Creaking coach wheels weren't the most pleasant sound to wake up to, but they were far from being the worst. On their own, Lanri doubted their noise would have been enough to rouse her. Had it been just that, she would still be peacefully asleep, dreaming of things good and bad.

The cold, too, would have been manageable. It was bitterly cold now that the lantern had gone out, but she had blankets, and so could just bundle up. The coach’s endless rocking back and forth as it crested the various roots and stones of the road they traveled had been what killed her nap. Far, far to the east of New Gyr, she guessed they had now passed the point where even the most philanthropic noble had bothered sponsoring a company to maintain the road in the last century.

A thousand years ago someone had done just that, she knew. Hells, she'd written her dissertation on the topic. Trade to the east had once been plentiful. So plentiful that the various lords and ladies of the lands this road crossed charged but a pittance in tolls, and could still afford to keep these roads in truly fantastic shape.

Nowadays, New Gyr itself paid for the maintenance to the roads connecting it to a few allied cities, the allied cities paid for the maintenance of the roads connecting them to their nearby villages, and their villages paid nothing for roads beyond them. In the other directions, it was another story entirely. To the north, there was her native city of Cerene, to the west they had the capital, Astoria, and to the south there was Cornon. Each of those were vibrant cities one could reach without even leaving the kingdom. But east of New Gyr? No. That was dead. Nobody went there anymore, and the roads reflected it.

Lanri – or The Lady Lanri Vattens, Junior Professor of Archeology at the First University of Remere, as her full, absurdly unwieldy title went – maneuvered herself off of the coach's sleeping mat, and towards the hatch up to the driver's seat with her blanket still wrapped around herself. She opened it and popped her head out. Her eyes stung slightly from the brightness her curtains had so handily protected her from, and she winced.

"G'mornin', yer Professorship," said Mick, the young man driving her coach.

"Morning?" She asked. As she spoke, she could see her breath form little clouds which quickly turned into long wisps, stretched by the breeze. "You said you would wake me when you set up camp for the night, Mick."

"I sure did!" He acknowledged. "But I did some thinking, and I talked to Tallah and Jolus," he paused as he gestured at the two mercenaries riding ahead of them. "And we all agreed we'd rather not deal with the hassle of setting up camp again, and just rode through the night. The horses don't like it, but they've handled worse. We'll sleep when you start doing your boring shit."

"Well, there goes my dissertation," she whispered to herself. Apparently, she’d slept through the whole night, and disproven her assumptions about the state of the roads in the process. The gods knew she didn’t feel like she’d gotten that much sleep, though.

"Huh?" He asked.

"Nothing, Mick. Don't worry about it." Lanri said. "So… where are we?" She asked, fumbling in her pockets for the map she'd folded up just before going to sleep. Her fingers were numb, and she blew on her hands to warm them up a little before unfolding the map and laying it flat on the bench next to Mick.

He glanced at it, then back to the road, then back at it. He pointed at a spot on the map about thirty miles east of where she'd expected they would be, and only thirty more miles from the point marked as their destination. "Here-ish," he said. "We're well into the Valtan foothills." He gestured ahead, where three white mountain peaks loomed between the trees. "We passed what's left of Nïewe-Caester an hour ago."

We really did ride through the night, she thought, glancing at the itinerary Mick held. Most of the landmarks and checkpoints were already marked off as having been passed. "Unfortunate we didn't set up camp there. I would have loved to look at it."

"No reason not to camp there on the way back then!" He told her, shooting her a winning smile. "Better that way anyways. Last time you lot chartered me you picked up twenty pounds of rocks at every place we stopped. Better to do that on the way back."

"Rocks!?" She scoffed, amused. "No colleague of mine had you haul rocks, Mick."

“That's what he said, too!" Mick said, and gently flicked the top set of reins. "Called 'm fossils like that's some kind of counterargument to them being rocks."

"Fossils are more than just rocks!" Lanri began. "They contain the petrified remains of long dead creatures! They're a treasure trove of information about the distant past."

"Yeah, yeah. Ya don't gotta give me the sales pitch. I had to carry the damn things, and my horses had to pull 'em; I can assure you they're still rocks."

