Chapter 57: 57. Dark Metal

Excerpt from General Yrkzhext’s “Peace By Force.”

“Deceiving the enemy to avoid battle is an act of honour. Once you have reached the point where an honest and clear statement of your intentions is looked upon with concerned scrutiny, your foe will never dare believe you for a second to be weak or vulnerable. When even their finest intelligence, their most powerful of scrying and auguring spells fail to provide information that satisfies their general to its truth—when the enemy general utters the phrase, ‘It can’t be that easy,’ you have won every battle by happenstance of it never taking place.”

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Before Sergeant Myuu’s plan could go ahead, there were a number of necessary precautions to take. Namely, it was necessary to ensure the skeletal sorcerer’s head wouldn’t simply reform or start casting spells while tucked away, without preventing it from sending messages. Yenna’s part in this was done—it was up to the priestess to complete this binding.

Suee had coincidentally arrived mere moments after Myuu suggested finding her, and the sergeant smiled and looked up as though she had expected the priestess to do exactly that. Something about the moonlight shining down on them made it easier to spot Suee in her obscuring robes—instead of turning her into an inky blot when one looked away they sparkled and made her easier to see.

“You have need of me.” The priestess made a statement—Yenna wondered if it wasn’t a similar effect to how Tirk routinely arrived when needed.

Myuu gave a nod and hopped to her feet. “We do—well, she does. All yours, mage. I’ve got other people to bring in on this plan.” 

Yenna watched as Myuu walked away, a spring in her step causing her chainmail to jangle loudly. The mage turned her attention back to Suee.

“Did you have a vision that you would be needed?”

“I have very good hearing.” Suee sat down and took the skull in her hand. “I can bind this with moonlight—concentrate this shining silver of night into a shackle, and seal away evil’s might.”

“...Then, do you mind if I watch?”

The priestess gave a simple nod, and Yenna eagerly retrieved her journal. As far as the mage was concerned, every opportunity to see this ‘divinomancy’ in action was another chance to learn its secrets. Suee carefully set down the skull onto Yenna’s fold-out table and placed her hands either side of it—with a nearly silent whisper, she began to pray. Leaning in as close as she dared, Yenna wrote down every word.

The whole prayer was long, a lot longer than Yenna had expected. The softness of Suee’s speech put Yenna in the mind of a bed-time story, though she couldn’t think of any stranger recipient than the skull of an evil sorcerer. Still, Yenna found herself entranced, soothed—she would very much like the priestess to tell her a bed-time story or two, among other things.

Suddenly realising quite how close she was, Yenna shuffled back a bit, her legs scrabbling a bit on the dirt to maneuver her as subtly as possible. Suee didn’t so much as look up from her prayer, and Yenna desperately caught up on writing down the words spilling from the priestess’ lips.

Ethereal chains formed around the skull, passing through and wrapping around the engraved surface. Magical pathways on the skull lit up as the chains passed through them, misfiring in unusual ways. Yenna cringed as she noticed—throwing magic randomly through an unprotected set of spell-circles was a sure-fire way to set off some rather nasty mishap. Still, Suee’s chains didn’t present any issues—any parts that began to glow immediately darkened again as the chains themselves absorbed magic back in.

Looking closely with her magical sense, Yenna could see them acting as a sink—any spell that passed through these chains would suddenly require far, far more magic than usual. To cast a spell through that would far exceed the limits the skull could draw in, effectively locking it in its own anti-magic prison. All except for the part that let it send its messages, including several small conduits Yenna hadn’t noticed that presumably had some part in the spell’s function. Suee was good. At least, she hoped so.

After finalising her notes, Yenna turned her attention to the other mystery the skeleton had left behind—its staff. As far as she could tell, the staff itself was no more magical than any other length of metal. The part that caught the mage’s eye was its head—a black shard of something encased in glass. The end of the metal rod split into four claws to clutch the glass, and it made inspecting the thing a pain—every time Yenna wanted to turn it around or over, she had to move the entire staff itself. She tried and failed rather ineffectually to yank the glass part out of the claw grips, only to have the staff pulled from her grasp by a large red hand.

Squeaking in surprise, Yenna looked behind her to see Narasanha in motion, her musculature rippling in fascinating ways as she used a four-armed grip to pop the glass sphere cleanly out from its casing. It was all one clean motion, though Yenna couldn’t help but engrave it in her memory. Narasanha looked suddenly sheepish at the attention, handing over both the staff and the sphere before walking away without a word.

