Draith
patreon
Chapter 117 - Not So Simple
🕑 Added 2025-06-01 14:00:16 +0000 UTCI wasn't able to simply drain the traps on the safe. Somehow, Balthum had managed to tie them into Mount Aeternia's enchantment grid.
Which meant that they wouldn't run out of power without draining most of the protections on the mountain. Considering I wasn't sure how intact the mountain would stay without those enchantments, it wasn't something I wanted to risk.
Nor was I even sure that was possible.
The plus side was that Balthum hadn't included any mana storage in the traps themselves. Which was why I hadn’t been able to find them with Reveal magic. They were using the same mana as the mountain. Since the safe was set up against the side of the mountain where that mana ran, the entire thing had been very well camouflaged.
I practically rubbed my hands together as I inspected the runes. Then I turned to Banya with a smile. "I need to grab Bevel. She'd kill me if she missed this."
Banya chuckled, nodding as I left. It didn't take me long to track down my apprentice, who'd been taking lessons with Calbern alongside her sister in our new residence. They were in the hanging room, which had been strung with nets at several levels for Bevel's comfort. Most of the halls had similar nets hanging from their ceiling, though there weren't any in mine or Calbern's rooms.
They were both reading, not far from each other. Keria was settled on the floor, her legs crossed beneath the nets, while Bevel hung above. Keria’d been doing a lot of studying since our talk. She wasn't learning runes or enchanting like Bevel and Banya, instead focusing on a lot of the other material Calbern taught, including history and geography.
She hadn't explained her thoughts, though she'd had plenty of questions, especially at first. Once she'd picked up the basics of reading, she'd been surprisingly quick to shift to self-study.
Keria wasn't the only one of the Tethered who'd been using the downtime of the Howling season to start learning to read. The school, I'd envisioned had started, though it wasn't Tarnibus or her former student teaching. I hadn't interacted much with Tarnibus since our discussion, nor had her former student arrived before the Howl had been upon us.
That hadn't stopped Tanis, of all people, from starting classes.
Apparently, he was pretty good at the whole teaching thing.
When Bevel spotted me entering the room, she immediately dropped down from where she'd been hanging, leaving the paper she'd been writing on stuck to the wall with a pair of short daggers stabbed through it.
"Daggers, Calbern, really?" I asked, turning to look at the man.
He simply inclined his head. "Lady Bevel has progressed to weapons training. As it seems her size is unlikely to increase for quite some time, daggers felt to be an appropriate choice. They also work well with her innate magic."
"Check this out," Bevel said, she'd crossed half the room, but at her words she stopped. She waved a hand at the wall, sending another pair of daggers out of her sleeve to slam into the wall next to the piece of paper. Neither of them struck true, clattering to the floor. "Still working on the spin," Bevel mumbled as she dropped down and collect the daggers, tucking them into her sleeve.
Throughout the exchange, Keria remained in place, flipping back and forth between the three books she had laid out on the floor in front of her, Bevel’s daggers clattering down just a couple feet away.
"Anyway… Banya and I finished disarming the traps and-"
"Aw, I wanted to help," Bevel said, once more hanging from the net near the center of the room, crossing her arms.
"And…" I said, staring at her, making sure she wasn't going to interrupt again. "And we found a safe with more runes on it. Thought you'd like to help me solve them."
"Yes!" Bevel said, punching a fist towards the floor. "Can I help disarm these ones?"
"We'll see," I replied, gesturing towards the door.
Bevel scrambled down, then ran over to give her sister a quick squeeze.
Keria looked up, shocked, only seeming to notice my presence as I led Bevel out of the room. I heard Calbern saying something to her that I didn’t catch as I closed the door and led her up to Balthum's hidden sanctum.
"You should put in more nets," Bevel said, her hand on the wall as she tottered up the steps.
"I will, once its ready for people to use," I replied, offering her my hand.
She took it after a second, regaining her land legs with every step. By the time we were up, she was mostly stable. When she spotted the dimensional safe, she dashed forward, almost tripping as she came to a stop in front of it.
Then she started pulling out sheets of paper, jotting down notes about everything she could see, chattering away about them the whole time. Banya squatted down beside her, her own notes already out.
I quickly followed their example.
That's how Tamrie found us, a few hours later, when she came to remind me to take a break.
"Huh, what's that?" Tamrie asked as she noticed the object of our interest.
"It's a dimensional safe. It's a special kind of dimensional storage," I replied, glancing over at Bevel's notes, then Banya's and comparing them to mine. We'd solved most of the runework, and thought we might have a way to get in, but it felt too easy.
So I was checking to see what we'd missed.
"Kinda big for a storage item, isn't it?" Tamrie asked, holding her fingers apart by roughly an inch. "Ain't they usually smaller than a sand dollar or such?"
"Usually. But they don't have to be. Attaching it to a bigger item makes it easier to do the enchantment. Which can let you make bigger storage items. Or it can just make it easier to practice," I replied distractedly, comparing my notes on the safe to Banya’s again, trying to figure out what I was missing.
