Chapter Forty-Four: The Vault

  The glyphs on the deep ocean blue edifice pulsed in sync with Selriph’s breath—the faint leftover acidic tinge from the rotting scarab’s remains mixed with the damp, mossy interior of the chamber. That olfactory experience combined with the faint murmuring of his two elven companions, like distant, dreamy voices, veiled by the thick fabric of his concentration, focused entirely on attuning to the intricate, extensive, and complex, arcane signature warding Oagat’s vault.

  The moments he had spent attuning his arcane energy—welling up in his hands in swirling orbs—seemed to stretch endlessly, like a looping dream. In reality, half, perhaps three-quarters of an hour had passed.

  The cause? Oagat’s arcane seal’s complexity, a marked degree greater than the lock, or rather, the test that Old Vick had administered to him on that fateful night of his escape.

  However, it was the sheer scale of the lock that rendered the challenge. If attuning to Vick’s trinket-cypher was like threading a needle through a minuscule hole, this felt like doing it ten times over, while having to change the shape, density, and frequency of the arcane ‘threads’.

  In his vision, he could see it; one glyph was just out of sync, nearly imperceptible. But it represented the faintest borders of the arcane energy that he fed into the lock that did not replicate the original frequency set by its caster.

  Without it, he could not dispel the lock; one strand was out of place.

  Breathe … just one more to go, feel it. Keep everything else steady…

  Selriph fixed his eyes on the remaining glyph, registering the minute difference in arcane energy–the correction he had to administer. Then his vision went dark, save for the wisp of pure blue energy that fed through his closed eyelids, mirrored in his mind’s eye.

  His arcane senses expanded, feeling the intricate tapestry he had created, which was already encroaching on the deepest bowels of the monolithic masonry before him. Then his consciousness reached out, passing through the threads as if they were a spider’s silk on the verge of breaking—already attuned to the one corner.

  As his mind’s eye reached the very corners of his quilt of arcane, he felt the discrepancy.

  Just too dense, too slow.

  With one more glacial inhale, Selriph willed the arcane energy to fade in intensity, reducing its ‘weight’, its ‘presence’.

  At first, nothing, only the low, somatic drone of arcane energy. But then, the humming grew, as if a dozen smaller, hardly audible instruments began to play the same tune in perfect harmony, a perfect synchronicity.

  Then the expectant sound came as the boy willed the spell to end.

  Click, click, Click…Click Click

  Selriph withheld the budding well of triumph welling in his gut as, one by one, the glyphs faded like the fading embers of a hearth, compressed into a second.

  Only when the final glyph extinguished and the final metallic punctuation from the parting metal came did Selriph step back. As if on cue, the door—its full scale now pronounced and well over three humanoid lengths tall—began to part at the seams, a groan accompanying as mithril ground against rock.

  Beyond in the darkness, braziers lined on the walls lit, flames blue—in the same shade of the mithril that adorned the cavern walls and the assortment of pipes, work desks, and loose scrap that lay around like a haphazard mosaic in the antechapel-sized chamber.

  And beyond in the lifting gloom, something adorned the centre, its ‘feet’ illuminated in a low, azure glow.

  Before the youth who had managed to undo Oagat’s intricate seal could appraise the vault’s contents, he felt a cold, soft hand on his left shoulder. A faint ache that pulsed through upon as he felt its grip—a result of the previous day’s injuries.

  He shifted his eyes to the left, tracing the female elf’s visage, which was plastered with amazement and approval—a stark contrast to the scowl of disappointment that had defined her expression the previous night.

  And to his right, a single word escaped from the male elf: “Incredible.”

  In this instance, Selriph could decipher from the tone of wonderment that Kaelan wasn’t just referring to the vault’s content.

  As the trio made their way into the dust-filled chamber, a visual cacophony met them: crystalline sconces held the blue-hued arcane flames, and the air carried the hum of arcane energy. Mithril plates, ingots, and struts—curved and straight—strewn about. Loose parchment and tomes were on a stone table behind a metal grate, the only thing made of steel in the room. On the other end of the chamber lay a crucible and a pile of dissected mithril scarabs, their corpses and carapaces lying like a pile of raw ore.

  In the heart of this vaulted chamber, a slumped-over construct sat motionless, which drew the attention of the twins. One could only compare its sheer size to a mythical frost giant or a young dragon, slumped over on its metallic haunches. It was made of a material with the same pigmentation as the critters that roamed the preceding caverns—equally impregnable.

