It was easy enough to return to the secluded valley of the elves. It felt weird thinking of them as elves instead of strange humans but I didn’t want to belittle their customs.

As with the first time, the leader came out to greet me. Apparently, they didn’t like outsiders within their village proper. That was fine. I had to explain to the man that I was just here to make sure no other seedy people had come by since we had left. He seemed to buy that excuse and left me to my own devices as I rode back to the small clearing at the base of the ridge.

It was late summer so the bugs were bad but the humidity in the cloistered valley was worse. At least the sun was out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The drone of insects drowned out all other forest noise and I could barely hear my horse’s hooves strike the ground. A deer bursting from the trees ahead startled me and my horse and I had my blade halfway out of its sheath before I realized what it was. I was more on edge than I should be. But coming back here brought up the memory of the dying woman again.

Her death still didn’t feel as meaningful as the bandits and that made me feel worse. I had killed both of them, why shouldn’t I feel the same way about both?

My horse stopped and pawed the ground in agitation.

“Easy girl,” I rubbed her neck gently to settle her nerves as I scanned the treeline. Through the trees, I spotted a black shape ambling through the forest. It was about the size of a large hog and fit the description of a black bear that Teacher had taught me about.

I continued to calm my horse as the creature moved away through the forest, apparently not noticing us. If the animal had been about four times the size and had a coat of shaggy brown hair covered in thick green moss, I would have sworn it was the monster from the city that clawed my leg open. It made sense that the monsters inside the city had once been perfectly normal animals. I mean, I had seen a corrupted human after all.

The bear disappeared into the distance and I let out a silent thanks to the Mother for not having to deal with it. After another twenty minutes, I came to the small clearing at the base of the trail. For a moment, I debated on whether or not to tie the horse up. If a bear wandered in while she was tied to a tree, she wouldn’t be able to do much to defend herself. Then again, if she bolted I would be walking back and that sounded like a worse option. So I loosely tied her to a nearby branch, which gave her plenty of room to graze and drink from the small stream nearby.

She was such a placid horse that I doubted she would tug on the limb enough to break it. And if she did get startled by another predator and tried to flee, then she could break loose. I would just have to go find her.

With that business out of the way, I grabbed my pack. I expected to be on the ridge for some time, maybe overnight so didn’t want to have to hike up and down a bunch of times. With that in mind, I collected a bundle of sticks to make a fire. If anything survived within the cave, I would need to dispose of it properly to prevent other occultists from finding it or some random person that stumbled upon these caves. Which seemed unlikely but it could happen.

The hike up the trail was even worse than I remembered. The recent rains had washed parts of the trail away. But I wasn’t in any hurry as I picked my path across the loose stones and boulders that had fallen from above. If it had rained any earlier the last time we were here, I don’t think I could have gotten Teacher down this trail without injuring him.

Eventually, the outcropping with the cave entrance came into view, and other than a layer of dark soot around the cave entrance, you couldn’t even tell anything had happened up here. I set my pack down to the side of the cave entrance along with the bundle of sticks I had collected from the forest below.

Then I lit another candle and drew my sword. It was probably safe inside but I wasn’t going to risk it.

I took the same path I had taken the first time but the explosion had caved in that section only a dozen steps or so past the fork. Seeing no point in trying to dig it out as it was a dead-end, I turned around and headed down the way Teacher had gone.

The path twisted and turned for a hundred steps before emptying into a natural cavern. I could see where Teacher had piled everything he found within the cave into a pile near the center and I was glad I returned to check. Very little had actually burned. Something must have popped from within the pile because bits and pieces of items were scattered in a circle around the pile. The worse was the corpse of the woman. I gagged as the smell of rot hit me. It was so bad it forced me to step out of the cave. I retrieved a handkerchief and wrapped it around my nose to hopefully keep the smell at bay.

It didn’t help all that much and I was forced to breathe through my mouth as I started collecting randomly scattered papers and strange-looking devices. I didn’t know what the devices were for but I knew they were made from plastik. That was something left behind by the ancestors in abundance. But it always looked old and weathered. This plastik was scorched by the fire but it looked newer somehow.

