It’s a dead fish. Or six dead fish, depending on how you look at it – a hydra with six heads. You can even see the egg cluster they hatched from nearby.
That’s unusual enough to begin with – even four heads is rare enough that it gets a boasting fisher laughed at. But it’s even stranger to find any fish in this dry tunnel. Does the water level change here as it does in the town? Or did somebody bring eggs here and hatch them only for them to die soon after birth?
You don’t see anything else in the tunnel. In fact, it abruptly ends, which is another oddity. There’s no way for the tunneler to have even gotten here purely by physical means. Which suggests that someone brought it here magically, probably whoever trained it. So your first guess is that the same person is responsible for the hydra eggs. But why?
Hmm. A test, perhaps? If you were magically transporting things, and unsure if the spell would even work, you wouldn’t want the tunneler to die on arrival. So transport some eggs that are about to hatch, and if they still hatch, then the transporting is safe. Why eggs? Because they don’t do anything, but if they’re far enough along, they’re still alive so you can see if they stay alive. Why hydra eggs, then? Perhaps to test for raw probability. If the transport has only a chance of failure, then some heads might hatch and others might not. Which now gives you unpleasant mental images of what a hydra that’s only partially hatched would look like.
It’s still more than a bit of a stretch as an explanation. But you can’t think of one that makes more sense. Even if this cluster ended up here by sheer chance without anyone bringing them into the tunnel, that would at a minimum require some way for eggs from the sea to get here. And you just don’t see any sign of that.
Wait, when you were comparing notes with Norle, she mentioned finding a lot of hydra eggs in the cathedral. Is this somehow related? Perhaps you should take a look at those eggs for yourself.
Still, before that, you take one last look around the tunnel in case there’s something you missed.
Markings on the floor, it’s numbers, a lot of equations, maybe part of the sick experiment conducted here?
Markings on the floor, they’re magic symbols that you don’t recognize, but they are emitting faint traces of ether
A button from a shirt or coat, it doesn’t look old, maybe whoever brought the eggs here dropped it? Might be a clue
Footsteps, that aren’t really human, maybe they’re the baby hydra’s before it was… Teleported? Carried away?
Can’t you just use time magic to see what transpired here?