The sick goblins recovered quickly enough, nothing more than the usual poor issues that came with long journeys and hard living. Lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of proper shelter. Once we got proper rations into them, clean water flowing, the coughs eased and the hollow looks faded. They were back on their feet within a couple of days.

The catgirl squad took to sparring with the untrained arrivals almost immediately. I watched from the edge of the training ground for a while, blackfang steel plate gleaming under the tropical sun. The new ones were clumsy, the unskilled labourers especially but the hunters among them held their own with short bows and short swords. Reville hovered nearby, quiet and helpful, offering soft corrections on stance and grip whenever someone looked lost. 

Master and I left with the five dwarves the next morning, heading south toward the ice goblin ruins. The road was still rough in places but the goblins had cleared enough that we made good time.

The dwarves made quick work of the excavation once we arrived. They were professionals, stocky, efficient, axes and picks biting into the earth with practised rhythm. Within hours the first layers of soil and root gave way to fitted sandstone blocks, the same ancient causeway style we’d seen before but deeper, more deliberate. Everything we uncovered pointed toward a slave production hub. The layout told the story even without words. Long, narrow chambers with iron ring anchors still rusted into the walls. Drainage channels designed for waste rather than water. Small, cramped cells arranged in rows around a central courtyard. Residual symbols etched into the stone not Bogclutch, not green goblin, but something older and colder, matched the half remembered accounts of Ice Goblin architecture from the few surviving Alderian records. Tools of restraint rather than industry. Breeding pens marked by the size and arrangement of the cells. The whole complex was residential in design but every corridor, every chamber, every courtyard funnelled toward control and production of labour. Green goblins and possibly Alderians, given the supposed hybrid nature of the Ice Goblins themselves. A place built to breed and break rather than forge weapons or store goods.

We found the artefact inside the largest structure, the religious building that dominated the centre of the unearthed complex. A square altar of dark stone sat in the middle of a high ceilinged chamber, its surface still stained with old, dark residues that the tropical rains hadn’t fully washed away. On the altar rested a short bow, broken near the grip, the string long gone. It was made of a purple metal none of us recognised. The dwarves turned it over in their thick hands, frowning and muttering. Master examined it with that sharp noir precision of his, testing the weight, the balance, the strange coolness of the metal against his palm. Green goblins from our garrison shook their heads when we brought them down later, no symbols they knew, no tales of such a material in Bogclutch lore or otherwise. 

The altar building took up most of the space we’d unearthed so far. The rest of the complex sprawled out around it in those tight, functional chambers, slave production and breeding grounds built around this ancient religious heart. No books had survived the centuries of burial and tropical rot. Even if they had, none of us could have read the Ice Goblin tongue. The language was extinct, deliberately erased during the Alderian Founding Wars. All we had were the stones, the layout, and that strange purple bow.

I stood beside Master at the altar. Something about the altar, the way the purple metal seemed to drink the light, the residual stains on the stone… an idea formed, sharp and feral.

“Blood,” I said. “Violent blood. The kind that comes from a fight, not a clean cut. These places always wanted pain. Sacrifice. Maybe the reaction needs the real thing.”

I didn’t wait for permission. I drew one of the short swords from a dwarf’s belt, pressed the edge hard against my own palm, and dragged it deep enough to make the blood flow freely. Hot. Bright. Violent. I held my clenched fist over the altar and let the blood drip onto the purple metal and the dark stone beneath.

The reaction was immediate.

The air in the chamber dropped several degrees. Mist rose from the floor in thick, swirling tendrils. Pale blue white light flared along the carved symbols in the walls. Shapes began to form within the mist, tall, lean, angular figures with translucent pale skin tinted blue grey, elongated serrated ears, silver pale eyes, and sparse ash blonde hair. Ice Goblin projections. A dozen of them at least, materialising in a loose circle around the altar. They didn’t attack. They just stood there, staring, mouths moving in silent words we couldn’t hear. Trying to scare us. Trying to drive us out with presence alone.

Anything we did went right through them. Master’s sword passed through the nearest figure like smoke. My spear did the same. The dwarves swung pick axes with the same result, pure illusion, pure projection. After a few tense minutes the figures simply faded, mist thinning, light dimming, until the chamber was empty again except for the five of us and the blood stained altar.

Master didn’t waste time. He raised a hand and cast a simple ice spell, nothing elaborate, just a focused burst of cold aimed at the altar itself. The reaction hit harder this time.

The floor beneath us shuddered. Stone groaned. A wide section of the chamber floor,  the area directly under the altar and several feet around it, simply opened up, the ancient mechanisms grinding to life after centuries of silence. We dropped.

I yowled as the ground vanished under my boots. Master’s arm shot out on instinct, catching me around the waist even as we fell. The dwarves reacted with that practical speed of their kind. One of them had already secured a heavy climbing rope to a solid stone pillar near the entrance before we’d even approached the altar, pure dwarven caution. As the floor gave way he roared a warning and yanked hard on the free end. The rope snapped taut. Two other dwarves grabbed it mid fall, their thick fingers locking around the line like iron. The remaining two managed to catch ledges of still solid stone on the way down, bracing with their picks and axes.

