Page 35 of Returned to the Vissigroth (The Vissigroths of Leander #6)

W e spent all morning talking. Thalia and Oksana filled me in about their stories, and Oksana even provided insight into Myccael's life and how he found his real mother, Minhalla.

I nearly cried when I heard her story of heartbreak.

I felt even worse, thinking that I hadn't been the mother to her son I should have been.

"I'd like to meet her," I said after a moment of consideration.

"I'm sure she would like that," Oksana smiled. "She is one of the warmest people I know."

I wasn't sure how she could be after what Kennenryn had done to her, but I took Oksana's word for it.

After a while, the servants brought us lunch, and we realized the sun was already high over the mountains.

The breeze had picked up slightly, brushing over the camp, bringing in the scent of forest from the other side of the mountains.

Somewhere in the distance, the faint grind of excavation echoed off the valley walls.

No one had come back from the secondary drill site. But some dragoons came to fetch Claudia, without any words for us.

Thalia leaned back on her elbows, her eyes scanning the horizon. “You’d think one of them would have checked in by now.”

“Males, when they scent blood,” Oksana replied, not even bothering to hide her irritation. “I swear ours are the most battle-hungry males I've ever met.”

I reached for my half-finished tea, but paused when an idea came to me. "Well, nobody said we couldn't go down to the dig site over here, did they? Who knows what we might find."

Thalia raised a brow. “The first chamber?”

I nodded. “It’s still guarded. Dragoons are everywhere in and around. It's not like we wouldn't be safe.”

“Beats sitting around all day,” Oksana added, brushing off her lap, “besides, I never got to see it, and neither did Thalia.”

Thalia was already grabbing her belt and weapons. “Good enough for me.”

It wasn't really like a rebellion, I told myself; it served more to fill our time and to satisfy some curiosity.

“Well,” I said, standing and adjusting the laces at my sleeves, “let’s see what secrets the Zuten left behind.”

We left the tent with purpose; the midday sun stood sharp over our heads as we made our way to the edge of the camp, where the first drill site waited, half excavation, half mystery, and all ours to explore.

The elevator groaned slightly as the gears engaged.

It was just big enough for the three of us, and as the metal grate slammed shut above, a flicker of unease passed across Oksana’s face.

She shifted her weight, one hand resting lightly on the metallic wall.

“Are we sure this thing was made for people and not crates?”

Thalia grinned. “Too late now.”

I chuckled. “It made it down with me and Mallack. I doubt our combined weight is more than his alone.”

Oksana gave me a flat look, but her lips twitched. “I’m just saying, if this lift starts to creak, I’m climbing up the walls.”

Thalia laughed. “I’d pay to see that.”

The light above us dimmed as the lift descended, and shadows curled over the stone walls as we passed level after level of reinforced scaffolding and layers of ancient dirt and debris. The metal rails rattled, but the movement was steady and smooth.

Thalia leaned slightly forward, her eyes were bright with anticipation.

“I’ve seen the drone footage, but I want to see it with my own eyes.

I can't believe it's thousands of rotations old and still there.

I've seen the underwater Zuten cities, they're…

" she raised her hands up in a sign of surrender for not finding the right words, "I'll take you there once this is over. They're fantastic."

“I would love that,” I murmured. “It's incredible to think about a lost civilization that lived here, thousands of rotations ago. Whoever lived there…" I paused, searching for the right words. “I mean, we walked into someone's home.”

Nobody said anything after that. We all followed our own train of thought.

Because… yeah, it was eerie. Someone… ney, not someone , a person had lived within those walls.

A person with hopes and dreams, family and love, and now they were gone.

Even if a lot of time had passed since, and nobody was left to remember them, it was still a tragedy.

One that we seemed to forget in the greater scope of things.

The gates unlocked with a soft click the moment the elevator reached the bottom, and we stepped into the excavation site.

The chamber had been expanded since the last time I’d been here.

More lights had been strung up, illuminating the carved walls with a ghostly silver glow.

Part of me felt like an intruder, or worse, a grave robber, but other parts of me were intrigued.

I mean, we were stepping into a place that nobody had stepped into or seen for thousands of rotations. In a way, it was deeply humbling.

Thalia walked in first, her boots crunching over the packed dirt and scattered gravel. Her mouth parted in awe as she took it all in. “Snyg… this really was someone’s home.”

