back of his throat. He counted four sets before he stopped bothering to count any further.
Once he managed to drag his focus away from the bones, he started to notice other objects. A blade that had clearly been here a while, corroded green at the hilt. Its edge had clearly not fared well against the passage of time. There was something that he guessed was once a pack, with most of its fabric now rotted away, leaving only the buckle to show where it had once been used to sit on someone's shoulder. Looking further out, he noticed a piece of armour, a breastplate, lying flat against the stone. It was dented, looked older than some of the other items he could see, but was equally as useless to him.
"This wasn't something new," he said, mostly to himself. "This has been gathered over years. No, decades." Other people must have found this cave to find shelter, from the storm or from something else, and met with that dark elemental instead. He thought back to the clan's previous expeditions: experienced groups, fully equipped, with capable members and strong Kithren. All of them sent out with the purpose of finding Adran's artifact.
Had any of them found this instead? Had there simply been nobody left afterward to report it?
He could have been one of them. The thought arrived plain and unremarkable: no magic, no weapon worth the name, walked through that gap with nothing at all. The only reason he wasn't part of this scattered collection of the dead was a creature he hadn't known existed less than an hour ago, choosing to stand between him and it.
He took a step toward the nearest scatter of debris. There might be a use for some of it, and a man with nothing had no business ignoring anything that could change that.
Then his attention snapped straight back to Mahkir, because some things mattered more than inventory.
"How did you do that?"
Mahkir didn't look at him. He'd settled onto his haunches in the ash, studying one of his own front paws, unimpressed by the whole idea of paying it any real attention.
I was expecting a bigger challenge.
The words landed warm and certain behind Ant's ears the way they had every time before, but the tone underneath them was new, more petulant than regal, the voice of a creature young enough to be disappointed and old enough to say so without raising it.
Ant stared at him. "That was a Dark Elemental. You understand that shouldn't have been possible. The mana cost alone—"
Mahkir's paw twitched toward his own face and stopped halfway, the gesture apparently not worth finishing after all. Was that meant to be difficult?
Ant opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out of it.
He needed an answer, and this time he pulled the system up himself instead of waiting for it to decide he needed it. It seemed only a thought was needed to force the interface to appear in his mind. The same two tabs appeared that he was now getting used to.
[ USER ] [ KITHREN ]