End of the Road: Passing of the Torch
Zedman7054
Eternally 3rd
- Location
- United States
A Divided Loyalties Omake
End of the Road: Passing of the Torch
It was a swift, decisive movement slamming a book shut, an echoing sound that defined a moment. With withered hands Lady Magister Mathilde Weber returned the tome to it's appropriate spot, a complicated but necessary ritual, with a finality to her strides and gestures. It took her but a handful of minutes, longer than the day before, and left.
"Eike, there you are."
Magister Eike Hochschild turns from her students, her hand giving them a casual wave of dismissal, as she focuses on Mathilde, a bright smile on her face.
"Greetings Master, it's rare to see you come down from the tower these past couple of months, has something happened?"
The wizened wizard gives her a soft smile. "You could say that. An important matter has come up. I'd like you to come back to the tower, I have one last lesson to teach you."
If it was possible Eike's smile grew wider, "Master, I think you called my last last fourteen lessons your 'Last Lesson' for me." She still sidles up next to her teacher easily, and pries. "What could be so important that you had to come down and get me yourself? You could have sent any number of messengers, you didn't have to go out of your way for me."
"Well Eike, I figured it would be good for me, to get out of that dusty tower and walk around the Karak. I even spent some time with Belegor, making sure he's been paying attention to his Master of Scouts." Mathilde gleefully pokes back before her verbal riposte, "And speaking of, are there any, hypothetical, stories you could share with an old woman?"
It's a blunt redirection of the conversation, but one Eike allows her, grumbling only a little before delving into the latest actions of Karak Eight Peaks Scout Corp, specifically the recent assassination of an Black Orc Warboss that had sent Eike and her team on a two week hunt across two mountain ranges and ended in an abandoned section of the Underway that he had claimed as his base.
It's a good story that takes up the boring trek back to Mathilde's Tower and by the end of it both Wizards are engaged with swapping stories, little moments from adventures long past.
"Noooo! Your undergarments?! Master! How scandalous. Just imagine what others would say!" The wizards share a laugh as the climb the last leg of their journey, entering Mathilde's personal library.
"Oh, the young beautiful Wizard and the rough but kind Witch Hunter, locked in a room together, it's right out of a romance novel." The wizard lord settles into her preferred reading chair, the one made out of the dragon skull she had stolen from Alkharad or Alhazred or whatever his name had been, and all but collapses into it. And as her breathing settles the mood shifts. With each breath she sits taller and straighter, the mists and shadows draw around her, and finally she opens her eyes and meets Eike's, whose already sensed the change in her master's mood and shelved the random book she had been perusing.
Wizard and wizard, master and apprentice, surrogate mother and all-but-adopted daughter. The weight of a relationship built over decades hang over the two of them and Mathilde hesitates. What she's about to do could not be undone.
"Eike, within the walls of this room lies the greatest secret I have ever kept. In all the decades I've lived, I have breathed nothing of the truth. I've skirted it, talked around it, but no one should ever, could ever, expect the truth. Not Belegor nor Algard, not Heidi or Mandred, not even Pan. It is protected by the greatest defenses I could devise and hidden to the best of my ability. And I know that you will be able to find it, I've taught you everything I know." A small smirk breaks through Mathilde's façade, "Well, I suppose not everything, but certainly every other conventional and unconventional trick and application of magic I know. Here, take this key," she holds out a plain bronze key and waits as Eike comes close to do so before resting her empty hand on Eike's shoulder, drawing her close and whispering, "the key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password: Senthoi. I have full confidence you'll know what to do with it."
Eike straightens back up, already mentally tearing the key apart to understand it's role in her master's puzzle, and casts her eyes around the library. "Right, so any other cryptic hints, perhaps on where to start Master?"
The little Damelichter walks towards a random shelf, before prompting her teacher again, "Well Master? No witty insult or obtuse lore?" Two, three, four more steps echo in an eerie silence.
"Master?" Eike turns back to her Master's chair and knows. "Master Mathilde!" The key drops from her hand as she scrambles back to what she knows but doesn't want to acknowledge, wrapping her arms around the still body. There's no heartbeat. No breathing. Just a small satisfied smile at a job well done.