  As they approached, Selriph felt a faint thrum, like the residual echoes of the midday bell from the Caer Eldralis sanctum, so soft that only the most attuned of magical senses could feel it.

  Its source? The arcane orb, visible in the chest of the dormant golem, was faintly fluorescent, housed in a metallic compartment with the doors ajar.

  An enthusiastic bellow erupted from the male elf. “It exists! With this, we can really take the fight to those Eldies!” Kaelan broke into a sprint as the sight registered in his vision, nearly tripping on the uneven flagstone.

  “Hold on,” Selriph called, his voice reverberating against the stone. “Don’t go ahead. We don’t know if it—”

  The elf’s eyes lay bolted ahead, like a feline entranced by a bloated rodent, his words directed towards the golem despite it being intended for the cautious runaway behind him.

  “Don’t be such a nervous nell; once I attune to this beauty, it will render death on your pursuers.” Despite its reassuring syntax, Kaelan’s remark was full of pompous air.

  Selriph’s courtroom rebuttal was stifled by the placating wave of the female elf that came into his vision.

  “Kaelan’s attuned to more golems than you have touched wands, but just keep an eye on him,” Kela gave a casual smile as she shadowed her brother.

  Kaelan pressed a hand to the cold metal of its leg, running down it like a sculptor would their masterpiece, with an air of cautious appraisal and amazement in his movements—a rarity for the elf.

  As long as he doesn’t cause the core to overload … besides, what’s more important is…

  Selriph’s focus landed on the parchment and tomes, then back again. The lingering doubt of the internal statement quelled at the continued stance exhibited by the male elf as he placed his hand on the orb; arcane energy brimmed in a veil that hugged his figure.

  While Kaelan tended to the marvel, the runaway’s youth’s legs seemed to be guided by a subconscious drive towards the parchments. A faint, earthy scent filled his nostrils as he opened the iron grate that separated the main chamber from this metal-barred study.

  This place, perfectly secluded from the twins’ enamoured tinkering with the golem construct, left the youth free to immerse himself in its curious contents.

  As the bars encompassed his vision—not unlike the holding cell that had defined his darkest moments in the Templar compound, paradoxically juxtaposed with the very thing, other than magic, that gave him comfort.

  Knowledge: parchment, tomes, schematics. With the aid of the faint azure glow, he could easily make out the detailed sketches—schematics for the golems as the various components, held down by a piece of mithril ore acting as a paperweight.

  A flame came to life in Selriph’s hand like a tinder catching a spark, piercing through the dimness to illuminate the aesthetic letters that adorned the page, no doubt in Oagat’s hand.

  What it contained was, no doubt, his personal notes on the Mithril golem, detailing the iterative, arduous process undertaken by its creator to conceive the work of arcane engineering in this vault.

  It would have illuminated the trio, or rather, the twins, on how to coerce the golem from its state of innate slumber. A much-needed remedy to the bickering spews of verbal sparring between male and female elves that wafted across the room.

  At least, that is what one would have expected. Instead, what was written on the parchment read as a collection of utter gibberish—at least at first glance.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The taut rope that was Selriph’s brow as he saw the scrambled letters made way for a softening of understanding; the text had to be in some form of cypher, no doubt to conceal its contents from prying eyes.

  The solution likely lay in the mind of its creator, either a rotting corpse among the many mages burnt at the stake or in some secluded cave that not even the greatest diviners or honed hounds of the Inquisition could locate.

  Regardless, the boy recognised traces of the pattern, a vivid jolt of his memory of the cold night of the third day of Solhallow two cycles ago. He could feel the frigid air of the library as he and Gerey sat huddled over a centuries-old parchment, along with the distinct euphoria that swelled in his chest the moment they cracked it.

  To the best of his knowledge, this seemed to be some variant of the Khape Cypher, although some words remained indecipherable, likely requiring a few minutes of work to unlock the full meaning of Oagat’s notes.

  Selriph looked up at the twins, who now both had their hands on the orb, arcane energy welling between them in an attempt to coerce any life into the golem; the solution likely lay somewhere among the hundreds of words on this desk.

  I’ll mention this to them later.

  Of course, presenting the deciphered information to them would likely have expedited the twins’ enamoured and impassioned tinkering. Perhaps it could even bypass any complications they’d encounter once the elf prodded the golem into some state of movement.

