Nevin blinked, staring slack-jawed at the three foot long gaping hole in the floorboards and the unyielding blackness within. His thighs ached from the strain of crouching, but he was too concerned with the hidden compartment to care. The rim of the hole and edge of the loose floorboard was chipped and cracked from what he assumed was regular placement and removal, and the wood around it glossy and discolored from handling. Had the silver embossed journal not kept his attention before, Nevin imagined the removable board would have stuck out like an ink blot on a blank page. How had he managed to overlook it for so many years?
The desk, he thought, running his empty hand along the floor. He saw them now, the scratches in the wood left behind by the angled writing desk's balled feet. Even running perpendicular with the wood grain, the faint gouges were almost invisible, but where his eyesight fell short, his fingertips prevailed. With the pine desk in its normal position in the study, the removable board would be both inaccessible and hidden, and with all the other decorative objects displayed around the room, he doubted many people would think to move a desk in search of further valuables.
Nevin looked around. If Ishen's bragging was to be believed, any would-be thief could retire happily on just a fraction of the study's contents, and his old mentor had boldly insisted on placing them right out in the open.
Had it all been a distraction?
“Ishen...what are you thinking?” He rolled the broken bit of black thread between his fingers. “You wanted someone to find this.”
He sank to his knees, leaning forward until his free hand rested on the floor beside the gap in the floorboards. Maybe the previously unseen Channel Disjoining and Annexing had been chosen as 'bait' in order to hint at other unknown tomes within. Maybe Ishen had squirreled away an atlas or travel journal of some kind, something that Nevin and Aidux could use to escape the peninsula, but as to why the old scholar would hide such mundane knowledge away from the world, he couldn't know. Maybe Nevin was just desperately clinging to any hopeful possibility that popped into his troubled mind.
“Question is, did you want me to find it...or someone else?” He took a deep breath. Only one way to find out.
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He set the leather tome beside the hole and plunged his hand into darkness, mumbling a soft prayer that no hungry animals or poisonous insects lay hidden within. To his surprise, something soft and coarse instantly enveloped his hand. He grabbed a fistful and pulled. A ratty wool blanket emerged from the hole, stained and faded and stinking of mildew.
“Ugh!” Nevin grimaced, tossing the foul-smelling blanket aside.
Undeterred, he tried again, sinking his arm up to the elbow, but finding only unexpectedly cold air. His wounded shoulder complained, shaking from the effort as he lowered his body closer to the floor. The stagnant air grew ever colder, but still the hole gave up nothing.
“I know you're in there,” he grunted, lowering all the way to his chest and squashing his cheek against the worn pine planks to stretch as much reach from his arm as he could manage. He could see under the desk now, could see all way across the study and through the door into other room.
As for his searching hand, it felt like he'd shoved it into bank of fresh snow. He stirred his arm about, reaching in every direction he could think of, inching farther and farther, feeling the muscles in his upper back cramping from the strain...
A pair of calf-length black boots stepped into view, pausing in the doorway.
Nevin flinched, nearly calling out in surprise. His grip faltered, and he slid deeper into the hole than intended. The back of his head knocked against the floor, and a bright light bloomed across his vision. Waves of hot pain and nausea wracked his body. He abandoned the search, flailing and grasping about before finally attempting to brace himself against the underside of the floor.
And that's how he found it.
His hand crashed into something hard, hard and unfathomably cold. His mind screamed at him to breathe, to instinctively suck air from surprise, to jerk his hand away from the brutal cold, but it was too late. All heat abandoned his body, torn from his extremities, through his center mass, and out through his frozen hand.
Everything stopped. A cloud of breath hung in the air before his parted lips. Beyond the writing desk, one black boot hovered over the floor, trapped mid-step. Even his heart refused to beat.
All feeling vanished, replaced not with numbness, but with an utter lack of existence. Sound faded. Each of his senses failed, one by one and all at once. His sight failed last, as the floor, the desk, the study itself just faded away, evaporating into nothingness.