The puzzle Mathilde had left for her was as obnoxiously long as it was complex. Having the key to open a chest or a safe or locked door was all well and good, but without knowing where the lock is, everything else is useless. But Eike was always a clever girl and her master had given her more to work with than Eike had originally thought. 'In this room'. Three simple words that kept the grey magister from having to search not only the entirety of Mathilde's Tower but also Karak-Eight-Peaks, the Colleges, or even Mathilde's Fief in Stirland, cutting the work down from an impossible feat for one person to merely impossibly stressful for one person.
With the search area secured, the next thing was to start looking. A prospect easier said than done. Lady Mathilde's personal library was incomparable to most in the world, deviating by scope, scale, subject, and organization, but to start with, her master's bibliophilia prevented her from maintaining anything approaching a small collection of books for her personal perusal and it had more in comparison with the libraries of established settlements or the wealthiest of collectors than that of a mere hobbyist. To end with, it was the work of nearly two days to reorganize and categorize her hoard with a small team of borrowed apprentices. They didn't find anything obvious, but Eike expected that. Whatever secret a Lady Magister decided was her greatest wouldn't be kept out in the open for anyone to casually stumble upon.
All the usual tricks were checked, hidden doors, false walls, pocket dimensions, the ceiling, the floorboards, the furniture, illusions, and mind tricks and found nothing outside of the expected defenses. Even the books were doublechecked. With the simplest solutions coming up empty, more to make sure there wasn't a bluff, it was time for the real work to begin. The books were returned to where they were before their efforts and Eike set her borrowed help on their way.
This would be the second roadblock. Where again was she supposed to look? The second clue, was of course the bronze key Mathilde had given her. A cursory look into it revealed that the key could extend and rotate in places by a series of grooves and locked into place by sets of pins, revealing hidden holes and precise lines that denote length and angles behind the surface. It was by a passing memory and a quick test that Eike realized the tool in her hand could be placed on a page of a book then through careful adjustments and turns would line up and display the letters underneath. A cypher key to point out hidden messages.
But she would still need to find the book her master's secret message was written in, and the answer came as Eike delved into Mathilde's favorite novels and found a copy of Miriam Webb's Hunters in the Dark, her master's attempt at writing a romance novel of her own, under a pseudonym of course. And there on page 281, and just like Matilde had said, "The key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password." It's a Witch Hunter, talking to the main love interest, a Wizard. The next line read "She leans in and and whispers her repressed feelings, 'I love you.'" A romance between a Witch Hunter and a Wizard. Subtlety never was Matilde's strongest suite.
Ignoring the sappiness of the moment Eike laid down the cryptic key and began adjusting it, starting at the most logical place; 'password. S', then e, then n, rotate the key to find the nearest t, h, o, and i, making notes on what letters line up with the holes along the way, the lengths and angles, what letters are pointed out by the key's bitings and tip, even the number of times she has to reset the key. Anything could be useful in figuring out her master's cypher and she'd rather have useless information than missing information. At the end of the day she had a mix of capitol and lowercase letters and a trove of numbers and all that was left was decrypting it all.
Two days and almost two dozen false starts later Eike strikes gold when she realizes the result of of initial decryption has two parts, capitol letters for part of one incomplete code and lowercase for another which combined with an Aethyic formulae Mathilde had penned while plugging in the angles in a reverse alphabetical order that they were obtained leads to a second Eltharian word and a page number. From there the process repeats three more times. And then it doesn't. Blank spots appear in the key, the information she needs not there and for a moment Eike had sat terrified that she had made a mistake.
But a decade of training and decades more of utilizing that training stops her; One: Don't Panic, and Two: Explore Every Other Avenue Before Restarting.
A closer examination of the page shows her exactly what the niggling feeling in her gut said would be there, invisible ink. Reworking the page a second time accounting for the new letters puts her on the right path once again. And when the cypher changes on a random page she calmly decyphers it and moving on. Again and again little problems are added to the gauntlet, different types of invisible ink on the same page, a second cypher that that needed to be solved by using the information gained from the first to reveal the true letters, and even spontaneously changing the formula are thrown at her.
And by the end of the week Eike is left with a stack of pages full of instructions. At first glance they seem to be another code. SOW, PAOS, PGODC, and FIN and more. But decades of living alongside the Head Librarian of the world's greatest library turns the next hurdle into a complete non-issue. Shadows of War, Practical Applications of Silk, Primer Guide on Dwarven Culture, and Frolicking in Nature. Book names, and ones Eike knows from personal experience are waiting on the shelves above her.
