The Sealed Passage

Sometime after the fall - perhaps centuries, perhaps longer - an unknown hand cut a path through the caverns beneath Abagarlas. The passage winds upward from the deepest chambers of what would later become Bastion Sanguinaris, through vast underground grottos where luminous fungi cling to the walls and dark water gathers between the stones, to an ancient Ayleid gate at the top. Beyond it lie the ruins of Abagarlas. The passage was sealed with deliberate care. No record survives of who made it, when it was made, or why.

The stonework near the gate does not match Ayleid construction. It does not match the later vampire masonry of the Bastion either. Steps were carved into the rock where the path climbs steeply - cut with tools that left no chisel marks, only smooth dark stone, as though the rock had been melted and reformed rather than shaped. A faint smell of ozone persists in the upper reaches to this day, strongest near the sealed end - the same electrical residue that lingers after a lightning strike or a powerful ward discharge. Below, where the cave opens wide, the air is damp and still, and luminous fungi coat the walls so thickly it seems as though darkness never touched this place.

Where the path narrows near the gate, the walls close in - but for most of its length the passage is open cave - the vault lost somewhere in the darkness overhead, and no stone thrown upward has ever returned an echo. The only worked detail is a single keystone at the far end, the gate side. This keystone was placed on the inside of the seal, meaning whoever closed the passage did so from the ruins, not from the Bastion.

This detail has troubled Clan Lar's scholars since the discovery. Whoever sealed the passage intended to be found - but only by someone approaching from the Bastion side. They did not seal themselves in. They sealed themselves out.