Agensyx remained unconscious as Jay took his brief look around. The silvery metallic walls of the necropolis were carved with gold patterns that were unquestionably art deco, each pattern matching to the ones on either side smoothly. It was a little bit disturbing how directly the panels matched with the style. It was like someone had reached into a hotel lobby on Earth and directly transplanted it here.

  There were even sets of brocaded lounging chairs scattered around with small tables between every pair. His tent couldn’t have been more out of place if it tried, being the only dirty thing in the visible area. Kallin’s forced transport hadn’t treated it well; Jay was pretty sure it had been through a ball of earth based on the circle of crumbled dirt covering the tent and its immediate surroundings.

  He didn’t have much to look at in the small room. It really was shaped like a lobby and probably served the same function. There was a long desk at one end, made of the same uncolored metal as the main wall panels with an oversized square doorframe. No doors, just the frame, but it didn’t look like there were spaces for hinges, so there may not have ever been a blockage there.

  It was all unnaturally pristine. The metal was reflecting light that didn’t seem to have a source without a bit of interference from tarnishing and there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen either, but it was entirely silent. The only noise was Jay’s steps making small noises that then echoed into the high ceilings. Even that seemed oddly muted.

  But he didn’t want to go out into whatever was beyond the doorframe. The small glimpse he could catch of the rest of the necropolis was just more gold-patterned metal, dark instead of the steely light metal there. Kallin had said that there was some form of deterrent in here, after all; where better to put something like that than somewhere with dark walls?

  Jay summoned the [Crypt] gateway again and Alister slithered out.

  Have we fixed the issue already? he asked.

  “No,” Jay said. He went on to catch the skeleton up with the few hours of events he’d missed. He left out the earth mage’s string of insults; no sense polluting his vocabulary.

  And we know nothing about what will happen beyond this room?

  “Absolutely nothing.” It was oddly freeing to be able to talk to him out loud again instead of purely mentally. If there was ever a bright side to this situation, that would be part of it.

  And he won’t wake up? Alister asked, poking the end of his skeletal tail at Agensyx.

  “I haven’t tried since we got in here, but he wouldn’t when I was trying to talk to him before Kallin did all of that. I was going to try once I was done taking a look around.”

  Is there more to look at?

  “No, I guess not.” Jay moved to where Agensyx’s head lay.

  It didn’t look like he was hurt at all and there wasn’t any unnatural cloudiness to his thoughts that could be felt across the familiar bond. Maybe he was just asleep. He’d never heard someone talk about magic that could keep someone asleep through everything happening in the real world, but it wouldn’t be outside the realm of imagination that such a thing existed.

  “Hey,” Jay said, placing a hand on the spirit. “Wake up.”

  He pushed gently a few times, the tried and true shake-someone-awake technique always being worth going back to. It didn’t actually move the bulky familiar, but hopefully it would still be useful. The snake’s mind started to stir after a few more wheedling words and pushes.

  Agensyx waking up was a slow process, like an amateur free-climbing a cliffside for the first time. A few more minutes passed as the fog raised. Jay shook him again every time the bond felt like he was going to stop coming back to wakefulness and return to sleep.

  What is it? the familiar asked, mental voice groggy. Why are you waking me?

  “Take a look around,” Jay said. “You needed to wake up.”

  The snake’s eyes opened as much as they ever did, the outermost layer twitching back to leave only the seemingly opaque golden inner lid. His head moved side to side as he surveyed the room, the last of the fog leaving his mind. Then the bond clouded in a much different way as panic flooded in to replace it.

  Where are we? How did we get here? It felt like he was carefully holding his mental voice in check to keep it from wavering, an effort that wasn’t entirely successful.

  “Kallin called it a necropolis,” Jay started, and gave Agensyx the same rundown he’d given Alister.

  None of those words are good, the familiar said.

  “I think I figured that one out, honestly. Was he telling the truth about these places being used to imprison everything undead?”

  That was not the use I was familiar with for them, but it is possible. They were all able to be locked to single direction entry, though it was intended to allow people only to leave and not to enter, Agensyx said.

  Why would that be a function that they needed? Alister asked.

  Jay had intended to ask the same question.

  I do not know, the familiar replied. These are old, old places. The reasons behind many of the original functions were lost to the passage of generations.

