Tahir fell to his knees, breathing heavily. He almost hit the ground as Theo ran over and collided with him in a freezing hug. With Metilia close behind. The traveler stepped to his side and put a comforting hand on his back. “Try to avoid doing anything adverse with your remaining energies. The power I used to protect your soul does not come without cost.” They smiled as Tahir looked up at the spirit. “I believe it’s time for a break. Call upon me again if you have the need, but be sure to let your soul recover.”
“Yeah, alright. Thanks as always, Traveler.” Tahir let bond with his spirits fade, and he watched as the spirit gave a bow before he disappeared. He looked at Theo and Metilia and smiled. “Mission complete?” He said.
Theo cried into his chest. “You almost died - that thing almost took your soul!”
Metilia looked at him with a conflicted gaze. “We couldn’t do anything to help you. If not for your spirits-”
“You two helped plenty.” Tahir corrected. “Moments before that, I would have been fried if not for you. Honestly we’re lucky that he targeted me. Not that I knew at the time, but I think I’m the only one who could have resisted-”
“That does not make it alright!” Metilia raised her voice to cut him off for perhaps the first time since he’d met her, as she got down on one knee and placed her hands on his shoulders. “It just means you nearly died twice instead of once. Are you that eager to see the afterlife?”
Tahir just stared, between her and Theo, for several seconds. “I…sorry. The whole thing would have gone up in smoke if the lich killed Neveroth, and I’m the one who brought you guys down here to begin with. I didn’t want to think of what would have happened to us, not to mention people in Balrech if he got away.”
“Care about your life a little more, you dummy.” Theo said, giving him a painful punch to the shoulder before she reached for her pack to drink a potion to calm down her freezing form. It felt aura enhanced, but Tahir’s own aura shield didn’t block any of it. After a moment, he realized that he had no aura or mana left, and the regeneration seemed incredibly slow, if not absent. Maybe that was what the Traveler meant when they talked about the cost of protecting his soul.
“Ow. Okay. I got it. I’ll try not to be as reckless. But at least this time, all’s well that ends well right?”
“Quite.” Neveroth stood behind them, having listened to their conversation for who knew how long, but it seemed like she grew tired hearing them speak. “Well fought, for what you were capable of. It pains me to admit, but I believe I would have been sent back to the underworld without that intervention.” She nodded to Tahir, and then stepped closer. The three of them stood as she approached, with Theo and Metilia holding up Tahir when he realized he had trouble remaining steady on his feet.
“My sisters will be envious of me for decades to come with this capture. Since you were pivotal to it, I cannot simply let our arrangement end with the treasures from this place. Hold out your hands.” They did as they were asked, and the erinyes waved her hand across them. The ground began to shake, and all three of them stumbled for several seconds. When the tremors stopped, they looked to the back of their hands, where symbols had appeared. Two circles, one larger with a smaller one inside it. The symbol for Odium. “My lord has found you worthy to receive his blessing. It shall persist while you continue to uphold divine law.”
Smirking at the wide eyed faces of the trio, she turned and started walking back to the throne. “And one more matter. You should remember it well should you find yourself in any Vudranian ruins in the future.” She touched a part of one of the throne’s armrests, about halfway down on the right side, and a glyph lit up. Around them, several stone doors slid open, revealing small rooms that each seemed to contain more treasure inside. She turned to face them while they looked around wildly. “For your sake. I pray we shall not meet again. For in all likelihood, one of you will be the target of judgment if we do. Live well.”
With a final, curt nod, she erupted in a pillar of fire in the middle of their goodbyes. When the pillar cleared, they were left alone in the room full of more treasure than any of them could hope to carry. The three stared at the now empty space, and after a while Tahir finally spoke. “Okay, in the interest of not making you two figure out how we’re going to carry a bunch of this back undetected, how about a nap?”
“That would be nice.” Theo replied, and with Metilia’s help, shifted Tahir over so that he could lean against a wall. “But before that, we should figure out what these blessings do!”
“Right, kind of still processing that to be honest.” He looked down at his hand. “Do you feel any different? If it affected my mana or aura at all, I can’t exactly tell since I’m kind of drained in both.”
“I think my aura pool increased! By a good bit actually.” Theo beamed as she sat down against the wall next to him.
Oh, Great. He thought. They’d only recently discovered that she had a massive aura pool that she hasn’t really been able to utilize. Even more of it was only a good thing, even if it made Tahir a little jealous. He looked over to Metilia, who’d come to sit down on the other side of him.
“I might be mistaken in this, as it’s a relatively new feeling for me, but I believe the lord of the earth’s blessing has unlocked my aura for me to use.” She met both of their astonished stares and smiled. “I suppose I will be joining you on those morning walks to learn to control it.
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Tahir immediately worried about her growth if she had access to both, but he mentally waved that thought off. Unlike him, she had an astronomical gap between her mana pool and a newly awakened aura pool. They had no chance of coming close unless she never used mana for the rest of her life.
“That’s amazing! We really did something amazing here didn’t we!?” Theo asked.
“Definitely, now I could go for an amazing nap.” Tahir responded. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, and listened to the two talk about the experience. Before he even realized, he’d fallen asleep between the two of them.
