Peasants' Ossuary

History. This chamber, once an ordinary burial chamber, was retrofitted as an ossuary—a resting place for hundreds of separate remains—when increasingly limited space in the Vaults of Day, Dusk, and Dawn required that the bones of commonfolk be exhumed and relocated to make room for those of nobles, warriors, and clergy.

Features. The air here is cold and dank, with a faint scent of mold and mildew. Three piles of bones fill the space here: a tall pile of large bones (such as femurs, ribs, hip bones) in the northwest; a smaller pile of small bones (such as finger bones, vertebrae, and foot bones) in the southwest; and a long pile of skulls along the eastern wall.

A six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide, one-foot-deep, one-and-a-half-ton stone slab fills the northern doorway that once led to the Vault of Dawn, carved with the insignia of a rising sun and sealed with mortar and plaster.

A two-foot-wide circular hole in the center of the floor holds the rotted stubs of a wooden grate.

Secrets.

• The Crack. A crack in the slab's bottom left corner leads to the Vault of Dawn to the north.

• Cistern Entrance. The hole plunges ten feet through mortared stone—five feet vertically, then seven feet diagonally—before emerging through the southeastern wall of the Buried Cistern below, twenty feet above the cistern's floor.