They left the next morning before the sun had properly committed to rising, three packs loaded onto a borrowed cart-horse and Elrick riding alongside them in place of Josh, who had been, in Elrick's exact words, "far too likely to fall asleep somewhere that actually mattered this time." Stephan spent the first hour of the ride sulking about this on Josh's behalf, entirely undeterred by the fact that Josh himself had seemed thrilled to get the short vacation.
The road southeast fell away from anything resembling civilization within the first few hours, worn farmland giving way to scrubby, wind-bent grassland, and then to something flatter and greyer still, as if the land itself had quietly stopped trying somewhere back around the second milestone. Bruce spent most of the ride with the map spread across his knees, tracing the same charted road over and over with the particular restlessness of a man who preferred certainty and was being offered very little of it.
"You're going to wear a hole in that paper before we even get there," Stephan said, watching him from over his shoulder.
"I would like to have memorized every inch of it before we get there, yes. That feels like a reasonable use of two days of travel." Bruce didn't look up. "Unlike whatever you're doing with that sash."
"I'm testing its aerodynamics," Stephan said, with the wounded dignity of a man who had, in fact, simply been flapping the end of it in the wind for the last twenty minutes. "It's important research."
Xavier rode a little apart from both of them, coat folded carefully across his saddlebag rather than worn — Elrick's insistence that they "look the part" apparently didn't extend to riding two days through dust and horse sweat in it — and spent most of the first day turning the shape of the coming task over in his head without arriving anywhere useful.
Six hundred years was a number he couldn't actually picture. He tried, a few times, to imagine what a person even became after that long, and kept landing on the same uncomfortable blank space every time.
They made camp the first night in the lee of a low, wind-scoured ridge, Elrick handling the fire with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly done this more times than he ever mentioned in his lectures, and for a while it felt almost like any other night on the road — Stephan burning the first batch of trail bread beyond recognition, Bruce cataloguing every star he could name for reasons nobody had asked about, Xavier mostly quiet, watching the flames.
"You've gone quiet," Elrick said eventually, settling beside him with two cups of something bitter that was charitably called tea. "That's usually a bad sign with you."
"Just thinking about the thing you said. About listening, if he wants to talk before it turns violent." Xavier turned the cup slowly in his hands, not drinking it. "People don't usually say things like that. About monsters."
"Well..." Elrick hesitated. "I've read enough old accounts of him to know he wasn't always what the histories call him. Whatever else six hundred years does to a mind, it rarely simplifies it. I'd rather you three go in expecting complexity than a simple villain, even if it turns out I'm wrong, and he's exactly the monster the reports describe."
"And if you're wrong the other way? If he's not a monster at all?"
Elrick was quiet for a long moment, firelight moving across a face that looked, just then, considerably older than Xavier usually let himself notice. "Then I hope one of you is kind enough to notice it before it's too late to matter."
Elrick stood and wandered off to "collect more firewood."
Their brief conversation ended there.
***
The second day's ride felt longer despite covering less ground, the landscape flattening further into the grey, stunted plain Elrick had warned them about, grass growing in patchy, reluctant clumps as if the soil itself had given up on the idea some time ago. By midafternoon the old battlefield came into view properly for the first time — a vast, scarred stretch of land that even now, centuries later, seemed to hold its silence like a held breath.
"This is as far as I go," Elrick said, reining in at the edge of it, studying the horizon with an expression that gave away more worry than his voice did. "Not because I don't want to. Because this will be your test, not mine. I'll be back here in five days. If you're not out by then, I'm coming in after you, rules or no rules."
"Five days feels optimistic," Bruce said.
"Five days is generous. Don't waste it." Elrick's usual grin made a brief, unconvincing return. "Go be terrifying."
The party collectively nodded and wandered towards the crypt.
The entrance itself was a half-collapsed stone stairway sinking into the earth at a steep angle, flanked by two worn statues so weathered their original shapes had long since eroded into vague, featureless suggestions of soldiers standing guard over something they'd clearly, eventually, failed to protect.
Xavier lingered a moment at the top of the stairs, looking back once at Elrick's retreating figure against the grey horizon, and felt the weight of the coat settle around him like something more than fabric. A reminder that whatever waited below, they weren't walking into it as the same three underprepared kids who'd once bumbled their way through a tinkering competition and a duel with a twelve-year-old. Something had shifted, quietly, over recent times, and it took a moment like this, dressed properly, standing at the edge of genuine danger, to actually notice it.
"You good?" Bruce asked, noticing him linger.
"Yeah." Xavier adjusted the coat's collar and started down the stairs. "Just thinking. Let's go be terrifying."
The stairway descended further than its size from above had suggested, worn steps slick with centuries of settled moisture, the daylight behind them shrinking to a small, distant square before finally vanishing around a bend entirely. Bruce lit a proper torch once the last of the natural light gave out, the flame throwing long, unsteady shadows across walls that had clearly once been finely worked stone before time and damp had worn most of the detail away.
"Anyone else feeling the temperature drop?" Stephan asked, breath beginning to fog faintly in the torchlight.
"That's normal for underground spaces," Bruce said, though he pulled his own coat tighter as he said it. "Probably."
"Very reassuring probably."
The passage widened briefly into a small landing where the wall bore a single carved inscription, the old script worn nearly illegible. Bruce crouched to study it while Xavier held the torch steady. "I can make out maybe every third word. Something about... a promise? Or a debt. Hard to say which without the connecting text."
"Great. Ominous and vague," Xavier said.
"Well," Stephan said, cracking his knuckles, the new samurai sash catching the wind that seemed to have no business existing this far underground. "No time like the present to get this done."