The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 184. A God Built a Retreat and Left an Apostle Behind. I Found Both.
After she left, Rex stayed by the fire for a few minutes, contemplating the numbers ninety-three and eighty-one, the dungeon, and what the ancient writing of the dungeon would reveal when they stood before it.
He had not decided yet whether tomorrow’s cave system was going to be explored as Rex Rexilion trying to win an assessment or as something else entirely.
The fire made the decision for him in the way that fires made decisions, which was by burning down to the useful truth of the matter. Tomorrow was not about the assessment.
Tomorrow was the next step in a sequence that had started the moment Aisella’s passive scan registered that the dungeon’s written inscription contained language she recognized and that the recognition made her go still in a very specific way.
"Let’s just see what the dungeon has to offer..." Rex sighed.
He let the fire die down and went to the shelter.
...
The morning brought the sound of birds from the island’s interior. These were not the birds from the shore or the mainland but a specific type that had been evolving on the island for eight hundred years and had a call that was not in any catalog.
By mid-morning, they were at the entrance to the dungeon.
The opening to the cave was tall enough that no one had to duck, and it was wide enough for four people to stand side by side. The inside was lit in the same way as the Thornmaze, but with different types of fungi that made light at a slightly warmer frequency, which made the stone walls look amber instead of blue-green.
It was clear that the cave had been built thirty meters in, where the natural cave ended and the worked stone began.
This wasn’t the rough cutting of someone who needed a place to live and made one. This was the art of building.
The ceiling changed from raw volcanic rock to shaped stone in a way that made it look like it was built to last forever by someone who knew more about material forces than most engineers do. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶
The original cave formation’s structural integrity necessitated no load-bearing changes for the walls.
Whoever built this chose the cave because it was already right and then made it even more so.
The inscription started about forty meters further in, where the passage opened up into a round room that was designed for one person to move around in all directions equally.
The writing covered the walls from waist height to the ceiling in a spiral that started at the entrance side and went all the way around to the chamber’s deepest point. Rex didn’t know how to read it.
There was no mention of it in any of the scripts that the survey notes from four years ago talked about. This could be because the survey team hadn’t gotten this far yet.
For a long time, Aisella stood at the entrance to the chamber.
Rex asked, "You can read it?"
"Not all of it," she said. "This is the Elder Script..."
"It is at least three thousand years older than the common Elven writing system," Aisella said, taking a closer look. "I know it because my grandmother made me learn it when I was a child, even though I thought it was boring."
"I have never been more grateful for her stubbornness than I am right now."
Talyra asked, "What does it say?"
Aisella walked slowly around the edge of the room, her eyes following the first turn of the spiral and her lips moving a little.
She stopped about a third of the way around.
"This place was made by the Earthen Divine," she said, and her voice changed to sound like someone who wasn’t giving their opinion but was trying to translate as accurately as possible. "The specific divine being who is given the Elven epithet that translates as... the one who rests under everything."
Rex thought. ’The one who rests under everything...? That sounded fucking cool, honestly....’
’And I can’t wait to see what it is."
"Don’t tell me it’s related to a god," Talyra said.
"It is, a god of the earth to be exact," Aisella said. "This is what the inscription says: this place was set apart from the world’s obligations."
"Nothing divine that I carry here carries weight... no prayer reaches me, no duty finds me..."
"In this place, I am the weight of the stone and the sound of the water and nothing else until I choose to be."
It was very quiet in the room when she read that.
Rex said, "A god built a retreat, huh?"
"Correct... a god built a retreat," Aisella said, "and wrote the reason for it on the walls so that anyone who found it would understand."
She moved a little further around the spiral. "Oh, wait... there’s more."
"The second revolution is different from the first, and the first is the reason."
"The second is..." She slowed down. "An account... of what was left here."
Rex felt the system activate before she finished speaking to warm him up.
[DUNGEON ALERT — DIVINE REMNANT DETECTED]
[ENTITY: EARTHEN APOSTLE — DORMANT]
[CLASSIFICATION: DIVINE VESSEL, SEALED, CONDITION: INTACT]
[ORIGIN: APOSTLE OF THE EARTH SOVEREIGN — FIRST GENERATION DESIGNATION]
[NOTE: ENTITY DOES NOT HAVE AN ACTIVE PATRON. THE EARTH SOVEREIGN HAS NOT BEEN ACTIVE IN THE DIVINE REGISTRY FOR APPROXIMATELY 800 YEARS. THE APOSTLE DESIGNATION PERSISTS WITHOUT RENEWAL OR WITHDRAWAL.]
[ASSESSMENT: PATRONLESS APOSTLE — DESIGNATION POWER INTACT BUT UNSEATED. CAN BE CLAIMED, REDIRECTED, OR RELEASED. SOVEREIGN NECROMANCY INTERACTION POSSIBLE.]
Rex read it with the focus of someone who had just learned something that would change the next few weeks or months.
’What...? I can use it, huh?’
’That... changes everything.’
A patronless Apostle. Not dead, not withdrawn, but sealed and dormant, possessing a divine designation without an active god to nurture or oversee it. This Apostle lay in a chamber at the bottom of a cave system on an island forty kilometers from Aethelgard, and no one had been aware of its presence.
The survey team had turned back at the first chamber four years ago.
Rex looked at the writing on the walls, Aisella still moving along the spiral with her lips forming words that were three thousand years old, and the light from the amber fungi making everything in the chamber glow like something that was supposed to be found.
He thought, "A divine vessel without a patron," just as people do when they realize that something very significant has suddenly become available and they are beginning to grasp all of its implications at once.
"A designation that is still in place and can be moved."
’An Apostle that no god is currently watching...’
’Interesting...’
He looked at Talyra, who was staring at the walls with the same look she had when something was too much for her to handle.
He looked at Aisella, who had stopped moving and was standing at a particular section of the spiral with both hands at her sides and an expression that was not the healer’s diagnostic expression and was not the interested-researcher expression.
It was the look of someone who had read something and needed a moment to think about what it was.
"Aisella," Rex said.
She turned to look at him, and the look on her face was that of someone who was about to say something important.
"There is someone here." She said, "The inscription says that the god left something here when he came to rest..."
"He left it here because this was the place where nothing divine was important, and he didn’t want to carry it anymore."
She turned to Rex.
"It says, ’Here I have set aside the one I called so that they may rest as I rest, without obligation, until someone worthy comes to wake them.’"
Rex looked at the chamber’s far wall, which was the spiral’s termination point and where the writing ended in a section that was different from the rest: the letters were larger, and the stone behind them was not the same as the surrounding walls.
It was sealed.
"Worthy," Talyra said softly, as if she were thinking about what that meant.
Rex looked at the seal and thought about Sovereign Necromancy and divine vessels and patronless designations and what happened when something that had been waiting for eight hundred years finally had a reason to wake up.
’Oh yeah, let’s fucking go, baby... let’s see if I can find something here that I could totally use.’
"I think," he said, in the voice he used when he had already made a decision and was letting the room catch up to it, "that we’ve found the real reason this island was on the assessment list."
He walked toward the sealed wall.
"Rex," Aisella said.
"I know," he said.
He stopped one step away from the seal and looked at the writing around it. It was big, clear, and left there by something that wanted to be understood.
The system notification was always there in the back of his mind, steady and patient.
He put one hand on the seal.
The stone was warm.
