Chương 42: Then There Were Three

Ch. 42 - Then There Were Three By the time Ivarr helped Altharia reach the priest's golden light where she would be safe and turned back to start cutting a path toward Sammel, it was already too late for the other man. His screams had stopped half a minute before, and though Ivarr fought his way back to where his friend had been, there were only bloody scraps that no longer resembled a man. You have gained 1 human soul!

It was a sickening sight, and with a cry of rage, he shattered all of those bloody skeletons as they sprang toward him.

Buxom, beautiful, or comely, they never stood a chance before its wielder's cold rage. That area was the last real knot of undeath in the room. When the attack had started a minute before, there had been more than fifty of the wretches. Now, there were less than a dozen, and more were dying every second. Still, the damage had been done.

"How did I not see this coming?" Ivarr asked, blaming himself when he stood by the corpse that had once been Sammel.

"Why did I ever let them come with us? I knew they weren't strong enough." No one but the blade heard those whispers, and it offered neither defense nor confirmation for them. Instead, it merely urged its wielder to keep his head in the game. Focus on the living. The dead can wait until the fighting is done. That was true enough, and despite their horror, the other three quickly regrouped.

"I didn't know," the mage was saying over and over.

"I didn't see it… I didn't—""No one saw it," Ivarr reassured her.

"But it was evil, and we purged it. It can never hurt anyone else again."

"What about the next room?" Dero asked.

"Whatever's in there... It's liable to be much worse than what we found here."

"We can't leave this half done," Ivarr insisted.

"Sam's death has to mean something. We have to purge this place." The other two debated that a bit more but eventually agreed to his way of thinking, and after Altharia used her magic to strip the door of whatever evil enchantments it held, Ivarr forced the right side open one slow step at a time. Even with the blade's magic to strengthen him, it took everything he had for those first two steps, because it was a weight that no mortal man was ever meant to open on his own.

After that, momentum helped him swing the thing fully open without much difficulty. The room behind it wasn't much bigger than any of them had expected. In the center of the room, on a raised dais, there was a stone sarcophagus. It was the least impressive part of the room, though, because on all sides of it were heaping piles of treasure. It was literally tons of gold and silver. The piles were mostly made up of coins and gilded artifacts, but jewelry, chalices, and other stranger things were there, too.

On the far side of the room, covered in a threadbare sheet of black silk, was something that could only be the mirror that Altharia had spent so many years of her life looking for. Ivarr pointed toward it with his sword, but as soon as he opened his mouth, wraiths boiled up out of those coin piles and charged, shrieking at him.

"Dare you to disturb our master!" they moaned as they tried to devour Ivarr's soul.

"The Mage-King's slumber is never to be disturbed!" Its wielder swung the Ebon Blade valiantly, but it could not strike any of the eerie gray specters. Fortunately, their icy grip slid off of its soul and that of its wielder just as easily. Their razor claws still sliced into Ivarr's flesh, but those were wounds that were easily healed.

-8 Life Force -6 Life Force -9 Life Force About the time they were figuring out how fruitless their attacks were, though, Dero had completed his prayer, and a beam of golden, holy light sliced through all of them, evaporating them like a morning mist. A moment after his light faded, the echoes of their hideous shrieks were gone, and with Ivarr's wounds healed, it was like they'd never existed at all. -5 Life Force -8 Life Force"A-are you okay?" the elf said, running up to its wielder. He just smiled and said, "Me?

Totally fine. It barely tickled. The sword's magic protected me." The first part was a lie, of course. The wounds hadn't been ineffective in the slightest. They hadn't managed to hook into its wielder's soul, but they'd rent his flesh in a way that was more painful than slender tears had any right to be. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. The young man didn't complain, though, or even look at Altharia. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the room.

Looking for other dangers that were ready to strike. Nothing else immediately jumped out at them, giving the three of them the chance to regroup. The first thing that the mage did was cast a spell that illuminated the room with cyan light. Then, once they could see, they discussed how to proceed.

