This is uncomfortable, repeated Isse for what felt like the hundredth time.
What’s really making you uncomfortable is the fact that you can’ hide anywhere in here, said back Siidi, nailing the point.
Other than the light she was holding in her hand the tunnel, for it was a tunnel now, even if made of bricks, was completely dark. At regular intervals in the walls there were torch holders made of wrought iron, which felt like a waste of money considering the place clearly wasn’t visited that often. Each one of them held an unburning torch and, more than once, she had to stop herself from casting a [Candleflame] Spell to turn at least some of them on to keep the darkness at bay where she passed, to feel less lonely.
She’d never thought of herself as someone afraid of the dark, but the anxiety eating away at her insides was slowly eroding her… maybe sanity wasn’t the right word, but that’s what it felt like.
Got any more of that Swing music?
I’m sorry Isse, we’ve listened to all the ones you remembered.
Then start again, from the top. This place is giving me the creeps.
A few moments later her mind was filled with the sound of ṫ̶̬w̵̮̜̅ë̸̥́̚n̸̫͠t̴͇͘͝y̶̮͗ ̵͕̙͂̀y̶̖͔͂̈ę̴̞̒̏a̷̠̐̒r̷̬̰̂s̶̤̅̈́ ̸̢̞͑o̷̩͑l̶̎̆ͅd̷̟̋ music. Many would’ve found it creepy: walking in a dark place, the sensation of the walls squishing her spider half slightly, making the place feel smaller, all while cheerful music played as a background. She didn’t. Because it was cheerful music! And because she could see, in her mind’s eye, Siidi dancing to the song with an invisible partner. Maybe, when all of this was done, she’d ask her to teach her how the arachne had danced, once upon a time.
And then, suddenly, the corridor opened up, allowing her to finally breathe in completely, the sensation of her spider half’s lungs filling up more pleasant than she remembered.
Looking around the room she was… disappointed. She’d expected something grand, something a bit more decorated, something rich for the vault of what was probably the most prominent noble family of the city.
Instead the room was made of the same bricks the corridor had been and, right there at its center, on a simple stone floor, sat three chests filled with coins.
Not all of them were even gold coins. It also looked extremely dusty.
This… this cannot be the vault, can it?
It’s impossible. There’s only a few coins, and definitely nothing that feels like what Kaminskyi showed us.
…Is it possible that the object is actually buried underground and the mansion was built atop it?
With her mind’s eye she saw Siidi shake her head: No, it’s impossible. A domovoi is more than capable of making the distinction, and if he told us it’s underneath the house then it’s underneath the house and reachable. We just have to find a way. Let’s repeat the trick with the secret passages, maybe we’ll find something.
So they did: Isse stuck close to the wall again, this time though not bothering to mush her face against the cold bricks (Siidi had told her in the tunnel that she’d been joking with her when she’d said that was the distance required for her Skill to allow her to see through the wall).
It took them five minutes and two circuits of the room, all while Isse tried her hardest not to even look at the chests of coins. For all she knew they were cursed or would activate an alarm if she touched them.
In the end though Siidi finally found something: Halt, I can see it. Gosh darn it, these walls are thick! I missed it the first time.
So there’s another secret passage?
Master had told her that was a possibility, but it was rare for basically anyone to think that much ahead.
Apparently Serafia’s family had.
Yup! A secret passage, coming right up! Oh, wait, I don’t have hands to open this up.
She smiled and felt her throat bob up and down with a barely contained giggle.
Just show me what to press you dumbass.
Hey! If it wasn’t for me you’d be stuck with the absolutely-not-cursed-treasure-chest ™, she shouted the T M so loud that she turned around to look over her shoulder, even though she knew nobody could hear her soul half.
What the fuck Siidi! Don’t ever do that again!
Siidi chuckled, then sighed happily and went on as if nothing had happened: Alright, let’s do another circuit of the room, see if I can find anything.
As they did Isse let her hand wander over the bricks overhead, hoping that she’d manage to find a secret button or something. Hopefully one that didn’t activate a trap.
Stop!
Isse froze in place.
The brick you’re touching. Push it.
You sure?
As sure as the fact that the moon’s made of cheese.
She pushed the brick, realizing only a moment later what had been said: Wait, the moon is made of cheese?
They can’t prove otherwise!
She chuckled as, where Siidi had found it, a door opened into the wall.
Happily, she skittered inside, while also warily looking for traps or other things like that. The thing was, she was sure she was immune to them. Why? Because she’d done the same in the previous corridor, finding it completely filled with traps from beginning to end, the vision reminding her of the games of Cat’s Cradle Makira used to play with them when they were spiderlings. When she’d touched one of the threads though she’d found herself back inside the fortress, right in front of the little snow arachne she’d made.
