"There's one on this side, too," Mila called as she swung a secret door open.

We were in the entry room for the vault - the real one - and Errod was looking more alert every minute which made me hopeful there was no real damage done by the gas. The rest of the group, minus Cyne who had been waiting for us on the Nusos end, had heard my screaming right away but had taken a moment to locate the concealed passage that led to the arrow slits.

"What's on the other side? Another decoy room?" A rhetorical question I guess, since I could see Mila hadn't gone in yet. I carefully walked past her, and down a short hallway I found that yes, there was another line of closed arrow slits that led to a decoy room. Unlike the side I'd come in through, however, there was another hall leading off to what seemed like a sort of ancient break room for guards. "Hey they have a toilet in here! And... some kind of card game? Some spare weapons. Nothing amazing."

Sige came in and began to poke around, and I opened some small cabinets - something that had probably been food six hundred years ago was in one, but the other had something very odd. It was a bunch of tiles in the wall with loops of leather tied to them. Cautiously I pulled on one strip - despite its age the leather held and the tile began to slide out, revealing itself to be a long stone pole in the wall. "What the hell is this?"

Sige came over, and immediately grabbed my wrist. "Shit. Don't fucking touch anything else. Um. Guys! Everyone in here. Fucking now, please." The rest of the group came in, looking concerned, and Sige let go of my hand. "Okay, Callie has helpfully found some rune poles. Does anyone here know how to read runes?"

Connie knew. Shit. I reached into my shirt and felt her Dumine there against my skin, and wished there was some way to get her back. I'd had that strange dreamlike vision as she died and every night since had hoped I would be able to talk to her again, but when she did show up in my dreams it wasn't the same.

"Okay, lesson time." Sige said, looking a little excited. "If you haven't seen rune poles before, the way they work is you write out a magic spell with runes, they way you normally would, but then part of it is written across this stick. It's stone here but it can be whatever. You can just write it across the pole, or you can have different runes at different points on the pole. If you pull the stick out, or insert it rotated to a different side, it changes which runes align. Or none align, which could also do something."

It sounded like a slightly less complicated version of the clockwork rune devices Connie had mentioned.

"These ones probably ran dry ages ago," Cyne continued, "but I didn't want to fuck with them until we were all out of the main entrance - probably one of them turns some traps on and off, and one of them unlocks the door, shit like that."

Mila, who seemed for once to have been actually paying attention, chimed in. "Well there were runes in the walls that I found while widening that opening to get poor Errod out, I couldn't read them but any place like this would have included wards against transfiguration. So I assume everything is dead."

That was what Connie had been banking on, but ever since the Necropolis I hadn't been sure. That spider construct thing that attached to the delver and took him over had been pretty low down and therefore fairly old, so presumably normal runes and magic items would have run out of charge. Since it had worked just fine, clearly there was some way to design things to last - or to hold a charge until disturbed. I pointed that out to the others and they spent a few minutes bickering about the likelihood that anything was still active.

The spider heart thingy from the Necropolis was an artifact of some kind and probably ridiculously valuable; Sige admitted he had really been hoping we could defeat the possessed delver in a way that would let us keep and later sell the device. For runes, which was the more likely problem here, it sounded like some could last nearly forever because they were so simple and those ones could then be used to trigger other more complicated devices to start pulling energy from a mana capacitor. But unless things were done just right the stored mana would either degrade over time or grow crystals and trigger the runes by mistake, so most of the time nobody bothered making devices last longer than a dozen years or so without maintenance.

In other words, any complicated runes that were more actively triggered were probably dead. Some of the more important wards against things like planar travel might still be up since that was a really simple one, and in fact they'd already located some important runes. The door everyone else had come in through from Nusos now led to a small chamber with a teleportation circle - another way of arriving, though it was covered by a metal grate with runes that were disabling it, and even if the grate hadn't been there without knowing the exact rune sequence we couldn't have used it.

That meant the other door led to the vault, but it was sealed fast. Once Cyne had returned Mila tried to go around by digging into the stone, but found that bars of metal were woven through walls and as it turned out she wasn't great with anything but stone and clay. Instead, she carved away enough by the door that Sige could lever one of the old weapons from the guard room into the hinges and break them.

