“Oh, come on. We walked for three hours just for this?” Kevin asked.

“I don’t understand. The spell worked. I saw it working!” Cesius said, throwing pages of parchment with the spell instructions back and forth.

“Ok, team. Take a five-minute breather, then we move out. We’ve wasted enough already,” Danielle ordered.

Melanie stayed quiet. She glanced apologetically at Mary as if this was somehow her fault. But Mary was busy thinking and barely noticed - definitely too busy to express her gratitude for the try, anyway. Something was off, and she could tell it. The spell did look like it worked…

“Hey, Cesius,” Mary called. “What exactly was the target of the spell? Was it the book’s resting place?”

“No, it was the book itself.” The boy frowned. “But… that doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, the spell clearly guided us somewhere, right? It’s not just any chamber we landed in.”

“Right…,” Mary said aloud as she inched toward the empty pedestal. “Could you cast it again?”

The boy shrugged but complied. Soon, another thin, blue trail of fire sprouted from his feet to the pedestal and up its base. Mary carefully walked around the thing and pulled out her jagged sword - this time she didn't lift it against herself, but the blade felt heavy in her weakened state. The pendant’s illusion covered the scars well, but it couldn't hide her weakness.

She lowered the blade towards the pedestal, and… heard a soft thud. The sword stopped a couple of inches above the stone.

“Whoa,” Melanie exclaimed.

“Huh,” Cesius said. “That’s new.”

“Oh!” Kevin said. “It’s like invisible ink, but like, the whole book, paper and all too! Do you think I should-”

“No!” shouted Cesius, Danielle and Melanie, before the boy could get the burning end of his staff anywhere near the manuscript.

“All right, all right! Maaan, I’ve just asked….”

Ok, so the trip wasn’t totally pointless, after all. Mary placed a hand on the tome holding the knowledge she might need to survive. The subtle texture reminded her of the bible from back home - there weren’t all that many leather-covered books out in the ‘normal’ world, at least in the current century. But… how was she supposed to read an invisible book?

Mary looked around the chamber, looking for something she might have missed earlier - she was pretty focused on the pedestal at the start. The entire room seemed dedicated solely to this one relic - its walls were smooth granite, polished to the point of shining. The entrance they came from was one of the three doorways - and it was the only one that came with a sign facing in its direction. Huh. Curious. The other two corridors were quite close to each other and looked more like caves than proper rooms of a man-made building. The light from the main chamber didn’t seem to reach into them nearly as far as it should.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Actually… as Mary walked a bit closer to them, she started to listen. The crackling flame at Kevin’s staff wasn’t the only source of noise in the chamber. It was definitely the loudest - especially when he got bored and started releasing bigger and bigger bursts at a time, under the ever-grumpy eyes of Danielle. Melanie and Cesius were talking, and from what Mary could overhear, the girl was getting lessons in the tracking spell. But in the rare moments of relative silence, she heard a sound coming from the tunnels. A clicking sound. It wasn’t the familiar typewriter sound, the tones didn’t match, and there was also a lot of shushing and howling wind mixed in. But…

“Guys,” Mary said, backing away towards the pedestal. “I think we should get going.”

She sheeted her sword and took the invisible tome with both hands - it was huge, and the hiding effect was so strong that she needed to grope around the edges to get a feeling for the shape and find a solid grip. As she finally lifted the thing, she heard a single loud click - from the pedestal. It was soon accompanied by a short, cheerful melody played on a slightly out-of-tune piano.

“Oops?” She asked sheepishly as others gave her a look. Well, Kevin gave her a thumbs up, but that wasn’t particularly reassuring…

A series of crashes, thuds and clicks followed from the tunnels. They grew louder and closer. Finally, a spider emerged from the left tunnel - the black thing was half a meter tall, two meters long, and clicked its mandibles in an unnerving manner.

“Iiick! Kcufuoy!” Mary yelled and sent a fireball at the arachnid.

The spider flew back at the wall with an audible crack, but began scrambling back to its legs immediately. Some of its hairy torso was covered in tiny flames, but it seemed annoyed more than harmed.

“Kcufuoy! Kcufuoy! Kcufuoy!” Mary and Melanie began to shout, sending fireball after fireball at the creature until it finally gave up, curling its legs upwards and reducing its movement to post-mortem twitches. The others didn’t help, glaring at them instead.

“Why have you killed it?” Kevin asked. “It looked like it only wanted a hug!”

Before any of the girls could answer, a clicking symphony overcame the sizzling of the first beast, and dozens of spiders came from both tunnels.

“Hm… run?” Cesius asked.

“Run!” Danielle answered, already performing a weird dance with her staff, sending waves of grey forcefields towards the incoming swarm. It didn’t seem to cause the creatures any damage, but they still slowed after the grey matter came into contact with their appalling carapace.

Mary turned away and ran, followed by the rest of the group. She tried to backtrack the route they’d previously taken but ended up in an unfamiliar room after just two chambers. There was a mixture of various coloured stone columns, with bookcases wrapped around them in sharp arcs. Mary stopped in place, and Cesius almost ran into her back.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I…,” Mary swallowed, panting - running while holding on to an invisible tome was hard, and being painfully aware of the clicking sounds nearing in on them didn't help her mood either. “I think I’m lost.”

“It’s not your fault,” Danielle said. “The library must have shifted. Cesius, find the way.”

He did that while Melanie tugged at Kevin’s robes, leading him backwards to the rest of their party. The boy seemed to be having the time of his life, throwing fire in different shapes and colours at the spiders chasing them. Each enemy could take multiple hits, but they avoided the projectiles nonetheless.

The blue trail of fire launched itself again from below Cesius’s robes, and this time it would hopefully lead them to the exit. Silently praying to Muchmighty for no further surprises, they broke into a run again, pulling maniacally laughing Kevin behind them.