Entering a building with an overly possessive and quick to anger beast of legends lurking in it didn’t really get any easier on subsequent visits, if anything, the looming dread caused by the muse increased as Iris became more familiar with it. However, for a new set of wings, she was willing to brave that and more, and after a brief moment of settling her nerves by the door, she entered the blacksmith’s shop to claim them.
Having worked out the kinks in their companionship over the past few days, the blacksmith’s shop had started to feel and look much more welcoming again. Despite working on the wings, some new items had begun to appear on the shelves and racks around the shop and the cold, desolate atmosphere had mostly lifted – though the feeling of being observed by something fearsome immediately upon entry still remained. As usual, the owner of the establishment appeared to be tinkering on something behind the counter, by himself at a glance, but the more one focused on him, the more visible the large armored beast behind him became. Whispering arcane advice and occasionally guiding the blacksmith by hand, the muse obsessively made sure that no piece of equipment left his hands lacking in quality. Though the beast still glared at Iris with malice for daring to interrupt their work, at least she had stopped attacking the necromancer upon entry after the second visit.
“The wingless little bird has returned once more.” Armaata announced Iris’ arrival to the dwarf, who was far too focused on his work to hear someone come in. “The stench of divine, ever growing. Vile odor of fire and deceit – a hint of midnight.”
The blacksmith put down whatever he was working on and stood up, only glancing at his customer before disappearing into the backroom to fetch something. “I had expected you to be there when I first opened the door in the morning. Not much of a morning person then?” He asked upon returning and placed a large wooden box on the floor by the counter.
“I would have, but I was hauled off to the guild offices when I tried.” The necromancer shrugged.
“They’ve been up to something weird the whole day.” The dwarf noted. “That should be everything. I didn’t know if I should have wrapped the pieces individually or what though.”
Iris greedily stared at the neatly piled bones in front of her and picked up one of the larger pieces to admire the workmanship and design. The patterns engraved to it were far more exact in depth, width and shape than on nearly any other weapon, tool or thrall in Mournvalley. In all honesty, such pieces should have been displayed in one of the many collections kept by the necromancers as something all craftsmen should aspire towards, but there was absolutely no chance Iris would ever let go of them now that she had new wings – they were truly both too good to use and too good to not use at the same time, if such a thing was possible.
“I’ve no use for them, but it does pain me to give them away for some reason.” The dwarf proudly laughed. “I guess it’s like watching your kid finally grow up and leave to see the world.”
“It is not our duty to be attached to our works, for we do not create them for ourselves, Master Dwarf!” Armaata reminded her master craftsman. “Masterpiece or not, a sword is a sword, a shield a shield. An edge honed for a thousand years is little more than scrap if it does not taste blood, a plate of armor tempered to withstand the wrath of gods is nothing but a shoddy mirror if it does not do so. A pair of wings is no different, useless, if not grated to someone with aspirations of flight.”
Running her finger along the patterns to truly appreciate their uniformity, the necromancer couldn’t help but to grin like an idiot. “Do you mind if I try them on?” She asked.
“You must.” The muse demanded and pushed the crate closer to Iris.
First taking control of the piece in her hand, Iris got used to the feeling of using her powers once more. No different than exercising an atrophied muscle, it took a while for her to be able to pour even a modest amount of her strength into it as it floated up from her arms. A healthy red glow appeared on her cheeks as she felt the power once more course through her and the material before her. One by one, the pieces from the crate joined the first one and began swirling around her, each one in their own orbit but without ever so much as grazing one another. Iris closed her eyes and held her breath to shut out as much of her other senses as possible, to feel nothing but the material around her. Though she was perfectly able to use living material, such as the dwarf himself, the sheer difference between flesh with its own will still coursing in it and bone specifically prepared with patterns almost made them feel like they were asking to be used. When the necromancer was in full control of each and every piece, they began to cease their travel around her in rapid succession and formed into the pair of wings they were meant to be. Even with everything in place, four sharp shards of bone were left behind, orbiting above the necromancer’s head as a crown of sorts. The utter ease of controlling them was simply astonishing to Iris, never once had she seen material so free of resistance that she could have sworn they were parts of her body all along. She hadn’t even paid attention to their order, but the patterns on their surfaces had made sure that each piece was in the exact location they belonged to, and near perfectly channeled the might that had been locked within the necromancer for several days. Finally feeling like herself, Iris could feel much of the anxiety and doubt clouding her thoughts melt on the spot. No longer helpless, even the primal fear the muse caused in her lessened to a fraction of what it had been.
