IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM

Be. Still.

That’s the first thing that went through Kae’s mind when the man in black bent the metal door inward and strode into the Eletes Ancient History Museum’s Secluded Section. The security measures activated immediately, dropping the ceiling in on the invader.

Archeologists did not fuck around. A few hundred years of experience in breaking into old tombs and stealing from them gave them a wealth of ideas on how to defend their own treasures. When it came to collateral damage, they tended to take the long view: you can always get new museum visitors, but ancient history is harder to come by. Maybe not so true in the days of the Wave, when all prospective visitors would soon become ancient history themselves.

The second thing that went through Kae’s mind, motivated by the slivers of living darkness that sprouted from the rubble and began hurling boulders away was: I am going to die.

After all the trouble she’d gone through finding the secret museum schematics with all the hidden rooms (not to mention the secret-secret schematics with the real hidden rooms), after navigating her way through more than five kilometers of ventilation shafts, maintenance tunnels, and a true-to-life recreation of the deep catacombs of King Mahk-Aete-Ma’s tomb (complete with deadly traps), and finally finding a safe-ish way into the Secluded Section, it had come to this. She was going to get killed by some bastard with a spell in his head.

A boulder thrown by a tentacle of darkness sailed over Kae’s head and crushed a pillar behind her, sending a cloud of dust up into the air.

Kae had heard of him before. He Who Manipulates Shadows was an old roving pirate, one of the endless list of enemies the First Guard fought and put away in the Hold with uncanny regularity. Old, cranky, and completely unaware of when to give up.

The old man finally extricated himself from the rubble. He was encased inside a sphere of solid darkness that pushed the final pebbles away in a tiny avalanche. The darkness dissipated. The man walked into the Secluded Section, trailed by a host of goons in matching uniforms.

Where do they all find the time to dress so sharp?

That was the third thing that went through Kae’s mind. Before the fourth turned out to be a spear of pure darkness, she hid back inside the secret panel that lead down to the depths of the recreated deadly catacombs.

Following barked orders, the goons spread out, checking glass protections and old mechanisms, ancient art objects and indistinguishable recent reproductions of the same. One goon in particular carried a black cylinder and pointed it at each item in turn.

A dowser. Now where did the old man find something like that? It didn’t look like a very strong one, but it did make a few things clearer. One: the pirates were searching for the old Eletes spell. Two: she was shit out of luck. They would find the spell before she did, and then all would be lost.

Spell-searching was made difficult by the fact that anything could hold a spell. Ancient tomes were just the top layer of snow on a very, very deep iceberg. Suitable hosts could be found among strange animals, old trees, particularly appealing rocks, paintings where the eyes seem to follow you around the room, incomplete bureaucratic forms, a single word in a slam poem, conspicuous motes of dust. Not to mention a pliable human mind.

With a dowser, it was only a matter of checking each item in the room. Which meant it was time to improvise.

Kae rose from her hiding place. Almost on cue, a host of weapons turned to stare her down.

“Settle down, boys,” she said. “See? Unarmed. Not security.”

As one, the pirates looked to He Who Manipulates Shadows, who had walked further into the room and, turned away from them all, muttered to himself and tossed priceless historical artifacts this way and that.

A teenage pirate, more enterprising than the rest, approached the spellwielder and touched his shoulder.

“Wha’?”

The pirate pointed. He Who Manipulates Shadows might have been a dashing pirate at some point. His hair might have been blonde and his beard elegant and pointed, his eyes a piercing green. Whatever he had been, it had wasted away with the sands of time. Age had taken its toll, offering no discounts. Everything sharp had gone soft and rounded long ago.

“Who’s she?” the man demanded. “Who’re you?”

“Victim,” hissed a voice behind her. She half-turned; the pirate with the dowser had siddled behind her. He nodded meaningfully towards the old man. "Be. A victim."

Kae turned to the spellwielder. Well. Couldn't hurt.

“Please,” Kae squeaked. “I’m only an intern.”

“Wha’?”

“An intern!” yelled the dowser-pirate.

The Spellwielder nodded. It made sense. With the Wave so close, Eletes was mostly abandoned, and all serious academics had relocated to Atlantis carrying about as much as they could fit in their pockets and a monograph or two. Leaving an intern behind to keep the place spic and span until the end was only good sense.

He Who Manipulates Shadows wobbled forward. Kae saw that he used a cane of shadows of keep himself upright. He studied her with a pale, rheumy eye.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Why’re you dressed like that? Eh?”

That was the flaw in the plan. Interns tended to dress in prim office clothes or heavy armor depending on whether there were any dangerous tasks that needed doing. Tight-fitting practical clothes, filled with more instruments, belts, and pockets than could be reasonably considered useful for day-to-day life, raised suspicion.

“Er, coward, sir,” Kae said. “I was just about to make my getaway. Please,” she whimpered for good measure, in case the man thought her too bold.

He Who Manipulates Shadows glared at her. He had a good glare.

“Ollie!” he barked.

The pirate with the dowser perked up.

“Yessir!”

“Found my spell yet?”

“Nosir!”

“Then partner up with Miss Coward here. You’ll get me my spell, Coward, and then you’ll be free to leave. Howzat sound?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Kae said, monotone. Best to stick to character.

The old man seemed to think that was the proper response for your typical hostage-faced-with-death scenario. He nodded to himself, then swiveled on his cane and kept walking, grabbing artifacts with long stalks of darkness, glaring them into submission, and smashing them against the nearest surface.

“Sorry about that,” said Ollie-with-the-dowser, relaxing. “He likes things to be as they were in the heyday. You know. Hostages should be helpless victims if they’re women, and if they're men they should yell things like ‘you're not gonna get away with this!'. Come this way. He'll only be happy if we find the spell. In the meanwhile, tell me: what are you actually doing here?"