I braced myself for an explosion, or a rampaging golem, or something - but the door clattered to the ground without triggering any kind of defenses I could see. Cyne and the kids stayed in the guard area, figuring any traps wouldn't be designed to hurt people there, and the rest of us advanced down the stairs that the door revealed. Immediately the architectural style changed - clearly the crazy patterns of the vault entry room were just to make it easy to find from Nusos. I had one of those stray memories hit - something about going down stairs, into a vault of treasures... and something about a collection of spoons? The more I tried to think about it the foggier the memory became.

We reached another door and dealt with that, this time triggering some sort of trap that feebly pushed some spikes from the ceiling. They only came out about three feet and the ceiling was well over ten feet high, so other than startling me half to death it wasn't particularly intimidating. We all took extra care leaving that room, in case the floor did something as well and was just delayed rather than broken. Once the initial reflex fear had worn off I was actually, secretly, really excited about the spikes. It was such a classic dungeon trap! I imagined myself saying "so there I was, in an ancient vault of the lost kingdom, and we set off a spike trap..." and it just tickled me pink for some reason.

Lights flickered on in the ceiling, though it was clear that much like the spike trap this wasn't working as intended; several of the little opalescent orbs stayed dark, and one of the ones that lit up was markedly dimmer than the rest. It was enough to illuminate a larger door with a complicated hexagonal symbol over it at the end of the hall that I felt sure would be the Duminere, but I was so nervous about going inside that I let Sige and Mila bust into each room along the side walls as we passed them.

After the first one none were even locked, and it quickly became apparent why - they were empty. One had a few old coins - identical to the ones still in use hundreds of years later - laying in the corners as if to imply there used to be more that were scooped up sloppily. One had a number of display cases - all smashed - with just a couple damaged items remaining. One had hooks all around the walls that looked like they were meant to hold swords, and a pedestal in the center that must have been for something incredibly important but now held only an old leather glove - Errod took it, excited at the idea that it might be magic, but if it had been it didn't seem to be anymore.

Sige was getting visibly agitated, the normal grin gone entirely and his body language making him seem restless. He kicked open the last of the side doors and found another room with smashed display cases - the only item still remaining was a weapon that was arguably a sword but looked more like a cricket bat lined with razor blades. Sige reached towards it and then immediately yanked his hand back, shaking it and rubbing it like he was massaging out a cramp. Then he kicked one of the display stands, knocking it over in a crash of broken stone and glass.

"Damn it! Fuck!" He turned to look at me, and I took an involuntary step back. "Calliope... they cleaned this place out. It's empty. I know this kind of job is never guaranteed but... kid, we were told there would be something good here. So far we've got some broken shit, an old glove, and someone's ancestral blade that feels like it'll probably kill anyone that picks it up unless they're from the right family."

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly. "Boss, I have... some debts. I'm trying to stay calm here, I know you weren't trying to fuck me over, but if this is all we've got here we're going to need to talk about revising the contract... Maybe if you give me and Cyne the bounty on Telen - oh and Mila, I don't know what your deal is - "

Mila looked up from examining the carvings on the door frame, "Hmm? Oh, I was just along because Calliope or Constance or whoever she was asked so nicely."

"Fine, well - wait." The building mix of panic and rage on Sige's face was replaced with confusion. "But then... you mean you're old friends, or?"

"Oh, no. She showed up one day, bought some things from my shop, and we had a lovely lunch together. And then she paid me to hold onto a letter to give to her later, though that turned out to be her sister here, and later she gave me instructions for how to break her out of the fortress in Theramas in case Lord Protector Hammersmith locked her up. We never signed an actual contract though, I just assumed she would make sure I got my fair share."

Sige's mouth dropped open. He started to say something two or three times before he managed to actually form words. "You... broke into the fortress in Theramas to... to fucking... you stole a prisoner from Lord Fucking Protector Hammersmith? Because she asked nicely and bought some motherfucking decorative frog statue from you?"

