There were too many skeletons in the ruins. Odys had thought that when the Abraham Family suddenly declined during the Fourth Epoch, some of its members had hidden here and died. That would explain the skeletons.
But when an Aurora Order member fired a flare, Odys realized he was wrong. In the center of the space stood a mound of skeletons as high as a small hill.
A thick layer of skeletons covered the surrounding ground. If people had taken refuge here and died after being trapped, they would never have ended up piled on top of one another.
More importantly, there were so many bones that they formed a floor.
Odys found it strange, and so did the Aurora Order members. He faintly heard one of them say, "Could this be where the Abraham Family dumped their bones?"
The sweet-looking Demoness of Pleasure beside him said, "A graveyard? It doesn't look like one."
"No," the Aurora Order member explained. "I mean, perhaps they kept some kind of monster here. It ate the flesh and left the bones. Or perhaps the Abraham Family simply had a tradition of eating people..."
The Demoness of Pleasure said, "That doesn't seem right either. What monster—or person—would eat its prey and leave the skeletons so intact?"
In the corner, Odys thought, I know someone who did that. His name was Darwin, though he didn't eat people.
The three Mid-Sequence Aurora Order members searched ahead cautiously but found no trace of the intruders.
On the inner side of the towering hall filled with skeletons were two enormous passages, each with a pair of massive stone doors.
The doors stood open. Beyond them, everything seemed clean, without a single skeleton.
The three Aurora Order members wondered if the intruders had already gone through one of the