"We found the Eyes of Cornelius!" Lily yelled as she ran up from behind.
Smokewell greeted her with the good ol' claws to the face. The girl cried out in pain. "What was that for?!"
"Because we are already in a graveyard," I said. "The last thing we need is someone suddenly yelling up from behind."
"Speak for yourself," Smokewell said, "You are the only wuss here. I just felt like scratching someone's face." She licked her paw again.
I rolled my eyes and turned to Lily and Asmod. "So you guys really found the Eyes of Cornelius?"
Lily nodded gingerly as she touched the cuts on her face and pointed at Asmod next to her. The short man was holding a lump of solid concrete in his hands. It looked like the head of a statue of some guy, half bald head and eyes made of glinting silver.
"I said this back at the temple as well, Lilian, but I don't think this is what we were supposed to take," Asmod said with an uncertain look on his face.
"What do you mean?" Lily said, "That was the temple of the Saint Cornelius the First. That's the head of his statue. And it has the Eyes of Cornelius in it."
"He's right," Smokewell said. "That's not what we are looking for."
"How?" Lily gaped at us all.
"Um, probably because the door didn't appear even after you retrieved it," I said, waving my arms around us, "The door would've opened if that was the right artefact."
Lily groaned and turned to Asmod, "Even I suggested we should've taken the statue's crotch instead. The Eyes are probably a code for his testicles."
Asmod grimaced. So did I. "That doesn't sound right," I said.
Lily held open her hexonomicon for us to see. We had just two hours and thirty two minutes left before the Dungeon Entrapment.
I sighed. "I'm sure we'll find it, don't worry." I turned back to Yazara's casket behind us. Smokewell hopped onto my shoulder to see.
I finally slid the lid off. Bright yellow light poured into our vision. My eyes went wide. Asmod walked forward. Even Lily peered over my shoulder. We all let out a collective gasp.
"The skeleton...the skeleton!" Lily blurted, pointing into the casket.
"Yeah." I nodded. "I can see it too, Lily. It is golden."
Smokewell giggled. "We are going to be rich! We are going to be so, so rich."
"Um, we'll have to return back to our home for that," Asmod said, "Gold probably doesn't have the same value here in heaven if people just give it up like this."
Smokewell's paws dug into my shoulder. "He's right!" she snapped and turned to Lily, "You idiot, we need to go find the Eyes quickly or we'll be stuck here forever."
"Hey, I tried my best, it's not my fault that people in heaven call their testicles 'Eyes'." Lily crossed her arms and glared at the cat.
"Shut up, everyone!" I snapped, "We still don't know if the Eyes are actually testicles. Let's not go on making any crass assumptions."
"Everyone be quiet," Asmod said, "One of my birds sent me a message. A big group is headed this way."
"Must be a funeral procession." Lily shrugged.
"People don't die in heaven, Lily," I said, "We just learned that."
"That's not completely true. Their soul can still be snatched out and turned prisoner. It's still a kind of death," Smokewell said. "Also a kind of slavery, now that I think of it."
Before Lily or I could say anything Asmod said, "They are getting clos--oh wait, here they come." He pointed at the gate behind him. A horde of people entered through the main entrance of the graveyard.
Lily quickly dragged us all behind a large tomb that read: Here lies Kyza's hatred.
The mob of people stormed into the graveyard. They carried spears and pitchforks in their hands and they seemed pretty pissed off at something. It wasn't hard to tell what they were here to do but I managed to hold off from jumping to conclusions. Then I saw the man they had tied to a wooden log and carried like a pig about to be roasted on a bonfire.
"I don't think cooking a live person is a good thing," Lily said.
Smokewell scoffed. "Thanks for letting us know, Lily. We were really on the fence with that one."
"We need to help him!" Lily snapped.
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"Keep it down or they'll hear us," I snapped back in a hushed whisper.
I looked up at Smokewell who was still perched on my shoulder. "We are surely going to help him but how should we go about doing this?"
"We don't owe him a penny. Why do you want to help him?" the cat said.
I held back a groan. "Because that scene looks like something that we would've been in had the Inquisition caught us."
"So? It's not like anyone would've come to save our asses had it been us. People already think of us as bringers of misfortune. Let that bastard die," Smokewell said.
"Madam, that's not why you became a witch!" Lily said in a hushed voice.
"She is right," Asmod said, "You were one of the few good witches who helped cleanse the accursed lands. Unlike the greedy covens who were only after intimidating commoners into committing expensive rituals."
"Did you forget that I said I'm retiring from being a witch?" Smokewell said.
"You weren't retiring from its practices, if I remember correctly," I said, smirking.