“You really outdid yourself with the design, I can barely feel them.” She cheerily complimented the dwarf and flapped her new wings.
“You’re the one who brought them to me though? We simply made them following your drafts.” The blacksmith frowned. “I’m proud of the work but I can’t pretend like I understand half of what you had me do.”
“What?” Iris asked and stopped her delighted flapping. “I’m nowhere near able to design something like this. There’s probably like two or three people back home who might have a chance.”
The dwarf hurriedly went through a hefty stack of papers to find the original plans for the wings and spread them on the counter upon finding the right ones. The handwriting appeared foreign to both of them and the complexity still left both of them baffled.
“It has been mere days, have your memories so decayed in such a brief time?” The muse mockingly asked from both of them. “These plans were drafted by the necromancer master by the name of –“ She explained but instead of a name, what came out was not even a noise but rather a ripple in the existence itself as it lurched past the moment the name was uttered, like a dislocated joint slipping back into its place. This caused the muse to grasp at its chest in what seemed to be agony and cough violently. As the fit passed, Armaata grabbed a cloth used to oil swords from the counter and wiped a drop of black blood that had come out of the mouth hole of her porcelain mask.
“Armaata!” The dwarf exclaimed and grabbed onto the beast in concern.
“Worry not, Master Dwarf… It has subsided.” The muse said and shook its body as if to rid it of something.
“Are you alright?” Iris asked hesitating to touch the beast. “What was that?”
“The world buckles to fill an unplanned void, the fate bends and slips. I am not my mother and have no wisdom from before time, but I can tell my lips are being sealed.” Armaata explained with a touch of anger in her voice.
A lot of weird things had begun to stack up on that morning for Iris. She herself felt like something was missing, the innkeeper had said as much too, The Guild’s treatment of her had been odd to say the least, the spider-like simulacra had spouted oddities and now a beast of legend was being muzzled from saying too much. It was starting to get hard to not get to a conclusion of there being something strange afoot. “And you’re saying that you’re not saying that it has something to do with whoever made these designs?” She suggested to the muse.
Armaata didn’t answer, but from under that annoyance and anger in her milky eyes peering through the mask, Iris could find a hint that what she was presuming was correct.
Iris rolled up the papers before her. “Do you mind if I borrow these? I would like to get to the bottom of this.” She asked. Not only was she now personally invested in figuring out what was going on, it fell well within her responsibilities as an inquisitor to find whoever it was that had such a deep understanding of control patterns and figure out how to use their talents for the good of Mournvalley.
“I doubt anyone else will come in asking for a pair of wings, so I’ve no need for them.” The dwarf said, still holding on to the muse. “Is there anything you need adjusted with yours?”
“Oh, no! Not at all! They’re beyond perfect!” The inquisitor happily exclaimed and spread her wings to their full glory. The wingspan of over five meters gave her a rather menacing appearance to contrast her easygoing personality.
The blacksmith proudly inspected his work on full display, but was slightly concerned with the logistics of having a pair of massive skeletal wings. “Do you need a bag to carry them? It can’t be easy having those on you at all times.”
Iris shrugged. “Nah, you get used to them. Besides…” The wings suddenly folded in on themselves in a way no natural pair of them would and the bones lined up against the necromancer’s body as some kind of a macabre suit of armor. “If I need to blend in, I can just do this. My uniform is made so that I can keep them under it. It does still look a bit bulky, but that rarely hurts in my line of work.” The wings immediately folded back out as the inquisitor was far too proud of them to keep them hidden for more than a moment.
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“Curious powers indeed…” The muse muttered and reached out to touch one of the pieces, but was surprised to find herself unable to move it easily. “Wield our works well. Make them the artifacts of legend they are fit to be – for better or for worse. The masterpieces we inspire are bound to bring about change in this fragile little world, the nature of which depends entirely on their rightful wielders… Excitedly, I await to see what comes of this.” She advised in a way that almost seemed like a threat or a warning.
“I’ll try my best.” Iris nodded and once more stretched her wings to their full extent. The proper flow of her powers allowed for much greater range of sensing material than her clouded mind could have even handled before, and she couldn’t help but to begin analyzing the variety of people around her, checking them for injuries and other physical curiosities. Even the worries regarding her homeland seemed lesser than before, now that she was perhaps more capable than ever.
