Chapter 80 Witchcraft.
Isaac rapped his knuckles on the plain wooden door in front of him. A thud followed by what sounded like cloth being shaken out was the retort. “Just a minute!” Aria yelled from inside. Isaac chuckled and Lenna shook her head at the continued commotion on the other side of the door. “Yes, I know that’s mine. No. Just put it over there.” Aria went on to someone whose voice had yet to be heard but it was safe to assume that her interlocutor was Claus.
“It sounds like a catastrophe in there.” Isaac commented. “They’ve been here for what, two days?” Isaac wondered.
The door opened to reveal a mildly disheveled Aria. The candlelight that caught her frizzy reddish brown hair brought out the red and drowned the brown. Her emerald eyes looked up to meet the two people waiting just outside her door. “Isaac.” She greeted him with a pleasant smile. “Hi.”
Isaac chuckled. “Hi.” He said in return. “Are we interrupting something?” He asked, trying to look past her into the room but the door was only half open and she was standing in the other half.
“I think we are.” Lenna added with an amused look on her face that tried to hide the second hand embarrassment.
Aria glanced over her shoulder so quickly if either of them had blinked they probably would’ve missed it. “No. Of course not.” The cleric of knowledge replied and opened the door the rest of the way before gesturing for them to enter. “I was just studying and you startled me. Please, take a seat and I’ll get some tea.”
Isaac and Lenna shared a look that seemed to say ‘Studying Claus more likely’ before they walked in and met Claus. The large bald man was wearing a pair of casual pants and a short sleeve shirt that Isaac thought both he and Lenna could have fit in together. “Claus.” Isaac greeted the goliath with a nod. “Keeping out of trouble?” He asked with a wink.
Claus grinned back. “Sometimes.” He replied and Isaac was sure that his and Lenna’s assumptions over what had been going on were correct.
The room in the inn that Aria and Claus were staying in was open with its own small table and two beds. The one bed was noticeably larger than the other. A glance between Claus and the larger bed showed Isaac that the large man still probably barely fit on the bed that was clearly designed for couples. The smaller bed was the same size as every other single person bed Isaac had seen thus far. The smaller bed was done so well that it looked like it hadn’t even been used but the larger bed had the blankets thrown on them haphazardly. ‘At least they aren’t on the floor.’ Isaac thought to himself before continuing to scan the room. There was a small magical stove that consisted of an iron plate held a few inches above the counter by a dozen spikes of iron that seemed to cradle it. The underside of the plate was glowing softly and pulling in mana while the top started getting hot.
Aria was setting a recently filled teapot on the hotplate. She was wearing a casual dress much like the one Lenna had borrowed from Jennie. The dress was tied around her waist and fell down to her shins exposing her bare feet. Her sleeves were rolled up so they were out of the way and she brushed some hair out of her face as she turned around to face them. “Give it a few minutes.” She stated and slid into a chair next to Claus.
Isaac and Lenna joined Aria and Claus at the table. Isaac made sure to position himself across, and not next to, Claus so the elvish women would be separated. Isaac hoped that if they weren’t next to each other then their cat versus dog act would at least be muted slightly. “How was the trip here? I know you’ve been back for a little while but we’ve been busy.” Isaac queried.
“Empty.” Claus replied.
Aria nodded. “I think you guys cleared out half of the monsters in the region. There was this absolutely awful smell coming from some of the side tunnels though.” She complained.
“Rotting and overcooked fish?” Isaac questioned.
Aria wrinkled her nose. “Yes.” She replied curtly. “I take it that was your doing?”
“More and less.” Isaac replied but got a confused look from Aria.
“More and less?” Aria questioned incredulously.
“Yeah, we killed them all, had to cook up a few of the flesh monsters. We got lucky though at the end. I don’t think we all would’ve survived another one after we finished off the mushroomancer. That did mean that there were still some corpses left lying around.” Isaac explained. “We used fire to get rid of the spore infested corpses while we fought and made the entire place smell like a seafood grill gone horribly wrong, so, ‘more’.” He punctuated the word by making air quotes with his fingers. “We cleaned up most of the corpses using said fire, which kept most of them from being able to rot, so in a way we also made it better.”
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“As in less bad.” Aria finished dryly.
Isaac nodded once and looked way too proud of himself for turning an idiom on its head. “Exactly.”
Aria sighed but then cracked a smile before chuckling. “You’re an idiot.” She teased.
“I have to get my bad jokes in now.” Isaac said somberly which sobered up the table in an instant.
Lenna punched Isaac in the arm so fast that no one at the table could react. “I’ll knock you out, keep you sedated for a few days, and hide you until it all blows over.” Lenna threatened. She was dead serious. There wasn’t a doubt in Isaac’s mind that she would do it. He swallowed hard.
“Yes ma’am.” Isaac replied. “No more morbid jokes until afterwards.”
Lenna’s intense gaze bore so deep into Isaac’s eyes he felt like she was reading and inspecting his very soul for falsehoods. “Good.” She replied and then turned back to the others at the table. “Have you been informed?” She asked Aria and Claus.
“Informed about what?” Aria questioned worriedly. “What’s going on?”
