Posted using PostyBirb",
"writing": "Niel moaned around Isamu’s cock as the German shepherd pounded his ass.\nThey’d been at it for a while now, each of them fucking the others. Niel was on the altar now, while Dario and Fedor were on the floor. The room trembled and stone ground against stone so long as at least two of them fucked.\nThey were Survivors, so it wasn’t like they needed to stop. Each time Niel glanced at the door, the stone wall moved down.\nThe kishu said something in Chinese. Then his cock pulsed in Niel’s muzzle. He noticed the opening at the top of the doorway, but grabbed onto Isamu’s ass as he started pulling away, and focused on sucking every drop of cum. He had time to enjoy this before they had to stop. He let Isamu go, and the kishu snapped something he didn’t understand.\n“The—” Niel started as the opening filled half the door, but Wieland thrust hard, and the raccoon forgot what words were. He’d have to hope they couldn’t miss the floor, because he wasn’t stopping this. In and out, the cock moved with Germain spoking softly. Swearing and pleading. Niel chuckled and tightened his ass.\nWith a groan and a last, hard thrust, Wieland came, then rolled off Niel and yelped as he rolled off the altar. Dario pulled out of the Pallas cat with a satisfied smirk, then froze, pointing.\n“The door.”\nEven Fedor looked up from where he was sprawled. Niel looked away from the capybara’s tempting ass. The doorway was fully open. The floor level on each side. With a sigh, he got off the altar.\n“I guess that’s going to have to wait.” He slapped the ass on his way to his clothing.\n“I do more than smack when I have chance,” the capybara promised.\nNiel grinned. “So will I.” He looked at his pants, then his cum matted fur. This was going to suck. Whoever had made this place hadn’t included a shower. His fur pulled as the pant fabric caught on mattes, and he didn’t close the jacket. It was warmer than he’d expected, now that he wasn’t exerting himself anymore. Not quite warm, but definitely no longer cold.\nThe light of the room ended at the threshold, and Niel picked up the flashlight and shone it into the opening. Statues of wolves lined the path leading away. They were muscular, men and women, wearing simple clothing and each holding a sword with the point in the floor. Behind them, sealed alcoves lined the walls.\n“What is they?” Dario asked, his voice trembling.\nNiel shone the light up. The alcove went all the way to the uneven, rounded ceiling; twenty or so feet high.\n“Catacombs,” Niel whispered, out of respect for the dead. He stepped onto the path and turned, shining the light on the wall. It was uneven, rougher stone out a few feet above the opening into the darkening sex elevator. For whatever reason, the hollowing of the catacomb had stopped, and those who’d made the elevator had taken advantage of the unfinished wall.\nThis place had come before, and they had…\nNiel moved the light back and forth and saw the damaged alcove.\nWhy?\nWhat could make Jarod, an archaeologist, a student of history, desecrate an ancient race’s burial site? He looked at the statues again. They weren’t lining the path. Each one stood before an alcove; they were guarding the dead. Which meant these people had buried important people here. Probably the holy and their leaders.\nHe remembered his comment about fetid air being what lead to legend of cursed tombs, and now, also remembering magic was real, he hoped these people hadn’t actually laid curses on this place for the unlucky explorer that made his way in.\nHe was sticking to the classroom after this. The more adventurous types could become archaeologist and discover which tombs were protected by magic and which ones weren’t.\n“What Nazi want?” Dario asked.\n“Power,” Isamu answered.\n“There is only dead here.” The capybara motioned around them. “No power.”\n“There.” The kishu pointed into the darkness, and Niel shone the light in that direction. The path continued on.\nWhat could the original Survivors have with them they’d wanted to hide here? Had He given them something to protect? Was that what these Nazis were after? That couldn’t be. What could a god of gay sex hand over to his followers that Nazis would want anything to do with?\nThey crossed a threshold, and the guardian statues were more ornate. These wore armor instead of clothing. Behind them, plain stone sarcophaguses lined the walls instead of sealed alcoves.\n“Why different?” Fedor asked Niel.