“It needs mana to spread,” Sophia muttered. Her voice became louder and higher pitched as she continued. “To make cuttings, at least. More mana than it can make on its own, probably more than the area can support, next to Casterville. I bet that’s why they aren’t normally an issue; the fact that it found its way into an artificially high mana environment has to be why it’s a threat at all. This explains a lot; I bet it stole all of the mana geodes from the south end of the building and that’s why it’s dead. There probably aren’t any left underground, either. That doesn’t explain this display; why are they all still highly magical? They’re more magical than the one we took to Halven, they can’t all have been open for ten years. Where are the dead ones?”
“They could, if that one was older and these were newer,” Dav disagreed, “but you’re right, this isn’t a good sign. The corpsevine isn’t smart enough to put them all here; they’d be with it on the top floor or down on the ground floor where it was using them to make corpsevine cuttings.”
“Putting the stones in the middle seems pretty smart to me, then,” Amy commented. Sophia couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or disagreeing with Dav. “I wouldn’t want to carry them around all the time.”
Dav shook his head. “That’s exactly it. I’m not sure it’s even smart enough to figure out that the higher mana level came from the rocks; figuring out it needed to break them open and put them in a central location sounds simple to us, but it’s a plant and I don’t think it really understands things the way we do.”
Before Amy could voice any arguments beyond a frown and a shake of her head, Dav continued. “We killed all of its monsters. That made it use what it clearly considered its biggest weapon against us, the illusion that caught you and me. If it had caught Sophia, too, it might have worked; we might have exhausted ourselves and retreated. It wouldn’t have solved things if we came back, and it didn’t work at all when Sophia saw through it, so why didn’t it try anything else?”
“I think it didn’t have enough mana,” Sophia contributed. “That spell has to have wiped it out, and I must have killed it before it was able to recover enough to do anything else. But I see what you mean; it was a bad plan. It couldn’t even run away since it gave up the only cutting it had left. Why didn’t it save a spare cutting, just in case?”
“It didn’t think of it. That’s probably also why it didn’t hold back a monster to use with the illusion.” Amy paused and seemed to think through the situation. “I think I see what you mean. That seems like a pretty basic emergency plan, and it was definitely planning for emergencies. Maybe it didn’t expect anything to get past the giant monster, but couldn’t support the monster itself while we were in the hallway?”
Dav shook his head. “Maybe, but I doubt it. I think it’s simpler than that. Plants aren’t tool users; it didn’t give the cuttings any instructions beyond what instinct gave them. It was more of a planner than I’d expect, but it didn’t think about what happens when plans go wrong. I can agree with you that far, but I doubt it would have moved the rocks. It’s easy to believe it would break them open, but I doubt it would move them like this; it’d probably take the bodies it wanted to turn into corpsevines to the rocks. The bodies were being moved anyway, after all. No, I think it’s much simpler than a smart plant. I think the corpsevine crown isn’t alone.”
“It’s not alone?” Sophia repeated Dav’s words to make sure she heard them correctly. “You think someone is working with the monster, helping it?”
Dav nodded. “If Lillah Gardener can walk safely among the corpsevines, why couldn’t the Head Gardener-Mage? Sure, maybe she was caught by surprise and killed, but she looked awfully healthy and so did the woman we found right at the beginning of this all. I think someone’s feeding bodies to the corpsevines, helped it take out people who were threats to it, and has generally kept it around as a threat. I don’t know why yet, but there could be a lot of different reasons.”
Sophia shuddered at the thought of someone helping literal monsters take over bodies. Despite her revulsion, she couldn’t really argue against the conclusion; it made a lot of things that didn’t make sense come together. It wasn’t just the stones, either, though the more she thought about it, the more that seemed like good evidence. “That would explain why the threat disappeared for years, and also why all of these are new. I wonder if the new corpsevine was planted with a cracked geode and these were added at the same time. Whoever did it wouldn’t even have to be able to sneak in if they did it all at once.”
“Monsters do not need the help,” Amy said with a snort. She looked down at the mess of geodes and shook her head. “Doesn’t mean they don’t get it sometimes, just that whoever did it needs to be found and killed. We need more; we need to know who did this.”
“Someone from another Conservatory?” Dav suggested. “They’d have access to geodes, the materials to grow a young corpsevine, and a place to do it.”
“But not the reason,” Sophia countered. “The West Conservatory is already dead, it’s not competition. No, I think it’s someone who wanted something much bigger. Maybe they had help from another Conservatory, maybe not, but I think someone wanted the city.”
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“How does that work?” Dav shook his head. “Samuel said they’d evacuate the city if the Challenge wasn’t resolved before the monsters broke out in a year and attacked, but that doesn’t let anyone take over.”
