--- AYMIAE ---

Aymi had never been particularly fond of mountain spiders, but when she’d been looking for a place to store her more… sensitive books, mount Beial was the ideal place for it. For one it was a young enough mountain that it was unlikely any other mages had hidden their secret stashes there. And for another it moved, and that just made it all the more difficult for anyone to find a secret room or two.

She might have overdone it with the twenty rooms of treasure, secrets, and more than a few expensive potions that she hadn’t had immediate need of, but no one had found it yet and that’s what mattered.

It was situated deep in Beial’s thick shell, deep enough that occasionally you could hear the monster’s heartbeat through the ground. It was protected by hundreds of permanent illusions kept in place by the most expensive wardstone Aymi had been able to get a hold of.

Aymi herself couldn’t even see through the illusions as she led Harrel through the forest and toward a familiar clearing. She relied on little hints she’d left for herself in the construction, a pair of specific carved initials in an aspen tree, a normal looking trail marker that was made from rocks not found on mount Beial.

Eventually, they arrived in the clearing and Aymi spread out her senses, making sure the illusion was still completely undetectable.

There wasn’t a trace that anything was even remotely odd here.

Aymi cleared her throat awkwardly and said the childish key she’d come up with, having known that no one would ever think to guess it. “Potato Mittens.”

The first illusion melted away to her eyes, Harrel still saw it, and the privacy wards she’d placed would prevent him from hearing the phrase either. The illusion further protected itself by making it nigh impossible for anyone to read the lips of whoever said the phrase. Harrel knew the key though, so this wasn’t a problem.

Aymi knelt down beside the rock that hadn’t been there before. She held it firmly and turned it sharply ninety degrees. The rock changed underneath her fingers, a carving replica of Lamariel, the Blinking Star melted into its surface in the center of its common constellation.

Aymi tapped the tiny almost imperceptible dot beside Lamariel that represented a planet to the constant beat of that star that she’d painstakingly memorized as a means of reading the codes of the Society of the Mis-born Dragon.

She did several other things, the layers of illusions slowly melting away until a keyhole appeared in the rock. She inserted her spare key that she’d gotten from Raan, resisting the urge to turn it.

After a minute of sitting in the lock, the key turned itself and suddenly there was a gaping hole in the ground a few feet away. She handed Harrel the key for his turn with the entrance ritual and stepped down into the pit, immediately met by darkness.

A moment later the magical lamps caught her presence and turned on, audibly buzzing slightly since they were old spells. She’d have to fix that tomorrow once she had time.

She descended the rest of the ladder, and ignored the highly decorated chest full of semi-expensive jewels and mage secrets meant to give intruders something for all of their trouble. She deactivated the last illusion and a peaceful blue door melted into existence.

Aymi opened it and relaxed slightly when she saw that not a touch of dust had disturbed her repository.

She examined the whole place, just to be sure it was the same. She sorted through vials of alchemical ingredients, she glanced through her shelves and shelves of inactive permanent illusions affixed to necklaces, rings, bracelets, and earrings. Aymi examined the beds that lined the back two rooms and the room filled with emergency food in case she needed to lay low somewhere without notice for a while.

After an hour or so, she got worried about Harrel, so she went to make sure he hadn’t forgotten how to do part of the entrance ritual.

She found him sitting in the front room, looking nostalgic as he examined the various trophies and mementos that littered the area. “It’s been so long since I’ve been here…”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Aymi nodded, setting down the wardstone she’d brought out from its hiding place. “Exactly why I need to get you a key to this place, I’m sure you’ll have more need of it than anyone else in the coming years.”

“What happened to an extra key’s existence threatening the safety of the hideout as a whole?”

“It lasted over ten years without anyone discovering it,” Aymi admitted, “I finally figured out how to sever individual keys from the system, so I’m a lot more comfortable with giving them out.”

Harrel grinned and motioned toward the wardstone, “Alright then!”

Aymi nodded. She made a sharp gesture above the wardstone, channeling magic into it in a specific way. It was difficult to shape the conjuration though without her illusion affinity, She hadn’t realized how much she’d relied on it for this. The Time magic and Body magic portions of the spell were just as difficult as she remembered, but the unexpected hardship in her own field of expertise threw the whole spell off.

Aymi frowned down at the resulting bronze goop that was even now dissolving slightly. Harrel gazed at it too with his mouth slightly open. “Aymi, are you alright?”

He’d never seen her fail at something that relied on an illusion before.

She prodded the mass and decided she was going to have to start over. “I’m… I’m fine. My affinity however, is not.” She sighed, starting up the flow of her magic again, “I’m just still figuring out how to use magic without it.”

Harrel nodded, but he paid closer attention to her as she cast the spell again. This time the conjuration worked, bonding to a piece of mass from the wardstone and producing a simple bronze key. He took it with a frown. “You didn’t tell me that your affinities were gone.”

Aymi glanced down, “I didn’t want anyone’s pity.”

“That’s strange, I remember you being quite the pity hoarder not so long ago.”

“...How so?”

“You would only ever cry if there was someone there to watch.”

Aymi thought back on how she’d made tear ducts just so she could cry in the desert not terribly long ago. “I think I’ve grown past that part.” Though… she probably would have done it sooner if she hadn’t been almost completely alone. She was glad though that things had gone the way they had.

She couldn’t imagine what would have happened if she hadn’t come across that bandit. Or if she’d eaten a companion's energy instead of someone who deserved that loss, or if she’d fallen catatonic only to wake up in a couple hundred years when someone bled all over her mushrooms.

Maybe… maybe that’s what was wrong with Turste.

Aymi frowned at that thought, shaking her head to dislodge it. It was possible, but she had more pressing things to worry about. “Anyways, what do you think we’ll need for a trip to Yera?”

Harrel grinned, “Is it odd that this is actually my favorite part of adventures?”

“The planning stage? Sparks Harrel, is that why you can take two months just to get a crime lord out of a city?”

“No, that part is my dramatic flair.”

Aymi shook her head at him and picked up a nearby map of Yera, refreshing herself on the distance involved, “Well, we’ll need three months of supplies and then three more for the trip back… but accounting for our luck, we should probably pack for a whole year.”

“And we need to look at your records of go’lir to see if this is even possible.”

Aymi wrote that on the top of her list, having forgotten before, she glanced at the second item on the list. “I’ll also need to try contacting Netun again, but he’s in Yera by now since the stone is just buzzing.”

Harrel perked up, “Oh! We should bring your gun! That thing helped a lot for making them take us seriously last time we were in Yera.”

Aymi winced, “I’d have to try conjuring one again, since… I was keeping that in the Ayfel.”

He winced, “oh… I’m… I’m sorry.”

Aymi was still trying to reconcile the loss of all the similar artifacts she’d had there, but she was familiar enough with the gun that she might actually be able to make one. “It’s fine, it was just a priceless artifact from a bygone age, there’s at least a hundred of them still kicking around. It’s not nearly on the level of when someone stole the Eye of Eclipse from you.”

“I never did find out who that was…” Harrel said thoughtfully.

“I thought you said Wela had it at one point?”

“Well yeah, she had it for at least a year, but I still don’t know who actually stole it. Then it dropped off the map entirely, I think someone took it to a different realm or something. ”

“Yeah...” She remembered Harrel spending hours every night pouring through legends and hearsay about that artifact, she remembered an expedition over the course of five years looking for it, and finally a victorious return from an icy island far to the south only for it to go missing the next day without a trace.

“Anyway,” Harrel said, “I think we should bring that last vial of full healing, last time we were in Yera we needed three of them…”

Aymi nodded and added that to the list.