What Sleeps Beneath

The forbidden book was still where she had hidden it. Three days since the massacre. Three days of silence.

She had been told to wait, to stay in her rooms, to leave matters of state to those who understood what was at stake. The palace had forgotten her, as it always did.

She was done waiting.

The old library was still, unchanged. Dust and mould and the peculiar mustiness of paper left too long in the dark. No one came here anymore. No one remembered this wing existed.

The stack of agricultural reports sat undisturbed on the reading table. Beneath them, the cracked leather binding. The book felt heavier than before, heavy with what she meant to do with it.

Brittle pages. Brown edges. Ink faded in places to near illegibility. Three readings now, each revealing new fragments, new hints. The chronicler seemed to have been dancing around something, leaving shapes in the negative space where truth should have been.

The Empress spoke of debts that could not be named, she read again, and of a bargain that purchased more than victory.

Debts. Bargains. The words recurred throughout the text, never quite explained, never quite dismissed. And references, scattered and fragmentary, to something sealed beneath the palace. Something the first Empress had feared enough to hide.

Pages turned under her searching fingers, leaving smudges on the brittle paper. Careless. Reckless. But she was past caring about preservation.

The debt-keeper waits in the dark beneath the crowned dead, one passage read. Those who wake it do so at their own peril. Those who bargain with it rarely understand the price until it is paid.

The debt-keeper. The term appeared in three separate texts, always mentioned obliquely, always accompanied by warnings dressed as fables. The clergy who attended her in those final years would not speak of what they knew, and their silence was eventually made permanent.

Made permanent. The chronicler had used that phrase before. Death, perhaps. Or something worse.

More pages. More fragments.

Near the back of the book, on pages so faded she had to hold them to the light, she found what she was looking for. An invocation. Old words in a formal cadence, the kind of language used in ceremonies she had witnessed but never understood.

Speak these words at the sealed door, the text instructed, and the thing that waits shall answer. But know that to wake it is to begin a bargain, and to begin a bargain is to owe a debt that cannot be escaped.

She read three times through the words, committing them to memory. Then, with hands that trembled only slightly, she copied them onto a fresh sheet of paper. The ink blotted where her pen pressed too hard, but the words were legible. That would have to be enough.

The book went back beneath the agricultural reports. The paper she folded small, tucked into the bodice of her dress, where it pressed against her skin like a secret. Like a promise.

Careful, she told herself. Brave.

What she did not ask: what she would do if the thing beneath the crypts actually answered.

Night came slowly, the autumn dusk stretching into purple shadows that crept across her chamber floor. She waited, feigning sleep when servants came to tend the fire, lying still beneath her covers until the palace settled into the rhythms of rest.

The corridors were empty when she rose. A single candle, carefully shielded, lit her way through passages she knew by heart. Past the gallery where portraits of her ancestors watched with painted eyes. Down the stairs to the lower floors, where the air grew colder and the stones wept damp.

The royal mausoleum lay beneath the palace’s eastern wing. She had been there before, for funerals, standing in the prescribed place while priests intoned rites she did not understand. The upper level was familiar: marble tombs, golden crowns resting on dead brows, the accumulated solemnity of centuries of Aurelian rule.

Tonight it felt different.

Her candle flickered as she descended the final stairs, though there was no wind. The air pressed against her, thick and heavy, as though the dark itself had substance. She found herself breathing carefully, each inhale requiring conscious effort.

The tombs rose around her, pale shapes in the candlelight. Her ancestors. Emperors and empresses, princes and princesses, all the generations that had worn the crown and been worn by it. She read their names as she passed, carved into marble with a care that had outlasted the flesh it commemorated.

Aurelius III. Empress Valeria. The twins who had died in infancy, their small tombs side by side. Her grandfather, whom she remembered only as a distant figure at state dinners, already ill, already fading. They were all here, her family’s history pressing down into the earth.

And beneath them, according to the book, something older. Something that waited.

She walked to the far end of the mausoleum, where the formal tombs gave way to rougher stone. The book had spoken of a passage “where the old stones meet the new,” a way down to whatever had been sealed in the founding years. She had not believed it. Such passages existed in stories, not in the foundations of palaces.

But the wall before her was not quite solid.

She saw it only because she was looking: a gap in the rubble, barely wide enough for a child. Not collapsed, she realised. Pushed aside. As though someone, long ago, had wanted this entrance hidden but not entirely sealed.

The flame dipped and wavered. Burned low, yellower than it should have been, as though the air itself were thinner here.

She knelt before the gap. Cold emanated from it, the chill of deep places that had not seen light in centuries. She could smell dust and old stone and something else, dry and faintly sweet, like incense that had burned to ash long ago.

She would have to crawl. The passage was too narrow to walk through, too tight to turn around in once she was inside.

