CHAPTER 240: INDIANA JONES AND THE LANGUAGE THAT TAUGHT ITSELF

Hours bled into the sky as the darkness slowly loosened its hold, giving way to the pale, hesitant light of dawn. The first threads of sun crept across the land, brushing the ridges of rock and the damp earth outside with muted gold, as though the world itself was reluctant to wake.

Inside the cave, the air was still—cold enough to bite faintly at the skin. A slow, measured drip of water echoed at irregular intervals from somewhere deep within the stone walls, the sound magnified by the silence until it seemed to mark the rhythm of the night’s departure.

Both women lay half-asleep on the uneven ground, wrapped in the shallow comfort of weariness. Eleyn slowly got up.

Seraphis had been meant to keep watch, her turn in their unspoken cycle, but Eleyn had made little effort to stir her when the time came. Her friend’s exhaustion had been plain, and Eleyn saw no sense in disturbing it. Besides, her own instincts told her the night would pass without danger.

The cave they had chosen was small, its mouth narrow and half-buried beneath a thicket of tangled brush. Hidden so well, it felt like a forgotten pocket of the world, tucked out of reach of wandering eyes.

And so it had proven. The night passed quietly, uneventfully, as if time itself had skipped over their refuge.

Seraphis shifted in her sleep, her lips parting in a faint sigh, one hand curling slightly as though even in rest she clutched at something unseen.

Eleyn remained awake a while longer, her back pressed against the cool stone wall, watching the faintest glimmer of morning gather at the cave’s entrance. Her thoughts drifted, unsought, to old memories.

The old tongue...

Her mind returned, as it often did, to the moment it had entered her life.

It had been years ago, when Eleyn and Alex were still students. Young, restless, already powerful enough to believe the world could be tested without fear.

Their tutors had often warned them against arrogance. At the time, Eleyn had despised the warnings, dismissing them as needless restraint. Looking back now, she understood their purpose. But back then? Neither she nor Alex had been willing to curb their curiosity. And so they left, driven by the hunger to see, to discover, to measure themselves against the vast unknown.

Their wandering carried them to places that clung to the edges of memory: ruins that whispered faint echoes when stepped upon, libraries whose half-burnt pages still sparked with traces of forbidden knowledge, forests where every corner seemed to whisper mysteries.

Some of these encounters were harmless, some perilous, some so strange they lingered long after in silence.

But one discovery rose above all the rest.

A cave.

At first glance, it was nothing. A collapsed section of hillside, weathered rock overgrown with roots and weeds, offering no sign of passage, no path leading inward. Most travelers would have passed by without sparing a thought.

But Alex had noticed, always sharper in such things, the faintest draft of air slipping through. A subtle give in the earth. And curiosity, as ever, drove them to dig, pry, and force their way inside.

What they found within was another world.

The ruinous exterior gave way to chambers impossibly preserved. The air was clear and dry, untouched by rot or the scent of age, as though time had forgotten this place.

The stone walls were smooth, unnaturally so, shaped not by hand, nor even by deliberate craft, but by something else. Ether itself seemed to have chosen to carve the halls, leaving surfaces that felt alive beneath the eye.

Etchings marked the walls in long, deliberate strokes. Deep enough to resist centuries, their edges sharp, their patterns beautifully intricate.

The carvings blended seamlessly into the stone, flowing as if the rock had grown them rather than been cut by a tool. They were mesmerizing, works one could gaze at endlessly, always finding another detail worthy of praise.

The deeper the pair ventured, the stronger the cave’s presence seemed to swell. The hall was wide, vast enough that a full-grown dragon could have passed through without strain.

And there, upon the walls that looped and spiraled, they first encountered the language. The old tongue.

They had never studied it, yet the script impressed its meaning directly into their minds. It was not read, but remembered. Not sounded aloud, but heard within the bones.

The words pressed recognition into them like an old memory returning after long absence, humming faintly as if the stone itself breathed them out.

Strangely, the words carried with them an urging, subtle but insistent. An invitation to shift into their true forms. And in time, the invitation became irresistible.

Blue scales and red scales filled the chamber as the two gave in, twisting into their dragon selves. Cramped, yes, but still manageable within the great halls. And in that form, the script seemed to pour itself into them, seeping into thought, settling like memories uncovered rather than lessons newly learned.

It was within those chambers that they came to understand what had been left behind in careful record.

The sealing of gods.

And the ones who carried out such sealing.

Spirits — not the fleeting shades that lingered in fire or air, but great ones, beings of law and principle, foundations in themselves. These were the sealers. They bound what was too great, too dangerous, too wild to remain unbound. And through the act of sealing, they were reshaped, elevated, transformed into what mortals later named gods.

Not creators. Not guardians. But Sealers.

The highest among them, bound most tightly to their roles, were the gods to whom temples now bent in worship. Worship that had never been born of creation, but of duty. Not of blessing, but of containment. This was what the cave revealed, its truth etched deep enough that even time had not dared erase it.

And among those spirits, two figures were given reverence above the rest, likely the lords among the sealers.

A dragon whose scales shimmered like molten gold, and a phoenix of bright red flames whose feathers blazed as if lit from within. The golden dragon and the scarlet phoenix.

For Eleyn and Alex, young though they were, the discovery was not so much revelation as it was weight. Something undeniable, something that clung to them, quiet and immovable, long after they left. A truth they could never unlearn.

And so it was that the old tongue entered Eleyn’s life. Not chosen, not taught, but inherited—forced upon her by a place where the past still lived.

Yet one detail had never left her mind. A detail that unsettled her still.

Both the dragon and the phoenix, in the image of their carved visages, bore eyes that glowed with a faint, unnatural purple.

Something about it was wrong. Something about it was frightening.

And it never left her.