Mary kicked a battered and rusted old helmet out of her way with a jaunty whistle that worked to mask her discomfort at the present situation.

The sack of loot was heavy on her back, stuffed with enough treasures to see her in a big house with servants for the rest of her life. Even after most of it inevitably went to the church and the treasury of the new Silver Princess, she would be quite well off.

So why wasn’t she happy about that? Well, in truth she was happy about it. It wasn’t like the money was a bad thing, and she certainly looked forward to being rich and having other people clean the blood and gunk off her armor after an adventure for her. It was the sort of windfall she had always imagined since being a little girl. Hell, it was the whole reason she left home in general.

But despite achieving her goal, Mary’s feelings on the current situation were a great deal more complicated, as she glanced to her left to where Karsten was looking through the armory himself.

His long dark hair was tied back properly for the first time in a while, which let her see more of his face. She had been insistent he shouldn’t cut it, and the compromise had turned out in her favor. Now she got to play with his hair in the evenings and see more of his face during the day. He had even started shaving properly, would wonders never cease! Unfortunately, the cause of his change in attitude was exactly what was worrying her.

Karsten was going to be a knight. A Holy Knight at that, and one with the title of dragonslayer. He had a magic sword from an ancient king on his belt. He had been praised by the Prophetess herself as a hero. It was like something out of a story, he was growing up to be every woman’s dream, and he was hers!

She, on the other hand, was just Mary, and therein lay the issue.

Oh, she had done great things for a farmgirl, let it not be said anything different. She had flown around on the back of a giant eagle who was also an elf. Protected Abbott so that they could actually kill that damned monster. She was a proud and strong adventurer, and in her village, she would be a big hero no question. But now the man she loved was becoming the type of person legends were written about, and the boy they followed had sort of always been that way if she was being honest. The others weren’t going to be coming with them either, not really, many were joining up with the holy knight sure, but Karsten was going to be in a class all his own she knew, and suddenly she was feeling quite human in comparison to her friends. Well, maybe human was the wrong word, the prophetess was human, and from what she had seen Abbott was as far away from the Prophetess as Mary was from him in terms of power.

Normal, Mary was normal, and Karsten was very quickly becoming something more than that.

“Everything ok?”

Mary blinked, when had he gotten over in front of her? Karsten’s smirk set her heart aflutter even as a blush colored her cheeks. “O-oh, yeah I’m fine, just thinking is all.”

“Thinking? About what?” Karsten looked even smugger now. “Maybe what we’ll do now that we don’t have to worry about Abbott walking in on us?” He stepped right up in front of her now, and she felt at least a few of her worries fading for the moment as his breath played on her skin.

The blush was now in full force as Mary giggled, punching his arm lightly for the tease. “No, about other things, important things…” Mary tried to think of an important thing to say that wouldn’t give her own worries away, ah, perfect. “We’ve got money now, think of everything we can buy with all this!”

“We’ll have a lot less once it’s all been sorted, but you’re not wrong.” Karsten chuckled. “By the way, I found something you might like earlier.” Karsten drew out a hand she hadn’t noticed was behind his back and presented his palm to her. In it was a thing golden chain of metal with an amulet set into it. The amulet was a diamond shape with three rubies inlaid in a triangle pattern in the metal, all three faintly glowed, clearly showing the magical nature of the item.

Mary stared at it for a long moment, thinking of what to say.

“...finally found an engagement gift huh?” She asked after a moment, though she couldn’t hide the red that had so quickly spread back up her face. Both of them were anticipating it, they wanted Abbott to marry them, but since the Prophetess had dragged him off so quickly, and because the little priest wasn’t going to be sharing a room or a campsite with them anymore...

Well, neither of them thought they’d be holding out that long. She just hadn’t expected it to be now! She felt her heart beating fast, both from the proximity and from the idea that they would finally be… well you know!

“Yep,” Karsten said with a big smile. “I want to go get it checked by someone to make sure it isn’t cursed or something, but as soon as we know it’s safe, it’s yours.”

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Mary smiled, and with both hands pulled him into a kiss, dropping her bag of loot as she pushed her lips against his. Karsten, who evidently hadn’t been expecting the gesture, stumbled for a moment, before wrapping his arms around her back. Embracing each other, she drew back from the kiss and gazed into his eyes.

“What’s gotten into you?” He asked though she could tell by the tone of his voice that he knew exactly what had gotten into her. They were both young, unsupervised, and rolling in loot in a millennia-old treasury full of magic items, what more could they want?

“It’s what I want getting into me you should be worrying about…” She said as she traced a finger down his chest, with all the drilling they had done with the company, both of them had put on a lot more muscles than they had when they met…

A loud cough interrupted them, and Mary felt her stomach drop like a sack of bricks as she whirled around, letting go of her man with a grumble as she saw who exactly had interrupted them now that they had FINALLY gotten alone and in the mood.

