Despite their list of tasks and goals written off as tomorrow’s problems on the previous evening being long and crowded, only after the sun had climbed over its peak, the two necromancers managed to leave the warmth of the inn – and even then, they were the first two of the party to wake up.
Anastacia had decided that parading Leggy around the city would have invited trouble she didn’t want to deal with yet, so both of the simulacra were left behind to do what they could in the kitchen while the two necromancers did their business in the city.
As they slowly made their way across the bustling market square, they perused the offerings of a few stands and almost ended up being swindled for their money more than once by the merchants. Both of them were accustomed to a humble life more out of necessity than their own asceticism, and so any and all flashy trinkets caught their eyes very easily. The one who had lived outside of their poor country for longer had actually acquired an impressive collection of overpriced garbage across countless unsupervised shopping sprees, and the habit showed no signs of dying off. Luckily, aided by the other, more pressing matters on their schedule, the combined wit of the pair was enough to avoid pointless purchases for the time being and they made it all the way to the blacksmith’s door without making their purse lighter.
Before walking up to the door, Iris tugged on Anastacia’s shoulder and stopped her. “Do the names ‘Lady Saga’, ‘Noir’ or ‘Vinca’ mean anything to you?” She asked unsurely.
Anastacia scratched her head. “I’ve met the last two, both utter weirdos. This lady of yours doesn’t ring a bell. How so?” She answered honestly and took a mere second to read the cleric’s expression. “You ate a feather, didn’t you?”
Iris nodded awkwardly. “There’s something wrong with that girl.”
“Nothing wrong with her, a lot wrong with whatever her situation is. As I said, I’ve tussled with it before and can tell you that it’s well beyond our means to solve. If you found out something that puts her in harm’s way, obviously tell me, but otherwise this can wait until we know more – there just isn’t a lot we can do right now.” Anastacia sighed and continued towards the shop.
Oddly enough, the sound of a hammer hitting metal didn’t echo from the forge at the time, which Anastacia took as a sign to look for the dwarf inside. She tackled open the door and made her presence know to whoever might have been there with a loud greeting – but no answer was given.
It wasn’t that the owner of the forge wasn’t in, but that despite all the noise, he failed to notice the necromancers or even look up from whatever he was tinkering with by the counter.
Immediately the adventurer could tell that something was off. The scent of oil, metal, smoke and manual labor was all still there, but the feeling the room gave off was entirely different. Somehow the entire establishment felt like it wanted the necromancers to leave, urgently.
Usually, the blacksmith kept the shelves and racks well-stocked with new items, but now many of them had been neglected – even the ones by the window that were supposed to pull in new customers were woefully understocked.
The dwarf himself was visibly drained. He had lost some weight, dark rings around his tired and bloodshot eyes were only matched by the bags under them. His usually shaved beard had grown well past its previous record length and showed no signs of its owner trying to tame it. He even seemed to have gained whatever the equivalent of ten years of age was for dwarfs.
The counter in front of him was messy beyond recognition, paper scrolls, drafts, tools and more, all strewn about. Several piles of coins, presumably from recent purchases, hadn’t been put away in time, ending up toppled over and spread across the floor.
Anastacia carefully moved closer to the counter and into the blacksmith’s direct view. “Hello?” She asked and picked up a coin from the floor.
The dwarf finally snapped awake from whatever had him so focused on his work and lifted his head. “Oh… It’s just you.” He sighed and quickly tugged his hands away from the piece he had been working on.
“No, it isn’t. I brought a fri… acquaintance with me as well, who will actually be your next client.” The adventurer smiled and placed the coin on the counter. “A bit messy here, don’t you think?”
“Ah…” The blacksmith frowned and looked around as if he hadn’t even been aware of where he was. “I… I’m sorry, I just haven’t had the time… and I don’t think I can take any new orders either.”
“Not even something weird? Something you’ve never made before? I bet making it would be interesting.” Anastacia could clearly tell something was wrong, far beyond something even a remarkable workload would cause. The blacksmith used to be extremely easy to bully into dropping everything with a promise of being allowed to work on something unique, but this time he didn’t seem to even entertain the idea.