\n“They were more important. This is where the leaders and holy people are buried. The other one might be the functionaries who help run things. The Egyptians did something like that.” He illuminated a sarcophagus, looking for something distinctive. “None of my classes ever spoke of a tribe of wolf in where ever we are in Switzerland.”\n“Wolf-Dogs,” Isamu said, “and these are the alps.”\n“Wolf-dog?” Niel studied a statue. “How do you figure, Isamu? These guys look like nothing more than wolves to me.”\nThe kishu looked up at the statue before him. “The men holding me spoke of a clan in the alps. The Wolf-Dogs ancestors to all canidae. Pure, perfect.”\nDead, Niel thought. How’s that for perfect? The Nazis had been delusional, and their Neo counterparts weren’t any more sane.\nAs they proceeded, the sarcophagus became more elaborate. Carvings appeared, some simple designs, others, drawings of people as they lived, hunted, celebrated.\nThe path ended at the bottom of stairs spiraling up into the darkness.\n“Why more walking?” Fedor demanded.\n“They should have made another elevator,” Wieland said. “That was fun.”\n“I don’t think they made this,” Niel said, studying the wall. It was rounded to match the inside, and tapered toward behind the sarcophaguses. “This is the entrance to the catacomb.” Was this why the back of the catacomb had been dug out? They’d come down this way expecting an exit and had to manufacture one when it wasn’t there? The desperation hadn’t been about getting here to hide whatever they hid, but leaving and covering their tracks so the exit couldn’t then allow just anyone to enter?\nJarod could answer his questions, if he was willing to just talk.\nIt was a hundred and three steps until they reach a landing. The light revealed another room with statues guarding sarcophaguses. Before Niel could suggest looking it over, the others were moving up the stairs, and he had to follow or force them to walk in darkness.\nAt another one hundred and three steps, they were on a landing again with another room. Niel tried to come up with a significance to the number after the third landing, but whatever it meant to these people hadn’t been documented by the outside. Instead of a landing, the top of the sixth set of one hundred and three opened up to…. They weren’t outside of the mountain; it was still the pitch black, beyond the light, of caverns, but the wall was smooth and stretched up further than the light reached.\n“Where?” Dario asked, and his voice echoed. They were inside a large room. At one end, the faint light revealed openings. Windows and a doorway the size of two doors. On the other side, they were at the top of stairs that vanished into the darkness.\nNiel stepped to a window and called out, “Hello?” He counted the seconds. There was no echo. What it meant, he wasn’t sure, but he had a sense of a vast open space.\n“Pitch.” Fedor smelled his fingers. He stood before a waist high bowl on top of an incline joining the side of the stairs. Checking the other side, Niel saw the same thing. The content was dry and powdery. It smelled of tar and something that made him think of—he sneezed, sending a cloud of it in the air, and he stepped away. When he’d been shot, the residue thing. From where he noticed the hole that opened to the incline.\nThere was stone rubbing against stone, and in the darkness sparks flew. It happened again, and Niel shone the light in that direction. Fedor struck the stones again over the bowl and sparks dropped into it. “I don’t think that’s how—” Niel said the fourth time, just as something inside it sizzled.\nA flame burst up, then ran out and down the incline, down the side of the stairs, illuminating the stonework. It lit a larger bowl as he went in. There was a burst of sparking flame, and it exited the bowl in three directions.\nNiel watched in amazement as the pitch fire traveled down more and more paths, lighting buildings and roadways. The grid pattern the house was laid in was quickly evident as the flame traveled further than Niel thought it should. No wonder there had been no echo. This was so much larger than he imagined. Where the fire illuminated a large door with what looked like the same stylized wolf’s head he’d seen on another door, it had to be more than three football fields away, maybe four.\n“Way out!” Dario yelled, pointing.\nNiel followed the capybara, a relieved Wieland at his side.\n“Nazis there?” Fedor asked, still at the top of the stairs. “That same door?”\nNiel stopped. Was it? He didn’t bother trying to map the trek that has led them here. Other than going down, then up, he had no idea what direction they’d traveled.