“If he manages to defend the city and the Mage-Chancellor has already left, it does,” Amy countered. “That’s enough that he might be able to convince the people who return to support him over the man who fled. I’d expect the people who stay to be Called, but there are some Professions that can be useful in a siege or he might plan to take a Profession once the siege is won.”
Sophia didn’t like the idea the two of them cooked up, that this might be a plot to take over the city. That wasn’t how rulership was supposed to work. At the same time, this wasn’t home. She couldn’t guarantee that things worked well here. “Do we have to deal with that? I don’t know how to fix a plot like that.”
“We don’t have to,” Amy admitted. “But if we don’t do something, we’re probably giving up on completing the Challenge. Maybe finding these geodes is enough, but if there’s also a clue in here to who’s responsible, finding it is probably the point of the Challenge.”
“The Guide does that?” Sophia wasn’t sure why she was surprised. Having a Challenge Dungeon based on political machinations that included a monster outbreak really wasn’t any different from having it based on the monster outbreak itself, but it felt different somehow. It felt like the Guide was interfering more, somehow, even though it did exactly the same thing.
“Yeah,” Amy answered confidently. “It explains a lot about why this is a Leveled Challenge instead of a static one. Most of the time, a monster infestation Challenge is a copy of the real monster. Leveled Challenges are the tricky ones, the ones you can’t just beat your way through. So having a Leveled Challenge where we have to find out how this happened, enough to satisfy the Registry Master that she needs to do something? Yeah, that sounds like something that might be in a Leveled Challenge. Finding the geodes might be enough, but having to find that and something else surely is.”
Sophia stared at Amy consideringly. She sounded confident, mostly, but there was a hesitation on the last few words that made Sophia wonder. Amy knew more than they did, but Sophia didn’t think she’d ever been in a Challenge before. She knew it all from stories and what she was taught growing up, which was definitely useful but not the same as having been there.
“How do you know she’s not involved? The Registry Master, that is.” Dav’s question was entirely too reasonable when Sophia thought about it.
Amy laughed. “A Registry Master? Why would she want to take over a city, especially a weak one like Casterville? She has more power as Registry Master than she would as Mage-Chancellor. He has to deal with all of the other Professional mages in the city, she runs the Registry and can tell him what to do for anything that affects Called.”
“Maybe she wants both?” Dav proposed.
Amy shook her head. “Only a Professional can rule a city, and a Professional can’t run a Registry. Anyone who tried would be kicked out by all the neighboring Registries as soon as they found out. It’s happened before, to bigger places than this. Places that actually matter.”
Sophia knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Some people didn’t learn from history; they thought their situation was different. Perhaps a place that “didn’t matter” would not get the same response. At the same time, Sophia had never met the Registry Master; all she knew was that Arryn, the merchant they traveled with to reach Casterville, thought she was a fair person and a decent Registry Master. That wasn’t much to go on.
Sophia shook her head. “We have to trust something. Why don’t we trust her for now unless we find something that means we shouldn’t?”
Amy looked like she wanted to protest the Registry Master’s innocence again, but she didn’t say anything. Sophia was certain they’d have the argument again if they did find something that indicated she was involved.
Dav smiled. “Fair enough. I’d rather have someone who can take what we find and deal with it so that we don’t have to.”
“You and me both,” Sophia agreed. She had no idea how to deal with a huge plot to destroy a town to take it over and she didn’t really want to have to figure it out. “Let’s hope we can do that. Uh, if there is something, the most likely places are up with the corpsevine or between here and the front door, right?”
“We didn’t find anything while we were digging up the corpsevine, and we moved a lot of dirt. I can go through it if you think I should?” Dav didn’t sound eager to follow his offer.
Sophia shook her head. “We can all go up there if we have to. Why don’t we search around here first?”
“I’ll start here,” Amy stated firmly. “Why don’t you two try to find the entrance?”
Sophia looked at Dav with a shrug. She didn’t think it would take both of them, but she also didn’t think it was necessarily a problem. “Let me pick up the geodes first, that’ll make your search easier.”
Sophia was halfway through picking up the geodes when she heard something clatter against the wood shelf. When she looked down, she saw something golden. It wasn’t magical, so she leaned forward to take a good look. She could see a bent metal bar that looked like it was supposed to clip into a slot that it could no longer reach. “Guys? I found something.”
When she flipped it over, it was a golden, or at least gold-washed, two-inch brooch chapped like a bird with its head turned to the side. The wings had blue and red enamel for the upper layers of the feathers, but the long feathers were the same golden color as the head and back of the brooch. The belly was a single large enameled “stone” that looked like fire with smoke rising from it on a dark background.
It was exactly the sort of thing that she could believe was dropped and lost while a bunch of rocks were carted in and then broken open, and it almost had to be identifiable.
Phoenix Brooch [https://i.imgur.com/MH4cTRy.jpeg]