With practiced precision she goes down the list, dancing from 'Studies on Conjured Alcohol' to 'Autopsies of Deep Sea Creatures', a growing pile of books in the center of the room containing a seemingly random assortment of literature that keeps getting added to. From a pile, to stacks, to what can only be called a mountain of paper and ink that Eike begins to refer to as Mt Knowledge.
Eventually the list comes to an end and Eike casts her eyes over the ravaged racks, the shelves looking pillaged and in many places pitifully barren. Each empty space causes a twinge in Eike's heart and she can't help but take a break from the numbing effort of solving her Master's last mystery, dragging her hand across the ranks of shelves.
Book, book, book, empty space, book, empty space, book book, empty space, book, empty space, book, book, book, empty space, book...
Her stomach lurches and her eyes grow strained for just a second. Was something there?
With a growing sense of something that she had long ago learned to trust she presses her thumb into the shelf's edge and runs it along past the book, book, book, and notes how far she's actually walked back.
Forcing herself to maintain her calm, Eike focuses her eyes on the three books section of the wall as she stumbles backward, blindly grasping for the discarded list of books before returning to her place. Marking her place with a solid grip on the edge of the mysterious space she tears through the pages, cursing the lack of foresight in not creating an additional list where the books were organized in any manner other than the seemingly randomized manner revealed by her master's puzzle. But experienced librarian's eyes accurately rips through the list nonetheless, every book from this shelf standing out among the rest, one, two, three...fifty-six books from the section and fourteen from this row in particular.
She turns to the mountain of literature, before quickly deciding to trust her gut over diving into madness trying to find fourteen specific books out of nearly five hundred stacked high. 'Maybe,' she wonders, 'I shouldn't have rushed to get everything off the shelves...' before dismissing the thought. Organizing the books was obviously going to be her next step, she just either got sidetracked or jumped ahead. Whichever it was depended on what happened next.
Drawing on memories of helping Mathilde work on Defensive Memes: Weaponized Clichés for the Purpose of Tricking the Mentally Unwary and How to Circumvent Them, Eike focuses on the feelings of her windsight and and gut feelings, trusting in all of her training, and reaches out towards the three books . And it's only then she feels the subtle magic woven between the shelves, like a clear piece of glass in water, hidden unless you knew exactly what to look for.
The mentally trickery is simple, as it should be, as she probes it out. Too complicated a mental suggestion and it sticks out as odd, too basic and it might not work, or even work too well. She had vague memories of a rotten apple both she and Mathilde had forgotten about in a test chamber for several months until a passing dwarf commented on the rotten fruity smell the two of them had known about but could never truly pinpoint.
Probing the spell requires a great deal of focus, but the numerous techniques and tests Eike was equipped with had solved the mystery of more than one exotic magic. In the case of this enchantment it simply filled in the gaps, so to say. On a full shelf wandering eyes would simply skip over the patch, seeing it as merely more books, and when the shelves were empty it would look empty as well. That was why it was so noticeable now, the magic was caught in the extreme between the two states, half-empty and half-full, making it stand out against close inspection. A cold sweat trails down Eike's neck at the thought. Strained to the degree that it was and it was at worst noticeable to a trained Magister-grade Grey Wizard upon a literal up-close examination.
'Just what are you hiding Master?'
With a series of careful 'tugs' she gains enough 'slack' to take a full look at the 'weave' of the spell and identifies the crucial aspect. With a 'pinch' and a 'pull' she draws the 'slack' 'tight' once more and hesitates...admiring the masterpiece of mental trickery her master had devised, before letting out a sigh. With a 'cut' she severs the borders of the magic and like water it spills out of the space it had been sealed to.
She does not hesitate in approaching the shelf a final time, taking in the hidden books before her:
A Full and Accurate Census of All Varieties of Undead within the Hunter's Hills, 2476, By M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), E.C. Abelhelm Van Hal (Templar) (S·T·T·L), J. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)
The Neglected Front: Economic Warfare against the Vampiric Bloodlines, by E.C. Roswita Van Hal (Templar), E.C. Abelhelm Van Hal (Templar) (S·T·T·L), M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), Chaplain Kasmir Heinz (Stirland), Steward Rodebrecht Brennen (Stirland)
The Premier Primer on Dhar and Those that Use It, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)
Her own sharp breath in disbelief draws Eike from her stunned discovery. Mathilde's most controversial book had only eight copies that she had known about, one each for the colleges in Altdorf, plus possibly one in the possession of the Ice Witches of Kislev and even less likely one shipped off to the White Tower on Ulthuan itself. It shouldn't have been a surprise to see her master had kept a version of it for herself, but it still was.