\n“We’ll open the door, then hide,” he said. “Hopefully, they won’t notice us in their rush to get in here and look for whatever they are after.\n“You will give them power?” the kishu asked in disbelief.\n“There’ nothing here,” Niel replied dismissively. “And if the Survivors did hide something here, it’s going to be about gay sex. Maybe it’ll do them some good to take it up the ass, loosen them right up.”\n“You do not know what is here.” Isamu bristled. “It will be powerful.”\n“No one knows what in here, Isamu. People like them don’t give a shit about what’s actually here. The only thing they care about is their delusions. They’ll invent all sorts of stories to justify what they do, to convince the idiots following them they are ‘the chosen people’. I’m telling you, they’re not going to find anything they can use here.”\nIsamu glared at him, hands in fist.\n“What if you’re wrong, Niel?” Wieland ask, sounding worried. “I’ve heard stories that He made a weapon. They say it’s what ended that Church thing a decade ago.”\n“He is right,” Isamu said through clenched teeth. “You know nothing of Him. He is a god. He is power. He makes power.”\nNiel pointed to the door, but couldn’t get the words out. The sun was on the other side. There was a shower that would get his fur clean. That was what was important, not whatever anyone thought was hidden in here. He just wanted to get out and back to—\nNormal.\nWasn’t that what Jarod did. Leave the responsibilities behind. For others to clean up? Maybe he was right and there was nothing here. But Isamu was also right. Niel didn’t know much about Him. The bat had given him plenty of memories about what they did for Him, but hardly anything about the god Himself. The church thing, as Wieland called it was the war with the Gray Church. He’d heard of it, but only in relation to how it had affected the families of the Guys in the frat. As far as the bat was concerned, it didn’t seem to have existed, because he’d never included it in a memory.\n“We get, we protect,” Fedor said.\n“We use it to defeat them,” Isamu said with enough conviction it made Niel uncomfortable.\n“No,” Dario said. “He wants us to protect and defend. Not—”\n“Guys,” Niel cut the capybara off. He’d had huddles that had sounded like this, no one doing anything because they couldn’t agree. “We find whatever is here, if it is, then we figure out what to do with it.”\n“I and Niel will—”\n“Stick with everyone else,” Niel cut off Isamu. “We have one flashlight, and no idea where, in this place it is. It’ll be way too easy for one of us to walk off a ledge we couldn’t see and break our necks. Dario’s the only one who can survive that for sure.”\n“I stay,” the capybara stated.\nNiel watched the annoyed kishu throw his hands up and curse in Chinese.\nThe pitch fire had traveled back to this side of the cavern while they argued, and what had been a shape only hinted to in the darkness was revealed to be a majestic building with carving of wolves worshiping larger wolves, with one at the lead, hand high, but what she was holding still in darkness.\nHe whistled. Considering how Nazis thought canines were superior to everyone else, if one of them had gotten one hint of this, he could see how they’d become obsessed. There was the question of how they might have learned about it. The most likely answer was they’d captured one of the Survivors involved in hiding whatever they had. Gotten them to talk. He glanced at Fedor. No matter how determined to keep the secret some of them would have been, at least one would have been susceptible to torture.\nNiel followed the others, watching Wieland’s back as they headed back inside.\nHow far back did his family go in Germany? Far enough, and what were the odds his ancestor had been on the German ship, instead of the English one? Wouldn’t that mean at least one of the Survivor families had been Nazis? Was Wieland a plant? It wasn’t like other than being drugged, he’d been treated as badly as the rest of them had been.\nIf he’d even been drugged.\nHe fought the idea. He was tired and stressed. There was no reason to believe Wieland was a traitor.\nOther than that nagging sense, there was a reason he’d brought up how He had made a weapon. None of the guys at the frat had even spoken of something like that.