A tentative step later the traps hadn’t fried her leg and she’d started the long walk down.
The same happened here.
It’s stupid, she thought.
What’s stupid?
Connecting all the Spells this way. They put all their eggs in a single basket expecting nobody to break them. It’s just stupid
Well, I think most people don’t think about the possibility of a [Soul Mage] appearing on their doorstep and hijacking the whole thing.
…Fair enough. By the way, did you find that word, hijacking, in my memories? It just feels strange coming from you.
Girl, that word was invented during the Arachne Wars because of us. Our [Soul Mages] were the reason it was created.
Huh.
She always forgot about it, but her abilities, her entire Class… it was quite powerful. It just didn’t come to her mind simply because she was so low Level. She also forgot that, at low Level, most people couldn’t do many, if any, inhumane things that broke the rules of reality (too much). All she needed was time and, probably, she could become one of the strongest people in the world.
So on they walked, and she was glad that this tunnel was big enough for her spider half to pass comfortably through.
----------------------------------------
It took them five minutes to reach the chamber at the other end of the corridor, and it was there that they found an undesired surprise.
[Guards]. Three of them. They were in the room, sitting on three small chairs in front of a table, cards in their hands as they played some unknown game.
Fuck! was all Siidi said, echoing her soul half’s state of mind right then.
Well, not everything can go our way, tried to joke Isse, realizing that it wasn’t funny a moment later.
She looked at the men from the darkness of the corridor, where she had deactivated her Spell the moment she’d seen light in the distance, and tried to find a way around them. But, for all that they looked distracted by their game of cards, they had also placed themselves in such a way that they could, with a glance, see every side of the circular room. In particular, the man wearing the fanciest armor (although maybe calling it fancy was an exaggeration, seeing that the only thing making it as such was a set of stars on his pauldron) was sitting in the perfect position to keep an eye on the only other table in the room.
A table completely covered in neat stacks of paper covered in tiny words.
Well, at least we found the documents. Hopefully.
You think they’re fake?
How should I know? I can’t see the words.
…You speak as if you could even distinguish a fake document from a real one.
Hey! Don’t call me out on the stuff I don’t know.
Siidi chuckled in the back of her mind, before sighing.
So, how do we get rid of them? she asked, her voice tired.
Isse didn’t answer, her mind abuzz with thoughts as she tried to find an answer to their little dilemma. The tunnel was too small for her to hide inside while attracting the men’s attention to the other room, so that was out.
A few other plans went through her mind, and each was discarded always for that simple reason: there was too little space for her to even begin to think about any kind of maneuver.
Then she looked back, the way she’d come, an errant thought popping up from the back of her mind: If only I could fry them with the security Spells.
A moment later a lightbulb lit up in her mind.
Aaaaaahhh, it’s bright! Turn it off!
A click sounded in the back of her mind and Siidi sighed in relief.
Meanwhile, Isse was already moving back the way they’d come, skittering as fast as her legs allowed (which was actually quite a lot. nearly as fast as a galloping horse).
A minute later she was back into the sad room with the treasure chests, where she climbed the wall atop the door, hiding upside down in the shadows of the unlit room, curling her human half into her spider half to make herself as small as she could.
Then she reached out to the threads of magic all around her and touched one.
And she was back into the fortress, in front of her snow-arachne. The body looked like it was already melting a bit, so she promptly compacted the snow with some fresh one, before looking up at the mess of stairs passing all over her head.
The stairs that looked distinctly non-Euclidean.
The stairs that seemed to change every time she looked at them.
Stairs that formed patterns, now that she thought of it. Patterns that reminded her of some Spell matrixes Grandmother had shown to her in one of her many lessons.
For those wondering, Spell matrixes were what modern [Mages] worked with most of the time: basic, already formed, forms for the mana to go through without a need to create a Spell from scratch. The type of magic that the System gave, studied and applied because it was easier than learning how to actually make magic. A crutch, as Grandmother called it.
“Siidi, how much would you be willing to bet that these are matrixes of the spells in those tunnels?”
Her sister appeared by her side, looking up with her: “I’m not betting with you again Isse. I lost way too many times the last time we did.”
Isse chuckled: “Come on, you sore loser! It was only the one time in Grandmother’s soul.”
“Yes, and you forced me to make you an entire wardrobe of clothes because of it. Do you have any idea how difficult it was?”
A moment later they both smiled and snorted, before looking back up.