He was a tall, broad-shouldered young man, clearly practical and level-headed. Possibly cautious, too. Spell-dowsing tended to attract the sort of people who always put on gloves before opening the oven. Or at least those were the ones who tended to survive.

In any instance, not a drama case like his boss.

"I really am an intern," she lied."

"Sure. And I'm a visitor. Could you direct me to the ancient traps exhibit?"

“Look, Ollie,” Kae said, placing her hands against her hips. “Believe me or not, the fact is I have no clue where the spell is. You think they tell us that sort of thing?”

“That’s alright,” Ollie gave her a lopsided smile. “In that case you’ll just keep me company while I make my way through the items. As long as the old man is happy, I don’t really mind.”

He nodded at her to go ahead between a row of artifacts sharply illuminated by the bright tabletops. The Secluded Section was just that: rows and rows of illuminated counters filled with items that were either too mysterious, too valuable, or that leading academics were too nervous weren’t the real deal, and were thus reluctant to show them to the public.

Ollie dowsed them all equally, serenely, touching the surface of the cylinder to the object and waiting a moment before moving on to the next.

Kae crossed her arms and kept close to him. The other pirates, a surprisingly orderly bunch, had stopped paying attention to her, which meant she could observe the items and come to her own conclusions. If she could identify and grab the spell before Ollie got to it, maybe there was a chance she could still make it out of here.

The trouble was that the artifacts ranged from pieces of masonry to old chamber pots with humorous writings to loose pages of old books. Even to her practiced eye none seemed particularly likely to contain a spell.

He Who Manipulates Shadows 'Harrumph!'ed loudly, and another item sailed over their heads. Ollie reflexively extended the dowser, trailing the object before it smashed against a wall. Kae winced at the impact.

“Y’know, if that had been a spell the entire museum would be a crater now," she said.

“Or it would have turned to banana bread, or teleported to the other side of the world, or it would have opened a hole in reality that something awful would be trying to crawl through,” Ollie answered, lifting finger after finger. “Yeah. Happens a lot. I don’t like it either. But grandpa thinks this spell is unlikely to break, at least.”

“Wait…”

A set of priceless porcelain dishes zipped through the air like clay pigeons, and with much the same fate.

“Grandpa?”

“Yeahh…” Ollie scratched his head, frowning. “It’s a tough time for him. He always thought he was going to find a really powerful spell in his lifetime. Now that everything’s about to end I think he feels like a failure. The family tries to humor him, you know, keep him distracted. I was interning for him when this whole mess started.”

"You guys are a family?”

“Extended family. On a final trip before the world ends. Or at least until the old man croaks his last." Ollie sighed. "He has the keys to the ship.”

He shook his head. Kae thought she could see it. He Who Manipulates Shadows was searching vigorously, barking orders and breaking invaluable historical artifacts against each other like he was banging pans together. Everyone else seemed content to poke at things with disinterested expressions, chat amicably, and roll their eyes at the old man’s choicer turns of phrase. Kae saw a couple of young pirates, nine or ten years old, chase each other between the tables.

“You don’t think you’ll find a strong enough spell?” she asked.

“Honestly?” Ollie looked at her. “At this point we could find War and it still wouldn’t be enough. He’s in it for the chase.”

“A one-word spell would crack him in two,” Kae said, touching a small metallic sphere inlaid with mysterious, deep-set etchings with the tip of one finger. She raised an eyebrow. “Try this one.”

“Yeah, well. Everyone has to go in the end, and that’s apparently going to be sooner rather than later. If he died trying to contain War at least he would have died happy.” The dowser touched the sphere. Nothing happened. “Wouldn’t you do the same if it was your grandpa?”

Deadpan, Kae nodded. She was still looking at the metal sphere, drumming the illuminating table with a pair of fingers. The design on the surface of the metallic surface was haphazard, meaningless. And yet, and yet there was something about it. It jogged something in her memory. As if the artifact only needed only a budge, a poke, before it was persuaded to reveal its secrets.

“Wouldn’t you?” Ollie repeated as he turned to her.

It was Kae who shrugged this time, leaning against the table and blocking his sight of where the sphere used to be. Praise be for quick fingers.

“Yees... Yes, sure, I would. Uh, what would you say will happen if you guys don’t find what you’re looking for here?”

Ollie snorted.

“Usually gramps destroys everything, lets off some nervous energy, and we move on to the next rumor, clue, or hint that somewhere, somehow, there might be a spell that no one’s ever found and claimed.”

On their winding about between the tables, they had approached the grate Kae had kicked out so she could climb in from the recreated catacombs.

“Right. And I was thinking,” she said slowly, insinuating as warm massage oil. “Wouldn’t it be nice of you to let me go before that happens? Keeping me out of harms way and all that?” She thought of batting her eyelashes, but resisted. She couldn’t trust herself to not look like she was just blinking.

“Sorry,” Ollie shook his head without turning. “No can do. I’d never hear the end of it.”

Well, fine, Kae thought. I wasn’t really asking.

She cracked her knuckles, lowered her center of gravity. She lifted her foot in preparation for the Sublime Dance of the Peaceful Lotus, a kick known for being able to rip a man’s head from his shoulders if performed correctly. Hopefully when performed incorrectly it would only give said man a distracting enough headache that she could slip past him.

Kae turned. Kae twisted. And right before she swung a steel-toed boot at Ollie’s blissfully unaware melon, a voice echoed in the large space, interrupting her.

“Room for one more?” the voice asked.

Someone else had climbed over the debris He Who Manipulates Shadows had left behind. Someone tall. Someone wearing stylish sunglasses indoors.

“I would hate to interrupt the party.”