\nThe antechamber was no longer dark. The pitch fire had made its way inside and revealed more passageways around the room. But what caught Niel’s attention was the majestic stairs at the back, with the fire lighting the top of the guardrail on either side and to—\n“Up,” Dario said, pointing. Something was visible, the firelight dancing over it. Not quite straight, with a two bulges at the end. Niel chuckled at the image of the thick bone embedded in stone. “Whoever shall pull this—” his whisper caught as he climbed enough of the stairs to see the bone wasn’t embedded in stone. It wasn’t embedded into anything.\nThe large bone—a femur, maybe?—floated in the middle of mummified wolves prostrated before it.\nNiel forced his attention away from the impossibility of that bone, and onto the wolves. Something wasn’t right. No, what was left of their clothing had the simplicity of people of long ago. His tired imagination, then? He shifted to study the floating bone again and saw the shadowed form at the foot of a column.\nNiel crouched next to him. He too was a wolf, and mummified, but the clothing was wrong. His pants were pleated, his jacket had a zipper. The shirt underneath, buttons that could be made of plastic. And none of it had the deterioration of the priests’s clothing.\nIt wasn’t like even early to mid-nineteen century clothing would have had the time to rot away by now.\nWas he one of the Survivors? He was a wolf, and even desiccated, there was a resemblance to the priests. Did he think he was one of them? Was he Wieland’s ancestor? Niel saw no injuries, but maybe he’d been killed in a way that didn’t leave a mark. That could be done without magic too. Had the others abandoned him here because he was a traitor? As a Survivor, it would only have taken a few days before he was too weak to do anything. A week, and he was probably dead.\nNiel shuddered. He didn’t want to imagine starving like that until he died. A few days of it had been more than enough.\n“No!” Isamu yelled, and Niel spun. \nWieland grabbed the floating bone, and a howl detonated from it, sending the German shepherd flying, and Niel covering his hears due to the intensity.\n“Don’t touch it!” He yelled at the kishu, who was heading for the bone lying on the floor, instead of to Wieland, like they were all doing. Things were starting to make sense.\n“What were you thinking?” Niel demanded of the still shuddering German shepherd.\n“Use it.” A spasm made to rest incomprehensible. “Protect us,” he said.\nNiel search Wieland for injuries. “We can’t use it.” The staff he’d touched hadn’t howled when it had thrown him across the back of the barn, but he recognized the full-body reaction. “That’s a Practitioner staff. They don’t like it when another faction touches them.”\n“Nazi not faction,” Fedor said, and Niel nodded. What might happen if someone who didn’t do magic touched it?”\n“How do we protect?” Dario asked.\n“There is power here,” Isamu said with pride, looking down at Niel.\n“Fine, you were right.” And Niel had gotten thing so completely wrong. \nMaybe Grant had lied, or maybe he just didn’t know the truth, but with that bone being a staff, it wasn’t the Survivor who had come here to hide that thing, and asked the Practitioners for help. The Practitioners had been the ones to ask for the Survivor’s help.\n“I said not to touch it!”\nFedor was next to it, taking off a jacket. “Not touch.” He threw it over the bone. “Wrap.”\n“Use your shirt,” Isamu said, joining him. “It is lighter, easier to—”\nThe ground shook.\n“What happened?” Dario asked.\nNiel looked at the covered staff. Was the mountain about to come down on them because they had removed it?\nA distant groaning of stone against stone reached them\n“The door,” Wieland said.\n“That was holding the magic that protected his place,” Niel said, then cursed.\n“Put back?” Fedor asked.\n“We use,” Isamu said.\nNiel ran down the stairs and outside the temple. The light was a thin line in the distance, but there was no doubting it.\nWhy couldn’t they’ve gone down the pedestal way and dealt with the same thing Niel and the others had? He would have loved to have seen them operate the sex elevator.\nSpanish was spoken loudly, followed by Russian.\n“Oh, come on.” He ran back inside. Hadn’t the fucking been enough? He was halfway to the back stairs when the argument turned into yells of pain. Then someone ran down the stairs he was heading for. A kishu holding Fedor’s jacket wrapped around something long.\nNiel didn’t wonder why. He angled for an intercept and hunched down. Instead of colliding with the kishu, Isamu grinned maliciously as he moved with the raccoon, then the wrapped staff was in Niel’s way and he was face first in the stairs.\nHe pushed the pain aside with a curse.\nWieland was at the top of the stairs, steadying himself against a wall. “He’s going to give it to the Nazis!”",
