The Vaults
Nobody agrees on what the Vaults were for. The argument has outlived everyone who had a stake in it.
What is down there
The rooms are square, identical in dimension, and laid out on a grid that does not vary by so much as a hand's width between floors. That is not how anything is built by people who are improvising. Somebody planned the whole of it before the first stone went down, and planned it for something they never wrote on a wall.
There are no corridors. This is the detail that unsettles the surveyors. Every chamber opens directly onto the next, which is an appalling way to build a storehouse, a tomb, or a prison, and a very efficient way to build something you intend to move through in one direction only.
The scorching
In @Missing file the burn stops in a clean line at waist height, on every wall, in every ash room, at the same height throughout.
Fire does not do that. Fire climbs. A level line means the room was filled to that depth with something burning and then left to go out on its own, and it means someone stood at the door and did the filling.
The ash is knee-deep in places and holds a footprint far longer than it should.
Someone has been down and come back up with a name for who did the filling. @Missing file is still at the far end of the burnt rooms, still warm, in a place that has had nothing left to burn for a very long time.
The water
@Missing file holds standing water in a place with no spring above it and no drain below. It has not evaporated. It does not stagnate the way still water stagnates, and it does not freeze.
Drink it and it will heal you, which is the part nobody can explain and the part everyone uses anyway. Roughly half the time it takes something in exchange, and what it takes is never the same twice. The delvers' word for this is the toll. They use it without irony.
The gallery
@Missing file is the one that ends the argument about whether anyone lives down here.
The bones are not scattered and they are not piled. They are sorted by type, laid in even courses, mortared flush with the stone, and load-bearing. Skulls face outward at eye level in unbroken rows. The work is neat, it is structural, and it is not finished so much as paused.
@Missing file is still at it. He wears a crown he assembled himself from the smallest pieces, the ones too fine to build with. He will talk while he kills you, and what he says is mostly about the work.
The rust
@Missing file is a problem of accounting. Iron has been coming out of the ceiling as dust for long enough to round the corners off the room, which means there was a great deal of iron up there, and it is not up there now.
The brackets are the part that bothers the surveyors. They are bolted to the inside walls at even intervals in every rustfall chamber, they are seized solid with corrosion, and every single one of them is empty. Whatever hung on them was taken down deliberately and in order, before the ceiling began coming apart.
@Missing file stood through the whole of that and is still standing in it.
The tallow
@Missing file is the only part of the excavation that looks used rather than built.
The fat has been poured over the floor and the fittings until whatever was underneath is gone. The stumps are burnt down to nothing. And every wick — every wick, in every chapel, on every floor that has one — has been cut square, which is not a thing fire does and not a thing that survives being left alone.
Two hollows are worn into the wax in each chamber, in the same position relative to the door. Somebody knelt in that spot long enough, and often enough, to wear a print into set fat. @Missing file is what is left of one of them, and it has not stopped.
The others
@Missing file stands where it was posted. There is nothing inside the armour and there has not been for a long time, and it has not left its position regardless. It does not hunt. It objects to being passed.
Which raises the question the surveyors keep coming back to: it was posted facing inward.
Whatever the seal was holding, it was not holding it out.