Done proudly observing his handwork being put to use, the blacksmith grabbed another rag from the counter and began more thoroughly cleaning off the almost tar-like blood from the muse’s otherwise spotless mask. “Go ahead then, if you need any adjustments for them later, we’ll be here.” He told Iris and nodded towards the door. “I think it’s better if we take it easy today…”
On her way out, the necromancer stopped multiple times to thank the dwarf and his muse. It felt almost wrong for someone like her to be allowed such masterpieces, and her mind was somewhat hazy on the matter of payment for them, but considering the money from The Guild hadn’t come in yet and that she had none on her, she didn’t bring it up either. Outside, her new appearance didn’t gather half the attention she figured it would. A couple of guards making their rounds nervously glanced at her a few times, but the merchants and adventurers of Valor were far too desensitized to nonsense to even really register a pair of skeletal wings. What seemed to interest them more was the apparent conversation between Leggy and the spider simulacra from before happening outside of the inn, presumably because the spider couldn’t easily fit through the door. Iris would have liked to see what they were up to, but the joy of finally having wings again only staved off the cold for so long, and she had to rush across the square to get back to the warmth of the inn once more.
Inside, King was still listlessly sitting in the same place he had been in when Iris had first woken up. Gilbert had sat down in the same table and seemed to be going through some awfully formal looking papers with a deep frown on his face. Iris figured that she would join him to see if she was of any help with whatever he was dealing with, but only after dropping by her borrowed room to store the drafts of her wings into a safe place. Her wings instinctively changed shape to better fit the relatively low ceiling of the staircase and the corridor at the top of it. It felt like even after only a few moments with them, she was already more used to them than she had been to the previous pair in the couple of years they had lasted.
As she was making her way down the corridor, allowing the tips of her wings to gently graze the walls to more exactly get a measure of its dimensions imbued into her mind, she noticed that one of the doors was ever so slightly ajar – specifically the one immediately after the innkeeper’s room. Even during her fairly brief stay, she had at least seen most of the people living in the same floor as she, and as a necromancer, she definitely knew the physical properties of more or less everyone in the inn – but now that her attention was drawn to it, she couldn’t place anyone within the second room of the floor. Stopping to think about it, she was reminded of a faint memory of the two simulacra entering the room at some point, so it could have belonged to them. This would have been the end of the mystery, if she hadn’t heard a noise from within the room while staring at the door. Both of the simulacra were accounted for, one outside and the other downstairs, yet someone was still inside, someone she couldn’t feel at all. Another loud bump from inside the room convinced her that it would only be polite to peek inside, in case it was a thief.
Stealthily opening the door, what the inquisitor saw confused her greatly. Aside from the default set of furniture each room was equipped with, there was a number of things that made no sense for a room presumably occupied by two simulacra. A pair of young trees growing on the floor in the middle of the room, a great number of books and tomes stored in ways which would make most scribes and librarians cringe, weapons ranging from rusted knives to a gilded sword with jewels embedded to its hilt, trinkets of no real purpose, jewelry, keys, literal trash, sticks, utensils for everything from surgery to soup, vials of countless different substances, toys, papers, towels, a disturbing number of socks, loose gravel, a shovel, rope, marbles, quills, inkwells, coins, dried vegetables, chunks of stone, party masks, what appeared to be a guild uniform, medicinal salves and countless other oddities Iris couldn’t even name if she wanted to. All of this was definitely weird, but all the clothing around the room was for someone decidedly smaller than the simulacra, who didn’t wear clothing in the first place. In the middle of it all, stood someone perhaps fitting the bill: a girl clad in a gown so dark that it seemed to suck the light out of the room. Her impossibly long hair weaved its silvery locks around several items by her feet, seemingly on its own.
“Excuse me. Do you live here? The door was open and-“ Iris asked but was struck silent as the person turned around.
Eyes empty as the void, entirely untouchable by necromancy, but familiar – though the last time Iris had seen the goddess of unwanted things, Vilja had fit into a coffee pot. “That would be funny, wouldn’t it?” The goddess spoke with a somber tone.
Suddenly an unseen force dragged Iris into the room and shut the door behind her.
“Do you know who I am? What it is that I preside over?” Vilja asked and joylessly stared at the clutter by her feet.
“Vi- Vilja, I think? You’re the god of the forgotten and unwanted.” Iris answered the best she could. Vilja had come across once or twice while talking to Emilia because of her apparent alliance with Sylvia, but even the priestess had limited knowledge on her.
“Close enough. In this world driven by greed and desire, a lot of things fall through the cracks into obscurity – sometimes naturally, sometimes because I willed it so. Things unfit for purpose, abandoned and lost, worthless by all standards, all are welcome to my domain, all for me to remember, for me to cherish. I still struggle with the vastness of this task, being able to forget is ultimately a gift after all, one that I don’t possess…” The goddess explained. “There are roughly three ways to leave this world: with grace, having given your all and being remembered for your works and deeds; abruptly, leaving behind tragedy and loss; and through me, through fading away once the last thought of you has been forgotten.”