Oksana stepped in after, trailing her fingers along the smooth, green-veined floor. “It doesn’t feel abandoned,” she said slowly. “Not in the usual sense. More like… paused.”

“They removed the wall screen,” I pointed out, nodding to the bare space where it had once hung. “It was oval and flat, like a large palmtop.”

“They’re probably analyzing it,” Thalia murmured. “We’ll have to get a look at the data.”

Just then, a young dragoon in engineer’s leathers spotted us. He raised a hand in greeting and jogged over, cheeks a little pink beneath the faint dust clinging to his skin.

“Susserayna Oksana,” he said, offering a bow that included Thalia and me with wide-eyed deference. “We weren’t expecting visitors.”

“We’ll be quick,” I assured him.

“You don’t have to be,” he said, straightening. “Actually… if you have time, I’d like to show you something. We uncovered a second room. It was hidden behind a collapsed wall, but we cleared the debris last night. You might want to see it.”

Thalia’s eyes lit up. “Lead the way.”

The young engineer nodded and turned, weaving past crates and coils of glowing wire until he reached a narrow corridor lined with newly stabilized supports. At the end of the corridor, the wall curved gently to the left, opening into a chamber unlike any I had seen.

Thalia stopped dead in her tracks. “Wow,” she breathed.

The room was small but pristine, sealed until recently.

The ceiling sloped into an arc of dark glass that shimmered faintly, as if responding to our presence.

A long fracture moved across from one end to the other, and there was nothing to see but darkness, probably from the rocks above it.

That it had held this long was either a miracle or spoke to the ingenuity of the Zuten, if they in fact had been the ones who lived here.

A long desk, made from some kind of mineralized alloy that caught and fractured the light like a prism, dominated the center.

Translucent panels hovered above it, flickering faintly with unreadable pulses, like idle tech waiting to be awoken.

Smooth shelves lined one wall, recessed and unadorned, each holding strange objects in deliberate symmetry, angular shapes, glinting with violet and gold.

Everything in here seemed to have been lovingly and tastefully decorated.

"Someone lived and worked here," Oksana's voice was hushed.

“It looks like something out of a dream,” I said, running a hand over the desk’s surface. It was warm to the touch and hummed faintly beneath my fingers, as though still alive. “Or a nightmare.”

Thalia moved to the desk and examined the recessed groove running along its side. “There has to be storage,” she muttered. “They wouldn’t build something like this without it.”

It took some trial and error, and more than a few muttered curses, but finally a drawer glided open, not with a clunk or click, but with a smooth hiss of pressurized air and light.

Inside was a single object.

A book.

Or at least, that’s what it resembled. Thick, bound in something that looked like stone, polished to a deep onyx sheen.

Its cover shimmered with a faint iridescence, catching the light in shifting bands of color.

The material wasn’t paper, wasn’t metal.

It felt like a cross between hardened silk and crystal, light, yet unyielding.

And the writing…

Thalia lifted it reverently, and Oksana and I leaned in to see.

The text wasn’t etched; it was burned into the material.

Each line carved deep, as if by heat or energy, not ink.

The characters weren’t like anything I’d seen or remembered, neither human nor Leander.

These were fluid and complex, composed of lines and whirls that shimmered faintly when touched by light.

“I can’t read it,” Thalia said, flipping carefully through the thick, stiff pages. “But it’s definitely not symbolic. It’s a language.”

“It’s not human,” Oksana added quietly, eyes sharp. “And it’s definitely not of Leander.”

“Zuten,” I whispered. My voice trembled with reverence. “It has to be.”

"Niara said she figured out the writing with her palmtop…" Oksana said, tapping her fingers against the desk, "I wonder if she shared the program she must have created for this… did any of you bring a palmtop?"

Thalia and I shook our heads, and with a sigh, Oksana put the book into her satchel. "Well, we'll have to stay curious a little bit longer, I suppose. I'll take this with me, though."

"Hey, what's that?" Thalia moved to the wall by one of the shelves. A lot of debris lay next to it. "Where did that come?—"

Her head moved up, and ours followed; our gaze caught at a large hole in the ceiling.

"Well, what do we have here?" Oksana stepped closer, using her light to illuminate the area.