"There are many magics on the sarcophagus itself," she said, "They seem to be for protecting the bones within, but just as with the illusion spells, there's no way to know if those magics hide something more sinister behind them."

"It's true," the priest agreed.

"That thing is like an infinite void. It's not just a body. That thing contains spirits of things that should not be." Anything could be hiding in there, the blade added silently, noting real fear in the eyes of the priest. Dero was a pretty easygoing guy that just wanted to do good. He'd held up okay in the face of the skeletons they'd fought so recently, but here he looked like he was about to run away screaming in terror.

Even if the priest hadn't looked like he was about to wet himself at whatever he could see that the rest of them couldn't, the Ebon Blade didn't like the look of the ancient thing, and with a tomb this lavish, it was certain that the real treasure would be carefully guarded.

There was an inscription on the stairs leading up to the elaborate stone sarcophagus that promised eternal torment to anyone who even approached the thing, and given what the weapon had seen so far down here, it was inclined to take such warnings seriously.

"Perhaps you could try shattering it from here?" Ivarr asked.

"You could use another spell."

"Not from this angle," the mage said after a moment's consideration.

"Anything that comes near that tomb might well be seen as an attack on it." Since they dared not approach the casket, they tried to navigate the pile of treasure on the left first in an effort to make their way over to the mirror. When nothing screeched in outrage and assaulted them for doing so, though, they started to pick through the near-limitless wealth that was contained there. The mage was able to pick out several items from the pile that had real magic infused in them.

There was a wand, a few rings, and a necklace. The blade tried to stretch out to reach those and explore them as she studied them, but it couldn't. The gulf between what its wielder touched and what he didn't was effectively infinite except where it involved the primal life energies that fed it.

"These might suit you," the elf said, handing Ivarr a ring and a necklace.

"What do they do?" he asked as he studied the ostentatious jewelry. The blade didn't have to listen to her answer, though. It already knew exactly what they did. It had only to reach out and touch them as its owners did for their magic to flow into it, the same as Elom's hexblade had before. You have learned Giant's Strength! You have learned Speed of the Shadows! As both of those messages appeared, a new string of runes appeared, winding around each of its cross guards, first on the left and then on the right.

While the blade couldn't read either, it could see that they mirrored the marks of the blade itself. More interesting than the marks, though, were the abilities themselves. Giant's Strength 1: +1 strength. This bonus is doubled when facing an enemy that is more than a foot larger than you. Speed of the Shadows 1: +1 agility, +10% speed in dim or darker conditions. Neither of them cost that much and considering it had over 1000 Life Force and a human soul.

Still, it hesitated to get either, even though it could easily afford both. There were too many unknowns to use serious energy. I'll wait until we leave this place before I see where those paths lead, it told itself as the mage readied herself to cast her spell once the three of them were finally in position in the back corner of the room.

"Don't you want to study it first?" Ivarr asked.

"You've been searching for this for years, and you're just going to destroy it?"

"I know everything that a sane person should about the Mirror of Unending Vistas," the mage sighed.

"As much as I'd love to know more or even use it myself, the things it has been used for have left it hopelessly cursed. To see into it is to let it see into you and the things that it shows you… Well, all of us are probably better off not knowing them." The blade hoped she'd give a better answer that offered up more information. Instead, she started to cast a spell. This one was different than the one she'd used before, and it was blue and white light that danced around her as her breath began to fog the air.

At first, it wondered why she wasn't using fire and lightning again, as the ice began to crystallize around her in shards. It realized only that she was almost done that she was probably worried the mirror might reflect such an attack and had chosen a spell that created solid objects to shatter it instead. Her magic summoned jagged bolts of ice, and as she finished singing them into existence, they flew unerringly into the mirror, smashing against the glass. At least, that's what they were supposed to do.

Instead, they dove into the dark reflection, like it was still water, taking the cloth that had covered it up until now with them.