  “How old?” the necromancer asked. This was the kind of situation where gathering information would be the most important thing.

  Uncountably. As far as I know, these necropoli have always existed.

  “Do you have anything more concrete about them than that?” Jay asked aloud. Internally, he asked Alister to go poke his skull out of the big doorway. There was a smaller chance that he’d be noticed than Jay would if Kallin’s little deterrent was actually out there.

  The small snake headed off immediately.

  There was a legend, Agensyx started, that these were as old as the System itself.

  “In a way that meant more than just the idiom?” Jay questioned, trying to get a little bit of clarity.

  I had never heard of it mentioned any way other than purely literal, the familiar said. At least not that I could discern.

  “Interesting.”

  That made them Jay already knew there had been time before the System, but as far as he was aware there weren’t records that far back, so that was both the beginning and the end of his knowledge. Hopefully if this place was actually that old, it would have some information related to the deepest portions of the System. Maybe even whatever oversight or design flaw had allowed Class Curses to be a thing in the first place.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Being trapped in here could turn into something very beneficial for him if he could survive whatever else was in here and make his way out. That went double if the inquisitors were actually after him, since they’d follow him right to Kallin. It might be a bit much to hope that they would mark him dead immediately but it had sounded like this was some tried-and-true method to kill a [Necromancer], so they might ease up.

  Alister slithered back in at a much faster pace than he’d left, the ribs skeletal body hypnotic at the speed he was moving.

  There are many things below, he reported. Only one alive. Some kind of purple… thing.

  “Thing?” Jay asked.

  Bulbous and tentacle-lined.

  “Damn.”

  So that was what they’d done with the abomination formerly known as Mirdun Ghose Rathi. They’d shoved him in here to rot. Jay had to admit that he respected the efficiency of recycling even the unplanned abomination that [Bolt of Decay] had created.

  It was definitely going to be an effective deterrent. There was no visible door out even if the necropolis had been set to allow passage both ways and the thing had shown enough surviving intelligence to hold a grudge, so there was a decent chance it was also looking for any exit that existed. It would be holed up probably as close as possible to any option it had found with the time it had already had, so the only way out of this place was through.

  And it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to bank on the thing suddenly being less hateful to him. Nor did he probably deserve any iota of mindset change it might have had. It hadn’t exactly been an unfair emotion in the first place.

  It…

  Why did he keep calling it an it? Mirdun had been a fully sapient being, even if he had seemed extremely unpleasant. Why did he reflexively shift to calling him an it after the spell had corrupted him?

  He hadn’t even noticed he was doing it, but looking back through his memories, he’d been doing it from the very moment the abomination had been more eldritch than humanoid. Sure, the label fit, but it – he – was still at least an intelligent entity.

  So why? What was the shift?

  Jay took his perusal of the memories to a deeper level, immersing himself not just in the memory of what had happened but in the mindset that had led to it happening. He ticked through like a scrapbook, knowing he was more focused on it than he should have been but unwilling to let it go anyway. There was a chance it was outside influence on his thoughts again and he wasn’t willing to let that chance hang over his head.

  The answer, it turned out, was nothing so ominous as another round of mind control. It was something simple, an extremely core emotion, but one that didn’t want to let itself be pinned down for quite some time. It was guilt. Jay hadn’t felt it so much at the time due to the adrenaline, panic, and underlying weariness, but there was a stream of it running through everything that happened afterwards.

  That made sense through the lens of hindsight. Killing another person would do that to someone’s psyche. Even acknowledging the emotion, he felt disconnected, like he was hearing another person’s testament about their guilt instead of it being something he was supposed to be feeling on a personal level.

  He’d have to keep that in mind. There was probably danger in that level of separation, especially if there was some Class that could mess with emotions.

  Jay shook his head to shake the thoughts loose. “Sorry. Had to think about something for a second there.”

  We could tell, Alister quipped.

  Agensyx agreed, more gravely. There was much turbulence in your mind. It seemed to be a private moment, not something that should be interfered with.

  “Thanks.” That meant they could probably tell the whirling wasn’t quite done yet and probably wouldn’t be for quite some time. Hopefully it wasn’t too distracting for them. For that matter, hopefully it wasn’t that distracting for him.