Was that what these occultists were doing up in this remote cave? Trying to recreate plastic seemed strange but it was an ancestral invention.

It made a twisted sort of sense. Anything to do with the ancestors was frowned upon but plastik wasn’t exactly dangerous…at least I didn’t think so. I decided to gather all the papers together and look them over to find out exactly what was going on here. You didn’t leave someone behind with a strange but powerful weapon to defend something of little value.

As I slowly cleared out the cave and dragged everything outside to create a new pile, the cave slowly emptied out of anything of note. I couldn’t put it off any longer and found enough boards and some twine that was conveniently left behind to create a litter. Rolling the bloated corpse of the woman onto the wood took every ounce of resolve I could muster. I had to step outside to calm my nerves before I went back in and dragged the wood out.

Burning her corpse was out of the question. I did not want to smell roasting human. Taking her to the forest below seemed like the right thing to do but there was no way I was getting a dead body down that trail.

“I’m really sorry about this,” I said to the corpse as I looked over the steep incline to the far side of the trail. It's where the miners dumped all the pilings from the mining. “You may have tried to kill me, but everyone deserves a proper funeral. May you rest safely in the Mother’s arms.” As I ended the prayer for the woman, I tipped the litter up and the body started rolling down the loose rocks, picking up speed and taking more rocks with it. It crashed against a larger boulder, halfway down the cliff, and burst apart. I winced and backed away from the cliff edge, glad I couldn’t smell it from where I was at.

The smell would attract animals but that was probably for the best. It was far enough away from the clearing below that it should keep any local predators away from my horse.

It took another hour to drag the rest of the stuff out of the cave and I even found that strange weapon the woman had been holding. It had a wooden end at one time but that was mostly burned away by the fire. That wasn’t what had caught my attention back then though. I pulled the black, arm-length tube away from the burned remains and looked it over. It felt right and when I tapped it against a rock, it gave a nice ring. Not quite like that bell, I remembered hearing, but I was right it was a solid tube of metal.

I looked into the open end of it and could see light coming through the other side. “Wonder what this was? Looks a bit like a blowpipe,” I mumbled, remembering a weapon I had seen once that used a blast of air from your mouth to propel a dart. But I didn’t see any place to put your mouth against it. It also seemed like whatever mechanism was on the other side had been broken by Teacher. It certainly wasn’t damaged like that when I had last seen it and the explosion hadn’t tossed it about the cave.

I wanted to ask Teacher why he would simply discard a fortune in metal. Was it cursed by dark magic? I didn’t see how, it was just a tube of metal. Well, if Teacher didn’t want it, I certainly wasn’t going to throw it away. I could find a certified smith that should hopefully be able to reforge it for me, along with my knife. I tucked the tube into the back of my belt and grabbed the stack of papers I had collected into a pile. They were filled with all sorts of writing and images but I hadn’t had time to dig into them.

Once back outside, I set a rock on top of the papers to keep the wind from blowing them away and set the tube next to them. It took a bit of time to get the fire going but the wood eventually caught and the pile burned with a disgusting black smoke that made me choke and move farther away. I realized the black smoke was coming from the plastik, so maybe it was cursed by the Father.

The sun was setting, so I just got as far away from the fire as I could while using my candle to read the papers I found.

Most of what was written was illegible. It was standard common but the person that wrote it had atrocious handwriting. The few words I could read had no context and sounded like technical terms. What I did find interesting was one of the schematics. It displayed a view of the entire weapon that woman had been holding. It was some sort of blowpipe but it used a round lead ball in place of a dart. I couldn’t make out the strange terms for what they used to make something called powder but I assumed that was the dark magic used to expel the lead ball. I realized I had just barely survived this woman's attack. If she had better aim, I would have been killed instantly. If that was what they were making in the cave, it made a lot more sense to leave someone behind to try and stop us.

I made sure to ball up each sheet and toss it into the fire as I finished reading it. Some of the pages just contained numbers grouped into blocks of six. A few were crossed out but one was circled. I was busy committing the number to memory when a familiar voice startled me.