Cece took a deep breath, as she stared at the scene before her. Enough bars of precious metal that it almost made her want to take a few. She abstained unfortunately, but still it was staggering to see the silvers and golds reflecting what little light was in the vault. Cece mentally reminded herself to get a boon that would let her see in the dark.
Before the vault door had entirely shut, Cece had her daemonic ocularis leave her eye and go back the way she came. She took a seat on some bars of pure silver while she focused on the eye. It would be a similar process to when she spied on Solastria the first time, only far simpler this time due to the fact that her boon now replaced the silver eye she had used previously. It could enter and exit the estate freely, and wouldn’t trigger any wards since it was neither magical nor entirely physical. She simply willed it to cross the street and enter through a balcony and it did so, its invisible form floating through the air. When it was inside the building, Cece navigated it to where the alarm for the wards was, and she used an antimagic salt scroll to temporarily disable the bell.
“CV7T5” She murmured while holding a scroll to her completely black eye, the slip of red paper glowing slightly against her face. Cece was quite fortunate with the design of the bank. The wards were insanely thorough, but the vault itself was a bit of a dead zone. It obviously had wards, but almost all of them were concerned with preventing teleportation into it, so luckily no alarm bells rang as the inscriptions in the scroll began to light with magic.
With Solastria’s ability to sense unusual magic removed it was time to proceed. Cece had the eye move further down the stairs, through labyrinthine hallways, and past many blonde headed people scurrying around, clearly preparing for the ritual. She went further into the ritual chamber, Tiberius Solastria stood at the altar, a hand resting on the gold bars. Freya and Joseph Solastria were nearby, standing with a very old looking man that Cece knew. He was the head of Solastria, the founder of the family, one of the oldest elementals in Europa, Nathaniel Solastria. It was strange for Cece to see him, she hated all of Solastria including him, but she didn’t feel that primal rage she had felt for Freya or Joseph. She had seen them, that night. She had seen the blood on them. She should logically feel angrier at Nathaniel than anyone else, it was likely his decision to destroy her family, but still nothing could compare to how that night felt.
“I suppose I’m just a child in the end.” Cece whispered, alone, in the dark silence of the vault. She had the ocularis move through the ritual chamber, to the other side of the room.
“Is everything ready?” Nathaniel asked Freya.
“Just about, we’re just waiting on a few stragglers to get into place.” Freya smiled softly.
“Very well.” The old man replied curtly.
Freya began walking towards Tiberius.
“Are you ready, Tiber?” Freya asked calmly.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” He replied. The man looked sick, his hands were shaking. Cece could logically understand his plight. Most people who sought to become an elemental died in the process, it was a poorly understood transformation that required a great amount of magical skill, so of course it would be normal to be nervous. Emotionally, however, she seethed.
“How dare he be afraid, how dare he be weak.” Cece though, her brow furrowed. Tiberius hadn’t been afraid that night, he had laughed. Cece’s thoughts were interrupted by the last few Solastria who finally entered the ritual chamber. The whole family assembled was quite a scene, they had called every useful member to help ease the process, which thankfully included no children. Seventy one people, all in one room. If Cece didn’t have more caution she would have simply unleashed every grimoire she had onto the building. Instead she waited until everyone got to their places. It was about to begin.
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She directed her ocularis to an isolated hallway, the location of her entrance. She held three small, crimson pieces of paper between her fingers.
“HG78B, 5F6ER, TQ92O.” She said in rapid fire. The first one triggered, pushing silver magics through her eye. It was a silence spell, a powerful one. It wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. The second scroll did not go through her eye, but affected Cece herself, as a salt shield protected her from any impacts. Finally the last spell went through her blackened eye and she felt a shred of trepidation at the thought of heavy duty phosphorous magic being near her face. Still it behaved and went through the ocularis link like any other magic. She watched through the daemonic eye as an explosive lance crashed through the stone wall on Solastria’s side, and then got to see the results with her human eye. Rock and metal were thrown against her, the salt shield making the debris bounce harmlessly off of her. It was a violent explosion, but it was completely silent.
“Hopefully, they think we had an earthquake…” Cece thought to herself. She looked up once the dust had cleared to find a hole straight into Solastria’s estate. Still invisible, Cece crawled through the rocky entrance and into the hallway. The entire procedure had taken her only a few minutes, but when she got through she saw that she had apparently missed out on quite a bit. She hadn’t thought about the fact that the silence spell would prevent her from hearing anything on their end as well, so she was quite pleased when the first thing that greeted her ears were screams.
She ran forward towards the chamber with a sickening grin on her face that only widened when she got there. The fake gold had done more than what she hoped. Tiberius stood at the center wailing, his limbs constantly shifting between flesh and metal, gold and silver. Everyone was trying to calm him, Freya and Joseph were trying to snap him out of it mentally speaking, and Nathaniel and most everyone else seemed to be trying to assert control magically. They would fail of course, they could help guide the gold magics all they wanted, but none of them were silver mages, no one could help him here. He had accidentally started the process of becoming a silver elemental, as well as a gold one. Cece’s eyes noted everything about the process that she could see, watching the magic flow through the metals and him, watching them replace him, and watching him replace them. It was a confusing process only made worse by the gold and silver fighting within him, neither wanting to share his body. Things were looking bad for him, but still, Cece could make it worse.
She silently pulled out a scroll, still invisible to all there, and triggered it with a physical gesture, this time touching her thumb and pinky together. The result was a gold and mercury spell that made any gold magic in the building go wild. Gold magic flew like a roaring hurricane in the ritual chamber. Several mages in the crowd gasped as they lost control of the magics they were carefully feeding into Tiberius. He screamed a pained wail as his body transformed. He grew several feet in size, a golden tendril grew from his left arm and a silver from his right, metal poured over his face completely obscuring his head, his eyes lit in fear as more metal grew up his head, making strange branch like formations. He looked more like a strange metal tree than a person. Cece, seeing her cue, pulled out a small ruby and triggered it with a physical gesture as well. Tapping on it six times.
The ruby immediately disappeared, cloaked by an invisibility spell, and flew upwards with mercury magic. It wasn’t a particularly powerful grimoire, but it would be useful, it used sulfur magic to capture souls, and platinum magic to store them in a very small pocket dimension. Still this was the last grimoire she would use today, she was in the lion’s den, and although she was sure it would be fun to sick everything she had on them, she also doubted she would escape. They would of course realize that someone had sabotaged the ascension, she had left a hole in their estate after all, but they wouldn’t realize that till later. Right now, they didn’t know why everything was going wrong, but she would make sure they couldn’t come back from it.