  However, for the moment, consideration and temperance took priority—the consequence, aftermath and boon of this fruitful bounty.

  Is it even the best thing to awaken this monstrosity? To use it on the outpost in the pass…?

  The portrait in his vision, the golem framed by the metal bars, faded from his conscious purview as his mind drifted to his next bout of introspective consideration.

  Echoes of last night’s unfinished conversation played in his mind, the disappointment that laced Kela’s words.

  Selriph, while holding no major sentiment for the female elf, still felt the sting of disapproval from his acquaintance. Or rather, he had to acknowledge the budding sense of camaraderie with the twins—one spurred by their mutual disdain for the Empire.

  Which made the prospect of paying them back in kind an attractive option.

  The golem before them was all but reality now; not even Thorne’s masterful bladework could hope to match the sheer power this beast of war held.

  Selriph’s mind filled with the chaotic scene of the mountain pass, faceless, armoured corpses around, crushed under the heel of the metallic monstrosity at the beck and call of the trio.

  The gruesome tableau gave him a slight hint of retributive satisfaction. Above all else, however, it provided the sweet release of the itch that had gnawed at him since he left the Shera Woods: the means to cross the Greyspire mountain pass.

  With the garrison slaughtered, there would be no witnesses. Dire wolf, gulper horse, and runaway deserter could pass through the aftermath before the next rotation of guardsmen arrived; none the wiser as to the cause of the massacre, and passage of the fugitive to the eastern provinces.

  Naturally, the next series of considerations did not appear from thin air; it came into being with the passing mention of the shepherd’s trail, a seasoned route that existed between the Ironcrag Highlands and Venthar.

  A similar apparatus had to exist between the eastern fringes of Eldeitia and the Naltherys state; the nascent mage just had to look for it.

  As such, another benefit emerged: Selriph could then scour through the missives and paperwork locked away in the drawers throughout the outpost. There would lie a crucial piece of information for his decision when he reached the eastern province: how privy his pursuers were to his whereabouts. Critically, if they knew of his Nalthrys-bound intent and the fact that he had a dire wolf and a black gulper horse in tow.

  If official circulation remained nebulous about the boy’s current whereabouts and the animals that accompanied him, the notion that a wandering youth with an oversized canine waltzing into Solvelis—the easternmost city of the empire—would not be immediately linked to the outlaw mage that caused the warehouse fire in the capital.

  That would provide Selriph the leeway to locate such a clandestine network, leading to a sure path beyond Eldeitia—perhaps fate gracing him with convenience; an easy chain of informants to an uneventful crossing across the border.

  As he reached the end of this trail in the forest of consideration, rational elements began to override the idealistic optimism that defined this line of thinking.

  No… it can’t be that simple…? Can it…?

  The first was that the slaughter of an entire complement of imperial guardsmen and soldiers would result in a spike of caution in the eastern province, perhaps enough to prompt the guards at Solvelis and any border settlements to stop and inspect any newcomers.

  However, the greater issue wasn’t confined to Selriph’s flight from the empire, but the wider considerations of Eldeitia’s overwhelming superiority—one that could threaten the life he intended to build in Nalthrys or beyond, in a mage’s college.

  It centred on one crucial question: what would the twins do with the golem after they had bested the garrison?

  Were they going to bring it back to Venthar somehow?

  Ludicrous.

  The golem had to be disposed of after their endeavour, something that the male elf would clearly object to, given the precedent set by his disposition.

  And if somehow Eldeitia managed to chance upon the golem due to some miscalculation on the trio’s part, if they stumbled upon Oagat’s now-opened vault?

  That would couple Eldeitia’s unquestioned rule in the clouds with legions of unchallengeable juggernauts on the ground.

  No… this is folly… the best thing for me would be to take these schematics and convince the twins to abandon this pursuit…

  Selriph lifted the metal ore and rolled up as many of Oagat’s parchments as possible, stuffing them into his bag in a manner that almost violated the typical care he’d show for such literature.

  Just as the last traces of yellow-tinged paper disappeared into the depths of his pouch, the distinct wave of arcane energy erupted from just in front of him—where the twins had been tinkering with Oagat’s prized creation.

  His attention landed at its source, cheers of joy bellowed from the elves as the construct roared to life, the arcane core in vibrant blue, travelling through the metallic body of the golden, the deep blue of mithril taking on the cyan-like tinge of the core’s output.