"writing_bbcode_parsed": "Niel moaned around Isamu’s cock as the German shepherd pounded his ass. They’d been at it for a while now, each of them fucking the others. Niel was on the altar now, while Dario and Fedor were on the floor. The room trembled and stone ground against stone so long as at least two of them fucked. They were Survivors, so it wasn’t like they needed to stop. Each time Niel glanced at the door, the stone wall moved down. The kishu said something in Chinese. Then his cock pulsed in Niel’s muzzle. He noticed the opening at the top of the doorway, but grabbed onto Isamu’s ass as he started pulling away, and focused on sucking every drop of cum. He had time to enjoy this before they had to stop. He let Isamu go, and the kishu snapped something he didn’t understand. “The—” Niel started as the opening filled half the door, but Wieland thrust hard, and the raccoon forgot what words were. He’d have to hope they couldn’t miss the floor, because he wasn’t stopping this. In and out, the cock moved with Germain spoking softly. Swearing and pleading. Niel chuckled and tightened his ass. With a groan and a last, hard thrust, Wieland came, then rolled off Niel and yelped as he rolled off the altar. Dario pulled out of the Pallas cat with a satisfied smirk, then froze, pointing. “The door.” Even Fedor looked up from where he was sprawled. Niel looked away from the capybara’s tempting ass. The doorway was fully open. The floor level on each side. With a sigh, he got off the altar. “I guess that’s going to have to wait.” He slapped the ass on his way to his clothing. “I do more than smack when I have chance,” the capybara promised. Niel grinned. “So will I.” He looked at his pants, then his cum matted fur. This was going to suck. Whoever had made this place hadn’t included a shower. His fur pulled as the pant fabric caught on mattes, and he didn’t close the jacket. It was warmer than he’d expected, now that he wasn’t exerting himself anymore. Not quite warm, but definitely no longer cold. The light of the room ended at the threshold, and Niel picked up the flashlight and shone it into the opening. Statues of wolves lined the path leading away. They were muscular, men and women, wearing simple clothing and each holding a sword with the point in the floor. Behind them, sealed alcoves lined the walls. “What is they?” Dario asked, his voice trembling. Niel shone the light up. The alcove went all the way to the uneven, rounded ceiling; twenty or so feet high. “Catacombs,” Niel whispered, out of respect for the dead. He stepped onto the path and turned, shining the light on the wall. It was uneven, rougher stone out a few feet above the opening into the darkening sex elevator. For whatever reason, the hollowing of the catacomb had stopped, and those who’d made the elevator had taken advantage of the unfinished wall. This place had come before, and they had… Niel moved the light back and forth and saw the damaged alcove. Why? What could make Jarod, an archaeologist, a student of history, desecrate an ancient race’s burial site? He looked at the statues again. They weren’t lining the path. Each one stood before an alcove; they were guarding the dead. Which meant these people had buried important people here. Probably the holy and their leaders. He remembered his comment about fetid air being what lead to legend of cursed tombs, and now, also remembering magic was real, he hoped these people hadn’t actually laid curses on this place for the unlucky explorer that made his way in. He was sticking to the classroom after this. The more adventurous types could become archaeologist and discover which tombs were protected by magic and which ones weren’t. “What Nazi want?” Dario asked. “Power,” Isamu answered. “There is only dead here.” The capybara motioned around them. “No power.” “There.” The kishu pointed into the darkness, and Niel shone the light in that direction. The path continued on. What could the original Survivors have with them they’d wanted to hide here? Had He given them something to protect? Was that what these Nazis were after? That couldn’t be. What could a god of gay sex hand over to his followers that Nazis would want anything to do with? They crossed a threshold, and the guardian statues were more ornate. These wore armor instead of clothing. Behind them, plain stone sarcophaguses lined the walls instead of sealed alcoves. “Why different?” Fedor asked Niel. “They were more important. This is where the leaders and holy people are buried. The other one