As I turned a curve, my foot landed against a pile of rubble, sending a stone flying forward. It disappeared around a corner and the echo that returned—of a dozen stones skipping across a vast hollow space—told me that I had finally arrived.
Ducking beneath a low shelf of rock, I suddenly found myself in a cavern the size of an Olympic swimming pool and maybe four times my height. I aimed my flashlight around the walls and located the massive wooden torches lodged in either side of the door. Pulling out the lighter Bran had told me to bring, I lit first one and then the other. I just lit a torch, I thought, immediately storing that nugget in a bizarre-things-I-have-done compartment of my brain that had been rapidly expanding over the last year.
As the flames flared to life, I coughed from the smoke and inhaled a deep gulp of stale cave air. The dark stone surface of the cavernous room danced in the flickering light of the torches, making it appear even more otherworldly.
The walls on either side of me looked like massive honeycombs. These were stacked on top of one another all the way up to the ceiling. I counted a few rows and estimated there were around six hundred in all.
The doors were painted with letters and flowers and organic swirly shapes that looked like tattoos. They all had one thing in common: In the center of each door appeared a hand with little yellow-and-orange-teardrop shapes at the tip of each finger, as if they were shooting out flames.
The doors closest to me on the left-hand wall looked ancient, all crumbling stone with only vestiges of their painted designs. Their condition grew better the farther down the room they were, until at the far end the doors were made of wood instead of stone and the paint looked less decrepit.
The wall facing me at the end of the hall had none of the half-moon-shaped doors, and was instead covered completely in wall paintings. Next to it, at the far end of the wall to my right, the painted doors began again, these looking almost new. There were only a few rows of brightly painted doors and then they stopped, leaving rows and rows of long empty holes stretching toward me.
I ran my fingers against the mouth of the one nearest me and, shining my flashlight inside, knew immediately what it was: a tomb. I had seen the same style of funerary niches in several Roman ruins I had visited around France. The Romans had carved holes horizontally into rock walls and laid their corpses to rest inside.
I shone my flashlight cautiously around the room before stepping farther in, scanning for booby traps. And then I remembered who had sent me: Bran would have warned me of anything I needed to watch out for.
I was in his family’s secret “archives” as he called it. More like mausoleum, I thought, although one could consider it an archive of bodies. Reassured that Bran would never put me in danger, I turned off my flashlight and stuck it in my bag.
In the gleam of the torches, I saw, at the far end of the room, a table holding stacks of books and shining metal objects. That was what I was here for—Bran had told me the books he needed were among them. As I walked farther into the room, I noticed that the final door on the right wall had been decorated with fresh flowers: roses and lilies and white lilac.
As I came closer, the odor of fresh paint mingled with the fragrance of the flowers. This door had recently been decorated. Something strummed painfully in my chest as I neared it. Even before I was close enough to read the letters carefully painted across the bottom of the door, I knew what they would spell.
Gwenha?l Steredenn Tandorn
Bran’s mother. He must have buried her here just a couple of days ago. I knelt down to look more closely at the ground-level tomb and admired the carefully painted hand-with-flames and decorative tattoolike swirls around it. Bran was no artist, but he had obviously spent a lot of time and care creating his mother’s memorial. I spotted a small card tied in with the flowers, and held it between my fingers. In tiny spiderlike script, I read, “This is for you, Mom. I will miss you every day.”
My heart tugged. I brushed away the tear that ran down my cheek. I knew exactly how Bran felt. For me it wasn’t as fresh a wound, but it was one that would always bleed. I missed my parents. And even though I had finally stopped thinking of them every minute of every day, when memories did come the pain returned full force.