Smokewell groaned. "If you want to help that poor bastard, first listen to what those people are saying." She pointed her paw back at the crowd.
We turned back to the mob lynching.
"Your family are nothing but a bunch of power hungry fraudsters!" someone from the mob yelled out while two people were lighting a fire nearby.
"That's not true," the man bound to the wooden log said. "My great grandfather wasn't a fraud!"
"Then why didn't he teach anyone the arts that he'd learned? He kept hogging away all the power to himself. He became the head of the village and even had a damn temple made after himself so that everyone could worship him. He kept getting stronger while he made everyone helpless," the first man yelled. "But today we end the tyranny of the Cornelius family once and for all!"
We all paused at the last sentence. I looked back at Asmod who was still holding onto the concrete head of the statue. "Heaven is quite the small place, eh?" I said.
"Change of plans, kids," Smokewell said. "We need to save that man at all costs."
I scoffed, "And you were questioning my morals a moment ago."
Smokewell ignored me and said, "One of you needs to cause a distraction, while someone else focuses on scaring away the crowd. The last one will obviously go and free the man in the meantime."
"I'll take care of causing a distraction," Asmod said. "But we won't have any more eyes in the sky, mind you."
Lily was about to say something when I cut her off, "I'll do the crowd control. You focus on freeing Cornelius."
The girl nodded at me. My eyes turned back to the crowd. There were at least fifty of them there, All of them armed and all of them blazing with anger. Yet, for some reason my heart wasn't racing. And their fierce yelling seemed to come from somewhere far away. There was another voice that kept echoing inside my head.
"Here by the daffodils," someone whispered to me. It was the same voice from before.
With Smokewell still perched on my shoulder, I padded out from behind the grave and over to Yazara's tomb that we had dismantled a few minutes ago. I pulled the golden skeleton out of the casket. "What are you going to do?" the cat said, half-annoyed and half-curious.
I didn't say anything. Honestly, I didn't seem to know myself what I was doing. But it was that muscle memory thing happening again. I was drawing a pentacle on the ground with my knife, placing the golden bones on the outline of the circle and the star. At the centre of the pentacle, I drew an eye with my knife. And inside the big iris, I placed the golden skull.
The voice in my head was whispering something else now, "Yes, set me free."
I raised my knife and sliced a cut on my palm. The same palm that had the pentacle tattoo on it. Blood oozed out of the wound. I winced and made a fist, dripping the blood onto the ritual sign to charge it.
"Yes, set me free."
There was an explosion. A black storm erupted out of the pentacle I'd drawn on the ground. A vortex formed in the air in front of us.
The cat clung to my shoulder tighty. "What the devil is that?!"
"I don't know!" I yelled over the roaring black storm.
From the eye of the vortex, a giant ethereal mass emerged. It was a person. He must've been tall as a tree, dressed in torn rags that barely covered his rippling muscles. He had flowing black hair and a face covered in a long shaggy beard. His eyes glinted like two individual suns in his fierce visage.
The giant man turned to me, the storm still whirling around him. He leaned down and placed a hand on his heart with an earnest look on his face. "How may I serve you, my master?"
I gasped. I looked down at the golden bones inside the pentacle. This was Yazara? Or whatever was left of him in that skeleton.
I didn't waste much time pondering on how he had gotten this big. I hardened my face with authority and pointed at the angry mob that was staring at us in horror. "Frighten them away," I said.
"As you wish, my master." Yazara bowed and turned to the crowd.
The giant lifted one huge foot into the air and brought it down on the scampering mob. My face turned pale. "Yazara no--"
There was a huge thundering slam as his foot came down on the mob of people. Followed by a loud, wet crunch as Yazara's giant foot sank into the ground. The impact sent shockwaves in the vicinity, making my bones rattle under my flesh and shaking the perimeter walls of the graveyard.
After I regained my balance, I could tell none of the raging mob had been able to escape the giant's foot. The realization hadn't properly sank into me when the big spirit giant lifted his foot again. I sucked in a lungful of air and screamed, "Yazara, stop!"
The giant stopped at once, turned his head to me, confused. "What happened master?"
"What are you doing?!" I waved my hands at the destruction under his foot.
"Didn't you say, flatten them away?" Yazara said.
I paused. My heart had stopped beating for a second. But I shook the feeling away and glared at the giant. "That's it, we are done here!" I yelled. "Leave at once."
"Are you liberating me, master?" he asked.
"Yes, I’m liberating you. Leave!" I yelled back.
In another whirl of black storm, the giant spirit disappeared. In the last gust of wind, a voice whispered in my head again, "Thank you."