might be the functionaries who help run things. The Egyptians did something like that.” He illuminated a sarcophagus, looking for something distinctive. “None of my classes ever spoke of a tribe of wolf in where ever we are in Switzerland.” “Wolf-Dogs,” Isamu said, “and these are the alps.” “Wolf-dog?” Niel studied a statue. “How do you figure, Isamu? These guys look like nothing more than wolves to me.” The kishu looked up at the statue before him. “The men holding me spoke of a clan in the alps. The Wolf-Dogs ancestors to all canidae. Pure, perfect.” Dead, Niel thought. How’s that for perfect? The Nazis had been delusional, and their Neo counterparts weren’t any more sane. As they proceeded, the sarcophagus became more elaborate. Carvings appeared, some simple designs, others, drawings of people as they lived, hunted, celebrated. The path ended at the bottom of stairs spiraling up into the darkness. “Why more walking?” Fedor demanded. “They should have made another elevator,” Wieland said. “That was fun.” “I don’t think they made this,” Niel said, studying the wall. It was rounded to match the inside, and tapered toward behind the sarcophaguses. “This is the entrance to the catacomb.” Was this why the back of the catacomb had been dug out? They’d come down this way expecting an exit and had to manufacture one when it wasn’t there? The desperation hadn’t been about getting here to hide whatever they hid, but leaving and covering their tracks so the exit couldn’t then allow just anyone to enter? Jarod could answer his questions, if he was willing to just talk. It was a hundred and three steps until they reach a landing. The light revealed another room with statues guarding sarcophaguses. Before Niel could suggest looking it over, the others were moving up the stairs, and he had to follow or force them to walk in darkness. At another one hundred and three steps, they were on a landing again with another room. Niel tried to come up with a significance to the number after the third landing, but whatever it meant to these people hadn’t been documented by the outside. Instead of a landing, the top of the sixth set of one hundred and three opened up to…. They weren’t outside of the mountain; it was still the pitch black, beyond the light, of caverns, but the wall was smooth and stretched up further than the light reached. “Where?” Dario asked, and his voice echoed. They were inside a large room. At one end, the faint light revealed openings. Windows and a doorway the size of two doors. On the other side, they were at the top of stairs that vanished into the darkness. Niel stepped to a window and called out, “Hello?” He counted the seconds. There was no echo. What it meant, he wasn’t sure, but he had a sense of a vast open space. “Pitch.” Fedor smelled his fingers. He stood before a waist high bowl on top of an incline joining the side of the stairs. Checking the other side, Niel saw the same thing. The content was dry and powdery. It smelled of tar and something that made him think of—he sneezed, sending a cloud of it in the air, and he stepped away. When he’d been shot, the residue thing. From where he noticed the hole that opened to the incline. There was stone rubbing against stone, and in the darkness sparks flew. It happened again, and Niel shone the light in that direction. Fedor struck the stones again over the bowl and sparks dropped into it. “I don’t think that’s how—” Niel said the fourth time, just as something inside it sizzled. A flame burst up, then ran out and down the incline, down the side of the stairs, illuminating the stonework. It lit a larger bowl as he went in. There was a burst of sparking flame, and it exited the bowl in three directions. Niel watched in amazement as the pitch fire traveled down more and more paths, lighting buildings and roadways. The grid pattern the house was laid in was quickly evident as the flame traveled further than Niel thought it should. No wonder there had been no echo. This was so much larger than he imagined. Where the fire illuminated a large door with what looked like the same stylized wolf’s head he’d seen on another door, it had to be more than three football fields away, maybe four. “Way out!” Dario yelled, pointing. Niel followed the capybara, a relieved Wieland at his side. “Nazis there?” Fedor asked, still at the top of the stairs. “That same door?” Niel stopped. Was it? He didn’t bother trying to map the trek that has led them here. Other than going down, then up, he had no idea what direction they’d traveled. “We’ll open the door, then