Randidly was strangely calm after getting a read on the situation. Calmer than he had expected from himself after seeing the Creature wearing a version of Lyra’s face that was clearly aged. And with that face being part of a body that was very clearly deceased. So calm that Randidly smoothly looked away from the central object on the platform, the casket, and noticed that it was surrounded by three smaller pillars that stopped about waist height and had things on top of them.

The first was something like a wooden podium sitting atop a pillar, on which Randidly could see the gently curling corners of a piece of paper. Before he moved his eyes away, he could even see tightly sloped handwriting on the page.

The second sitting on top of a pillar was an ivory bowl. The bowl, to Randidly’s very calm surprise, was completely empty and without residue. It was probably the pillar that he was the most curious about immediately. And the third object propped up looked like an elaborate rack used to dry clothes. A weathered piece of canvas hung from the top of the rack, fluttering lightly from the violence of Randidly’s sudden arrival.

Other than those three things and the casket, there wasn’t even dust here. The whole cavern was ominously clean and empty.

Due to their sudden dash to get here, Randidly had been breathing rather heavily when he arrived. But as he stood for a minute and looked between the three outer edifices around the casket, his breathing rapidly stabilized. Leaving Randidly frowning and trying to judge what the Creature’s play was here.

It seemed that Neveah sensed something in Randidly’s silence, because she nudged him mentally. Randidly, Yystrix seems to be…

“I know, she looks damn dead,” Randidly said quietly. Then he sighed and rubbed at his eyes. He could already feel a headache brewing in the delicate nervous of his face. “I know what it looks like. But… We know she has multiple incarnations. I’ve been completely tricked and blindsided before by similar tricks. Never hurts to be careful.”

Would you prefer she was alive? Neveah asked exasperatedly.

“Be easier to believe if I could have seen whatever apparently killed her,” Randidly admitted.

That silenced Neveah for the moment, so Randidly steadily backed away from the central platform and down onto the topmost stair. Then he focused his Aether Perception and Grim Intuition and began to heavily scan the surrounding area. After the first scan, Randidly paused, took a breath, and then checked everything one more time.

Congratulations! Your Skill Aether Detection has grown to Level 193!

The result of the scan didn’t change. It appeared that he hadn’t missed anything, but the lack of anything… that wasn’t how the Creature operated. It was clear that she meant to bring him here, and now that he was here…

Shaking his head, Randidly raised a hand and pressed it against his chest. He took about a minute break as he waited for his heart rate to fall back to normal. Then, for good measure, Randidly scanned one more time.

Congratulations! Your Skill Aether Detection has grown to Level 194!

Only after three scans did Randidly speak out loud to Neveah. “Are you sensing anything that I’m missing?”

For a second Neveah didn’t reply. Then, with awkwardness radiating through their mental bond, Neveah replied, Nothing like you are expecting, but even I would have difficulty picking out harmful constructs in her thick Aether that fills this place. But… it seems like… There is something. Yystrix’s Aether is beginning to transform now that you… are here.

That grabbed Randidly’s attention. “Transforming? Is there a shape around us-”

It is not a formation, but a fundamental shift in the energy. It’s aligning itself with our Aether, Randidly. Neveah thought back. Coming here definitely caused it, but it seems like the Aether around us had been sustained by this inner core above the coffin, and you’ve now broken that balance with that Aether you are throwing off passively. Probably within a few hours, a day at most… all of the scent of the Creature’s Aether will be gone from Earth.

It’s becoming your Aether. It’s mimicking your images.

Randidly’s expression turned grim. Considering the ban on his images being part of the passage of the Second Calamity, this was exactly the sort of attack that might trip the Earth up. A roundabout attack, but one that might be time-consuming to address-

To his surprise, rather than Neveah sharing his indignation, she seemed even more exasperated than she had been previously.

Handling this Aether problem is easy. If you… well, for now, I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you… continue exploring this area.

Then Neveah’s presence was gone, leaving Randidly alone with his thoughts and what he had found in his exhaustive earlier attempts to scrutinize the surrounding area. While frowning, Randidly walked back up onto the top of the platform.

The first thing he noticed was how this whole area had become a pressure cooker for the Creature’s Aether. Every bit of ground here was suffused with it. From the distant walls to the scratched roof, everything was the Creature. The effect of the Creature slowly claiming this area as ‘territory’ was much stronger here than outside.

An unnoticed effect of the architecture seemed to have been to slow the diffusion of the Creature’s Aether from this central room into the outside world. It still eventually escaped, but there was a sharp difference in the density of the signature within the vast cavern.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

But within the cavern, the Aether was entirely uniform. Which forced Randidly to admit that no new Aether was being created, or had been created in quite some time. He would need to attempt some time-consuming experiments to get a truly accurate picture of the diffusion speed of Aether, but his instincts told him that the Creature hadn’t been active here in at least a month.

The second thing that Randidly noticed, and the thing that made him extremely irritated, was that he sensed several muffled images in and around the cavern, concentrating around the ivory bowl that was completely empty. And here, the Creature’s handiwork was clearly visible to his senses.

Randidly attempted to focus and isolate one of the images in order to figure out who had already been here, but when he pressed, some hidden Aether constructs hidden within the vast amount of Aether in the cavern activated.

“Goddamnit,” Randidly snarled. Just like Neveah had admitted earlier, he had missed the mechanism in the dense Aether around him.

