Lieze kneeled down and felt around the table leg’s perimeter, surprised to find her fingers curling around the freezing surface of a metal ring. It was perfectly invisible and attached to the floor, leading her to believe that it was a part of some greater hidden mechanism. Drayya watched with interest as her investigation continued.
She yanked the ring up, causing dust to dislodge from hidden crevices in the stonework. It didn’t feel like she was lifting the ground, but something lighter. Pushing her hands against the table from beneath, she freed the leg from its invisible shackle and ran her fingers over the surface of the floor. Rather than smooth stone, she could feel the grainy, splinter-ridden texture of wood running up against her palm.
“It’s an illusion.” She felt out the shape of a square, “There’s a cellar door here. Or something that feels a lot like a cellar door, anyway.”
Without a table to get in the way, a great shelf of stone rose up as Lieze pulled on the latch. Not a second later, its surface was coated with a colourful incandescence as the illusion was dispelled, transforming the false floor into coarse wood. Lieze could spot a light beaming up from the hole, where a flimsy ladder had been propped up against the claustrophobic passageway.
A secret pathway. An invitation into the hidden recesses of the tower. Lieze tempered her growing curiosity with low expectations, but her mind was bursting with possibilities. Why would a Sage ever want to hide something? The natural answer only deepened her curiosity - because there was something too important to be gazed upon by the unwelcome eye, she thought.
“Well, well, well…” Drayya folded her arms and let out a great sigh of contentment, “And you were just about ready to give up, weren’t you?”
It was making sense to her now. The flimsy, harmless traps, the useless bookshelves, the overwhelming sense that the tower really was nothing more than a secluded home - it was all a hoax. A misleading ploy to divert would-be thieves from the tower’s secrets. The real tower was nestled within the belly of the earth, where its treasures could be left to ferment for centuries.
Secret Quest ‘Trial of the Sage’ Complete! Description - Discover a hidden pathway in Sigmund’s tower. Reward - 4,300xp
Level Up! You are now level [48] HP + 0 MP + 55 MIND + 1
Lieze examined the walls of the cellar, “It seems safe enough…”
“Why don’t we send the Void Beast down first?” Drayya asked, “If there are any traps waiting for us, better to let something else take the brunt of them.”
She couldn’t object to such a reasonable point. With all the enthusiasm of a housecat chasing a mouse, the Void Beast pounced into the darkness, landing with surprising grace at the bottom of the cellar. Having confirmed the absence of traps, Lieze lowered herself onto the rickety ladder and slid down, wincing as a stray splinter gouged into the flesh of her palm.
A mechanical humming wormed its way into her ears, running through the length of the stone corridor awaiting her at the bottom of the ladder. The passageway veered to the right after a short walk, hiding the source of the noise from sight. While Drayya made her way down the hatch, Lieze scanned the walls and ceiling for anything resembling a trap, concluding that the hallway was perfectly featureless - though that didn’t do much to ease her mind.
Drayya placed a hand on her shoulder, “What’s wrong? Let’s get going.”
“This hallway is too suspicious.” She replied, “Why would someone waste time constructing a path towards their hidden sanctum instead of placing it right below the tower?”
The more out-of-place the passageway became, the less enthusiastic she was about the idea of blindly marching forth. Digging into her Bag of Holding, she pulled out the Portable Home and spent the requisite minute to enter its bound dimensional space while Drayya prevented the Void Beast from moving ahead, grabbing the largest tome she could spot on her desk before reappearing in the hallway.
With both hands, she tossed the book as far as she possibly could down the hallway. As soon as it crossed the halfway point, something lit up in the stale air of the subterranean passageway.. The hairs on Lieze’s neck stood up as a great flash of light engulfed the corridor. The sound of a thunderclap left a horrid ringing in her ears. When her vision returned, there was no more book - only a smouldering pile of ash where it had landed.
“Ugh…” Drayya blinked in rapid sequence, her expression not unlike a drunkard having just woken up in the morning, “What was that?”
“Not something we can just walk through and hope for the best.” Lieze observed the thin branches of lightning coursing through the air, “I’d like to avoid being disintegrated, if possible.”
She scanned their end of the hallway in the hope of identifying some contraption that would disable the trap. If Sigmund visited that part of the tower regularly, there had to be some method of passing safely. Lieze clicked her tongue when the most likely scenarios bloomed in her mind. She could only imagine that he fashioned some sort of talisman which disabled any trap he wandered near, which would prevent anyone other than himself from entering.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
But that wasn’t a foolproof solution. If the talisman was misplaced or destroyed, he could have very well become a prisoner in his own home. There had to be a failsafe in place - a mechanism by which the tower’s traps could be disabled in an emergency.
“It wouldn’t be anything as simple as a lever or a button…” She thought, “Moreover, it would always have to be within arm’s reach. If the failsafe was only located at this end of the corridor, it would be useless if Sigmund was trapped on the other side.”
New Quest Received! ‘Panic Button’ - Discover a failsafe for the tower’s traps Reward - 3,900xp
The quest provided her with a crucial piece of wisdom: that there was, in fact, a failsafe of some description.
