Ferrisdae was positively brimming with energy when she saw me approach the city walls. We had spoken on the Sending Stone when I was heading back. She had big news to tell me, but she wanted to do so in person. Since there was a lot to discuss, I told her about the Dark Elf Quarry.
Dalsarel was, indeed, a powerhouse way above the level we usually allowed in a dungeon like that one. Even though she had only half a year of practice, she wove her newfound sorcery into her expert martial maneuvers almost flawlessly. She had been giddy about her increasing kill count, but that was something to be expected from someone who grew up in the halls of propaganda.
Not that Athir was much better. The feud between the Dark and Forest Elves was one that went back so long and was so ingrained in their culture that I didn’t think telling Ferrisdae that Dalsarel reminded me of her was a good thing. Even if she managed to shuck the indoctrination, there was every chance that she wouldn’t take it as the compliment I meant it to be.
Still, she was open to the idea of another Dark Elf dungeon popping up once all this was over, though she wasn’t thrilled. That, I think, was just because of her impatience for me to arrive since I had not taken a wagon.
Ferrisdae bounced as she waited for me to ask the guard if Cojisto and Moose had come back, receiving a negative, and she came to greet me when I was done.
“Took you long enough to get back, Badger,” she said, her voice jolly despite the sarcasm.
“I have short legs and I wanted a walk; I took exactly as long as I wanted to,” I corrected, glancing at the folders in her arm. “I take it you’ve made a breakthrough?”
The Elf nodded vigorously. “After days of research, we have finally made progress. I still say that we would have found this earlier if you came to help, though.”
“We needed to split up, so we did,” I replied before I began walking towards the noble quarter. “The fact that you can be in such a good mood now means I made the right call believing in you.”
“You did, but there’s still things that I need to go over with you. We did make progress, really good progress, I’m just not sure what to make of it,” Ferrisdae admitted. “So I’d like some of your insight on the matter.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said with a wave of my hand. “What’s going on?”
She cleared her throat, standing up a little straighter. “We went through a lot of rituals in an attempt to find out what was wrong. From dungeon identification magic to healing magic to an obscure pruning magic that was supposed to make trees stronger and produce more fruit, we tried anything we thought might have stuck.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Pruning?”
“Well, Grandfather Red is a tree monster, no matter how respected he is,” Ferrisdae offered.
Thinking about that for a moment, I nodded. “Strange, but I’ve heard worse ideas. Did that bear fruit?”
The Elf hesitated before giggling. “Did you just make a plant pun, Badger?”
“No. Did the pruning magic work?” I corrected, rolling my eyes.
“No,” she said, stifling her enthusiasm. “It was just another failed attempt.”
“They’re not all winners, but it’s heartening to see some out of the box thinking,” I replied, dodging out of the way of a group of Elves who were not watching where they were going. “Unless that came from Constance?”
“It… might have,” she sighed. “I know you don’t approve of her, but some of her other ideas have been great and she really is the most powerful Treesinger in Athir.”
“Provided she remembers how to use words half of the time?” I asked, looking up at Ferrisdae.
In truth, I wouldn’t have anything against Constance Dar Fesuande from the hour or two I had spent in her presence. The issue I had was that her lackadaisical nature and inability to remember things was hindering our investigation. Powerful or not, she was an annoyance at best. Based on the other Treesingers I met, this wasn’t a trait that only she had.
Ferrisdae cleared her throat. “Anyway, we finally settled on a ritual that worked,” she said, changing the topic.
Snorting in amusement, I looked up at her. “That sounds promising. Which ritual was it that finally got you some progress?”
“Yours, Badger,” she answered.
“Mine?” I asked, arching an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t say I have any rituals of my own. I’ve certainly modified a few to fit my needs, sure, but I’ve never come up with one that I’d call mine.”
“The Mage’s Guild seemed to think it fit,” she replied with a shrug. I stopped to look at her, now even more incredulous. She stopped and turned back to me. “What?”
“I didn’t come up with a ritual and I certainly didn’t give one to the Mage’s Guild of all places,” I said, scowling. “I’d rather the Adventurer’s Consortium use it for a thousand years, well after I’m bone dust, before those stuck up spellcasters get their hands on something I made up.”
Ferrisdae gave me a thin smile. “You still haven’t realized what I’m talking about?”
“No, so spit it out already,” I told her, resuming our walk. As we moved, I looked around. Nobody was really paying attention to us, but the streets were pleasantly spacious at this time of day. I knew it wouldn’t stay that way, though, because dinner would be over soon enough.
“It’s the one you used to save me,” she answered, absently fiddling with the folders she was carrying. “They told me about it, by the way. What had happened after Razorbeak fell, and what you had to do to save me.”
“Right, that. I suppose I did give them that one so they could better make sure you were alright,” I said, crossing my arms. “Before you get all sentimental about that, it’s not brand new. It was a haphazardly tossed together mixture of a dungeon shut down ritual, energy funnel, and magic crystal formation ritual followed by another energy funnel to make sure that the mana was something actually safe for a person to take in.”
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“Badger,” Ferrisdae started, holding a hand up. “Do you not realize that what you just described is a miracle?”
“No, the miracle came after that,” I muttered.
“Because I woke up?” she asked, having clearly heard me.
I shook my head. “Nothing. It was a mix and match, willy-nilly solution. And you know how much I hate willy-nilly.”
“It wasn’t willy-nilly to me, Badger, you used it to save my life,” Ferrisdae scoffed, bringing her hand to her heart. “Actually, did I ever thank you for that? Or was I so starstruck by the fact that you had a family that I completely forgot to?”
“It doesn’t matter. Thank me or not, it was my job to take care of you and that’s what I did.”
“Then my gratitude will show itself by not forcing a hug on you,” she said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “But really, thank you.”