“So, how do we do it?” asked Siidi.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
“Simple. We anger the guards.”
Siidi looked at her with raised eyebrows: “You want to play another game of tag with lightning?”
“Nah, I think it’ll be some kind of fire spells this time. They’ll probably try to cook us alive.”
“That’s not reassuring Isse,” cautioned her soul half.
“Oh, don’t worry. After all, fire is slower than lightning.”
Right?
----------------------------------------
“Isse, remind me never to listen to one of your plans ever again!” screamed Siidi as she ran, activating her [Lengthy Step] to dodge a [Fireball] aimed at her, nearly falling down the stairs.
Isse didn’t answer, too concentrated on trying not to get hit by any of the numerous different Spells being thrown at her. Sure, the aim was bad, and dodging was not just possible, but even easy in some circumstances, but what the guards lacked in ability they more than supplied in sheer number of magical attacks being thrown at them.
Ducking under a [Wind Blade] aimed at her head she skittered over the side of the stairs and began running underneath them, baffling the guards and this way gaining some breathing time.
This should be enough.
“Siidi, we’re getting out!”
“Thank fuck!”
And they blinked out of the fortress, their eyes opening back into the real world as they both looked at the bit of ceiling Isse’s human half was facing, her spider half over her head.
A few moments later she began hearing whispers in the distance, getting closer by the second as the guards from that room advanced, wary of any traps ‘accidentally’ activating themselves.
For a moment a dark side of her, the side that had emerged after that fateful night of death and destruction, the side that wanted nothing more than to see everything and everyone suffer for what had been done to her clan, to her sisters, to her soulmate, emerged, whispering sweetly that she could go back into the spellweave, let herself be targeted and, this way, kill the men, possibly even slowly and painfully.
She suppressed it: these people weren’t the cause for what had been done to her and her people. They didn’t deserve something like that.
She stood stock still, clinging to the ceiling, her clothes the same color as the dark bricks, enveloping her in a soft and comfortable cocoon of silk.
A minute later Siidi spoke to her: I see them. They’re about to enter the room.
If it was possible she stood even stiller, telling herself that she was ‘one with the shadows’ in an attempt to keep the anxiety at bay.
A few seconds later the guards passed hurriedly underneath her, giving the room a quick glance and moving onward. Hopefully they’d also been alerted that the security systems outside had gone on the fritz again, since she’d asked Siidi to first take a gander outside the fortress and dodge around a few Spells before coming back to her.
This way they’d maybe gain some time to actually explore the place and not be forced to do everything in a hurry.
Still, she waited two more minutes, her ears straining to hear even the slightest of footfalls in the distance coming down the corridor. When her enhanced senses didn’t pick up anything, she skittered to the ground and back into the tunnel leading to the second room.
I can’t believe that worked, she thought.
Me neither, but hey! For once things a -
Don’t you dare finish that sentence! You’ll jinx us!
… Yeah, fair enough.
Two minutes of walking ever downwards later she was back in the room with the papers, her mind filled with some polka music she barely remembered listening to as a child.
With a smile on her lips she skittered towards the pages, covering her hands in finely spun spider silk of the not-sticky type and picking one up.
On the white paper, which she could feel was quite coarse through her improvised gloves, was written, in small words to make sure all the available space was used, ‘Expenses Report, Wondros Month’ and, beneath, in neat rows, were lines of numbers with, on the side, explanations in regards to what the money had been spent on.
We hit jackpot! said Isse with a smile and a mostly silent whoop, fist raised in the air triumphantly.
Then she realized something.
But still no trace of whatever it was that Kaminskyi showed us. Unless it’s hidden under these documents.
Siidi looked around the room for a moment, then sighed dejectedly.
Let’s start looking for another secret passage.
They found the hidden doorway five minutes later, the stones touching so seamlessly that nobody could even notice. Two minutes and nearly pressing a button that would’ve caused an alarm to go off (they’d been saved by Isse still using her Mana Sight now and then), they found the right brick to push and watched as the wall not fifty centimeters beside the entrance opened up.
Wait a moment, that wasn’t the secret passage you found, thought Isse, looking and feeling slightly alarmed.
Indeed it wasn’t. In truth, what Siidi had found was a fake secret passage that led to some rather… unpleasant traps. The non-magical kind that turned your body into fleshy paste through the use of good ol’ moving walls.
As Isse looked down she saw the threads of dozens, and I mean dozens, of Spells covering every possible available surface everywhere the eye could look. All of them, though, were connected to each other in some small way, and all of them lead to the Fortress in their weave.
Third time’s the charm, said Siidi encouragingly.