The necromancer glanced at the drafts in her hand, immediately connecting the dots between her strange morning and the divine monologue. “Is something or someone missing?” She asked, hoping for aid in her own conundrum.
“Missing doesn’t even begin to cover it. Something is gone, leaving behind no memories and only a void that is slowly being filled with whatever happens to be nearby. Something has been artificially forced past me, without my say so.” The goddess hissed increasingly frustratedly and gritted her teeth. Her mere presence in the mortal realm had begun to gnaw away at it. Unwittingly, everyone in the area had begun to lose their faintest memories of times long past. Colors of items of items in their childhood homes, names of the streets their favorite shops had once been on, unremarkable moments in their youth that for some reason still remained in their minds, nothing too important.
“Actually, this morning there has been a few odd things that might be related to-“ The necromancer started to explain the oddities she had come across but was interrupted.
“Of course they are related!” Vilja exclaimed. With her great frustration and fury, an emptiness began to grow in the small, cluttered room. The walls began to feel exceedingly far away and the distances between things that had been right beside each other started to grow. “I know for a fact that your presence here is a result of divine machinations and tiny tweaks of fate – even you should know that much by now. That is exactly what irks me so in this moment. Beings I consider allies, friends even, knew to place you here to take a spot of another. Which means they knew that this was a possibility… They knew someone was plotting to insult me like this! So, share me your theories, why was I being kept in dark?”
As the void around them grew and grew, the walls and furniture faded into nothingness and became hard to even remember. Iris couldn’t even tell if the walls had been wood or stone, and the only piece of furniture she had any recollection of was the bed. Neither dark nor bright, the emptiness wasn’t scary or even uncomfortable. If anything, it filled her with calm, as worldly worries faded from sight and memory. The matters of Mournvalley, the violet sect and more – all less than a distant memory for a short moment, before the inquisitor was able to shed the accidental effect the god was having on her. As her mind focused once more, for a split-second Iris thought she could feel something staring at her from the void – or perhaps the void itself did so as it writhed full of the feelings of betrayal the goddess was fighting to overcome. For a split second she was aware that the small and frail being in front of her was little more than a projection of something much, much grander, made for the benefit of her own comprehension. Just as quickly as it had come to her, the glimpse of divinity was erased from her mind and the void fell silent.
Realizing the effect she was having on the mortal realm in such an agitated state, Vilja forced herself to calm down until everything returned to the state it had been in before. “I’m sorry… Discovering that someone is fucking with the very concept I am is a bit of a sensitive matter to me.” She explained with a forced grin on her face. “I’m sure there’s a good reason I wasn’t told beforehand… I did sort of barge out as well, now that I think about it.”
“You have… uh… very mundane gripes for a god.” Iris pointed out while recovering from a sudden bout of dizziness she couldn’t remember the reason for. It was a bit surprising to hear, that the biggest problem a god would have in an instance of someone seemingly breaking the rules of existence, was that she didn’t get warned by her friends.
The comment brought a bit more genuine smile on the deity’s face. “Never let anyone convince you that us gods are above you in any way. We may be immortal embodiments of concepts, feelings and other stuff, but each god is a being with experiences and feelings of their own, regardless of who they are. We have our failings and flaws just the same as each and every mortal. There are cowardly gods, greedy ones, petty ones, stupid ones, just as there are flawed mortals. Simply because we have access to greater knowledge and power does not on its own make us perfect or even correct in every matter. There is no grand difference in the daily woes of you and I.” She shared some of her wisdom. “And as you are already intertwined in divine plans: never accept divinity as a sole justification for anything. Do what you think what you must, not just what is asked of you.”
The necromancer frowned. “Is that something you should be saying? I feel like a god going around telling people to not trust gods is going to upset some of your… colleagues, I guess?”
“It’s about time for us to do better than we have. If someone has a problem with it, perhaps they have become useless as gods.” Vilja smiled, revealing her sharp teeth. Picking up a small white crystal from the floor and rolling it between her fingers, she took one more look around the room and placed the crystal on the table by the window. “But, if my allies have seen it fit to leave this to you, then so will I. Who lived here is of no real interest to me anyway, I simply want to know how all of this got past me, and I feel that answer is easier to get by keeping Sylvia in a headlock for a day than by rummaging through the collection here again.”
“I’ll do my best!” Iris promised, still a bit unsure how she should address a literal god before her. “Wait, you’re going to do what to who?”