Half a dozen of their fellow looters, at least 3 of whom she recognized from the company, stood in the doorway, most of them blushing. Evidently, they had just arrived to search this very same armory.

“OUT.” She shouted after a moment, ire replacing any lust she had felt as she gestured wildly with her finger towards the exit of the building. That seemed to light a fire under them, but unfortunately, the moment had passed with their untimely interruption, and she was left with a simmering fire and nothing to put it out.

“Uh… are we still going to-”

She whirled around back to Karsten, the dear, and then shook her head, disentangling from his arms. ‘Later’ she told herself, before saying the same to him. “Later, once we’ve dropped all this off with the Holy Knights.” She said, and at his crestfallen look, she felt a bit bad. “Oh don’t give me that, We’re going to find an attic or a sewer or a damned hole in the ground somewhere, so it’ll be just as inappropriately adventurous as this.” She put on a good poker face as always, but in truth, she was just as eager for it as he was. It would be a first time for both of them, and while she was sure there’d be some fumbling, she’d seen enough in the thieves’ dens of Brynden to know what exactly went where.

“Right…” Karsten nodded, still looking a little crestfallen, but he soon perked up as she reached out and squeezed his arm. “Right right, so what’s the plan then? Keep looting?”

“Yep, after all, I just got rid of all our competition here.” Mary giggled to herself as she walked over to the other side of the room. “And if I’m seeing the mechanism here right…” she moved aside the battered helmet she had kicked earlier, and pressed against a stone at the base of the wall, prompting a creaking floorboard to shift. “Then I think I’ve found us a secret basement. Help me lift that would you?”

As the two of them worked up a section of floorboards, and Mary went about disarming the trap on the latch of the trap door. (A nasty little thing with a serrated needle. Probably poisonous, at least it was when it was made.) she puzzled a bit at the symbol on the trap door. “Huh, that looks kind of familiar.”

“What do you mean?” Karsten asked behind her, and Mary brushed the dust away.

“The symbol here looks a lot like Abbott’s food thing, doesn’t it? A Cornucopia. Isn’t that thing really old too?”

“Yeah he said it was a treasure his dad got from one of the old gods of Mirno, Mudra I think. Maybe his cult used it as a symbol?”

“Maybe…”

Mary lifted the ancient trap door with a bit of effort as the long-ago rusted hinges creaked against her. Below was a stone chamber, the floor at least, with what light was coming in from above.

“Get a torch lit,” Mary said as she dropped down into the room, swinging off the edge of the trap door so she didn’t land on any pressure plates right under it.

It wasn’t a big room, maybe 10 by 15 feet. Enough space to be fairly tight with 2 people in it. She vaguely wondered why they would bother hiding something like this, since if she remembered right Mudra was a big deal in the old pantheon, not a cult that needed to hide in basements.

Then she remembered that at the end the Mirnese had spurned most of their gods, and it made more sense.

Checking for pressure plates, she found none, so Karsten came down with a heavy thump because of course.

With his torchlight, she could see that the chamber was relatively sparse, with plane stone walls on three sides, and low bookshelves. On the decorated side was a relief carved into the wall, which showed Mudra raising his left hand into the sky as his robe formed into farm fields down the wall a bit, rolling out like the god himself was a mountain. What was more interesting though was that he held a small girl in his right hand, no more than a toddler as far as Mary could tell. She seemed to be divine as well, as her extended hand seemed to be sending forth livestock like pigs and sheep and goats. In front of that wall was a stone altar, and a strong smell of burning incense filled the room, coming from a somehow still burning censor atop the stone.

“Do you know who the girl is Karsten?” Mary asked, glancing back towards the man only to find him clearly staring at her ass. ‘Oh come on!’ “Pay attention Karsten”

“H-huh?” he scratched the back of his head. “Oh, well yeah, that’s uh… actually I have no idea who that is. Abbott might know.”

As he spoke, Mary felt her eyes drift down his body as well, a fire coming back unplanned as she tried to focus her nerves. “Well… maybe it says something about her in these books,” she said quickly, pulling her eyes off of Karsten with an effort of will. “They seem to be in good condition.”

“Oh, er… yeah! Haha...” Karsten nodded, reaching down to grab one and brushing up against her in the process, which didn’t help her focus. As she tugged one of the books out and saw the cover, she got a reasonable idea of just what was going on, seeing as how it depicted a naked elven woman dancing and was labeled “The Gospel of Fertility.”

She felt her opinion of Saint Eugene of the holy Mountain plummet, even as she opened the book with Hypocritical eagerness.