Like a bear trap snapping shut, the image within the muffling was crashed, leaving Randidly with three more muffled images floating around the ivory bowl, tantalizingly out of his reach for the moment. And what Randidly knew was that these four people were likely just minions out helping the Creature accomplish her goals, not anyone Randidly could get anything useful from. So the images were likely a waste of time.

But that didn’t mean he could prevent the slight from getting under his skin. Even now, the Creature managed to make him furious.

But Randidly admitted that it was better to leave those images untouched for now and wait for Neveah to return from her task of managing the spread of his image across the surrounding area. Because by this point, even Randidly could naturally sense what Neveah had been talking about. His Aether had been like a drop of black ink into a bowl of water when he arrived… and now, for whatever reason, all of the ‘water’ was turning black.

The third and final thing that Randidly had sensed was that the podium with the piece of paper had been very obviously marked by the Creature’s image. It glowed in his image-focused vision. In a way, it was like the Creature was waving her hand at him, telling him to go to the podium.

“Did you expect me to just follow your guidance blindly just because you are dead?” Randidly asked the air. There was no answer. There didn’t even seem to be an echo. Despite the huge space in which he found himself, Randidly felt… slightly suffocated.

But just like Randidly refused to look too long at the face the corpse wore, Randidly did not start with the podium. He had already been foiled by the Creature’s working around the empty ivory bowl, so Randidly went to the strange drying rack. And he flinched when he reached out and touched the canvas and was greeted with a notification.

Congratulations! You have located the Third Piece of your Fateset! Unfortunately, as you have not raised the Second Piece of your Fateset to Level 100, all qualities of the Third PIce of your Fateset will be hidden from you!

However, from exposure to the Third Piece, it is possible to sense the Level Up gains you will be granted from obtaining it! You will gain +10 Focus and -1 Control!

With trembling hands, Randidly undid the wooden clasps that held the piece of canvas in place. As he did so, he felt another Aether construct the Creature hid in the thick sea of her snap into place. Once it activated, Randidly cursed himself for not waiting to move until more of the surrounding area shifted and revealed these constructs. His mental grip on one of his drops of liquid Aether tightened, but the effect was just that a bubble around the third piece of his Fateset dissipated.

Randidly made a mental note that this was the first time he had seen a Level Up gain that would involve him losing Stats, but he set that aside for now in favor of more pressing concerns.

From a quick scan of the rapidly deteriorating construct, it became clear that it had just been made to keep anyone but Randidly from touching the piece of his Fateset. Which was… thoughtful, Randidly supposed. But extremely confusing. And it was already disturbing enough that the Creature had apparently noticed the presence of his Fateset on her person, although considering her longstanding paranoia, it made sense that she would spot it anyway.

She had been avoiding the System for a long time. An obvious interference like this wouldn’t go unnoticed.

Even though his emotions were surging back in forth in his stomach like he had drunk too much rootbeer, Randidly was calm. But because he had now twice missed Aether constructs that the Creature left, he didn’t dare move and risk triggering another one. No matter how calm he was, there was definitely something… off about his behavior. The first two mistakes turned out to be harmless, but it was difficult to believe that his luck would hold out much longer.

The Creature undoubtedly made plans that would force him to take the Path that she left for him. These protections were ensuring he did that, in their own way. He didn’t want to walk blindly into the Aether construct that finally took off the kid gloves.

Slowly, Randidly rolled up the blank piece of canvas. Even if it had most definitely been tampered with, it was still a piece of his Fateset. He believed that with time, he could figure out what the Creature had done and reverse it. Once he had the rolled-up canvas, he walked to the edge of the topmost portion of the platform and meditated.

Eventually, Neveah returned and informed Randidly that she had honestly taken inspiration from what was happening now around them and used it to solve the issue. There seemed to be a way of priming Aether to rapidly change to the next Aether that arrived, so she had gathered Randidly’s Aether, primed it in the manner she learned from the cavern, and then added a drop of pure Aether to the mixture.

It worked as intended; gradually, all of the Aether that had been the Creature’s and was now turning into Randidly’s began to transform into pure energy. This way, the world would experience another gush of pure Aether rather than just having a large quantity removed.

That solved, Neveah turned her attention to the constructs around the images, as that was the only concrete example that Randidly could give her of the hidden Aether constructs in the area. Still, Randidly was somewhat aggrieved how much easier they were to spot as the Aether around them continued to transform.

After a second, Neveah snorted. Indeed, there are constructs here… but do you know why you missed them? Because they were specifically made to appeal to you. And from the purity, Yystrix generally meant it. They were made with a powerful image that reads something like ‘Randidly Ghosthound is free to do as he pleases’. Probably your Grim Intuition reads them as implicitly in your favor and makes it difficult to detect them.

“Something to work on,” Randidly shook his head. It made sense that Grim Intuition would be less useful in non-dangerous situations, but this was another thing in a long list of disturbing things he learned since arriving. But he was calm. So he then asked. “Any other constructs I haven’t stumbled into yet?”

Yes, in the area around the podium. Randidly could feel Neveah focus for several seconds, but then he felt her return with an answer. A trigger. It’s clearly a letter… and the trigger will have the letter be read aloud when you near. The image-

“Keyed to me I bet,” Randidly grumbled. His heart was pounding. But he shook his head and began to walk slowly forward. “Better get this over with…”