hide,” he said. “Hopefully, they won’t notice us in their rush to get in here and look for whatever they are after. “You will give them power?” the kishu asked in disbelief. “There’ nothing here,” Niel replied dismissively. “And if the Survivors did hide something here, it’s going to be about gay sex. Maybe it’ll do them some good to take it up the ass, loosen them right up.” “You do not know what is here.” Isamu bristled. “It will be powerful.” “No one knows what in here, Isamu. People like them don’t give a shit about what’s actually here. The only thing they care about is their delusions. They’ll invent all sorts of stories to justify what they do, to convince the idiots following them they are ‘the chosen people’. I’m telling you, they’re not going to find anything they can use here.” Isamu glared at him, hands in fist. “What if you’re wrong, Niel?” Wieland ask, sounding worried. “I’ve heard stories that He made a weapon. They say it’s what ended that Church thing a decade ago.” “He is right,” Isamu said through clenched teeth. “You know nothing of Him. He is a god. He is power. He makes power.” Niel pointed to the door, but couldn’t get the words out. The sun was on the other side. There was a shower that would get his fur clean. That was what was important, not whatever anyone thought was hidden in here. He just wanted to get out and back to— Normal. Wasn’t that what Jarod did. Leave the responsibilities behind. For others to clean up? Maybe he was right and there was nothing here. But Isamu was also right. Niel didn’t know much about Him. The bat had given him plenty of memories about what they did for Him, but hardly anything about the god Himself. The church thing, as Wieland called it was the war with the Gray Church. He’d heard of it, but only in relation to how it had affected the families of the Guys in the frat. As far as the bat was concerned, it didn’t seem to have existed, because he’d never included it in a memory. “We get, we protect,” Fedor said. “We use it to defeat them,” Isamu said with enough conviction it made Niel uncomfortable. “No,” Dario said. “He wants us to protect and defend. Not—” “Guys,” Niel cut the capybara off. He’d had huddles that had sounded like this, no one doing anything because they couldn’t agree. “We find whatever is here, if it is, then we figure out what to do with it.” “I and Niel will—” “Stick with everyone else,” Niel cut off Isamu. “We have one flashlight, and no idea where, in this place it is. It’ll be way too easy for one of us to walk off a ledge we couldn’t see and break our necks. Dario’s the only one who can survive that for sure.” “I stay,” the capybara stated. Niel watched the annoyed kishu throw his hands up and curse in Chinese. The pitch fire had traveled back to this side of the cavern while they argued, and what had been a shape only hinted to in the darkness was revealed to be a majestic building with carving of wolves worshiping larger wolves, with one at the lead, hand high, but what she was holding still in darkness. He whistled. Considering how Nazis thought canines were superior to everyone else, if one of them had gotten one hint of this, he could see how they’d become obsessed. There was the question of how they might have learned about it. The most likely answer was they’d captured one of the Survivors involved in hiding whatever they had. Gotten them to talk. He glanced at Fedor. No matter how determined to keep the secret some of them would have been, at least one would have been susceptible to torture. Niel followed the others, watching Wieland’s back as they headed back inside. How far back did his family go in Germany? Far enough, and what were the odds his ancestor had been on the German ship, instead of the English one? Wouldn’t that mean at least one of the Survivor families had been Nazis? Was Wieland a plant? It wasn’t like other than being drugged, he’d been treated as badly as the rest of them had been. If he’d even been drugged. He fought the idea. He was tired and stressed. There was no reason to believe Wieland was a traitor. Other than that nagging sense, there was a reason he’d brought up how He had made a weapon. None of the guys at the frat had even spoken of something like that. The antechamber was no longer dark. The pitch fire had made its way inside and revealed more passageways around the room. But what caught Niel’s attention was the majestic stairs at the back, with the fire lighting the top of the guardrail on either side and to— “Up,” Dario said, pointing. Something was visible, the firelight dancing over it. Not quite straight, with a two bulges at the end. Niel chuckled at the image of the thick bone embedded in stone. “Whoever shall pull this—” his whisper caught as he climbed enough of the stairs to see the bone wasn’t embedded in stone. It wasn’t embedded into anything. The large bone—a femur, maybe?