She turned to Drayya, “Have you noticed anything strange about the tower?”
“Apart from the fact that its only occupant seems to have spontaneously exploded?” She paused, searching her mind for an answer, “There were a number of books in the study written in a language I’ve never seen before. I just assumed they were some strange corruption of Elvish or Dwarvish and left it at that.”
“Could you go grab one?”
“Oh.” Drayya blinked, suppressing a look of surprise, “You don’t normally ask me to do something so politely.”
“Would you rather I screamed orders at you?”
Her mouth became wavey and self-conscious. She turned her head to the side, “Well… maybe when we’re somewhere more private? Uh… I’ll go get one of the books.”
She scampered up the ladder without another word. Lieze sighed and directed her attention towards the walls, which she searched for any sign of a hidden button or passage, making sure not to shimmy too close to the threshold where the trap lingered. When Drayya returned, she was carrying a beaten-up tome with a featureless cover.
“It’s all gibberish to me.” She handed the book over to Lieze, “But maybe you can read it? Like the engravings on those obelisks we saw beneath the castle?”
Those were exactly Lieze’s thoughts on the matter. She was pleased to see that the language inscribed upon the pages was anything but illegible, but though it made use of the common tongue of humans, the letters and punctuation were conjoined in a manner that transformed the book into a jumble of meaningless scripture.
Lieze moved her lower lip to one side, “Do these look like letters to you?”
Drayya shook her head, “Runes, or something like that. I can’t make any sense of it.”
“I can see the letters of the common tongue, but they’re pure gibberish.” She replied, “What could it mean? Nobody would bother to write something like this without a good reason.”
“Maybe it’s a cipher?”
The possibility intrigued Lieze, “A cipher?”
She nodded, “If the Sages were known for one thing, it was their secretiveness. Not only is this book pure word vomit to anyone who can’t understand that strange language, but even if they can, it’s still written in code. Doesn’t that sound like the kind of ridiculous security a Sage would love?”
Lieze closed the book, causing dust to escape from the margins, “If this is a cipher, then there must be a key. I certainly wouldn’t remember how to decode something like this.”
“All this trouble to hide one section of your tower?” Drayya tilted her head, “There must be something juicy at the end of this corridor if so much trouble went into protecting it.”
Lieze thought the same. All the more reason to intrude, she thought.
New Quest Received! ‘The Key’ - Locate a method of deciphering the strange book Reward - 5,800xp
So began a torrential upturning of Sigmund’s beloved tower in search of the elusive cipher key. Lieze knew better than to expect a convenient notebook containing every piece of information she required, and so turned her train of thought towards more esoteric methods of acquiring information - searching the walls for hidden messages or behind the neatly-arranged bookshelves for clues carved into the wood.
“The Sages were familiar with one-another. Familiar enough that they all disappeared at the exact same time...” She muttered, “Could Sigmund have welcomed any visitors while he was alive? If so, he must have divulged the failsafe to his colleagues…”
Her Portable Home contained every scrap of information on the Sages she had ever found. The hastily-scrawled journals spoke of journeys and expeditions across the continent and beyond, where great civilisations and empires staked their claim on the world. For all their boasting and pride, however, the Sages rarely spoke of one-another.
But Lieze’s feverish studies during her time in Tonberg had honed her sixth sense for hidden information. She knew when a sentence sounded a little too flowery, a little too philosophical. Her knowledge of the Scions and their connection to the Gods allowed her to parse meaning from seemingly incomprehensible sentences.
“There’s a riddle hidden in this passage…” Her finger traced the untidy handwriting, “The first word of every other sentence creates… something. Was it written by Sigmund? I picked it because the handwriting looks similar, but none of these blasted Sages ever sign their journals…”
She muttered the words to herself and repeated them in her head over and over until they took form as a hidden verse.
The Tower Gut
Dragon Wind Peeling Flesh
Ancient Tongue
“...Am I going mad?” Lieze blinked, “Does that make any sense at all, or am I grasping at straws?”
‘The Tower Gut’ was simple enough - it referred to the hidden chamber beneath the false floor. ‘Dragon Wind’ seemed incomprehensible, but Lieze’s studies turned up a nugget of knowledge that seemed pertinent to the riddle. It was a commonly-held belief in ancient times that wild Redcrowns became Dragons at the conclusion of their northern migratory flight in the autumn. ‘Dragon Wind’, therefore, would imply a direction - north.
“Is it referring to the tower…?” She wondered, “The north side of the tower…”
Her eyes graced the next portion of the riddle. ‘Peeling Flesh’. Morbid, but more than likely a clue as to how something could be found. To peel meant to strip away. More than likely, there was something hidden in the walls of the tower. Finally, ‘Ancient Tongue’ was simple. It referred to the runic language Lieze’s status as a Scion allowed her to decipher.
“Something is hidden in the tower’s northern walls, written in the same language as the coded books that Drayya found.” She summarised, “If that isn’t a key to the cipher, then I don’t know where else it could possibly be.”