#but i've thought a lot about this and hnnnnng folklore

[anamatics]

From her back pocket, Blake produces a brush and starts to sweep it over what she thinks might be the head of the casement. There, in looping proto-Menagerian script, are a knot of words so stylized that it takes Blake a minute to read them. Weiss holds the flashlight, and Blake traces her finger down the loop of the script. “Who guards the forbidden knowledge, who holds the secret close, whose name can never be known, and whose wish can never be granted.”

“Poetic.” Yang plucks the brush from Blake’s fingers and uses the back of it to jam into a chunk of earth and clay that’s lodged itself into…. “There’s some sort of lock here. Looks like stone on the inside of this thing too.”

“Whoever it was, they didn’t want them getting out.” Weiss stares at the knotted letters carved into the casement. “Is there anything in the stories about something like that?”

“No.” Blake shakes her head and wraps her arm around herself. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she mutters. “We don’t –” She casts searching look to the mural, to it’s faunus and the god of the animals flying lazily by a whole moon. “I have no idea what we’re dealing with here,” she confesses. “This is beyond…anything I’ve ever encountered. The stories of the Lost City of Knowledge don’t mention a guardian.”

“Why would they lock the guardian away?” Weiss frowns.

Something unpleasant lurches in Blake’s stomach and she swallows down bile. “Faunus didn’t entomb their dead, but humans of the time did.”

Yang takes a step backwards. “This is a murder victim?”