—floated in the middle of mummified wolves prostrated before it. Niel forced his attention away from the impossibility of that bone, and onto the wolves. Something wasn’t right. No, what was left of their clothing had the simplicity of people of long ago. His tired imagination, then? He shifted to study the floating bone again and saw the shadowed form at the foot of a column. Niel crouched next to him. He too was a wolf, and mummified, but the clothing was wrong. His pants were pleated, his jacket had a zipper. The shirt underneath, buttons that could be made of plastic. And none of it had the deterioration of the priests’s clothing. It wasn’t like even early to mid-nineteen century clothing would have had the time to rot away by now. Was he one of the Survivors? He was a wolf, and even desiccated, there was a resemblance to the priests. Did he think he was one of them? Was he Wieland’s ancestor? Niel saw no injuries, but maybe he’d been killed in a way that didn’t leave a mark. That could be done without magic too. Had the others abandoned him here because he was a traitor? As a Survivor, it would only have taken a few days before he was too weak to do anything. A week, and he was probably dead. Niel shuddered. He didn’t want to imagine starving like that until he died. A few days of it had been more than enough. “No!” Isamu yelled, and Niel spun. Wieland grabbed the floating bone, and a howl detonated from it, sending the German shepherd flying, and Niel covering his hears due to the intensity. “Don’t touch it!” He yelled at the kishu, who was heading for the bone lying on the floor, instead of to Wieland, like they were all doing. Things were starting to make sense. “What were you thinking?” Niel demanded of the still shuddering German shepherd. “Use it.” A spasm made to rest incomprehensible. “Protect us,” he said. Niel search Wieland for injuries. “We can’t use it.” The staff he’d touched hadn’t howled when it had thrown him across the back of the barn, but he recognized the full-body reaction. “That’s a Practitioner staff. They don’t like it when another faction touches them.” “Nazi not faction,” Fedor said, and Niel nodded. What might happen if someone who didn’t do magic touched it?” “How do we protect?” Dario asked. “There is power here,” Isamu said with pride, looking down at Niel. “Fine, you were right.” And Niel had gotten thing so completely wrong. Maybe Grant had lied, or maybe he just didn’t know the truth, but with that bone being a staff, it wasn’t the Survivor who had come here to hide that thing, and asked the Practitioners for help. The Practitioners had been the ones to ask for the Survivor’s help. “I said not to touch it!” Fedor was next to it, taking off a jacket. “Not touch.” He threw it over the bone. “Wrap.” “Use your shirt,” Isamu said, joining him. “It is lighter, easier to—” The ground shook. “What happened?” Dario asked. Niel looked at the covered staff. Was the mountain about to come down on them because they had removed it? A distant groaning of stone against stone reached them “The door,” Wieland said. “That was holding the magic that protected his place,” Niel said, then cursed. “Put back?” Fedor asked. “We use,” Isamu said. Niel ran down the stairs and outside the temple. The light was a thin line in the distance, but there was no doubting it. Why couldn’t they’ve gone down the pedestal way and dealt with the same thing Niel and the others had? He would have loved to have seen them operate the sex elevator. Spanish was spoken loudly, followed by Russian. “Oh, come on.” He ran back inside. Hadn’t the fucking been enough? He was halfway to the back stairs when the argument turned into yells of pain. Then someone ran down the stairs he was heading for. A kishu holding Fedor’s jacket wrapped around something long. Niel didn’t wonder why. He angled for an intercept and hunched down. Instead of colliding with the kishu, Isamu grinned maliciously as he moved with the raccoon, then the wrapped staff was in Niel’s way and he was face first in the stairs. He pushed the pain aside with a curse. Wieland was at the top of the stairs, steadying himself against a wall. “He’s going to give it to the Nazis!”",
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