Shady Archeology

“Did you see them again?” Shady growled.

“I did,” I said. “Montezuma’s Castle, Arizona. My parents and their colleagues did some survey work and took some photos of it for the interactive museum tour thing. I saw the fucked up sliced off clouds hanging directly above… what my dad called the Arizona Petroglyphs. This circle, in a circle, in a circle symbol, carved thousands of years ago into rocks.”

“Show me.”

I looked up the petroglyphs in Petrified Forest National Park made by Puebloans and showed them to Shady.

“You gotta be shitting me,” Shady rubbed her forehead.

“What?”

“The stick-figure people. You are one hundred percent sure that you saw them?”

“Yes,” I answered with a shudder. “Sometimes in my dreams, whenever the trailer was parked close to the petroglyphs. Sometimes in real life. White, lanky figures. Sometimes with one eye. Sometimes two eyes, radiating white light around their bodies. It’s like they were living in the cliffside castles like Montezuma and nobody except for me saw them and whenever I told my parents about them they just made bothered faces at me.”

Shady let out a deep, unnerving growl.

“What? You know something I don’t?”

“Wandjinn,” she said. “Those are Wandjinn Omnids, Ashy! Zexxia must have sold gate passes to the Wandjinn too! Slayer!”

She grabbed my phone flipping through the photos of Arizona petroglyphs. “Look! LOOK! That’s a Frontenachii Wendigo! The giant elk thing with antlers that are too dang big for its body! And this one, the giant centipede with seven legs! That’s a Corpse Seeker!”

The image displays a close-up of ancient petroglyphs carved into a textured, reddish-brown rock face. The carvings reveal lighter-colored stone beneath the dark patina, depicting a variety of stylized figures including human-like forms with raised arms, quadrupeds resembling deer or dogs, and abstract geometric shapes. The scene evokes the historical context of the Puebloan carvings mentioned in the text, specifically referencing the 'stick-figure people' and 'Frontenachii Wendigo' that Shady identifies in Ash's photos.

“Hum,” I stared at the screen along with her. “I wouldn’t have made the connection.”

“These look like old magitek runes,” the Wendigo girl explained. “The crosses like plus signs are healing runes. The centipede is a Corpse Seeker detection ward. The elk thing with oversized antlers is a Wendigo fear ward!”

The image displays a close-up of weathered, reddish-brown rock face covered in ancient petroglyphs, likely from the American Southwest. The carvings are etched in lighter tones against a dark, oxidized rock surface, featuring rows of stylized figures including four-legged animals, centipede-like creatures, and humanoid shapes with large ears. Spirals, circles, and cross-like symbols are scattered among the figures, evoking the 'magitek runes' and 'Wendigo fear wards' mentioned in the text. The texture of the stone is rough and layered, emphasizing the age and mystery of the archaeological site.

“What about the two animals in a mounting pose? And the animal-looking art in general here? And all the spirals?” I asked.

“Okkay, so,” she said, tapping a petroglyph of a humanoid figure with floppy large ears and a spiral under it. “This right here? The spiral direction indicates alignment reinforcing. Clockwise is Syntropic. Counter-clockwise is Entropic. This one’s counter-clockwise, so whoever carved it was trying to fuck up linearity, replace it with entropy to do magic easier.”

“Like Sage?”

“Similar vibe, yeah. Oh, this one is easy.” She flipped to the next photo. “A humanoid with four horns and a sheep next to it and a human foot inside the humanoid and spiral going clockwise inward? Mage Skinwalker, aligned with eating sheep and Syntropy, marking its territory. A ward sign designed to tell others to piss off their domain.”

The image displays a rough-hewn stone slab mounted on a wooden stand, featuring a carved petroglyph in a light, chalky color against the dark rock. The carving depicts a humanoid figure with four horns and a square body, seemingly riding or interacting with a centipede-like creature beneath it, alongside a spiral symbol to the right. This visual corresponds to the text's discussion of a 'Mage Skinwalker' ward and a 'Corpse Seeker' detection ward, grounding the scene in the dark, arcane archaeology of the LitRPG setting.

She flipped to the next photo in the search.

“Kachina ward,” she identified. “Protective boundary marker. The flat lines around the head are Aetheric dispersal channels meant to scatter incoming Scrutimancy pings. Basically anti-surveillance runes. The curvy lines reinforce Foresight.”

A close-up view of ancient petroglyphs carved into a dark, textured rock face, likely sandstone or slate. The carvings are lighter in color, revealing the stone beneath the weathered patina. Several humanoid figures with elongated bodies and distinct headgear or headdresses are visible, alongside various geometric symbols, spirals, and what appear to be animal figures. The scene evokes a sense of deep history and arcane knowledge, consistent with the 'Shady Archeology' chapter where Shady explains the meaning of these ancient markings.

