My strength made climbing easier, but I still worried I might break off a handhold and plummet. Fortunately, on closer inspection, the cliff resembled a sharp incline rather than a straight drop to the main cavern floor.

But bones littered the floor, glimpsed through gaps in the blue smoke.

Small, warty yellow-orange pieces of razarras ore protruded from the otherwise black stone floor. Some of the chunks had broken underfoot too, leaving powdery residue. I began to understand what Qown had meant about destroying any traces of razarras clinging to my suit. Any dust kicked up into the air and breathed in would prove fatal. I walked toward the dais where the spear sat.

For the first time, I wondered if there might be traps.

A large black boulder stood in the cave’s center, near the spear. The stone was … hot. Red hot, radiating a heat I felt through the armor. I saw no reason for the heat; the boulder didn’t sit near lava or a volcanic vent, and no one had lit a fire near it. It just glowed hot.

Then I realized the same symbol marked on my back had been carved into the stone.

I stopped.

The presence of that symbol meant Senera had been here. That meant, as I had once suggested to Qown, Relos Var almost certainly knew how to neutralize the poison here. Yet he had chosen not to, for his own purposes.

But what purpose did the stone serve? Why that symbol?

I pulled the rolled-up skin—my skin—from the satchel. There had been no time to treat or tan it, so it was still a grisly souvenir of my stay with the duke—one I’d also have to destroy.

Although I didn’t much care if it turned poisonous, considering what I planned to do with it.

As I looked closer, I saw the two symbols were not identical. Close, but a few marks distinguished them. They seemed to be variations on a common base glyph. I didn’t understand what either meant.

I shifted my sight past the First Veil and saw what the Spring Cave had to show me. Not much, to be honest.

The most insidious feat the Quuros had performed was transforming these caves in a way that required no magical maintenance, in a way that couldn’t be overcome by a snap of another wizard’s fingers. Their poisonous metal ore wasn’t magical at all. But the blue smoke? Yes. Magic had powered it, and finally, that magic had begun to fade. If the smoke in Mereina faded at the same rate, well, then, in a few centuries, Mereina would be safe to occupy again.

There had to be a better way.

The large black boulder, nearly an obelisk, held astonishing amounts of pure tenyé.