Mila shrugged. "I don't think it was a frog, but otherwise I suppose that's right."

I was with Sige, honestly - Connie had told me that she lived with Mila for a while and they'd been close, and while I had known that was in the original timeline I just sort of assumed they had also spent a lot of time together in this one. Mila was... wild.

Before Sige could wrap his brain around that and get back into panic mode, I held up a hand. "Hang on. You're getting paid, I promise. The thing we're here for is too big to move. I actually already told Cyne, I guess it makes sense he didn't pass it on - he seems like the type to keep stuff secret unless given permission. We're here because... no, you know what? I want to see the look on your face. Come on, let's open that last door."

He squinted suspiciously at me, but his body language was already way more relaxed. Mila did an extra thorough examination of the last door before she and Sige broke it open, tsking over some particularly difficult latch. Finally the door gave and we could see inside - there was a massive natural cavern, and in the center of it was a faintly glowing geodesic dome made from some kind of blue crystal.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The side facing us had a large doorway filled by a gently rippling mirrored surface like a vertical pool of mercury, and I could feel something - like a sound just out of the range of hearing - thrumming in my chest. Sige pushed past me, eyes wide, and then slowly turned back to stare at me. The look on his face was every bit as good as I'd hoped.

"Okay," I said, "Let's bring the others."

Sige and Mila went to get Cyne and the kids, and I walked slowly up to the shimmering entrance. I gently reached a hand out, and as I made contact the wall of silver it hardened - the ripples vanished, and my hand thudded into it like a solid panel of metal.

"Oh, no. Oh no no no. Fuck."

I took a step back, and Katrin gave me a nervous glance before hurrying over. "Maybe it's locked?" she asked, gesturing to some sort of braided metal cord dangling next to the entrance. She extended her own hand, the tips of her fingers entering the mirrored doorway like it wasn't even there. She pulled her hand back and looked at me with pity in her eyes.

"Oh, Callie. I'm so sorry. Is it..." she looked around, and continued in a barely audible whisper, "is it just that Connie already went in? But you're different people, and she went in in the other timeline, and..."

"It's fine." I could feel the tears running down my cheeks. "It's okay. I knew this might happen. I'll just... Sige thinks I already have something, I can just develop that." If it wasn't just me hijacking Connie's Dumine. If it was, that probably wouldn't work either. I shrugged, not sure what else to say. I'd been planning, thinking of the combinations I could get. All the possibilities.

When Cyne returned with the kids, he took that braided cord and ran it under his shirt - presumably to his Dumine. After a moment he pulled it out and detached it from the Duminere as well, then handed it to me. "This allows you to restrict options in the Duminere. There are some newer ones made by certain artificers who know the secret, but this appears to be an original from the old Empire and is quite valuable. Currently no options are restricted."

I put the cord in my bag while Cyne gathered the kids and went over how the Duminere worked. "When you enter the Duminere, the doorway will seal behind you. No one else can enter while you are inside, and you cannot leave until you have affixed your Dumine. Approach the pedestal, and touch the golden hexagon to begin the process. You will see the Duminere's greeting, and then six smaller hexagons will appear in the air in front of you - they're not really physical objects, just constructs of light.

"Most, if not all of you, will see that the hexagons are dull silver and there is seemingly nothing you can do with them. This means that like the majority of people you cannot receive a gift, but you will still need to be given a Dumine to leave. If you are lucky enough to receive one or more gifts, the hexagons will instead appear to be gold and will have glowing lines extending from them to dots of light - these are the places you touch to select a gift. You can feel, to some extent, what each one can do by touching it gently. To take it as your gift you need only to think that you want it, and the dot of light will change color.

"Once you are done, you can touch the hexagon on the pedestal again and think about being ready - this will cause the images in front of you to vanish and your Dumine will appear. Once you take it from the air, the walls will change color and you will be able to affix it to your body. Most people choose to put their Dumine in a place that will be covered up by clothes. Do keep in mind that once the Dumine touches your skin at a place large enough to fit it, it will sink in and can not be moved except by specially trained enhancers. When the Dumine is in place, the walls will change color once more and you can leave the Duminere. Your Dumine will take time to build enough potential to do anything impressive, but you will be able to meditate and visualize your Dumine in your mind to feel the different ways that you might be able to grow your skills."

