Apologies for the shortness of the chapter folks. I keep dozing off while typing again. Busy day. Hopefully I'll get more time to write during the day tomorrow.

Episode 8: For the Ring, Chapter 5

Flynn and Eve looked around them. Emily's team had all but taken over the small hotel, setting up their work rooms in the conference room, for the laying out, cleaning and cataloguing of small artefacts, and the basement, for larger items that needed to be thawed slowly. They had left her team cutting deep into the ice wall around the winged body. Flynn hadn't bothered to ask how they would cut the back of the block. Several solutions had presented themselves to his mind. He had said as much to Eve when she asked on the way to the hotel. That had been several hours ago now. Long enough for Emily to make good in her promise to show them the clues she had found. Long enough to look over every one of the artefacts from the dig so far, however briefly. There was little that linked directly to the body in the ice, but plenty that allowed the team to date their finds. They were currently estimating the body to be over 2000 years old.

The body itself was now sitting directly in front of them, still encased in its ice block, on the thick wooden table in the basement. The first time they had been down there, when Emily gave them the grand tour before talking them through all her finds, it had been cold enough to double as a walk in fridge, possibly freezer. It had been dug down into the permafrost layer, and the cold seeped through their warm clothes and straight into their bones. Now it was still cold, but not to quite such an extreme. Heating lamps were turned on the giant ice cube in the centre of the room. Their radiated warmth bounced off the polished ice surface of the cube and heated the room around them instead. Nonetheless, through the crystal clear ice, Flynn could now see much more of the smith than he ever had before.

The body was huddled in a protective ball, its arms wrapped around its knees. The wings hanging from what were now clearly harnesses were bent and broken. The head was tucked in. It was the attitude of a man who knew something was about to happen to him. It was certainly not the attitude of a man who had just crashed into a surprise mountain, glacier or snowdrift.

"I think he had already landed," mused Flynn, looking over the right side of the body. Something was bugging him about it. "I think he had landed and was walking somewhere."

"And then he what? Curled up and died?" Emily scoffed. "No, he flew into an ice wall in a blizzard and curled up to protect himself from the fall when his wings broke."

"He managed to land softly, then," countered Flynn. "I don't see any bruising or obvious broken bones."

"Snow is generally considered a softer landing than rock," Emily pointed out.

"Not that soft," murmured Flynn. He tipped his head to the side and looked again. A memory clicked into place featuring another mountain, and another snowdrift. "He was walking, and then he was caught in an avalanche. That explains how the worst of the damage is to his wings and back, not the area he was protecting."

"Not necessarily..." Emily began.

"Why would he be walking?" Eve cut in. "If he can fly, why walk?"

"Maybe his arms got tired?" Flynn hazarded.

"So then you stop and rest," Eve replied. "He didn't just stop and rest, he walked."

"Maybe he did stop and rest," argued Emily. "Maybe he was asleep and he heard the roar of the avalanche and huddled up to protect himself."

"Then where's his gear?" Flynn waved a hand around. "Regardless of changing tides, sea levels or weather fronts, he was caught in an avalanche. That means there's no way he would have stopped for any length of time without at least lighting a fire!"

"That's not all that's missing," Eve added. "Didn't you tell me on the way over here that this all started over a ring? Of the seven hundred he made her, one went missing and he couldn't let it go. He traced it back to the king and that was how he got caught."

"Yes," nodded Flynn. "Because the ring the king's men took was the one his wife gave to him on their wedding day. It was the ring that sealed the promised of their wedding vows."

"Did he get it back from the king?" Eve asked, walking round the glassy block, her eyes fixed on the form within.

"He did," Flynn nodded, catching her line of thought and following her gaze. "It was one of the things he did before leaving. He would have put it... He would have put it back on his finger."

Emily bristled. "The body predates the time of Christ," she said. "Any marriage ceremony then would have been a pagan hand fasting ceremony, not the Christian exchange of rings."

"Why not?" Flynn enquired. "Christianity stole plenty of other Pagan ideas. He was a smith. Making jewellery of any sort would be easy, but he famously makes rings. Why? To remind his wife of her promise."

"Okay, but I don't see how that helps us," Emily conceded.

"Look at his hands," Flynn waved a wand towards the body. "Where is the ring he went to such great trouble to steal back?"

"On a chain around his neck," Emily shrugged. "In a pouch by his waist. Why does it have to be on his finger? It was his wife's."

"No, it was the one his wife gave him," Flynn persisted. "It was his. It was his most prized possession. He would have been wearing it."

"Fine," Emily gave in with a shrug. "He was walking and his ring has gone. I don't see how that gets us any further."

"Why would he be walking," Eve asked again. "He has wings. It's a much faster way to travel in this landscape. He would only land for a handful of reasons. One: the visibility was so bad he couldn't fly in it for fear of crashing. Two: he was walking to meet a person he knew. Three: he was walking to reach a place nearby on the ground."

"Exactly," shouted Flynn, pointing triumphantly at his fiancée. "He had reached either a person or a place, and only one of those makes sense when you include the ring."

"The person," Emily sighed.

"No, the place," Flynn shrugged. "The person came along later, maybe much later. Dying in an avalanche isn't exactly on the battlefield, but he was fighting for something. I'm sure his wife would have thought that was an argument for bringing him to Valhalla. She was a Valkyr, you see. He landed to walk to somewhere nearby, died and she collected his soul, along with the ring she had given him years before."

"So where do you think he was heading, Librarian?" Eve grinned.

"I can't be sure until we find it, of course," Flynn began, picking up one of the other artefacts from the ice flow. "But I think he was going home."

XXXX

The warehouse was dark, dusty and quiet. The contraption had worked as Jones had been told it would. The door had opened into the familiar aisles of the warehouse. So far, they had moved a dozen or more boxes through the door into the Library, taking care to check each one for any of the items represented on the machine. Stone, Cassandra and Jones had ferried boxes back and forth to the office, while Jenkins and da Vinci had moved them elsewhere for safe keeping.

"I can't believe that actually worked!" Jones kept muttering.

"You ain't the only one," Stone muttered in passing one time.

"This is going to take days," Cassandra sighed. "We have barely cleared one aisle. Look at this place: there are hundreds of artefacts here. Thousands!"

"Then we take what we can," Jones decided.

They had continued ferrying boxes out of the warehouse and now had started on a new aisle. It would take a while, Jones knew. It would take days. The sooner you start a job, though, he shrugged. At least the place was abandoned now.

A sound made him halt. Was it abandoned? They hadn't heard anything from the Serpent Brotherhood in months. Since Dulaque's death, in fact. He raised a hand. Behind him, Cassandra and Stone froze. The noise sounded again. There was definitely someone else here. The trio put down their boxes and listened.

"The chains of the wolf have been broken," announced a voice, accompanied by a rattle of chains.

"The serpent stirs," added a second voice.

"The queen of hell rises," finished a third. "Our work here is almost done, brethren. Go, prepare yourselves for the next stage of the transformation."

Jones' jaw tightened, but he waited until the voices were definitely gone before he turned to the other two. "We need to get these boxes out of here and talk to Jenkins," he hissed. "I think I know what's going on."

"From that?" Cassandra's eyebrows went up. "How?"

Jones looked up and met her eyes with a steady gaze. "Because I know who the guy in charge was."