This was a winding, dim tunnel carved out by humans wielding iron tools. Its rough stone walls held the same chill as the blizzard raging outside. Nights in the Himalayan Mountains were exceptionally cold; the claws of winter gripped the air tightly and slowly seeped into the cave with every breath. Agamotto walked at the front, holding a torch. Gravel scraped beneath his feet, tumbled loose, and slid deeper into the tunnel. Resin torches embedded in cracks in the rock gave off the charred scent of burning sap. Thin, pale-gray smoke rose lightly, gathered against the rock ceiling, and drifted unsteadily toward the entrance before vanishing into the dense, pure-white snowfall.
As the firelight gradually spread ahead, thousands of skeletons adorned with crude gemstones and precious metals came into view along both sides of the tunnel. Rust clinging to the rock walls flaked away in the moving air stirred up by the visitors, adding a faint, nearly imperceptible scent of blood to the already foul air. Inanna insisted that the blood smell came from the skeletons laid out on either side of the tunnel, though they were quite clean—these bones had once belonged to the workers who dug this tunnel, and the workers' descendants were the natives living hundreds of kilometers away at lower elevations. The temperature here was too low for corpses to rot and decompose. At lower altitudes, bodies could have been given to eagles, falcons, and wolves, returning them to the ecological cycle—but here, Agamotto could only place the bodies in boiling snowmelt, strip away the flesh, apply grease, and embed gemstones, turning them into relics resembling those of the future Catholic Church. This was how he commemorated this group's contribution to the planet, though they knew nothing of it. They did not know what was sealed