We didn’t plummet free. The rope jerked us hard, swinging us in a painful arc against the side of the newly opened shaft. Master’s grip on me never loosened. My claws dug into his.

The purple bow still rested on the altar above us, blood staining its broken grip, the square stone now cracked and tilted where the floor mechanisms had given way. The chamber was silent again except for our heavy breathing and the low, strained grunts of the dwarves hauling us up inch by inch.

The dwarves finally hauled us back up onto solid stone. Master’s arm never left my waist. The moment our boots hit firm ground I pressed myself hard against his side. The chamber still felt wrong, colder than it should have been, the air thick with that residual blue white mist that refused to fully clear. The square altar sat cracked and tilted where the floor mechanisms had given way. The purple bow still rested on it, stained with my blood, looking for all the world like a dead thing that had somehow refused to stay buried.

Master sat down near the edge of the open shaft, legs stretched out, back against a solid pillar. He pulled a small flask from his belt, embercrack tea and took a slow drink. The sharp, spicy scent cut through the damp stone smell of the chamber. Then he started thinking.

I felt it through the bond the second it began.

It wasn’t the usual steady stream of thoughts I was used to. This was a flood. Dense. Layered. Relentless. He turned the entire situation over in his mind with that cold, noir precision he always used when the pieces didn’t fit cleanly. The blood reaction. The projections that couldn’t touch us. The floor mechanism that only opened after the ice spell. The unknown purple metal. The slave-production layout. The hybrid nature of the Ice Goblins. The way the altar seemed to drink light. Every detail clicked against every other detail in a rapid, interlocking logic that left no room for gaps. He was mapping connections I hadn’t even noticed, discarding false paths in the space of a single breath, building a working theory from the stones and the blood and the silence of the language no one could read anymore.

My head started to hurt almost immediately.

The sheer volume of it poured through the bond without filter. Process after process. Detail after detail. The way he weighed the residual symbols against the architecture, the way he cross-referenced the blood stain patterns with the lack of any military purpose, the quiet calculation of how a non magical artefact could still trigger ancient mechanisms. It was too much. Too dense. Too fast. I yowled under my breath and pressed both hands to the sides of my head, blackfang steel gauntlets cold against my temples. My tail thrashed wildly behind me.

“Master stop,” I growled, voice tight and strained. “Your head is going to make mine explode. All that detail… all that logic… it’s flooding everything. I can’t hold it. It’s draining me dry. Every corner of my mind is full of your process and there’s no space left for anything else.”

I stayed pressed against his side even while I complained. The dwarves kept a respectful distance, muttering among themselves as they secured more ropes around the open shaft. The mist still curled low across the floor. The cracked altar waited.

Master didn’t stop. He simply finished the last of the tea, set the flask aside, and reached a quiet conclusion. He stood, walked back to the altar, and did something deceptively simple. He took the broken purple bow in both hands, pressed the blood stained grip against the deepest crack in the altar stone, and whispered a single, incomplete phrase, half Ice Goblin, half the old Alderian root words he’d pieced together from the west forest ruins. At the same time he focused the faint residual cold of his own ice spell into the metal itself, not as an attack but as a key. A connection. A recognition.

The bow glowed.

Soft purple light spilled out from the break in the grip, spreading along the limbs until the entire weapon was lit from within. The metal flowed like liquid for a heartbeat. The broken section sealed itself with a soft, crystalline sound. A new string formed out of the same purple metal, thin and perfect. When the glow faded the bow sat whole in Master’s hands, unbroken, silent, waiting.

He tested the draw. The moment his fingers touched the string, a single purple metal arrow materialised against it, perfectly nocked, the head sharp and gleaming. He turned slightly, aimed at the nearest dwarf, the same thick one who had held the rope and loosed.

The arrow flew true. It struck the dwarf square in the chest with a soft thock of impact… and then simply sparkled into nothing. No wound. No blood. No mark on the leather. Not even a speck of dust left behind. Just a brief shower of purple motes that faded in the air like dying fireflies.

The bow was harmless. A toy. A circus trick. Something that looked deadly and felt real but carried no actual force in the physical world.

Master studied it further in silence, turning it over, testing the weight, the balance, the way the purple metal seemed to answer the faint cold of his own magic. Through the bond I felt the quiet click of understanding settle into place. He had tapped into a connection, a residual knowledge left in the artefact, a thin thread of Ice Goblin understanding that the blood and the ice spell had unlocked. It wasn’t a new spell. It wasn’t power. It was simply a clearer path. When he next cast the ice spell he had learned from the west forest ruins, the success chance would be slightly higher. A marginal but real improvement. A small edge. Nothing more.

“Next time you decide to drown me in every single detail of your thinking process,” I muttered against him, “warn me first. My head still feels like it’s full of broken glass. But… the bow works. Harmless or not. And if it gives your ice even a little more reliability, then it was worth the headache.”

The dwarves began packing their tools. The shaft remained open and dark. And somewhere above us the tropical sun kept shining on an island that still had far too many buried secrets left to dig up.