"Think it’s a treasure vault?" Tamrie asked, a sparkle in her eyes as she squatted down beside us, pulling her blue dress up to keep from brushing our notes. "Full of sapphires and pencils!"
"Pencils?" I repeated, finally looking up from my notes.
"Pencils," Tamrie confirmed with a nod, a smile tugging at her lips.
I chuckled. "Sorry. It's kind of exciting."
"Aye, it is. Secrets of a Magus, locked tighter than an ocean clam's shell," Tamrie said, plopping down on the only other chair that'd been in the room. Neither Banya or Bevel had used one the entire time we'd been there. "Right special, that."
"Yeah. And… we think we've got it figured out except…"
"Except it's too easy!" Bevel pronounced as she got off the floor. "It can't be this easy, it just… can't." Bevel said, frowning at her notes.
Banya just shrugged. "Doesn't seem that easy to me, but I'm no expert."
"Talk me through it, why don'tcha?" Tamrie suggested, adjusting her flowing blue dress as she settled further on the chair, smoothing it out before setting her hands in front of her. "What have you found so far?"
"It's three layers of enchantments," Bevel said, standing up and thrusting a page of notes in front of Tamrie.
"I… see," Tamrie said, and I held back a chuckle as she practically went cross-eyed from trying to focus on the page.
"Except they're not really separate," Banya said, holding up a much simpler sketch, showing how the three layers were linked, mana flowing into all three from the same connection to the mountain's rune network.
"Yeah! They're all using the same mana, and they don't even have any reserves. All we need to do is cut off the input and blam!" Bevel smacked her fist into her open palm, making Tamrie startle slightly, though she smoothed her dress back down a moment later. Bevel opened her fist as she continued, "No more traps or enchantments."
"That does sound rather easy," Tamrie said, nodding. "Though I doubt I could do it."
"But you're not a mage," Bevel said, scrunching up her face. "These were hidden from us too."
"And what do the traps do? If'n they were to go off, that is?" Tamrie asked, looking towards me.
But I was having fun letting Bevel explain, and she'd been doing a fine job of it so far, so I looked over to her, indicating she should continue.
Bevel's eyes lit up as she pulled the first page of her notes out. It was a complicated mess, and even I couldn't really make sense of it. Bevel tapped a bunch of scribbled notes in the top left corner as she said, "The outermost layer causes you to forget you saw the safe, if you trigger it." She dropped the page, picking up another one, which was much better labeled, and only had the second trap on it. "This one makes it so the safe looks like the wall. At least, we're pretty sure that's what its supposed to do. It doesn't seem to be working."
"And… the last one?" Tamrie asked.
"There is no last one, it's just the safe," Bevel said, slumping.
"The dimensional safe?" Tamrie asked, squinting. "The magic one, you’re on about?"
"Yep," Bevel said, sighing while staring down at her notes. "It's too simple…"
"I… perhaps I've mistook a thing, but don't the safe need magic to function?" Tamrie asked, tilting her head to the side to look past Bevel at the magical safe.
"Course. Otherwise it'd break," Bevel said as I smacked my palm into my forehead. Bevel looked at me, but I let her and Tamrie continue. Was pretty sure Tamrie was leading Bevel to the same conclusion I'd only just arrived at.
"And what happens to the contents of a dimensional storage when it breaks?" Tamrie asked, the corner of her mouth twitching into just the faintest of smiles.
"Depends, it either… explodes or disappears. You can’t get anything if you…" Bevel trailed off, turning back to the safe. "If we turn off the mana, we'll lose the safe."
"We can probably bypass it, but that's going to be a lot more work than simply turning it off," I said, chuckling.
"Lots more," Bevel agreed, a smile on her face as she nodded along. “Lots and lots more.”
"I… thought you both knew that," Banya finally said, before also laughing softly. "I thought I'd just missed something."
"Glad to be of service," Tamrie said, smoothing out her dress before getting to her feet. "Now, dinner is ready. You can finish this tomorrow."
"But mo- Tamrie," Bevel coughed, correcting herself halfway through the word. Both Tamrie and I arched our eyebrows at Bevel as she looked back down to her notes before mumbling out, "Okay."
I pushed to my feet, offering Bevel a hand. Banya continued looking through her notes, and I paused, looking back at her.
She met my gaze with a shrug. "Not feeling like eating tonight. Think I'll look through all this again then take a shot at designing a way around it, if that's okay?"
"Sure. I can look it over in the morning, if you'd like."
Banya nodded, gaze shifting downward once more.
Leaving the stone-woman behind, I made my way down the stairs with Tamrie on one arm and Bevel holding my hand on the other side. I chuckled at the simple oversight Bevel and I had made. It'd been staring us in the face the whole time and neither of us had been able to see it.
Sometimes life really was that simple.