The dwarf worriedly glanced over his shoulder. “I really can’t. I think I’ve finally gotten around making something of a masterpiece and I’ve spent far more time than I should have on other orders until now.” Despite the visible exhaustion, his words appeared true and his eyes still seemed to hold some glimmer of excitement.
The adventurer still didn’t like the feeling she got from the situation and wouldn’t take no for an answer so easily. She backed away with a smile, grabbed Iris on her way and huddled into a corner for a quick strategy session.
“Is something wrong?” Iris asked. She didn’t know the blacksmith, but had gotten a concerning read from the situation as well.
Anastacia nodded. “I think so. I’m going to do a bit of snooping around in the back. Keep him occupied with questions or something.” She whispered instructions to the other necromancer before casually walking away and pretending to look at the few weapons that were still hanging on the walls of the shop.
Iris did as she was told and approached the counter in turn. She didn’t know the person she was supposed to talk to or any of his interests beyond smithing, so the subject of her distraction defaulted to what she was always ready to discuss: health factoids.
“Did you know that dwarfs spend roughly ten percent of their daily energy intake by growing body hair? In many ways, they would be a better alternative to sheep for the production of wool. I’m sure some people would be weird about their clothes being made from dwarf hair, but I don’t see the issue.” The cleric unloaded her line on the unsuspecting blacksmith, who couldn’t do anything but confusedly stare at the weirdo that had just entered his shop and asked him about body hair before even bothering with introductions.
While Iris did a fine job with her distraction, Anastacia slowly and quietly made her way out of the view and snuck behind the counter successfully. She had been in the backroom of the shop a few times before, and had a good chance to notice if something was amiss.
The purpose of the backroom was mainly to be a storage for items in need of repair and for some items often sold along with weapons and armor, such as leather straps and whetstones, but it also contained a workbench for tasks too complicated to be done by the counter but which didn’t require a forge to complete. The workbench had obviously been in use as of late, but the works by it seemed to have been abandoned and put to the side in preference for something that must have been very important. The mess of crumbled papers and pieces of materials used in crafting littering the floor wasn’t anything new, but the dwarf enjoyed keeping his tools in order, yet he appeared to have become more lax about them for some reason, as they were tossed around the workbench.
Out of the heaps of chipped and fragmented pieces of different materials on and around the table, the most prevalent and therefore likely the most recent one appeared to be sharp shards of slightly yellowish white bone that any necromancer worth their salt could immediately recognize as ivory. This struck Anastacia as a bit weird, as it was an absolutely awful material for both weapons and armor. She herself most certainly hadn’t ordered anything like that either, so the most feasible alternative she could come up with was some type of a decorated piece – a sword with a carved ivory pommel or some such item. On closer inspection, she could definitely feel more of it on the counter, where the blacksmith had been working on what he called his ’masterpiece’. Having formed a fairly close relationship with the person responsible for keeping her geared for quests, Anastacia considered it to definitely be odd. The dwarf she knew had no interest in such frivolous nonsense, likely wouldn’t have wasted his time with decorations and most certainly wouldn’t defile his masterpiece with anything that didn’t strictly serve a function.
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“Masterpiece…” She muttered quietly and skimmed through a plie of drafts. Even the choice of words seemed off character for the humble blacksmith. He was definitely the type to just silently be content in his work, and certainly not proud enough to call anything he made a masterpiece.
Next to the workbench was an open barrel, a home for poles and sticks of every possible size – as well as seven of the special spears the blacksmith kept in stock for Anastacia alone. Figuring she’d pay for them on the way out, the necromancer took three and placed them by the doorway back into the shop – where iris was currently explaining the effects different diets had on dwarven beards to an increasingly confused, and by then slightly scared blacksmith.
Nothing else in the room struck her as particularly out of place, so Anastacia decided to move on with her search. From the backroom, another doorway led to a small hallway with a door to the forge, a door labeled as a bathroom and an extremely steep staircase to the upper floor of the building, where the owner of the establishment presumably lived. While the forge may have been the place to first look for further clues on what exactly was it that had the dwarf so occupied, the necromancer – or possibly anyone else besides the blacksmith himself and his brother – had never even seen the second floor. Letting her curiosity take over, she decided to head upstairs first. A couple of the wooden steps let out a worrying creak, but it didn’t seem to be enough to alert the blacksmith. Pushing the trapdoor at the top open with her head, she peeked into the room above.