"Fine," she told him with a roll of her eyes and retreated into the coach before gently closing the hatch behind her. Once inside, she opened her various suitcases and began to search through them, gently putting aside her notebooks and tools. She dug through her clothes until she found the things she was looking for. At a glance, it simply looked like a leather belt wrapped around what might be a knife sheath. It was far more than that.

She unwrapped the bundle cautiously, until she could grip the weapon within, and pulled it out. Her single most treasured possession: her wand. She held it reverently, knowing it to be a fine and delicate tool, and utterly irreplaceable to her. Though it would be no less precious once its enchantments were gone, she used it sparingly. The idea of depleting it entirely was nothing short of repulsive to her. The wand bore two lines of runes engraved on it, glowing softly in the dark coach with pure white light.

Sith Laom, and Leudach Lasag. Spells for weaponized and utilitarian fire magic, respectively. She pointed the wand at the compact metal lantern, and whispered one of the two incantations. "Leudach Lasag."

She spoke the words, momentarily jealous of those gifted with the ability to use magic without needing such tools, like her Faron. Thanks to the wand, though, a small, perfectly white flame appeared in the lantern, giving off the exact amount of light and warmth she had desired. Magic, even in such a limited form as this, was still amazing to her. The coach quickly began warming up, and she set about changing out of the clothes she had accidentally slept in. After dropping her blanket, she sat down on it, methodically removing her jacket, shirt, trousers, and underwear, before replacing them with cleaner, warmer, darker alternatives.

Shiny leather boots, thick black woolen trousers, a cotton blouse, a woolen vest, the holster for her wand, and her jacket. The dark colors of her winter attire looked good on her, she thought. Her black hair and warm brown skin tended to clash with the bright reds the First University encouraged her staff and students to wear in lieu of a proper uniform. Snuggling a bit closer to the magical fire, Lanri reached for the notebook she'd taken to using as a log of her expedition. Day six. We're getting close. So close, in fact, that my entourage decided to ride through the night. As my driver put it, we’ll sleep once we get to the site and I start my ’boring shit’. Fair enough, I suppose.

After setting the notebook aside, she switched to a novel. An honest to goodness novel called Ytrandiir the Pure. A slight grin formed on her lips at the taboo of it. A scholar wasting her time on a pulpy, cheaply bound, mass-produced work of fiction? Unheard of! She relished the thought as she found her bookmark, and resumed reading the drivel she so adored in the light of her favorite flame.

________________

When the carriage stopped and Mick knocked on the side door, Lanri was genuinely annoyed to have to stop reading. The story’s heroine was helpless at the hands of a vile trickster's magic, and only her beloved could save her. She stuffed the bookmark back in the book, and stowed it back in her suitcase before stepping out into the snow. Looking around, she saw the two mercenaries eager to set up camp while Mick found a sack of feed for the horses.

To the west, Lanri could see the foothills and a gray dot she assumed to be Nïewe-Caester. To the east, the mighty Valtan mountains loomed high, and mighty. To the south, there was nothing but pine trees. And to the north, a clearing. With some luck, this clearing would be the one they’d come for, marking the beginning of a trail leading to a cave marked with inscriptions painted in the divine language. Though… This all relied heavily on what that girl from the Ravenswood guild had said being true.

As she walked onto the clearing, she withdrew her notebook, and compared the scene to the girl's sketch and description. A mostly clover field with the occasional white chalk boulder. In the middle, a large abandoned bonfire surrounded by bones, and around the edge, stumps of trees cut down to fuel that fire.

She saw the bonfire, stumps, and boulder. As she got closer to the bonfire, she could feel the bones crunch, and after she kicked away some of the snow, revealing the clovers that blanketed the field.

"This is definitely it," she told her team after returning to them.

"Ya sure, yer Professorship?" Mick asked.

"Yes, I'm sure. Go ahead and set up camp here. I'll get to my boring shit."

"Out-fucking-standing! You heard the woman! Let's get some fire going and get some shut-eye," Mick exclaimed, sending the two mercenaries they brought as guards off on their tasks; one to cut down some more trees, and the other to pitch everyone's tents.