Shadows danced around them and one after another the candles and lamps were snuffed out until the room was in total darkness. Without the light, covering them all in an orb of shadows that silenced their conversation to the outside world was easier and more sustainable. Once sealed off from the rest of the world Isaac and Lenna began filling in Aria and Claus on the perilous future Safeharbor had. He made sure to inform them that the Arbencrofts seemed decently confident in their plan working and that was why they were even risking baiting in Jallen in the first place. If the Arbencrofts thought that they would lose then they would have called for reinforcements from the capital or at least Sapphirestone but as far as Isaac and Lenna were aware they hadn’t.
“So that’s why the Guild Master asked us to stick around.” Aria said once the duo were finished. “Usually adventurers aren’t necessary in court proceedings because truth spells are used so personal testimony isn’t required. At least, not here, in other frontier towns testimonies are basically a necessity to convict anyone of anything.” She rambled a bit. “The Guild Master asked us to stick around until after the trials were done, which was odd but not odd enough to raise any real questions. Is he doing the same for all of the adventurers in town? Making up reasons for them to stay, I mean.”
“I’d assume so.” Isaac replied. “We’ll need all of you who are strong enough to hold your own. Aria, I assume you won’t be fighting at all if we can help it. Battlefield healers are hard to come by.”
Aria nodded more to herself than to Isaac. “Claus will be on the front line though.” She said and her face took on the countenance of someone who was overlooking a battlefield. It looked to Isaac like Aria was building the entire future battle in her mind and splaying it out on the table in front of them. “I’m going to do a divination.” Aria said abruptly and sat bolt upright. “I need light.”
Isaac nodded and his shadows drifted away. Lenna got up from her seat and went around lighting the candles with a flame that danced above her thumb and index finger. Lenna had summoned the small flame with a snap of her fingers and froze her hand in place immediately after the snap as if she was holding onto the stem of a flower but the flower was a small candle sized flame that danced as she moved. By the time the room was alight again Aria had a handful of things tossed about on the table. “What’s all this for?” Isaac wondered.
“El’No can’t intervene as directly as we wish she could. She is a goddess of knowledge though so she can help us out in that sense to some degree. If I asked her to come down and smite Jallen V’Nova she would probably scold me for being sarcastic to my goddess… again.” Aria shook her head to get back on track. “Trying to hear her voice directly while awake is almost impossible so she gave us a ritual to contact her and ask for knowledge.”
“Why can’t you just sleep on it then?” Isaac wondered.
“Because she isn’t babysitting all of us at the same time.” Aria explained. She winced. “And scheduling an appointment with a goddess who is notorious for losing track of time is an awful way to get advice.”
“Scheduling an appointment?” Isaac asked with a chuckle.
“Yes, we would send her a prayer and when we did we would let her know when we would be asleep and for how long so she could talk to us in our dreams. Apparently it works with some other gods and goddesses.” Aria explained. “Those that don’t get angry with a mortal trying to set their schedule anyway. That number is surprisingly large, all things considered.”
“Large as in?” Isaac continued.
“Four.” Aria said simply. “Now, back to the ritual and my time blind goddess.” Aria refocused. “Her domains are knowledge, secrets, the pursuit and hiding of information, passwords, codes, curiosity, riddles, puzzles, penmanship, and finally, scrolls and books.”
Isaac and Lenna inspected the table full of seemingly random things. “What is this?” Isaac asked and picked up a cylinder that had rows and rows of letters up and down its length.
Aria sighed. “The problem with the ritual is that it has to include a representation of each of her domains.” Aria explained. “That is an encoded puzzle box. The password is a riddle and there is a scroll hidden inside with a secret penned on it.” She cracked a weary smile. “It’s quite the curious trinket isn’t it?”
Isaac chuckled. “That is most of them in one item.” He stated the obvious. “What’s with the rest of this stuff? You are only missing books and the pursuit of information and I see the book.”
“Loot.” Aria replied simply.
“Loot?” Lenna asked incredulously. Isaac’s face showed as much confusion as she felt.
“We’ve been looking for the secret vampire civilization, remember?” Aria asked to which Isaac nodded slowly for her to continue. “Everything laid out in front of you has some kind of connection to it, I think.”
Isaac picked up what looked like a discarded knife. The blade was short and dull and there were flakes of rust along its length. “A junk knife?” He asked and set it down before picking up the next thing. “An arrowhead, I assume you found this in a skeleton somewhere.” Aria nodded. Isaac set it down and picked up the next thing. “What is this?”
“A broken piece of pottery.” Aria explained to him.
“So this is your pursuit of knowledge given form huh?” Isaac asked with a raised eyebrow.
Aria nodded and opened the book in the middle of the table. She turned to a blank page which wasn’t hard as only the first dozen or so pages were filled with anything but she paged past them too fast for Isaac or Lenna to see anything that was written on them. She arranged the items on the table so they formed a circle around the book with no discernible order to their placements. It seemed as though it didn’t matter as long as it was in a circle. “Witchcraft.” Lenna spoke quietly.
Aria stopped and turned sharply to her. She scowled at the dark elf for a long moment but didn’t comment. She took a deep breath to steady herself and then spoke.