Chapter 7:

You go directly to Kael’s basement, not bothering to take the usual circuitous route. Apollo is injured and likely didn’t plan for failure. Caville is somewhere in the city but the odds of running into him only increase the longer you are in the street.

Plus both Opal and you are bone tired from the battle and from carrying the dead weight of the still listless Kael.

The streets are full of people which makes it all the more awkward to be mostly carrying a woman through the street. You still cannot make her go any faster than a shuffle so there is more than enough time for people to see you as you go by. Tourists stare and you know that they will remember your passage if asked. You just hope that Apollo is not the type to brush shoulders with the common man. You know Caville certainly isn’t.

You arrive at the basement quickly, waiting until the alley is empty before you rush to the doors. Opal takes the keys from Kael and unlocks the doors before ushering you down into the earth.

You set Kael down in the old armchair where she sits on the edge, rigidly straight but still seeing nothing. Opal moves to the kitchen and begins making tea, heaping in way too many leaves and overfilling the kettle. You take over for her and she moves to the side to let you, watching like a hawk until she notices the drops of blood falling off her chin onto the counter.

She walks into another room and rummages around a bit before returning with a first aid kit that she uses to clean out the cuts on her face more thoroughly and apply ointment and a bandage. This is clearly not the first time she has had to do something like this. You feel a grudging respect for her. Through everything that happened today, she handled it all accordingly.

Plus anyone that can take on several succumbed Oracles at once has to be tough as nails.

You finish the tea and set three cups on a tray and place it on the coffee table only realizing your hands are shaking when you almost spill it. You look at them like you’ve never seen them before. What else can they do that they have kept hidden from you?

The tea is a spicy blend and the air soon fills with the scent of tea and mint. Not your first choice, but you’ll take anything at this point. You take several fortifying gulps, ignoring the heat.

Opal walks over to where you sit on the couch and takes your hand, rolling up your sleeve to wordlessly dress the burns there.

“Ow!” you yelp as she swabs an ointment on a particularly sensitive part of your arm.

“Hold still,” she says, looking angrily at the burns, her movements practiced but jerky.

“What was all that?” You ask, partially to distract yourself, but mostly because curiosity is burning in your chest, searing right through the exhaustion in your bones. You did something back there. Something that you can no longer pretend anyone could do with some effort.

Opal’s hands tighten imperceptibly on your arm. “That is what Enchanters do”

“What is that exactly?”

“Enchanters use you up until there is nothing left, taking and giving power whenever it suits them.” She finishes bandaging your arm and throws herself onto the couch next to you. “He did it to Kael, He did it to that man, and one day He’ll do it to me too.”

“That’s not true,” Kael says.

Both of you spin and look at her. She hasn’t moved from where she sits perched on the edge of the chair, her eyes still fixed unseeing on the wall, but she speaks in a steady stream.

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“You have to want the power, to ask for him to help you,” she says, regret palpable in her voice. “I was a graduate student, assigned to Kerameikos. It was going poorly. After some time, we found the tunnel, but we hit a wall after that. There was nothing there that we didn’t already know. It was a huge waste of money and time.”

“I must have sat in that tunnel for days,” she continues, “I could feel something just on the edge of my consciousness telling me that there was more. But after weeks, I was no closer to the answer. Until I met a man that offered to help me. Apollo.”

Opal is staring at Kael with wide eyes. She clearly hasn’t heard this before.

“He said that he could help me see the undiscovered sites in the city if I was ‘compatible’. Places that he claimed to have read about. Places any archaeologist would give their left kidney to find.”

You stand up abruptly. “Demosion Sima,” you say, thunderstruck. “That was you?”

Kael simply nods her head, looking faintly amused by your outburst. You don’t care. Demosion Sima was a public cemetery where prominent citizens and war casualties were buried. It was the stuff of legends until relatively recently when the site was discovered after someone found several funerary monuments on the site and began digging. If that was Kael, her ability was game changing in the archaeological world.

“Pericles?” You have to ask.

Kael just shakes her head. Pericles, the architect of Athens and democracy was rumored to be buried there, though his grave was yet to be discovered.

“Regardless of the outcome,” Kael continues, cutting you off before you can get going. You feel slightly ashamed at your excitement. The price, even for such a discovery, had been too high.

“I was changed. Apollo placed something inside of me that twisted my perceptions. I don’t remember what he did but when I woke up, everything was different. If there was power around, I could feel it and if I looked really hard, I could see it.”

“At first, I used it to find small pieces. I would bring them to Apollo, he would remove the power and give me some to ‘keep me going’ and I would make sure the object was put in a museum where it would be kept safe.”

“But that wasn’t enough for me,” she says, looking down at the floor in shame. “I wanted more. I wanted to see through solid bedrock, I wanted to see if that path in Kerameikos led anywhere. So I asked him to do it again.”

“It was worse that time. I was in a coma for a month, but when I awoke, I could see magic two blocks away in a crowded street. And I didn’t need Apollo to harvest the power, I could do it myself. Just touching an object was enough for me to pull the power into myself where I could burn it to stay on my feet for days. It was a twisting, burning thing. The more I found, the hungrier I became. I scoured the city for every trace of magic, convincing myself that I was doing good. I was really just keeping off the withdrawal for as long as I could.”

“When it came, when the whole city was cleaned of Artifacts, it nearly killed me. I wish it had. My addiction consumed, no, I consumed the history of this city. If you hadn’t stopped me today, I would have latched on to that Ley and died.

“Apollo didn’t like that I cut him out nor that I went through the entire supply of magic in the city and as far as I know has never made anyone like me again.”

Finished, she bows her head. The room is silent for several minutes as both you and Opal digest everything that she told you. Opal seems to have known parts of it, but her shock tells you that she has never heard the full story before.

Kael looks like she badly needs a drink which is why you decide not to get her one. You push the tea toward her and she takes it mechanically, taking sip after sip of the too hot tea. You drink more of yours, but black mint tea continues to be too confusing to your habitual nature so you put it down. Instead, you lean back, turning what Kael said over and over in your mind, comparing it to what you felt.

Were you like Kael? Able to absorb power into yourself and burn it for energy. Would you become addicted like she did? The thought scares you. You’ve lived a very clean life, declining even the coffee that many of your colleagues so desperately consume. Even your tea is often herbal, more of a habit than of any true need. Could this magic change all that and make you a slave to its power? The experience had been exhilarating, but quickly became sickening. Though they say the hardest addictions to kick are the ones that you hate at first.

“Professor,” Kael says, breaking you from your thoughts, “Do you think you have a good grasp of the Wisdom Ley?”

Your mind, already filled with doubt, flashes to stripping the power from that man, grabbing and tearing it from where he desperately held it to his heart. You swallow hard, “Yes, I believe so.”

Kael nods and her face creases slowly and deliberately into lines of determination.

“Let's give that asshole what he has coming.”