Lanri, for her part, returned to her coach to retrieve the magically lit lantern, her wand, and a bag of tools and sketchbooks. Hoisting everything over her shoulder, she pulled out her map and flipped it over to look at the Ravenswood girl's sketch of the cave. “These stumps here, and that boulder are all one straight line. So that puts the cave" – she looked up, and pointed at a gap in the trees – "there!"

She walked over, and once there, confirmed the gap in the trees gave way to a narrow path. She looked back at her team, and stuck two fingers in her mouth to let out a sharp, shrill whistle. "I'M OFF IN THIS DIRECTION, WISH ME LUCK!" She yelled back at them, and got only a thumbs up from the guard gathering firewood in response. Tallah, she was pretty sure.

Certain that her departure was noted, Lanri turned back towards the trail and followed it. It wasn't a pleasant place to be, even if the view was great. The road that had brought them here was now a solid thirty feet below her, down a daunting edge only two feet to her left. She was confident in her abilities, though. She'd done this plenty of times before, just… not alone.

She gave her beloved wand a gentle, affectionate tap, and banished the thought as she trudged on, around a corner. From a distance it had looked like the path suddenly ended, though in reality it simply turned into a crack set into the mountain. Exactly like the girl had said, red paint began to occasionally appear, showing various words of the divine language. lieu interdit meaning forbidden place being the first one, and the easiest to interpret. Farther down the chasm, however, she began to run into words she didn't know.

"Should have brought a priest," she cursed as she pulled out her notebook, jotting down the words she found in the order she found them, to be translated later. As she moved deeper and deeper into the chasm, the sheer walls of the mountains began to make her feel claustrophobic, but it would be foolish to turn around now. There was so much here to uncover! "le prix," one marking began, but the rest was too damaged to be read. She did her best to replicate what was left of the last word, and smiled slightly when she realized it looked like a sad face, not a word.

"You would have loved this, wouldn't you?" She whispered quietly to her wand as she turned a corner, and saw what she had been promised: a small space, perhaps twenty feet across, with a bright, polished white doorway set into one of the walls. It looks like a portal leading into a divine temple, she thought, excited. Outside of it leading to a pitch black void of a cave instead of a place of worship, of course. She'd had one of her students scour the libraries for references to anything like this, and what few he had found all referenced sites in Adampor, which were seemingly getting harder to reach with every passing week.

Lanri held up her lantern which still housed her beloved white flame, and shone its light into the cave. It did very little to improve visibility, but it did just barely illuminate the occasional fleck of quarts in the otherwise dark rock and make navigation possible. Shining the magical flame around, she saw more of the red paint, this time forming the sigil of the goddess Ishara on the wall.

"So it's one of those?" She mused as she pulled out her notebook, and copied the – in her opinion – needlessly… intimate, and not nearly subtle and abstract enough symbol, sketching the narrow diamond symbol, anatomic decorations and all, before continuing on down the cave.

What kind of goddess wants her name to look like a vulva, anyways?

She could remember the first time she’d seen the symbol like it was yesterday. It had been when she and the other teenagers of her village were all visited by a priest of the goddess. About half of them had snickered at the sight of the rose-golden medallion he wore, depicting the same symbol.

Armed with the knowledge that it was a shrine to Ishara, Lanri had certain – perhaps slightly prejudiced – expectations of what would be within. She expected a nude statue at an altar, obviously, but also some ancient casks of what the builder considered the most sensual wine, as well as perhaps some fancy beds. Maybe that would be a little much to expect in such an obscure place, but it wouldn't be out of character. She passed a few more sigils, some of Ishara and others that looked similar, but she didn't quite recognize; as well as more divine writing, which she dutifully copied.

Eventually, she was surprised to see light ahead. The cave opened into a large, artificially round space with white walls. In the center she was not remotely surprised to see a statue of a very naked Ishara, elaborately carved from shiny black rock, and decorated with gold and copper. The statue was stunningly clean, she noted. The stone and metalwork polished to a mirror-like shine everywhere except for the statue's curly hair, which was deliberately left matte. It was breathtaking.

Perfectly detailed, as if the sculptor had taken the most attractive woman Lanri could imagine, and simply petrified her through magic. As she wrote down her observations, the thought occurred that the chalk boulders on the clearing might have been hewn from this room.