“You’re avoiding the ‘mounting’ art question.”

“Am getting to that one,” Shady huffed, flipping back to what I assumed was a basic ‘nature channel’ native cave-dweller type art of two animals. “It’s… basically a… sex rune, designed to enforce a particular Omnitype birth. Nobody wants a nullborn child.”

I stared at her.

“If an Omnid has sex with a human without reinforcing the location with particular runes or rituals… there are… higher chances of having nullborn children. Aka, Omnids that look like people with very little magic. They’re treated as… disabled in Omnithornia, given support and scholarships at Skyfall. Lots of bullying too. Delving instructor Zalimar was all ‘bout murdering and harassing nullborn students so that they would drop outta Skyfall.”

“Hold up.” I stared at her. “We had unprotected sex.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ughhhh,” it was my turn to produce a bothered exhale. “You know… I assumed it was impossible for us to have kids, on the account that we’re… different species from different dimensions.”

“Assumptions make an ass outta you and me,” she stated.

“Shady, if you’re trying to make me radiate dread you’re succeeding excessively,” I ground out.

She giggled. “Relax. An Omnid girl can’t get pregnant unless she really wants to.”

I stared at her, feeling too bothered to deepen my inquiries.

“Jeez. You’re projecting enough panic to feed me for a week,” Shady observed dryly. “If you must know, Omnid reproduction is consent-based at the biological level. My Fractal Engine heart has to actively ignite a new soul-seed. No ignition, no baby. Simple as.”

“And if you sneeze during sex or something? Accidentally ignite?”

“Sneezing doesn’t activate a Fractal Engine, you absolute goober.” She rolled her silver eyes. “It takes sustained, deliberate will. Decades of focused intent for most Omnids. especially Wendigos, because we are aligned with Void and don’t die off easily. Empress Aconia spent decades trying to conceive my grandmom and my grandmother spent even more time trying to conceive my mom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wendigo fertility without Wormwood Star shards is cosmically rare. Part of the whole finite-soul-template problem Sage mentioned. Each new Wendigo kiddo is basically hand-forged by the mother’s soul from raw Syntropy. It’s exhausting work. Most Omnid families have one kid per century. Two is showing off. Three is suspicious. Basically the more naturally immortal an Omnid is, the more difficult it is for them to have kids. In areas of thick-ass Aether like your Earth this is even harder.”

“Sage’s mom has three kids.”

“Since like 1920s,” Shady pointed out. “It’s different for Skinwalkers. They eat souls.”

“Eating souls makes it easier to have kids?”

“Yes. The consumed souls converge into a new Skinwalker baby… I think.”

“YOU THINK?” I growled far too loudly.

“Don’t judge me. Listening to a lecture ‘bout Skinwalker reproduction particularities in Dr. Greyfield’s bio class wasn’t that interesting to me,” Shady huffed. “What? You’re the one who ran off to fuck Sage in her magic forest shack while I was knocked out from excessive self-murder.”

“What about… prads?” I asked.

“Prads are only fertile during the Cycle,” Shady stated. “You’d notice if our kitty Knight was in cycle. She’d be sex-craaaaaazy. Zero chill-ness. Also, the prad girls are fed a steady diet of cycle-suppressants in the fleet. Can’t have the ground-pounders getting pregnant. Hexagrams on the exhaust pipes, burning Cycle-suppression spells into the UwUs. No cycle, no pregnancy.”

I relaxed slightly. “Do Omnids have… cycles?”

“Some do, most don’t,” Shady shrugged. “I certainly don’t suffer from such bothersome nonsense. Would you stop glaring a hole into me? Wendigo Commanders like Sillicia have no chance of having kids without being supported by a powerful family with a gargantuan hoard, which is why she wants to be my Hearth Keeper so badly.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m currently cut off from Frontenachii family hoards, I’ve no chance to have kids in my current state. Without a yuge-ass hoard there’s just not enough magic to even begin the necessary rituals for kids. Only those in High Command manage to get pregnant by sitting atop mountain-sized hoards of artifacts stolen from a thousand doomed worlds and swimming all day long in Void-whale blood pools and doing nothing but riding their kobolds twenty four seven.”

I relaxed further.

“Let’s move on. Tell me more of what you saw,” Shady asked softly.

“Fine,” I said. “Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Mom and Dad were mapping structural deterioration in Pueblo Bonito. I wandered into one of the smaller kivas, the circular underground ceremonial rooms.”

