An Auger-Man's Scrawl

Chalk on a shoring-timber near the well-breach, left by an earlier salvager who took the easy bronze and knew better than to go deep — a plain warning about the water and what strips the grain-stores below it.

Chalked here for whoever comes after, since nobody else will say it plain:

The uppers are worth having and safe enough. Strip them, sell them, go home.

The deep augers are not worth your life. Past the breach the floor drops and the old vault's flooded black. I went in to the chest and came out and I do not go back, and I have a strong stomach.

Something is down there feeding. The grain never fully rotted — you'll smell it, sour-sweet, wrong. Whatever's kept fat on four hundred years of it left a shed skin on the landing bigger than my pack. It molts. Things that molt, grow.

Take the easy coin. Leave the drowned wheels turning in the dark. — a man with sense