  Then, a creaking frown came as Kaelan stepped back, as if like a puppet master pulling the strings of a stuffed marionette. With a grunt from its magically endowed herder, the golem drove its legs into the ground, pulled itself up, its haunches leaving the ground.

  It took a single step.

  Or more accurately, half a step.

  Then it stopped once more. More alive than it was moments ago, but very much frozen. Immovable.

  “Gods be damned”, a low call of annoyance came from the female elf. Laborious grunts came as the male elf amplified his gesture, sending tendrils and pulses of arcane energy into the golem.

  Yet it remained still.

  “Hey, magical-study aspirant, anything over there that is useful? Can’t seem to get it moving.”

  Selriph forced a smile, one that stifled his budding protest borne of the flame of rational cynicism.

  “I… yes, I believe so. Will be with you in a moment.”

  Selriph’s eyes ran along the golem’s limbs, brimming with barely contained magical energy, perfectly conducted by the mithril alloy Ooagat had conceived in these caverns.

  An ingot of the same material lay on the desk, caught in the corner of his vision as he turned to leave the caged study.

  This…

  Selriph glanced once more to the now active mithril golem, the orb slowly picking up energy as the ocean blue tinge lit up with the arcane energy from the orb and Kaelan, the elf, moved in jerking movements, almost in a comical, begging manner, trying to force movement from the arcane invention.

  In the seconds Selriph witnessed the spectacle building frantic gestures of the elf, the golem remained a frozen statue—stuck in mid-stride, its right leg raised, yet the golem remained upright as its arms were held by the metallic supports at the side.

  This is futile… surely there will come a moment when he will relent?

  Selriph gave a quick shake of his head as he paced over to the ingot, grabbing the hunky piece in his hand.

  However, instead of lending his immediate assistance, presence and proximity—both intellectually and with the inked parchments he possessed—Selriph found himself led wayward by the curious properties of the mithril alloy.

  The sensation felt simultaneously foreign and familiar in his hand when he held the carapace of the beetle. This, along with any reagents or additives mixed into the alloy—probably the loose pieces of bark near the crucibles—made this material magically receptive.

  Extremely magically receptive.

  Selriph’s hand welled with arcane energy, the energy travelling into the ingot like water filling a pothole, far more than the steady stream he’d felt holding the elderbark.

  He found himself immersed in a trance of magical and academic curiosity. His arcane senses were fully focused on the Mithril alloy and its properties,.

  His mind indulged in the possible implements it could be shaped into, one that could allow him to meld his martial skill and sorcery into harmony.

  How curious… perhaps it might even be possible to forge it into a blade? One that could be used to cast spells…?

  In that self-indulgent contemplation, he had dismissed the erratic pulsing of the arcane core of the golem—a result of Kaelan’s repeated attempts to make it move, bidding it with magical energy—still stuck in its mid-stride.

  Instead, Selriph’s senses went deeper, exploring the lattice that was mithril, magical energy flowing with a smoothness that almost seemed unnerving, unnatural.

  Yet, it was almost tranquil, meditative, what he felt in his hand, so deep in his mystic probe that the shout of warning that came from Kela was as if she were in the middle of a thunderstorm.

  And so, the first sensation that did register in Selriph’s consciousness was not a sound, but the distinct thud that radiated through the stonework into his feet.

  Then, his consciousness picked up the aftermath: a mulchy, sickening series of cracks mixed with dry, brittle snaps—something had been crushed.

  What came after was utterly indescribable; not even the scream from the woman, now safely in Shaylee’s shop in Caer Eldralis, when she saw the mangled remains of the bounty hunter could compare.

  This was like a howling banshee, completely inhuman in its sheer distress.

  His eyes darted left, to the source of the noise. His heart climbed into his throat, as his instincts already anticipated the worst, given the sensory information from the last two seconds.

  Nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to witness.

  Kela stood frozen, a grotesque mask of grief carved into her features. Her entire body was rigid, her hands twitching slightly at her sides. Then her knees buckled, the elf’s bottom finding purchase with the floor—in tandem with the clatter of the charred staff.

  Paralysed in grief, staring at the golem’s foot.

  It took but a moment for Selriph’s mind to register what she was seeing—why she was in such a state.

  Blood soaked the stones, and underneath the golem’s foot was a mangled pile:

  Grey garments, blood, flesh, bone.

  And the bloodied elderbark shield rolled to a stop just a mere footfall away from its former owner.