Katrin and Errod sat with me as I tried to keep from crying, and we let the kids go in first. To my surprise, Tig came out grinning ear to ear and announced he had gotten a gift - specifically gravity, which was unexpected since he had been talking about getting something a little more... destructive. When Lilan came out and said she'd picked dimensional magic so she could never be trapped with the Sahrger again we all shared a look - two in a row getting gifts was statistically unlikely - and then Yasna emerged and said she'd taken both fabrication and crafting so she could work in her father's blacksmith shop.

Elba got reinforcement, and at that point it was just Roran - while he didn't want to say what he'd picked he did show off his Dumine and it had the little angular patterns of gold and silver, not just the silver of a dud. Mila was the first to say anything about it out loud, though we'd all clearly been thinking it. "Is there something special about this Duminere?"

Cyne shook his head, but he didn't look certain. "All of the known Dumineres work in the same way, with the same likelihood. Possibly it's something about the children?"

"Yeah," I said, "that could make sense. Maybe the Sahrger could sense the potential in them, it could be that was one of the reasons they took the kids in the first place. I mean there's one way to find out... Katrin and Errod still need to go."

Errod stood up, took a deep breath, and walked right into the mirrored entrance like it was a brick wall. He stumbled back, already bleeding slightly from the nose, and then tripped over his own foot and went down in a heap. Katrin ran over to him and helped him up, then cautiously walked over and again extended her fingers through the opening without any problem.

"Why is it keeping Errod and Callie out? Callie, even if this was something about you and..." She looked at me, then at Cyne and Sige, realizing she couldn't finish the sentence, "... well, it wouldn't apply to Errod, right? Why can't he go in?"

Cyne had Errod try again, just a hand this time, and it was clear the Duminere wasn't going to allow it. "Hmm. Fascinating. You have never entered a Duminere before?"

"No."

Cyne flipped his notebook open and turned some pages. "When we were going over health information in case healing was needed, you told me that you do not have a Tahikk implant."

"I don't. I've only even heard of them once or twice, I come from the wrong side of the continent."

"In that case... hmm. I'm going to need to ask you to take off your clothes. You as well, miss Smith."

"I already had my dress off earlier, we used it to stop up the gas coming under the door. Errod would have seen anything strange unless it was in my underwear, and I'm not taking that off in front of you anyway."

"He may have been incapable of noticing what I'm looking for," Cyne said, "though I suppose Sige and Milanata would have seen it. Hmm. Start with your boots, then, but I'm afraid if that does not reveal anything someone will have to inspect the rest of you."

Meanwhile, Errod had pulled off his tunic and struggled out of his pants. The awful underwear on this world left very little to the imagination since they were only meant to cover the most important bits, and I would have happily traded them for the worst underwear I'd ever owned on Earth - I only had the one pair I'd arrived in, and I was saving it in case I could get someone with Fabrication to somehow reproduce elastic. At any rate, I could say with confidence that there was nothing on Errod's very exposed lower half - which made it extra confusing when everyone gasped and started examining his upper thigh.

"What? What are you all looking at?"

Cyne turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. "Miss Smith... there is a large parasite attached to Errod's leg. If you can't see it, then you must have one as well. They work slowly, dulling your mind while they attach themselves. You wouldn't have noticed it happening, except that you might have stayed in one place longer than intended."

"We... we lost time. When we found the note you left we were confused, we were sure it hadn't been that long."

"Ah. Yes, well, that was probably the reason then. They exist in larval and adult forms in Nusos, but for some reason only pupate on the material plane. So they attach to travelers and ride back on them, feeding as they go. If left too long, you eventually die from them taking too much of your blood and nutrients. But in this case, it won't have had time to do any real harm."

