“Wow.” Eibon said, looking at the massive stone pyramid in front of him. Cece stepped through the verdant jungle growth and started making her way there, walking past him. “Hey! Wait up!”

“I want to get this done quickly if I can.” She replied continuing at her pace.

“Why the hurry? Didn’t you come here to kill time?”

“I doubt investigating a ruin that has killed most people who’ve gone into it will be a quick task, and besides I’m worried about leaving Lotte on her own for too long.”

“Why? It’s just a service golem. She’ll probably deactivate herself to save energy.” He replied. He didn’t know too much about golems, but he knew enough. They were relatively common among poorer mage households and higher middle-class mundanes.

“She’s more of an experiment at this point than a service golem.” She stated.

“You modified her?”

“Psh.” Cece scoffed. “As if I’d have another alchemetrix’s work in my own home, unaltered.”

“What are you experimenting with?” He asked curiously.

“It started with just trying to customize her, but it’s become a project in itself to see how intelligent I can make her.”

“Oh my, that’s interesting. Why does that matter though?”

“This is hard to explain to a layman.” She said, considering how best to describe it. Eibon opened his mouth to feign offense at the comment, but didn’t interrupt. “I have inscribed into that golem, a guiding principle to learn everything she can.”

“A fitting principle for the daemon queen of knowledge.” Eibon joked.

“This principle can override any other inscription in her core besides those prohibiting her from harming others. Even my verbal orders fall second to this principle. So I’m hesitant to think I can predict her behavior.”

“I see.” Eibon said, looking back at his interactions with the golem. It had seemed like a completely ordinary service golem previously, and it had never interacted with him personally. “She seemed quite ordinary.”

“Ha. She’s been getting shy around strangers for some reason. Although shy isn’t the right word, I’m just anthropomorphizing her.” Cece admitted, feeling slightly crazy for projecting so much personality on a construct.

They had finally made their way to the foot of the pyramid. Cece started looking for an entrance while Eibon asked another question.

“You speak like you don’t know her inscriptions.”

“I don’t. Well, I know most of them actually, but more are being formed every moment as she learns and grows. The Lotte we left at the inn, won’t be the one we return to. Although I doubt she’s causing any serious trouble” She said with a small smile on her face while looking around the structure. “I found our entrance let’s go!” She cried, starting to walk towards it.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Cece and Eibon walked through a small stone doorway into the structure. It was pitch black inside of course.

“Can you see in the dark?” She asked Eibon.

“No, unfortunately.” He replied. Cece wordlessly took out a small glass orb, attached to a loop of rope. She violently shook the liquid contents and the orb lit up with a blue green light. She handed it to Eibon.

“Here.”

“Ever prepared aren’t you?”

“You have to be when magic isn’t in your blood.” She said coyly. Eibon merely hummed in agreement as they stepped down the dreary stone hall. Cece would have found it creepy if her upper limit for creepy hadn’t been raised so high by dealing with devils and killing angels.

“Stop!” She suddenly called out. Eibon stopped moving. Cece took off her eyepatch and looked at a suspicious part of the masonry. A mercury inscription was hidden behind the brick, ready to launch the stone at anyone who walked by. “Step over this line.” She said pointing towards a crack on the floor. Eibon did so.

“Was it trapped?”

“Yes. There was an inscription behind the wall.”

“My hero!” He said dramatically.

“I doubt a stone to the head would take you down.”

“But it would hurt.” He pointed out. Cece ignored him, using her eye to analyze the area ahead. Ghostly eye on its own allowed her to see through fifty centimeters of solid matter, but combined with thermal eye, she was able to get enough data to estimate another few centimeters deeper. She had started looking through the walls this way since before they even got into the hallway they were currently standing, but now she stood still just looking ahead.

“They’re everywhere.” She whispered.

“Pardon?”

“Inscriptions, they’re everywhere.”

“I suppose that’s to be expected isn’t it?”

“No when I say everywhere I don’t meant here and there. I mean that as we move forward the density of inscriptions is building. They’re covering almost the entirety of the structure.”

“What are they for?”

“I don’t know. I know what most of them do individually but they’re all connected, as if this entire place were a construct.”

“No wonder this place is dangerous.”

Cece wordlessly guided them forward, occasionally stopping Eibon to instruct him to step over certain stepping stones, or to duck under certain parts of the hallway that had sensers on them. She had taken her eyepatch off to focus better on the world around her. Her eye moved back and forth taking in every hidden inscription, and trying to discern their purpose. Most of them led further into the ruin, ambiguous and indecipherable when cut off from the larger picture. Still each one was emblazoned into her memory. She had already learned two new inscriptions, although she had no idea what they did.

Eibon watched her in fascination, as her glowing daemonic eye rapidly scanned their environment at every step, appearing to focus momentarily on an area before continuing forward. Cece was uncharacteristically unaware. Almost all of her mental energy was concentrated on the task in front of her.

Eventually the two made their way to a slightly larger chamber where a stone door blocked their way. In front of them were five pedestals that stood at waist height, each with a different symbol.

“What’s this?” Eibon asked.

“A lock.” Cece replied quickly, circling the pedestals. She touched the symbol on the leftmost one and it glowed a faint indigo. She moved on to the others, touching the third, fifth, fourth, and second, which each glowed a different color. When she touched the last, the door slowly opened, the sound of stone scraping against stone echoed through the chamber as it did so.

“And you’re the key.” Eibon said slyly.

“If they didn’t want people to open it, they should’ve hidden the passcode better.” She replied with a grin.

“I doubt they were designing with someone who can see through stone in mind.” He replied.

“They would certainly have to be quite paranoid to do so.” She admitted, as they walked through the stone doorway. As she said this, one of the tiles Eibon stepped on sunk slightly into the ground. They both looked at the other, with a slight panic in their eyes, and then looked up at the room before them. A cavernous room with two stories, a staircase led up one side of the room and a bridge linked the two sides of the second story to each other. On which two very large stone golems stood, freshly activated and staring at the two with expressionless eyes.

“Fuck.” Cece cursed.