  “So you said there were other things down there, Alister?” he confirmed.

  Counters. Walkways. Stairs. More and more.

  “Stairs?”

  Stairs, steps, whatever you want to call them, the skeletonized parasite said.

  “Stairs that you were able to go up and down?”

  They were difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. The big one will have no issues but they are almost larger than I am.

  Jay couldn’t help but smile at the mental image of Alister trying to get up the stairs. A cartoon etched itself in his imagination of a snake forming a spring to bounce its way up a cliff.

  Not like that, Alister said.

  “Did you see what I was thinking of?”

  No, but it was making you laugh and that couldn’t be correct.

  Agensyx made a noise in reaction to that. Jay had never heard that sound from him, a kind of irregular hitched exhalation, and both he and Alister turned to look at the huge spirit at the same time.

  “What was that?” Jay asked.

  Nothing important, Agensyx deflected.

  Was that a laugh? the skeleton sent, mind giving off a feeling of complete bafflement. Clearly he’d never heard that sound before either.

  Perhaps we should inspect the rest of the facility.

  “It was totally a laugh.” Jay tried to whisper it directly to Alister but from the look his familiar gave him, it wasn’t quiet enough. He stopped talking about it. “Exploring sounds good to me. How far from this room did you say Mirdun was, Alister?”

  A few turns down. Getting close didn’t seem smart, so I didn’t get a good glimpse.

  “So we should be fine to look out for a while, then.” He ducked back inside the tent to shove the contents and the tent itself into his interstitial storage.

  It probably wouldn’t be necessary, since it seemed like this was an enclosed space but it might be good to have just in case. There was at least one cave he knew of that had managed to have weather in it back on Earth, so depending on how open some of the lower levels were, shelter might be a good thing to have. It was honestly a surprise Kallin had left him with the thing.

  Maybe he thought it wouldn’t matter.

  On that depressing note, Jay disentangled himself from his thoughts again and gestured the two snakes onward.

  Am I not going back in the [Crypt]? Alister asked.

  “Not on your undead life. I want to see how you made the stairs work. Besides, there’s nothing to hide you from down here as far as I know.”

  *

  Agensyx, as expected, had no trouble managing the black and gold lined stairs. Alister didn’t have the same ease of movement. In the first real example of non-serpentine movement Jay had witnessed from him, several sets of his ribcage-like length began to scuttle like insectoid legs, gripping onto the metal of the stairs and allowing the parasite to lower his body down. Presumably the same thing had happened when he needed to come back up too.

  It was a little bit disturbing to see bones suddenly becoming malleable like that, so Jay didn’t focus on it too hard. That being burned into his memory now was the price he paid for his curiosity.

  The stairwell itself was a continuation of the art deco theme, with the patterns transitioning smoothly from the lobby area’s nested rectangles to intersecting lines that followed the slope of the stairway down. The lines were spaced far enough out that it was almost odd not to see a handrail installed there, but on stairs that were only wide enough for two people to be on at the same time, that probably would have been wasted space.

  One full flight down was an entryway that actually had a door. It was a heavy, wooden thing, carved to match the patterns on either side, and lined up in front of it were the counters that Alister had referenced. They were silvery, maybe steel, and stood out from the door enough that there was clearly supposed to be someone standing behind them, and progressing down the stairs meant you had to funnel through the space directly in front of them.

  Jay felt like he was getting ready to fly out of an airport with how much it resembled a TSA screening line. The idea of it being potentially another coincidence crossed his mind but that explanation was already starting to wear thin. He hopped the table, his companions making their own way over and under, and opened the door.

  The door turned out to be a sliding door so his first couple of attempts didn’t actually open it, but he got there in the end. The room on the other side was jarring: plain gray carpet, desks arranged in pairs inside what could only be described as wooden-walled cubicles, and a small collection of cubbies against the wooden back wall that could have come straight out of an IKEA.

  That was one coincidence too many for him to be willing to make excuses. He clearly wasn’t the first person to come to this planet from Earth. Did it matter? Jay didn’t know. But in a structure that supposedly predated the System itself, it seemed like everything was useful information to have.

  And if there wasn’t more information to fill in the blanks elsewhere in the necropolis, he’d be very, very disappointed.