Lit by plentiful light flooding in through the pair of windows, what Anastacia found at first glance was almost disappointing – a perfectly normal living space, with perhaps a bit basic in terms of furnishing but cozy enough for someone such as the blacksmith. No one else seemed to be home, so the necromancer quietly slithered her way in and carefully shut the hatch behind her to not cause noise.
The upper floor consisted of a fairly large, open space with a table, a very basic kitchen, chairs, a bench and so forth. Absolutely nothing about it seemed unusual, worrying or off. Everything was tidy, if not a bit dusty, and outside of some bottles and wrapping papers Anastacia recognized as the type Rosie used whenever she packed food to be eaten outside, there was no litter or filth to be found. The wooden bench had a pillow and a planked tossed on it, which the necromancer took as a sign that it was the spot reserved for the blacksmith’s brother, whenever he didn’t manage to spend his nights somewhere dubious. The side of the room facing the direction of the market square had two large windows as well as what seemed to be a regular dining table with a single cup and a few pieces of drafting paper left on it. Anastacia would have liked to check the drafts, but that side of the room was also on top of the shop itself, and anyone walking over the wooden floor would have no doubt caused some noticeable noise below.
“I really expected there to be more swords and stuff here…” The adventurer whispered disappointedly to herself.
On the other side of the room, along with the kitchen, there was one more door. Judging by the lack of a bed or wardrobes so far, it stood to reason that it would have led to the bedroom. However, before further intruding on the dwarf’s privacy, Anastacia decided to get a closer look at the kitchen.
A sink, some cupboards, a bit of working space and a stepladder for the dwarf to reach the upper shelves – all perfectly normal as far as Anastacia was concerned. She found no dirty dishes in the sink or rotting food in the cupboards, in fact, she even taste tested some cookies she found, just in case.
However, a rather suspicious item on the countertop did catch her eye: a wooden comb. On its own, a comb wouldn’t have been exactly damning evidence of literally anything besides basic hygiene, but tangled in it weren’t the slightly curly reddish gray beard or hair of the dwarf, or the even redder hair of his brother, but extremely long and straight strands of someone’s pure black mane. Stranger yet was the fact that the strands didn’t seem to resonate at all with necromancy, but hair in general was at best fickle and at worst impossible to deal with. So, while definitely suspicious, it was technically possible that they simply belonged to a person with a strong enough will to have some natural resistance to necromancy, and not entirely necessarily to something immune to it – or at least that’s what Anastacia convinced herself of. Though she figured that the chances of the blacksmith bothering with a woman he himself didn’t build out of metal were about on par with some kind of a deity just randomly happening to lose their comb in his kitchen. She collected a few strands and rolled them into a tangled ball with the intention of making Iris chew on it later, if that by chance happened to work or possibly even helped in some way, and moved on to the door she had ignored so far.
Just in case and to be polite, she knocked on the door and waited for a couple of seconds before trying the handle. The lock made a clicking noise as the bolt slid into it and the door slowly opened into a much darker room. Only lit by the sparse light that made it through a curtain covering a window visible as soon as the door was even slightly ajar, the bedroom at least appeared to be unoccupied. Obviously, she would have known if a person was in there, but in Valor, there were no guarantees.
Letting the door open fully on its own, Anastacia let out a sigh of relief and stepped in. “Would’ve been awkward to catch someone nake-“ She was about to whisper but had to cover her mouth to avoid yelling.
There was indeed a bed, some wardrobes and some drawers in the bedroom, but constructed around the bed was what could only be considered ‘a nest’ of weapons and armor. Painstakingly weaved together, hundreds of swords, polearms, axes, hammers, shields, pauldrons, gauntlets, helmets and more, all forming a neat circular hedge with a patch of bare floor in the middle. The bed itself was more a part of the nest’s structure than a centerpiece or anything, whatever the nest was for, was both far too large for the bed and almost certainly didn’t use it.
“What the fuck even is this?” The necromancer cursed under her breath and snuck closer.
