Cerebrim Idol

Raggard received a note with a rough tunnel map and the words come quickly written beneath it.

He recognized Farder’s hand at once.

Whatever the Stonewalker had uncovered, it was not something to be left unattended.

Raggard gathered his traveling gear and made for the lower tunnels without delay. The greater portion of the journey lay within patrolled borders, and he expected to find his cousin waiting just beyond the last outpost gate.

The Stonewalker did not wait.

Farder seemed to step from the stone itself less than a mile past the gate and fell into stride beside him.

“Damn disturbing, it is,” he muttered.

Raggard glanced over.
“What is?”

“You’ll see.”

He offered nothing more.

As they walked, Raggard felt the change in his cousin’s pace. Shorter steps. A hand never far from the haft of his hammer. The kind of tension Farder carried only when he believed something nearby was listening.

Raggard drew his own battle hammer from his back without comment.

At a sharp bend in the tunnel, Farder slowed and raised two fingers. Silence.

They edged forward together.

The passage opened into a long, narrow cavern split by a shallow stream. Pale lichen clung to the walls and cast a thin, ghostly light across the stone.

Something stood beside the water.

Raggard’s breath caught.

A Cerebrim.

Octopus-crowned. Tall. Humanoid in its frame. Its silhouette was unmistakable, even in the low glow.

It did not move.

Farder advanced to within inches of it without looking at the figure at all. His eyes traced the cavern walls. The ceiling. The dark mouth of the far tunnel.

Raggard took a cautious step closer.

Only then did he understand.

The surface was not worked stone.
No chisel marks.
No seams.

It was flesh.

Or what had once been flesh.

The Cerebrim had been turned to stone in the exact posture of its final moment.

They stood with it for several long breaths.

“A basilisk?” Raggard whispered.

Farder shook his head slowly.

“Too clean.”

“A medusa, then?”

“Wouldn’t leave it standing like that. Not this deep.”

Raggard frowned. “A wizard?”

“Maybe.”

Farder finally looked at the petrified creature.

“Or maybe someone who builds their monsters instead of summoning them.”

They waited.

Long minutes passed while Farder searched every shadow and hollow. At last, he lowered his hammer.

“Nothing close enough to hear us,” he said.

They approached the statue together.

Near the edge of the stream, set carefully against a flat slab of stone, rested a small figure.

A carved likeness of the Cerebrim.

Its form was unmistakable — the heavy crown of tentacles, the narrow shoulders, the rigid, upright stance. The carving was crude in places and hurried in others, but it captured the creature’s shape with unsettling accuracy.

It had not been dropped.

It had been placed.

Raggard turned the small idol slowly in his hands.

“This wasn’t made by a mason,” he said.

“No,” Farder replied. “It was made by someone in a hurry.”

They left the petrified Cerebrim untouched.

Neither of them wished to test whether whatever had done this still claimed the cavern.

As they prepared to withdraw, Farder paused.

“I heard something, a few weeks back,” he said quietly. “Free Caravan, running the southern trade spur. Came back missing two guards and half their wagons.”

Raggard waited.

“They swore it was stone golems,” Farder continued. “Two of them. Fresh-made. Poorly shaped. Only just holding together.”

Raggard looked down at the small idol in his hands.

“Summoner?”

“Wizard, most likely,” Farder said. “Or something that wears one well enough to pass.”

He glanced once more at the unmoving Cerebrim by the stream.

“Only… this isn’t how golems hunt.”

They sealed the cavern mouth before leaving.

The petrified Cerebrim was left where it stood.

The small carved figure was later entered into the forge archives as:

Idol of the Cerebrim —
a carved likeness discovered beside a petrified Cerebrim specimen in the lower tunnels. The idol is believed to have been deliberately placed, possibly as a marker or focus connected to an unknown stone-shaping entity operating beyond the patrolled borders.