“You’ve acquired yourself quite the guardian.” Suee spoke up without looking away from the skull, her lips curled in the tiniest, faintest hint of a smirk.

“Eh? Oh, no, Narasanha is the captain’s guard. She was just being helpful.” Yenna wasn’t about to tell Suee about the things she imagined those muscular arms could do to her, so the mage cleared her throat and moved on.

Peering into the glass with her magical sense, Yenna got an uncanny sense of deja vu. The glass was, much like the staff itself, completely mundane. A convenient housing to hold something that does not take well to being handled—that object being a shard of black metal, an empty void to her magical sense. It reminded her of the black book, minus the unnatural allure. The shard wasn’t much, a fragment the size of Yenna’s fingernail, but it radiated a malice that the mage couldn’t stand. It defied all of her knowledge of how magic flowed, causing strange distortions in the natural tides in the layer of energy just below mundane reality. It made Yenna think of an iceberg.

Of course, Yenna had never seen an iceberg, but she had read about them—a book of distant wonders focused on the icy waters far, far south of Aulpre had explained in great depth the sheer size and scale of an iceberg, how a majority of their silent mass lay deep under the water. Magic of elemental ice was said to coalesce on them, causing all sorts of disruptions in the flow of water that allowed them to reach deeper and deeper into the sunless depths of the frigid ocean, pulling energy from the world in a way that no other entity could hope to achieve. Magic-users of distant tribes who loved amongst those icebergs proclaimed that there was so much power to be brought about by harnessing the energy kept stored within the ice, brought forth from a world inaccessible to mortal beings—so hostile and alien that the mind could barely even comprehend–

Yenna blinked. She realised she had been staring intently into the tiny shard, holding the glass bauble to her eye as though all the secrets of the world would reveal themselves in miniscule print engraved on the shard’s black surface. A thought occurred to Yenna—she hadn’t looked at the black book itself in a while. This shard was related, but she couldn’t confirm anything without looking at the book itself. To that end, Yenna tracked down Jiin.

As expected, the stonecarver was sitting with Mayi, the doctor still in the process of packing away her supplies.

“Hey, Yenna!” Jiin gave a big smile and a wave. “All in one piece?”

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“I don’t suppose you could conjure me up more bandages, do you?” Mayi’s tone of voice made it sound like she was joking, but there was a hint of hope in her eyes.

“I… I probably could think of something, but I can’t let myself get distracted now.” Yenna carefully filed away the already-forming design for a spell circle that would create spare bandages. “I need to speak to Demvya, and to see the book.”

Mayi gave a sigh and nodded, gesturing to Jiin. “She’s all yours. I’ll get out of your hair.”

The doctor began to leave, but Jiin stopped her. She grabbed softly at Mayi’s wrist, holding her gently enough that the doctor could have easily pulled her arm away. She didn’t.

“Stay with us? S’nice having you there, even when I can’t really see ya.” Jiin had a look of intensely private worry that Yenna felt somewhat awkward witnessing—still, she couldn’t bring herself to look away from the entire exchange.

“You know I don’t like– …Okay, I’ll stay. Yenna owes me a spell, after all.” Mayi flashed the mage a grin, though Yenna could tell it was hollow. A voice in the back of the mage’s head was telling her that fleeing into the darkness of the night would be preferable to enduring the sinking pit in her stomach, the tangible awkwardness of walking into a cobweb of someone else’s interpersonal problems. The voice was gently tamped down by reason, but it didn’t make the situation any more comfortable.

Jiin straightened up, muttered to herself something that sounded like, ‘S’okay, c’mon out,’ and allowed the spirit to take control. There was a marked difference between Jiin straightening up and Demvya coming to the fore—the former was a pale imitation of the harvest goddess’ divine regality, the way she held herself that turned Jiin’s rough form into a fine sculpture. Her eyes glowed a gentle white, and Yenna’s magic sense could see an unusual haze around Jiin’s head.

“THOU WOULDST SEE THE BOOK.”