###
When he woke up, he found his head resting on someone’s lap. Without moving, he blinked away grogginess as best he could, and looked around with only his eyes to try to figure out who. After a couple seconds, he spotted Theo arranging something into a pile. “Metilia?” He murmured, and felt a hand rest gently on the side of his head.
“You’re awake.” She let him rise and watched as he took in the surroundings. The various rooms full of treasure had been emptied of coins and gems, with the largest of valuable objects left inside.
“How long was I out?” He asked. This seemed like more than a nap’s amount of work, and where did all the gold go?
“About ten hours. Theo and I alternated for about eight.” Metilia raised a hand at Tahir’s surprised expression. “From what we heard from the Traveler before you released them, you needed the rest, and nothing happened down here anyway.” She clarified. “You were also rather hard to rouse once you fell asleep. How are your energies?”
He checked, probing his mana and aura pools. Both increased a noticeable amount from the recent trials, but his aura by much more. A result of Odium’s blessing, no doubt. “Fine. Higher than they were before. Hard to believe all this started from me having trouble growing them.”
“Good. I’m glad you’ve recovered without much issue.”
“Hey Tahir! You’re finally awake! Look at what we got.” Theo dragged multiple bags, shoulder and backpacks with symbols of the Vudranian language sewn into them, and dropped one in front of Theo. It wasn’t heavy, but felt like it held something substantial. He looked inside and found a much disproportionate amount of gold and gems inside. He stared for a couple seconds as his mind caught up with what he was seeing.
“Storage bags?” He looked back up to Theo, who gave an enthusiastic nod. They were bags with an extra dimensional space within them, allowing them to store mass quantities of things.
“One for each of us and an extra! There’s also a bunch of other magic stuff too. Meti says Neveroth would have warned us if anything was cursed, but I wanted to make sure with you.”
At that, he stood, and made his way over to the pile of items, which Theo had been sorting when he noticed her. He could see a staff with a gem at the top, two rings, a black cloak trimmed with gold, and multiple potion bottles. He also spotted a thick book off to the side.
“You don’t mind if I take the potions, right? Master Callipho could help me reverse engineer them.” Theo asked, and Tahir nodded, picking up an item and beginning a ritual to find out its magical properties.
The haul seemed to be a mix of personal items from the Lich and spoils taken from others. One of the rings was a Spell-storing ring, and a rather powerful one at that. It could store a single epic spell, or several spells of advanced and below in power. The other ring aided in aura recovery, allowing one to recover from even grievous wounds in combat. It only worked for a limited time before having to recharge, however. The staff increased mana efficiency to any non-epic spell, without any larger boosts to specific types of spells. Still, reducing basically any spell Tahir could currently cast down by a third of its cost it blew the tenth or so that Tahir’s wand reduced out of the water. Finally, the cloak was reinforced with protective magics, acting as armor and even slightly enhancing one’s aura shield.
A major haul worth several thousand gold on its own, but it said nothing of the just-over ten-thousand gold in coins, gems, and other minor valuables that Theo stuffed in the storage bags. A couple more thousand’s worth of value existed in the larger items. Ancient portraits, gold-plated lamps and the like, but they couldn’t reasonably carry them back into Balrech without bringing a ton of attention to themselves.
With all of those identified, he checked the book. It was written in draconic, the only other language that Tahir studied extensively other than common, and it seemed to be a spellbook. Zorhe’s spellbook. “There are at least 40 spells in the book.” Metilia pointed out. “And only some of them I recognize. Just missing the opportunity to uncover this alone will get the collective fuming, but should we have to deal with another major mage’s guild in the future, we can leverage the ability to trade spells none of them have ever seen before.”
Finding the book a bit too complex to flip through with everything going on, Tahir set it down. “This is incredible. You and I can share the spellbook obviously, but otherwise, who gets what?”
Metilia and Theo looked between each other, and back to him before Theo spoke. “We already talked about it a little bit, here.” Both of them came up to Tahir and started picking up the items. One by one, he was handed both the rings, the cloak, and the staff. Metilia held on to the book, while Theo held the potion bottles.
“Wait, no way. I can’t take all of these.” His hands were full, and he looked between them and hoped one of them would take something back. “At the very least, Metilia could use this staff better than I could.
“Tahir, do not take this the wrong way, but you need them more than we do.” Metilia said this with a straight face, but Theo held a hand over her mouth to hide a smile. “You are a skilled fighter, and the Traveler more than pulls their weight when they are out, but your aura and mana pools are still very small in comparison to ours. Your ability as a fighter plummets considerably when you run out of either.” Tahir opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find any way to refute her words. “And as far as the staff goes, mine has a similar efficiency already. It wouldn’t be nearly as much of a jump as with your wand. Also, given the fact that we would have gotten none of this without you - both leading us to the ruin and convincing Neveroth to let us join her, it only seems appropriate that you should get the biggest share. Theo and I have already discussed this extensively while you were sleeping.” Theo nodded to affirm.
Tahir glanced between the two of them, but after he couldn’t come up with anything else to argue. “Alright. Fine. Let’s just get out of here.”