----------------------------------------
Have you ever felt stupefied? And no, I don’t mean ‘shocked’. Shocked just means you’re surprised beyond belief about something, usually horrifying in some manner. Stupefied on the other hand? That’s when you’re frozen in place, mouth gaping open in, yes, still surprise, but also wonder and curiosity.
Stupefied was being a child and staring at a magician perform a trick so impossible, a feat so incredible, that you felt your brain stop.
Stupefied was entering the National British Library for the first time with your parents by your side, hearing the absolute silence, and seeing those thousands of books neatly put in the shelves, the weight of knowledge looking down at you and smiling, inviting you to partake in this feast.
Stupefied was walking the halls of a castle for the first time and seeing it not as a vestige abandoned centuries prior but as it should’ve been in its glory days.
Isse was stupefied.
She looked at the small room in front of her, and there was nothing special about it.
The walls were made of bricks, just like the rest of the tunnels and the other rooms.
The floor was simple stone, just like all the floors she’d seen so far in her descent.
The table in front of her was made of simple wood, and although it held a few neat stacks of paper sitting inside a magical-looking circle, it wasn’t that special.
Truly, one would call this room extremely boring… if it wasn’t for the ice covering every single surface in half of it.
The ice was clear in some places and a deep blue or black in others, reflecting the light coming from a few torches burning with great strain in their holders, seemingly being choked out by the cold. Or rather, probably being choked out by the cold.
Why? Because the room was warm and inviting to Isse.
It didn’t feel like standing inside a freezer. No, it was like standing in a meadow in a spring afternoon, the sun high in the sky, a few white, fluff, clouds over your head sometimes covering it and plunging everything in light shadows accompanied by a pleasant chill.
It was like standing in the snow of Winter’s Last Stand.
It was like sitting at a white table in a white clearing in front of an ancient white woman telling her stories of a world that was, and still is, in black and white.
It felt like home.
And she stood there, stupefied, as the ice shifted, as flowers of ice formed from the ground and the walls, outlining a path that led directly to a section that was slowly melting away, the corollas opening up to reveal the darker insides of the ice flowers. Roots snaked around, climbing the walls and causing flowers to appear on the ceiling, the shades inside lighter, reflecting and deflecting the light in impossible patterns.
Woah, was all Siidi managed to say.
Slowly, without even noticing it, Isse stepped forward, around the table, her feet touching the ice and feeling the warmth grow ever so slightly, the sensation of being welcome growing in her heart.
The flowers creaked ominously as they kept on opening up and following her as she stepped forward, yet the sound was music to her ears, like birds’ calls and crickets singing their song of joy and warmth.
The ice melted away from the wall in front of her, rivulets of water trailing between her legs and freezing again, forming strange patterns, words in a language that this world had never seen and had only ever heard spoken a few times since its creation by guests who invited themselves in, called by songs that told stories of their kindness and cruelty.
They remembered the kindness of the musician, they remembered the promise he’d given to his oldest friend, and now, in death, they were helping him keep his promise, even now that the story he’d so hoped to be able to tell had been derailed.
The vault’s door creaked as it slowly opened, the roots of the countless flowers pushing it inwards on water slick and ice stained hinges that were old enough to have seen the one whose story had been deleted from all books and were only sometimes whispered about in darkness by hopeful soldiers.
Much was hidden away in the room behind that door: artifacts of power and forbidden books that could’ve caused the death of the ones who lived in this home, scrolls of magics long ago written, to be used only in the direst situations and so much more.
Yet only one thing was of interest to the arachne. An object hidden at the very back of the room, held in a box of leather so old that it had changed color from brown to gray. The ice slowly melted away from the walls of the room, not touching any of the items, for there was no need to damage them: the current holder of these grounds was much kinder than those who’d come before her and, had she known the story behind the object calling to Issekina, she would’ve brought it back to Winter’s Last Stand, where it rightfully belonged.
So the ice melted, and the water poured down onto the floor over to the girl, to the path ahead of her, freezing in place to form a path for her to walk on, and what was left over formed words in that strange old language, unreadable to the girl, and yet understood in some deep part of her mind: it was a story. Her story. The story of what had come before, of what was happening right then, right there and of what was to come. She wanted to read those words, to see what they would tell her of her future, but the box called her, whispered sweet nothings, asked of her to hold it, to open it and take what was inside, to receive a gift given in good faith, to use what was inside to become greater than what she was now and write her own story. There was no reason to read the words, for they were meaningless, for they told of chances that could be taken and broken into fine pieces. They would cut her, but with her blood she could write something new.
