Forbidden Love (Rewritten) | Arthur Pendragon

14 • THE CURSE OF CORNELIUS SIGAN

A year in Camelot felt like ten in Ealdor. Eowny had never believed that so many things could happen in such a short span of time. Half of the adventures she had lived would have taken more than a decade to occur had they happened in Ealdor. Eowyn liked the villages but it was quite boring. Camelot was eventful and quite dangerous, but she had learned a lot about science and about herself. Of course, she knew she had yet to unravel the truth about her origins but she was not feeling ready yet to depart. She did not want to depart.

However, at the moment, the idea of leaving the palace was becoming more and more a possibility. Uther had undertaken a search of the castle's undergrounds in the hope of finding hidden treasures, and the hubbub it was making rendered anyone unable to sleep. And it was tremendously irritating, especially when she had planned to perform medical visits in the lower town early in the morning.

Eowyn let out a heavy sigh and sat up. There was no way she could possibly sleep with such noises. In fact, she doubted that anyone could sleep.

The door of the room opened. Merlin smiled when he saw that his sister was already awake. "Perfect, you're already up! We need you and Gaius in the mines,"

Eowyn felt quite grateful to get some work. Since she could not sleep, she needed something to do or she would die of boredom. And as she had abandoned her research and had read almost all books Gaius owned, there was nothing she could do more.

"Why?" Eowyn stood up as Merlin left the room for her to dress up. Eowyn grabbed her gown a red corseted vest. It would be a much better fit to visit the mean than a sleeping gown. "Has a miner lost a limb?"

"No, but some have found a tomb and one of them died," Merlin said from the main room.

Eowyn stopped and looked at the door as if Merlin was there. "Died? How?" She removed her sleeping gown and rapidly dressed up.

"Honesty, I have no idea. I have never seen anything like that,"

Eowyn tied her hair into a ponytail and grabbed her pouch. "Then let's go and investigate."

She stepped into the main room where Gaius and Merlin were waiting for her and they all headed to the mines which had already been evacuated. They slithered among the wagons and picks lying on the floor. It felt particularly humid and was dimly lit by the torches on the walls. Quite deep into the undergrounds, Gaius and the siblings stumbled upon a hole in the wall. A hole of human size. A secret entrance. They stepped inside the even more poorly lighted hidden room and, expectedly, found a plethora of treasures. Countless shining jewels and boxes of golden cutlery were lying everywhere, and in the center was a tomb on which was embedded a fist-sized blue jewel. Just at the feet of the tomb was a corpse whose skin was sickly blueish. The man seemed to have been frozen in ice, his eyes and mouth wide agape in shock as if it was the very thing that had murdered him.

A cold chill ran down Eowyn's spine when her feet got closer to the tomb. The unusually enormous jewel with a heart shape was inducing a sort of discomfort within her. Precious stones were not her domain of expertise, but she was still quite certain that this stone was not normal. Stones were not naturally of this vivid azure.

"Something's not right," said Eowyn, her eyes carefully looking around. "There's something strange about this tomb,"

"Magic?" Merlin asked.

"I don't know. Maybe,"

Eowyn countered the sepulcher and kneeled beside the dead man. From afar, the cause of death was already peculiar, but closer, it was even more apparent. There was no visible sign of wounds which suggested that the man had not been attacked and assaulted; no disease could kill a man so rapidly. If science could not provide a plausible explanation, it left only one solution. Magic. But still, it did not answer the question "why".