I shrugged, but didn’t push her away, instead rubbing the back of my neck. “It was an insipid idea that just so happened to work.”
“According to the mages, it was inspired,” she told me. “Even though they got it from you, they had a hard time believing you made it up yourself. I wouldn’t have even known where to begin if I had to do all that from scratch. Especially with the time crunch Cojisto said you were under.”
“As someone who doesn’t cast spells, I wholly believe they wouldn’t think I could come up with it,” I snorted before uncomfortably glancing from her hand up to her face. She quickly pulled away. “Okay. It’s new. How did you use it to figure things out about the dungeon?”
Ferrisdae cleared her throat. “We used it on Grandfather Red. It was a last ditch effort before we started brainstorming again, but we figured there wouldn’t be any harm to it. He’s not a spellcaster himself so he couldn’t use the energy we were putting into him, but if he took too much in then he would have simply revived later on.”
“A terrible way to go, but if he can feel anything in his state then the respite of death might be welcome,” I grunted. “How much of his dungeon did you consume in the ritual? And how did you stop it? The original was built to consume and transfer everything until the well had run dry.”
“Resistance gates and a DTER barometer, essentially,” she answered proudly. “Once the dungeon magic in the area dropped below a certain threshold, which I calculated that it would end about halfway through consumption.”
I nodded along. “The resistance gates would trap the energy transfer long enough that the rest of the ritual would be able to accurately feel the ambient magic in the air without confusing it for the stuff already in use,” I stated. “From there it would go in stages, wouldn’t it?”
“You’ve got it right,” she said.
“See, now that’s inspired,” I replied. “You should be happy with your work. Actually, you already clearly are, why don’t you tell me what came of it?”
Ferrisdae grinned. “Grandfather Red woke up for about a minute,” she enthusiastically announced. We received a few looks from people passing by, but she didn’t seem to care. “We pumped him full of the Red Thicket’s energy, and it seemed to weaken the Rage Rot. It really has pervaded the dungeon so much that it’s become a part of the whole. Our best guess is that’s why he’s having such a hard time, because it’s also siphoning his power.”
“Interesting. He went right back to sleep after?”
“Yes, and he wasn’t really even lucid for the minute,” Ferrisdae admitted. “But it’s something. I need permission to break the dungeon.”
“That’s… probably not going to be something that happens for a while,” I said with a wince. “You know the research division of the DoD will want to get in there.”
“I know,” she sighed. “But I think it’s the only way to save Grandfather Red. He’s old and powerful, I’m sure another dungeon will spring up around him after a century or two of good health.”
We entered the noble quarter, switching from buildings topping out at three or four stories tall to grandiose mansions inside and around old trees. They were built to take in whole generations and, given how long Elves lived, there were many generations in each noble family. My destination was a particularly old one.
“I’m glad to hear we’ve made progress,” I said as she started looking around. Come to think of it, I hadn’t actually told her that my meeting with her mother was today. It hadn’t come up. I shrugged to myself. “Were you able to find anything else?”
“Yeah, I did,” Ferrisdae confirmed as she looked back down at me. “I had a few pages out so I could get readings in the dungeon. Everything I’d need, you know, to show what I was doing later on.”
“Your due diligence, good,” I praised.
The Elf smiled. “Of course. I don’t want to tarnish either of our good names,” she replied before opening up the top folder. “One of the pages was the Automatic Map. It’s a little expensive and I know you like to do your maps by hand, but I wanted to make sure everything was done right. That includes redrawing the map by hand once we were done.”
“This Automatic Map is important?” I asked. While the tool was rather reductive, if it helped then I wouldn’t hold it against her.
Instead of answering, she handed me a piece of parchment. I took it and looked it over. “This is a map of the Red Thicket?” I asked, frowning.
“Should have been,” she answered. “I think the Automatic Map picked up something else.”
My frown turned into a scowl, but I schooled my expression as I pored over what should have been a map. A circle in the middle was blank as if the magic hadn’t picked anything up at all, and I recognized the outside boundary as the Red Thicket’s original shape. If I brought up the map we used before, that outline would have been the same.
From the original boundary to the blank circle were lines. I narrowed my eyes, thinking it familiar like the edges of a rune I had seen once or twice. Stopping in my tracks, I wracked my brain, trying to figure out where I had seen it before.
“Badger?” Ferrisdae asked, stopping again. A chill passed down my spine, causing me to shiver. “Are you okay?”
“Just fine,” I said, pulling out a quill from my Dimensional Pocket. Putting the tip to the paper, I started drawing lines.
“You’ve seen this before?” she asked, moving to look over my shoulder.
“Once,” I said. “On the body of Carimella Rose.”
I could nearly hear the Elf’s neck snap as she looked from the paper to me. “Excuse me?”
“I made a copy of what I could of the sigils on her body after her unfortunate possession. This was one of them,” I said. “This rune is made up of several crossing lines and is meant to be an anchor. Something that stabilizes an already powerful ritual.”
“Why would that be in the Red Thicket?” she asked slowly.
I stared at the symbol once I was done recreating it. “Maybe it’s what was keeping the Rage Rot there,” I said, not fully trusting that it was right. “Whoever invaded and inflicted it on Grandfather Red may have wanted it to stick, and that’s how it was able to permeate the dungeon.”
“You think so?”
This time, I shrugged. Replacing the quill in my Pocket, I handed her the failed Automatic Map. “I think it’s too early to make any calls on it just yet. Right now, I have an appointment to keep. Since you’re already here, you’re invited as well. I know you’ve been wanting to come.”
“Come where?” she said before I gestured forward.
“I appreciate how lost you can get in your work, Junior Dungeon Inspector,” I said, pointing out her family home ahead of us. “Now that you have some free time, you can introduce me to your mother.”