-Broadcast-
Perona's ghosts reported back in the way ghosts do — not with language but with the impressions they carried when she recalled them, the sensory residue of what they'd passed through. Stone. Darkness. Old air. A mechanism. No living things.
"There's a way to open it from the inside," she said. "Hold my body."
"What?"
"Hold my body. Don't let it fall over."
Moria caught her as her spirit separated from it — a process that looked, from the outside, like the girl simply going vacant, her eyes going still and her weight shifting entirely into his hands. The spirit that stepped out was identical to her in every detail, Gothic dress and all, and walked through the tomb door without slowing.
On the other side: darkness, and the smell of centuries, and the mechanism. Her combined ghost did the work. Stone grinding against stone, deep within the door's architecture — the sound of something very large and very old being asked to move.
The door rose.
Moria watched it with the specific focus of a man who was trying to appear more composed than he was. The gap at the base widened. Cold air moved through it. The smell that came with it was the smell of a place that had been sealed for a very long time, which was the smell of everything organic in that space having completed whatever process it was going to complete, decades or centuries ago, without interference.
Perona's spirit returned through the door ahead of it finishing its movement. Back into her body. She shook her head once, the way people do when adjusting to reoccupying themselves, and stepped out of his arms.
"There's a mechanism for the eternal lamps too," she said. "It's set up to trigger when the door opens. Either the mechanism is broken after this long, or—"
The candles lit.
Not one at a time — one at a time, starting from the entrance and moving inward, but the sequence was fast enough to appear simultaneous from a distance. Green flame. The color of her ghost light, which was either coincidence or wasn't. The tomb chamber resolved out of the darkness like a developing image.
Perona looked around.
"She expected to come back," she said.
The observation was accurate. A tomb that keeps its lamps ready for lighting, that places its mechanisms accessible from the inside — that was not a tomb built for someone who had accepted death as final. Perona had been in enough tombs to recognize the difference between burial and storage. This was storage. The tomb owner had made arrangements.
Perona found this worthy of note and not much else. She had seen strong people afraid of death before. The fear didn't help them.
The chamber was large.
The burial objects were extensive — gold, silver, fabric that had survived better than fabric usually survived, vessels of various materials arranged with the care of someone who had considered the placement. Perona moved through them with professional interest, cataloguing what was portable and what was worth carrying.
At the center, on a raised platform of black jade, the woman lay.
Her preservation was the first remarkable thing. Not mummified — not the desiccated result of dry air and time, which was the common outcome — but something closer to sleep, the skin holding its color and texture in a way that shouldn't have been possible after what was clearly a very long time. Whatever method had been used, it had worked.
Around her bed, nine stone statues.
They were the same figures from the door — the same nine shadow-forms in attendance, rendered now in three dimensions, each different from the others in posture and apparent nature but unified in their orientation toward the woman at the center. Some were shaped like things that had no common name. Others suggested human origin that had been significantly modified. All of them had the quality of things that had been depicted by someone who had seen them, not imagined them.
The closer you got to the statues, the more the air changed. Not temperature — something else. Pressure, maybe, or something that Observation Haki would have named more precisely.
"What power did she use to control things like this?" Perona said, looking at the nearest statue. "A Devil Fruit?"
"Doesn't matter," Moria said, from the woman's bedside. "She's mine now."
He had already taken the shadow out — not a good one, he acknowledged privately, just a placeholder from a small-time pirate he'd stored for occasions like this. He would match her properly with something stronger once they were back in the Devil's Triangle. For now, the priority was establishing occupancy.
He applied the shadow to the corpse.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. The shadow, which should have entered the body with the straightforward compliance of a medium accepting a new occupant, did not enter. It contacted the surface of the corpse and stopped, as though the corpse had already been claimed by something it could not displace.
Moria frowned.
A third attempt. Same result. The shadow sat against the woman's skin and would not go further, like trying to press two magnets together at the same pole.
He stood back and looked at her.
"That's not supposed to happen," he said.
Perona had stopped examining the burial objects. She was looking at the nine statues — specifically at the fact that they were stone, and had been stone when she looked at them a moment ago, and she was not entirely certain all of them were still stone now.