For a long moment, she did not move. Her candle guttered.

Turn back, she told herself. This is madness. Return to your chambers and forget you ever found this place.

But she thought of Tobias. The roof coming down. Her mother’s contempt: You understand nothing of ruling.

She pushed the candle through the gap ahead of her and began to crawl.

The passage was worse than she had imagined.

The stones pressed close on all sides, rough and cold against her palms. Within a few meters, the ceiling dropped low enough that she had to flatten herself, wriggling forward on her belly. Her candle, held awkwardly ahead, cast jumping shadows that made the passage seem to writhe.

She could not turn around. There was no room.

Don’t think about that. Keep moving.

The stones here were older than the palace above. She could feel it in their texture, worn smooth by time rather than by masons’ tools. This passage had been here before the mausoleum was built, before the first Empress claimed this ground for her capital. Ancient in a way that made the golden tombs above seem like yesterday’s construction.

Her candle went out.

One moment light, the next, darkness so complete she could not tell if her eyes were open or closed. She gasped, fumbled for the tinderbox in her pocket. Her hands shook. The stones pressed down. The palace above her. All those marble tombs. All those crowned dead.

The tinderbox was gone. Dropped somewhere in the crawl. Lost.

She lay very still. The darkness was absolute. The silence pressed against her ears like cotton.

I could die here. Die in this passage and no one would find me. No one would even know to look.

But she had come this far. She had read the words. There was something at the other end of this passage, something that might have power to change things.

She began to crawl forward again, blind now, feeling her way.

The stones scraped her palms. Her dress tore on some protrusion she could not see. The air grew thinner, harder to breathe.

Mira, waiting in the palace above. Tobias, going back into the burning bakery. Her mother’s face at the council, the contempt, the dismissal.

You understand nothing of ruling.

That might be true. But nothing would change unless someone was willing to act. And no one else was willing.

The passage opened.

She felt it before she saw it: the sudden absence of pressure on her sides, a shift in the air. She pulled herself forward, out of the crawl space and into something larger. A chamber. She could stand, though she could not yet see.

Her hands found a wall, rougher than the passage stones. She followed it until she felt a shelf. And on the shelf, by some miracle, a candle. Beside it, a tinderbox.

Someone left this here, she thought. Someone expected others to come.

She lit the candle with shaking hands. The flame caught on the third try, small and yellow, burning low in the thin air.

The chamber was vast.

Ceiling lost in shadow. Walls carved with symbols she did not recognise, worn smooth by time. And on the floor, dominating the space, a giant circular pattern. She might have taken it for decoration if she had not been looking for it.

The binding sigil. It had to be. Intricate lines and curves, geometric shapes that seemed to shift as she moved. The stone within the circle darker than the stone outside. Stained.

Across the chamber, a door.

Metal. Old iron. Symbols that made her eyes ache to look at. Rusted sigils in the old tongue. Do not wake. The debt waits. Sealed by blood, sealed by crown.

Stains around the door. Dark. Brown. Old blood.

Her candle guttered. Each breath harder now. The air itself resisting her.

Her skin prickled. Not fear. Something worse.

Awareness.

The Presence. She had read about it, dismissed it as superstition. She felt it now. Crushing. Immense. Centuries pressing down. The crowned dead above. And below them, behind that door, something that waited.

One step. Another. Each harder than the last.

The sigils pulsed in the candlelight. Her shadow stretched behind her, too long, wrong. The stains on the floor were blood. Old and brown and cracked.

She stood before the door.

Silence. Absolute. She could not hear her own heartbeat. Could not hear her own breathing. Sound itself had fled this place.

She could not move.

The door. Massive. Dark. Rusted sigils gleaming faintly. Behind it, something waited. Pressure on her mind like the air before a thunderstorm.

She had come this far. Crawled through darkness. Lost her light. Found it again. Memorised the words. Copied them onto paper that now pressed against her skin like a brand.

I can still turn back. Pretend this was a dream.

But turning back meant accepting nothing would ever change. That her mother was right. That sentiment was weakness. That the bread district would burn again and again while the palace ate cold meats on golden plates.

The paper. Her hands shook unfolding it. The candle dimmed. Barely enough light to read by. The words seemed to writhe on the page.

She began to speak.

The words were formal. Archaic. The kind of language used in coronations and state funerals. They felt wrong in her mouth. Too large for her voice. Weighted with meanings she did not understand.

She spoke of debt. Of blood. Of bargains owed and debts unpaid.

She spoke of the first Empress, though she did not know it, repeating words that had been spoken here centuries ago.

As she read, her candle dimmed further. The shadows deepened, swallowing the edges of the chamber. Closing in. The sigils on the door seemed to glow now, faintly, with a light that had nothing to do with her flame.

She finished.

Silence.

Her candle guttered once. Twice.

Went out.