It wasn’t a question—Demvya had been present for the whole conversation, after all. It felt a bit odd, to be reminded that Jiin’s passenger of a spirit was always listening, an insight which gave the mage some measure of clarity as to what Jiin and Mayi’s problem might be. Yenna gave Demvya a nod, and the spirit pulled the book out from the folds of Jiin’s clothes. She placed it down in front of her, onto the flat top of a log that Mayi had been using as a makeshift table, though her hand never moved out of range to snatch it back if it was needed. Demvya seemed as though a coiled beast, effortless power projected in the threat of motion.

With a quick flash of her magical sense, Yenna could tell that the effect on the metal shard and the book’s equally black metal cover were identical. Both interrupted the flow of magic on a level that didn’t truly make sense to the mage’s understanding of how magic itself worked, the material paradoxically an active manipulator at the same time as it was completely and utterly inert. Much like the iceberg, Yenna had a slightly different comparison to make—it reminded her of Suee’s insistence that Yenna herself was somehow outside of fate.

Whenever magic made contact with the surface of the black metal, it didn’t vanish entirely or become repelled, it behaved erratically, as though there were no natural laws to define how it should act. The metal itself wasn’t native to the mundane world—a construction of magic, or something else, that was not meant to be here. Yet, it was here, and that meant that it needed to submit to those natural laws. Mundane matter couldn’t pass through it, it had weight and mass and physical dimensions, it even resembled a mundane object. Yenna wondered if it hadn’t taken that form to put those who witnessed it at ease—better a strange black book than a terrifying mass that spat in the face of all the rules.

“I’m going to pick up the book.” Yenna looked up at Demvya, and the spirit remained perfectly still. The mage gave herself a nod and reached out.

The book felt heavy in her hand—heavy with the weight of what it was, sure, but also the more tangible weight of it being a book encased in a metal binding. It looked as implacable as the first time Yenna had beheld it, as infuriatingly shut as ever. Bringing the glass sphere close didn’t produce any reaction, no change in the flow of magic through or around them. Yenna had expected at least some interaction in the space between—perhaps the glass is shielding it?

“I’m… I’m going to break this.” Why am I narrating this? Just in case they think I'm mad? I suppose I would be shocked too, if someone suddenly shattered glass before me.

Yenna placed the sphere in front of her and concentrated on a spell. Encasing the glass in a shroud of energy, she used the power of Certainty to crush it. To an observer, the glass had taken on a yellow glow before shattering under the unseen grip of a mad giant, the glass reduced to glittering dust. Yenna attempted to lift the black fragment out of the pile with her telekinetic magic, but it refused to budge. Somewhat reluctantly, the mage picked it up with the tips of her fingers.

She had partially expected it to burn her, sting in some way or attempt to take over her mind with dark magic—instead, it was just vaguely cold, a piece of metal untouched by warm hands in the cool evening moonlight. Feeling a little silly, Yenna poked the surface of the book with the shard. When nothing happened, she touched it to different places—the lock, the edges, the spine. The piece of metal had no more reaction to the book outside of its glassy prison than anything else.

Yenna placed the shard down, careful to put it where she would still be able to find the miniscule fleck of darkness. The mage gave a deep sigh, her fingers running over the pommel of her dagger. Wait, my dagger? Yenna looked down, slightly bewildered—she had put the thing in her bag, where it had dutifully remained this entire time. Yet, here it was, sitting right there in her hand. She looked back, to see if someone had maybe attempted to pinch it from her bag, but there was no one about. The dagger had come to her seemingly of its own accord.

“Do you have something to do with all this?” Yenna mumbled to the silvery dagger. “Aren’t going to do me a favour and turn into a key or something, are you?”

The metal of the blade was unsurprisingly silent on the matter, though Mayi was not.

“Is talking to inanimate objects something mages do, or were you expecting it to give you an answer?” The doctor gave a laugh, her mischievous smile returned.

“A-Ah, I, erm.” I had forgotten she was there. “I was just talking to myself, is all.”

Brushing it off, Yenna put the dagger away and entrusted both the book and shard back to Demvya. She felt fatigued suddenly, the nerves and adrenaline of the fight having worn off under the cover of academic intrigue—now Yenna just felt tired, and in need of either a nap or a mug of warm kaffe. There was still so much to do, so much to find out, and the mere thought was starting to feel exhausting. Yet, a fire of hope burned within her—a solution lay at the end of the path, a clear answer. Yenna would be the one to figure it all out.

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