He pulled off my boots, and when the second one came free it felt... wrong. Like something had been holding it in place. Cyne winced and prodded at my leg, and after a moment went off to talk to Sige. They spoke quietly at first, and then the volume began to increase. After a moment Sige yelled "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" and stormed over, pulling out a knife. He took my leg, still muttering to himself.

"Fucking religious nut, wants to find some fucking harmless way to pull off a mind-altering fucking parasite."

He dug the knife in and instantly I could see the parasite. It was a huge leech-like creature wrapped around my leg with little hair-thin tentacles digging into the flesh. I looked over and now I could see the one on Errod as well, stuck on his upper thigh and being carefully removed by Katrin. The removal process didn't really hurt, although my leg bled quite a bit - presumably the things had done something to keep me from feeling that part of my leg properly although unlike my inability to see them it hadn't ended with their deaths.

Cyne came over and gave us some quick healing, and then I gestured for Errod to try the Duminere again. He passed through without incident.

"So then, you'll be able to as well - right?" Katrin asked. I wasn't sure. It was at least possible now. Errod wasn't in for long, and when he came out he looked resigned. He shook his head, and came to sit with us.

"A dud," he said, "but that's okay. It just means doing things the hard way, more training and more... it's fine. It's my destiny, it will happen somehow."

Katrin seemed hesitant to go in but Errod insisted and so she stepped inside. She didn't take long either, and when she came out I was sure for a moment she'd gotten a dud as well - until I realized she was just trying to not look too excited for Errod's sake.

"Comprehension, I assume?" We'd really wrecked the curve when it came to gifts.

She nodded, barely managing not to smile from ear to ear. "Yes. And Mana - I got two. With those two combined, I should be able to cast every spell in my book soon and even start writing my own."

"Good," Errod said, "then maybe we can get rid of the damned thing and not have to worry about..." he trailed off and looked at me nervously. Katrin was pale, and avoiding my eyes.

"Wait. What's going on?"

Katrin took a deep, shuddering breath. "Um. There's... there's a reason we were planning to leave Yallowsben, even before Errod angered those men that were attacking you. It's about the spellbook, we... we can talk about it later."

I'd never asked. It just hadn't occurred to me. I was in a fantasy world, and someone had a spellbook. That checks out. But as Connie had said, it was probably extremely valuable - and everything that I knew about Errod and Katrin told me they had almost nothing to their name. Little memories started to come back - the way Katrin had come close and whispered when she first told me she had a spellbook. Connie's speculation on the book being involved with why they were both murdered in the original timeline. The way they had been so eager to join up with me, to follow me into danger for the chance to travel and gain some magic. I had been so wrapped up in my own issues, so sure I was the protagonist of the story, that I hadn't stopped to question any of it.

Here's why they've stuck around, a voice in my head whispered. They were using me, and would leave now that they had what they wanted. Like Adrian, who had suckered me into thinking he was going to let me move in with him and his girlfriend only to steal everything from me. Katrin and Errod hadn't gone that far, of course - they may not have actually liked me or wanted to be friends, it might have all been for their own reasons, but they at least had always held up their end of things. They'd been nice to me, and helped me, and... saved my life multiple times. Hmm. It was possible I was being a bit harsh, and quick to frame them as villains. I could still feel it, that part of me trying to prepare for betrayal and abandonment - and mentally justify leaving first, running off as soon as we were out of here.

I took a deep breath. This was stupid, and anyway it wasn't the time. We would stick together, or not. And if we didn't it wouldn't mean anything. I held that thought as tight as I could, forced myself to believe it for now, and then smiled at them. "Don't worry about it. I never asked, but I kinda figured something was going on. Like you said, we can talk about it later. Or not at all. Although..." I glanced around again to make sure nobody was close enough to hear us, "If this is what got you killed in the other timeline you should maybe tell me whatever you can so I can help keep an eye out."

I stood up quickly, before they could reply. It was time. Maybe it still wouldn't work, maybe somehow the Duminere remembered Connie. But it's not like I was going to just leave without finding out for sure. I walked forward, bare feet cold on the stone floor, trying to be confident as I reached the silvery doorway - and passed through it like it was nothing but fog.

I was inside.