She… She blinked as she looked down at her notes. Her description of the statue's features was nothing short of outlandishly detailed. Had she written all of this… excess about the statue's shape, and the fact that it appeared excited? Apparently so, she thought as she tore the page from the notebook and started over. This time, she described the statue as a typical depiction of Ishara, possibly enchanted, before deliberately moving on.

The rest of the room was rather mundane, actually. It smelled nice, faintly musty and cozy. She put down her bag of tools as she wondered where that smell came from and walked around the room. The light, she at first thought, came from a white piece of fabric on the floor behind the statues that seemed to glow brilliantly. Brief excitement filled her as she thought about how well discovering such an artifact would make her look, until she picked it up.

With disappointment, she realized the light actually came from a series of enchanted stones the fabric had covered, and not the cloth itself. The three stones were set into the ground, and the word feu and several runes were carved into each of them, shining white light with a subtle pink cast to it.

Frustrated, she threw the cloth over her shoulder, and wrote a description of the divine light sources. She noted the thing smelled pleasant as she lumbered back to her bag of tools, planning to describe the one artifact she'd found that she had any chance of recovering on her own.

She unfolded the bundle of fabric, hoping to find anything special about it. All it seemed to be was a faintly dirty white dress. Dirty? she wondered and hesitantly sniffed it. She confirmed that it really did smell wonderful, and she set about describing it in her notes.

White dress. Artifact has a distractingly pleasant smell. Is stained. Sweat?

She put her notes down and focused on the dress. It was simple, shockingly soft, and – she added soft to her notes – it smelled so… good. It smelled like… She smiled as she placed the smell. It smelled like her office at the university, the night her husband had made her current wand for her, before he…

She paused, and thought about it. What had happened after that? They… She pulled the dress against her face and inhaled deeply, trying to remember. She grinned as she felt a spark of heat in her groin. That's what happened. He'd made her wand, and then he'd shown her the time of her life. Oh, how long it had been since she thought about that night!

One of her hands traced down to between her legs, while the other held the bundle of cloth to her face. It smelled good, she thought, as she undid the string keeping her pants up. It smelled amazing. She pulled her pants down and rubbed against herself as she breathed in again. She hadn't wanted to do this since…

She shook her head and gently explored herself with her fingers. The dress smelled like love, and how her husband made her feel. She curled her fingers into herself, and she felt stupéfiante. The foreign word in the Divine Language came to her exactly as the smell and the feeling of her own touch came together.

Lanri giggled. The divine language felt so appropriate to invoke right now. She… Everything felt good as she touched herself, and inhaled the pleasant smells of the dress. It really smelled exactly like her Faron. It made her feel like he was there with her again, touching her the way only he could; feeling and exploring her, devoting his entire being to making her feel good. She wanted that now. It only made sense, right? She was in a shrine to Ishara, and the Goddess Ishara would want nothing less than for those in her temples to feel good.

She played with herself passionately, enjoying the feelings she’d suppressed and rejected since he… Since the last time they did this. She moaned, and giggled, and kept smelling les choses stupéfantes et divines. She didn't want to ever stop smelling this amazing dress. She wanted to let it permeate her, wanted to be ever closer to it.

She curled her toes and kicked her legs, yearning to feel the peak. Vividly, she imagined her love proving himself the artist in bed she knew him to be as she explored her clit and folds, and she stared up at the statue of Ishara. As she took another breath, she imagined, no… She knew that the Goddess had always been there, guiding the couple in their pursuit of mutual pleasure. Lanri was so very grateful for that. She let her gratitude to the Goddess out in the form of a passionate cry as she reached her peak and a wave of joy and satisfaction rushed across her entire body.

Lying there, Lanri panted, grinning and giggling in her afterglow as she continued to savor the scent of the dress while staring up at the likeness of the goddess Ishara. At her Goddess Ishara. She calmed down, satisfied that she had done what she was supposed to. What Faron and Ishara would want from her.

Lethargy and satisfaction both took a hold of her mind, and she kept taking slower and deeper breaths. She had a smile on her face when she let her eyes slowly fall shut, and soon fell asleep in the glow of her lantern, her late husband's magic still powering the flame that was keeping her warm.