Far from haphazard piling, the weapons and armor were actually put in an extremely intricate order, in which they held up each other and stuck together firmly. None of the blades had any signs of blood or anything like that, but more strands of black hair could be found on the bed as well as among the weapons, some of it similar to what was stuck on the comb but some shorter and thicker – more fur-like.
As she got closer, a sudden unwelcomed feeling washed over the necromancer, far stronger than the one she had felt when she entered the shop. She could feel a burning glare on her back, but when she turned around, she found nothing.
“Interloper…” Something whispered directly into her ear, causing Anastacia to recoil from the metal nest.
“No thanks!” She immediately decided, retreated out of the room without a care for any noise she made, lunged to the hatch, ripped it open and jumped all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
Anastacia rushed through the backroom, grabbed the three spears she had taken from the barrel and with an unnecessary roll because she tripped, returned to the other side of the counter.
“Where did you go?!” The dwarf immediately demanded to know when he realized that the other necromancer had disappeared for a while. More panicked than angry, he worriedly glanced over his shoulder repeatedly.
Even paler than usual, the adventurer took a while to come up with an answer. “I- I just grabbed these from over there.” She finally lied and placed the spears on the counter. Something about the feeling and the voice upstairs had startled Anastacia to her core, far more so than it should have. Almost as if she knew to fear whatever it was, possibly out of familiarity. Yet there was no way she would just leave the blacksmith in what was obviously trouble, so, she steadied her shaking knees and began to think.
“Okay then… but you two really need to leave. Just put the money there and I’ll sort it out when I have the time.” The blacksmith said exhaustedly and resumed his tinkering. Upon closer observation by both of the necromancers, something about the movements of his hands seemed odd. It was as if some invisible force pulled them to the tools and held them in place by force.
Anastacia peeked over the countertop to see the workspace behind it. “What is it that you’re calling ‘a masterpiece’ anyway? Must be something special for you to call it that.”
“Well, I’m not sure I would call it that yet.” The dwarf gave a faint smile. “It was ordered as a hat, but really now… run along, you two – I have to finish this.”
“Excuse me.” Iris suddenly interjected and started to move behind the counter. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and based on your body language, you seem to be in some sort of a distress. I technically have medical training, so if there’s pain or ache somewhere, I’d be more than glad to help in any way that I can.”
As soon as she was about to lay a hand on the dwarf, the room became noticeably darker and even more strangely, the floorboards themselves under her feet bent and stretched in an impossible manner to move Iris further away. Though she did get slightly startled by the event, she had obviously started to get numb to the constant barrage of weird nonsense that followed Anastacia, and glanced at the goblin queen with equal amounts of sheer annoyance and fear on her face.
Both of the necromancers considered simply darting out of the building, but as soon as they saw what was supposed to be a door and large display window to the market square, they discovered that the wooden walls of the shop, as well as the shelves and weapon racks lining them, now seemed to continue infinitely into the horizon. The lanterns on the walls now only gave a pitiful morsel of light compared to what they should have and the ambient noises of the city vanished entirely.
“Ah, I see…” Anastacia nodded and stared down the infinite corridor of darkness once more. “Kind of embarrassing that it took this long for me to figure this one out.”
“You know what this is?!” Iris almost screamed. “Actually, you know what, I’m not even surprised.”
Anastacia was reminded of the nonsensical infinite corridor she was stuck in with Gilbert not too long ago and that memory connected the dots she needed to diagnose the problem. A master craftsman plagued by what seemed to be an all consuming need to create masterpieces, impossible changes in their surroundings and the unwelcoming feeling left little ambiguity to what the source of the dwarf’s troubles.
She turned her gaze on the slowly stretching and growing doorway leading to the backroom and yelled. “I thought you left this world peacefully!”
Out of thin air, a pair of large hands closely resembling the sharp-clawed feet of an eagle appeared. They grabbed the dwarf’s shoulders tightly, slightly sinking the claws into his skin, but only barely not deep enough to puncture it. Above them appeared a large ceramic mask, made out of porcelain and depicting a pleasantly smiling face of a woman.
Though her guess on the nature of the issue had been correct, there was a slight issue which made Anastacia’s stomach drop and heart skip a beat. “You’re not Nirmaata…” She spoke to the mask she didn’t recognize.