The air in the cellar was heavy and sweet. Damp and cool from being under the ground for so long. Everything inside should have rightfully rotted away to nothing, leaving trapped gases and mold just waiting for whoever found it first.
Even after letting it air out, the taste of their air made Eirian’s mouth water and her stomach turn. There was sothing acrid to it that she couldn’t quite place, but she’d definitely slled it sowhere before.
It felt like sothing obvious, that she was going to be an idiot later for forgetting.
She hated that feeling.
A few steps in, part of the tunnel had collapsed, and they had to crouch and crawl through a short section before they could stand back up. Since they didn’t know for sure how big the storage cellar was and generally, they weren’t that big, only one soldier, Li, and Eirian, because she’d threatened to stab anyone who tried to stop her from going, were going in at first.
The soldier was in front of Eirian, but she’d stomped her way in front of Li, who’d done a good job at hiding his amusent and taken up the rear without complaint.
Once they could stand again it was only a few more feet into the open area. The floor was dirt, sof,t and cool beneath their feet. Soone had gone to a great amount of trouble to make the floor as flat and smooth as wood and after all this ti it remained that way.
Eirian held one of the torches out in front of her, peering into the darkness.
“There should be torches mounted on the wall.” The soldier swung his torch around, trying to find the wall.
“I doubt they’re still viable.” But Li waved his torch to search as well.
Eirian channeled a bit of her magic into her hand and pushed it into her torch, causing it to burn a bit brighter.
The room was big enough that their words had echoed, which seed strange if it was cold storage and if it wasn’t, why put it underground?
On a smaller, less important note, thinking about cold storage was making her hungry for sothing besides heavy bread and stew.
Sothing hot and spicy with at. Her mouth started to water again.
And so cheese.
Her stomach growled and Li and the soldier both turned to her in surprise.
“Uh, I have so bread?” The soldier offered.
Eirian grimaced. “No thank you. I’m fine.”
“Your magic?” Li asked, face creased with worry. He looked far more worried than he sounded, but that was probably the shadows cast by the flickering torches.
Eirian nodded. “I’ll be fine for a while. Probably dream of hot and sour soup tonight.”
The soldier groaned. “Yes. My grandmother makes an amazing hot and sour soup.”
“Talking about it while we’re out here and can’t have any, will not help.” Li warned.
He was right, so they forced their attention back to the room. Eirian held her torch aloft and followed the shadows until she found a shelf and the wall.
There was no wall torch or lamp, so she had to use hers to illuminate the objects on the shelf one by one. It was just pottery, corked at the top. They’d probably contained wine or vinegar, but she doubted either was safe to drink now.
She found three more shelves of similar pots beneath it and another set nailed into the wall next to it.
“I think these were ink bars.” Li studied another shelf across the room.
“Can you store ink and food together?” The soldier muttered. “I have no idea what these were? It looks like they exploded.” His torch illuminated a shelf filled with pieces of shattered pottery.
Eirian made her way deeper into the room, nearly running into a row of shelves built across the center of the room.
They were made from a different kind of wood than the shelves along the walls and used an interlocking joint technique of carving the ends of the wood to fit together perfectly instead of nails.
“These shelves are newer,” Eirian called back as she stepped closer to investigate the clay plates stacked on them. “It’s not food…”
Wait.
Sothing in the back of her mind flared to life as she picked up one of the clay plates.
The second she saw the writing carved on the front it all clicked.
“Oh.” They weren’t plates, they were tablets. Wood and paper were hard to co by and expensive in the prairie that made up the borderlands. Clay tablets weren’t used anywhere else in Sorrow, probably nowhere else on the rock. At least not anymore, but before so genius a thousand years ago had figured out how to make paper, clay had been a better and cheaper option for keeping records than slates of wood.
And the sll. Baked clay slled sweet and acrid. Eirian had slled it on the Artisans Street in Aontacht, where skilled potters made beautiful statues and all manner of household items on spinning kilns. Once a week, they allowed spectators to co in and watch them work.
Eirian had gone once and been bored to tears ten minutes in, but now she rembered the huge oven they used to bake the clay into its final shape. The way carvings and coloring would be permanently etched into the clay after a night in the heat.
Historically, they hadn’t baked the clay tablets, just left them in the sun to dry. The sa treatnt they gave clay bricks used in building and those would stand for hundreds of years if the clay was taken care of.
This cellar wasn’t just cold storage; these clay tablets were records of sothing. Maybe just family records, but the Song family had been in charge of the village for a long ti so maybe so of them were village records.
There had been other families after the Songs, but maybe the fact that there were clay tablets down here ant there were more sowhere else.
Maybe, after all the madness, they’d gotten lucky.
~ tbc
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