Sera halted three paces from the basalt dais, the point of her star-iron pike dipping toward the flagstones.
The amber glow of the magma lake caught the edges of the jagged black spikes. They jutted from the skeleton’s collarbones, ribs, and forearms like clusters of dark obsidian needles, piercing through the rotted yellow silk of the elder robes from the inside out.
“Do not touch the bone,” Barnaby warned in a harsh whisper, unhooking a pair of long-handled iron crucible tongs from his work belt. “Not with bare skin.”
Kaelen stepped up beside the old herbalist, keeping his hands comfortably tucked into the deep sleeves of his sleeping robe.
He peered at the dais through his soot-darkened crystal spectacles, taking deliberate care not to extend a single thread of soul-sense or divine intent.
No soul-sense, no meridian probing, and no philosophical contemplation, Kaelen thought firmly. If you point divine sense at a dead Golden Core master, his lingering spiritual grudges try to dump three hundred years of tragic memoirs into your skull. I am only here to inspect the local geography.
Beside the skeleton’s left knee lay an ancient pouch of oiled pigskin. The leather had long since dried into a brittle, cracked husk, spilling a dozen round, dark gray pills across the dusty flagstones.