She reached the box.
There were two locks on it, still somehow in good condition. Her hand reached out towards them. Stopped.
She hesitated. No, she shouldn’t be doing this. She should be back there, in the other room, checking those documents and leaving.
Isse, said Siidi, her voice barely a whisper.
Yes?
Listen to the heart and its reasons.
Silence reigned in the room and the world itself held its breath.
The System watched, as It always did, and waited for her to make her choice.
Her hand stood still in the air, hesitation still gripping her.
Then she shuffled slightly closer and unlatched the two locks, hearing them click in relief.
She opened the box.
And saw the object that had always been intended for her, from the day this story had started, from the day she’d been born back on Earth. It had been taken away from her, kept hidden from her grasping hands by foolish tomb raiders who had no idea what they’d been doing, who had always known what they were taking.
But it didn’t matter anymore, for she was here, for she would take it.
The Wintry Violin.
Her right hand grasped delicately the neck while her left dug gently underneath the lower bout, trying to control the trembling of her limbs and utterly failing, feeling as if she were doing something sacrilegious even though this was meant to be hers.
She lifted the Violin from the box and, for a moment, allowed herself to admire it.
And then, finally, something seemed to click into place. A great mechanism that had been missing a single piece had just found it and the gears were finally beginning to move anew as they should.
There was ice on the Violin, as was to be expected for something that had come from a place such as the Last Stand, but it was already melting away from the strings, slowly dripping on Isse’s fingers, the water warm to the touch, coiling around her appendages as if trying to hug them.
She could’ve spent hours merely sitting there and watching and feeling what was happening.
But there was no time, and this wasn’t the place. It had never been meant to be the place for her to find it. Alas, it could wait. It had waited for so long, what would a few hours more?
Gently, Isse placed the instrument back into its box, before she latched it closed and, with the delicacy of a mother handling her newborn child, put it inside her Bag of Holding.
Then, the spell finally broken, she turned around, deciding it was time to leave.
She took a few documents with her.
----------------------------------------
The next morning Serafia and Gaius stood in front of the open vault, watching the ice garden slowly melt away into nothing.
They were surprisingly silent and, for once, serious.
“I can’t believe someone actually managed to do it. I thought my family’s vault was impregnable,” said Serafia.
“Luckily for us they didn’t take everything,” said Gaius, frowning.
“But whoever it was took the Violin. And a shitload of documents.”
Gaius sighed, his hand going to rub his forehead for the umpteenth time in the last ten minutes as he tried to suppress a headache: “I’d love to say something along the lines of ‘It was a useless Relic’ or ‘Nobody ever found out how to make it work’, but we both know that’s bullshit.”
His wife nodded, stepping forward and taking a slowly melting flower in her hand, breaking its ice stalk and twirling it in her fingers: “Whoever it was that stole from us was clearly invited in. This is definitely the Relic’s work, I can feel it.”
The ice itself resonated with her Class, after all, and she could feel something akin to satisfaction and joy emanating from it.
Finally, she let the flower fall to the ground and turned back to the corridor, where a contingent of [Guards] was standing stock still: “Clean up the vault of all this ice, then lock it up and come back up. Clearly we’ll have to figure out some new safety measures for the home.”
And out they walked.
Looking at each other, they nodded, deciding in unison not to pursue whoever had done this: they’d gained the right to keep what they’d taken, all the while showing off the weak points of their defenses and security systems. And anyways, they couldn’t use the Relic. The worst thing about tonight had been the loss of documents, and they hadn’t even been the particularly important ones.
The things that actually mattered most of all had been moved to another broom closet on the ground floor of the mansion.
----------------------------------------
That night, the System spoke to both of them
[Spy Level 10!]
[Skill - Proficiency: Sneaking Obtained!]
[Conditions Met: Soul Shaper -> Shadowed Soul Shaper]
[Spy Class Consolidated!]
[Shadowed Soul Shaper Level 23!]
[Skill - Comprehend Spell Obtained!]
[Skill - Influence Spell Obtained!]
[Skill - Spellweave: Enhanced Agility Obtained!]
[Skill - My Reshapings Left No Trace Behind Obtained!]
[Conditions Met: Comprehend Soul: Minor -> Comprehend Soul]
[Skill - Comprehend Soul Obtained!]
[Bound Relic - Wintry Violin Obtained!]
[Relic Bond Level: 0%]
[Soul Curator Level 20!]
[Skill - Soul Half: Share Skills Obtained!]
[Skill - Summon Lightning (Minor) Obtained!]
[Skill - Summon Snow Arrow (Minor) Obtained!]