It’s here and waiting for you.

I hear there’s a reason why nobody’s ever come back from the Parisian catacombs–at least, once you go down far enough. There’s a lot of bad shit down there, but the baddest of the shit is the Unquiet Tomb.

Supposedly there was an old-school mage who bound a demon into the stone of a sepulcher that held the woman he loved–an attempt to bring her back. Naturally it failed, and a demon that took her name filled the big damn box.

The Unquiet Tomb is just what it sounds like: a grave that refuses to keep its damn mouth shut. Specifically, it sings. Always it sings in a woman’s voice, high and beautiful, but highly unnerving. It sang anything that “came” to it–old hymns, children’s rhymes, whatever struck its fancy. Lots of weird stuff. It used to be held in a vault in Paris, but when some ritualists found a spell to temporarily banish demons, they took it upon themselves to relocate the damn thing to the Catacombs. Nobody knows why, or how, but they left behind two records of what they did: a two-page manifesto and a wax cylinder of the Tomb’s singing.

There’s no real advantage from finding the Unquiet Tomb, unless you want to freak out honey-bunches of people. But some people say it’s got power–terrible power. Maybe it entrances or binds when it sings in the right tone of voice… Maybe it turned the corpse inside into some terrible monstrocity, which it unleashes when it feels like it. I’m not sure why or how or what, but it’s not good, at all. That much is sure–from the manifesto, and from what happened to the first guys to see it in a century.

Here’s what we know. I knew these guys–a pair, a videomancer and a cliomancer. The clio was gonna test out some idea she had–that making history might nail her a hypercharge like going to a place full o’ history for the first time, so she wanted her dungeon dive recorded for posterity. The vidiot cooked up a magic camera that records to a video held elsewhere, just in case she bit it somewhere down there.

It sucked for her; she found the Unquiet Tomb somewhere in the depths.

I’ve seen the last ten minutes of the video. It’s her, walking through the catacombs, and she’s saying, “Oh, God. This isn’t on the map. I’ve had to scribble additions every turn. It’s … Jesus, I could be hitting the jackpot. My God. When I get it, what am I gonna do? I have no… What’s that?”

A song, high and gentle, wafts down the hall. She follows it for a while, quiet, then she places the camera on the ground and follows the noise. After a while, the song is almost drowned out by the sound of flesh and bone being torn to pieces.

It took me a few weeks to find out what magical anything could’ve been dumped there. I found a mechanomancer who thought he found some big stuff to put in his next ‘bot, but it didn’t take, so he hitched them off on me. The manifesto wasn’t useful; it was mainly a declaration of the users’ magical prowess and the gallantry they held in containing the Unquiet Tomb, and a little bit on how they silenced it long enough to defeat it. Not enough to be useful, I think… but…

I checked the song on the wax cylinder. The voice matches up with the one on the video.

Dammit, I know I should leave it alone… But dammit, Ginny was my friend. She was a friend, and something down there killed her. I’ll take that fucker out. I’ll get some adepts together, and we’ll tear some ass. We can get some nasty stuff together.

But… Well, I don’t know. There’s something about the song it sings, on the cylinder and on the video. It freaks me out.

It’s the same song, and I’ve seen the movie it comes from.

In heaven,
everything is fine.
You’ve got your good things,
and I’ve got mine.

In heaven,
everything is fine.
You’ve got your good things,
and I’ve got mine…