I looked up the photo on my tablet and showed it to Shady.

“There was a ‘sipapu’ in the floor. The small hole the Puebloans believed connected the physical world to the spirit world below. Standard archaeological feature, nothing remarkable. Except when I stood near it, the air tasted… felt wrong as fuck. And I could hear breathing.”

“Breathing?” Shady’s dark, star-spotted ears shot up, wiggling at me.

“Slow. Deep. Measured. Coming from the sipapu. Like something enormous was sleeping directly underneath the kiva floor, and the sipapu was its nostril. Each exhale pushed warm air through the hole, carrying this freaky smell out. Each inhale pulled cold air down with enough force to make my hair move.”

“Did you look into it?”

“When I came closer to the hole… It felt like… Like whatever was down there suddenly became aware it was being listened to. It fell silent. Then a single exhale, much warmer than before, carrying out… A word, maybe? Or a name. I couldn’t parse it. Some language I’d never heard, all vowels strung together with clicks between them.”

“Sounds like an Aetheric funnel,” Shady murmured. “An… access port. A vent for whatever pocket dimension was anchored below.”

“Something lives under Chaco Canyon then?”

“Long ago, perhaps… Or still does, in a deep hibernation state. Probably some Omnid knob buried an artifact or ten under there that’s messing with the local Aether.”

“Wonderful.” I rubbed my face. “Moving on… Fourteen year old me. And this one’s the one I really couldn’t explain away, even with the meds at full dose.”

Shady squeezed me supportingly.

“Ninstints, British Columbia. Haida Gwaii. Mom and Dad were contracted by Parks Canada to assess coastal erosion threatening the remaining totem poles at SGang Gwaay. UNESCO World Heritage site. Mortuary poles, memorial poles, house frontal poles. Some of them… surviving a hundred and fifty years of Pacific rains. Many of them were… leaning, crumbling, returning to the earth.”

The memory crawled out of the mental chasm when I prodded it.

Salty air. Ocean waves. Ferns. Rotting and fresh cedar covered by moss.

“We arrived via boat in late afternoon. Cultural guardians of the site, Haida Watchmen, met us at the landing. They assigned us an attaché, an older woman named Ruth… and for most of the trip she was all professional courtesy and logistics. Then mom and dad asked her to keep me company while they did their usual site assessment biz’.”

Shady nodded, petting my leg.

“Anyyyyway,” I resumed. “I followed her around while my parents worked. The totem poles in the rainforest… had this weight to them, a density of attention, like being in a room full of people all pretending to sleep. Some felt very off.” I sunk deeper into my mental recollections. “The Thunderbird at the top of a memorial pole. The Bear Mother cradling a child. The Raven with a sphere in its beak.”

“And you… saw things that weren’t there?”

“Yep. Eventually I saw that the Thunderbird had feathers made of fractal lightning folded into itself, like origami constructed from glass prisms. Wings stretching out past the edges of the totem into empty air, over sixty feet from wingtip to wingtip and visible only when I looked at the pole from a specific angle. From any other angle, a regular carved bird on rotting cedar.”

“Sounds like a Thunderbird ward-anchor,” Shady said. “Maybe with a small piece of someone’s soul. Eyes like Sage’s burned into an artifact.”

“Ruth noticed me staring at it,” I said. “She said, ‘Most people see wood. You see the bird. Good. The bird sees you too. Has been waiting for someone to see it back.’”

“Hmmm.”

“Dang. You think she was an Omnid like Sage?”

“Maybe a nullie.” Shady shrugged. “They do have some magic in ’em. What else?”

“The Bear Mother’s child on the totem was… moving. Shifting position in her arms over the course of the hour I observed it. The Raven’s sphere pulsed with a light that wasn’t really there… like internal… pre-dawn. And… The Watchman figures, the, uhmm… Carved human figures wearing tall hats at the top of the house’s frontal poles?”

“Yeah?”

“They turned their heads to track me as I walked. All of them. Every Watchman figure on every pole, rotated eerily, as if following my path through the village site. When I stopped they stopped. When I started walking, their heads followed me. That was… some freaky shit.”

“Ward sentinels,” Shady said thoughtfully. “Bound guardian spirits. Keyed to perceive threats.”

“Me?”

“You, walking around, openly noticing the ward most likely made it notice you too.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Welcomeses,” Shady stated. “Go on.”

“Ruth saw my expression. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Breathe, Seer. They’re just saying hello. They don’t get many visitors they can talk to anymore.’ I asked her if she could see them moving too. She told me, ‘I see the wood remember. Same thing, different words.’”