Which was why it was baffling why one of the rarest books in the world would be in the same spot as two of the most mundane papers she could think of.
With trepidation Eike pulls the books off the shelf one by one, left to right. She opens them up and skims them cover to cover but finds nothing that stands out in them. If the cypher continues through the mountain of books behind her into these three she's in for months of difficult work, so she holds out for a hope she's simply missing something, and so it's only barely by chance that as she tucks the three books under her arms that she looks straight-on at the mysterious shelf space and notices the slight discoloration of the natural rock wall. A minute detail only picked out by her years living in Karak-8-Peaks alongside the Dwarves.
Drawing her closer in curiosity the discoloration seems to glow...because it was! As her finger probes the mark, tracing it, the slightest of light reflecting off of the digit grows brighter, though it fades as her hand flinches back. Then a second time with more confidence and the glow returns. She finally stands back from her spot, amazed and shocked at the same time. A dwarven rune.
With sudden clarity Eike scrambles to every spot she had pulled books from and notes how each shelf section also have runes carved onto the walls as well. Grabbing a set of parchment she gets to work copying the runes down, listing them in the order they would have been revealed going down the decrypted list of books, searching out a pattern.
Just how much work had her master put into this challenge? Surely she couldn't be far off from finishing it? There's dozens of phrases that could be used, Branulhune or Unseen but not Unfelt, it could be something personal and private to Mathilde for security or something so mundane and generic it could be anything else.
Eike stands on the precipice of the latest obstacle for what feels like days, hands massaging tired eyes, her mind analyzing and working over every idea and thought. Had she by coincidence managed to skip ahead of her master's laid out challenge and now found herself needing knowledge hidden along the path she skipped? Or was there some other riddle at play? Did she risk wasting months doublechecking everything so far, or risk wasting an unknowable amount of time searching for a path forward blindly? Would there be a punishment for failing this section of the puzzle, whatever secret destroyed rather than be risked?
Thoughts war in her mind, every memory of Mathilde playing through like a hundred theater plays running at the same time, searching for some clue. From her earliest meetings with her before discovering magic to the years of her apprenticeship to the life they made in Karak-8-Peaks. And inevitably, their final moments play out, as she stares at the dragonchair. The desire to just collapse into it pulls her close enough brush her hands across bone and silk cushions.
"The key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password."
It's not a burst of energy that revitalizes her, but it's enough to get her moving again. Translating Eltharin into Dwarven Runes isn't easy, but by this point she had faced far harder challenges in this final test so it's almost a trivial issue, more a matter of time before she makes her way to each sequential rune and pressing it in the correct order. Senthoi, the elven word for unity, loyalty, and broken promise.
The final rune is pressed, but nothing happens until, with a fatigued sigh, Eike returns to the mysterious shelf space and presses the rune there as well.
In an unceremonious motion the rock wall behind the last rune swings open like it's on a hinge and she nearly cries as she realizes how literal "within the walls of the room" her master's last words were.
But all fatigue and frustration flee with a fearful rush of adrenaline as she recognizes the book Mathilde had built this entire test around. Plain, battered leather, unadorned by filigree or illustrations, it nonetheless possesses a pull to it that churns in Eike's gut. With hesitant hands she draws it into the fading light of dusk and candles, marveling and terrified at how stable the magic contained is. She opens the cover to the title page and finds what she already knew.
The Liber Mortis. The original Liber Mortis. Written in the hand of the man that saved and doomed Sylvania, Baron Frederick Van Hal.
In a decisive movement she slams the book shut, the echoing noise ringing out defining the moment, and throws it back into the safe.
"Oh Master! What have you done?! You'll know what to do? With that?" Does she? Is she supposed to keep it safe, like Mathilde herself did? Or, the dark thought swirls, was she to use it? The lessons taught to her, by Mathilde herself, of Grand Theoginist Kurt III and his use of a mere copy of the book before her to stop the Third Vampire War rise unbidden. "Or...," as the sun sets behind the ring of mountains, the image of Mathilde's body comes to her. No one would think anything of her visiting the catacombs where her adopted mother lay preserved, still awaiting the rites and ceremony for her funeral. Still in near perfect condition...
Eike, stricken and paralyzed by the surge of competing emotions gathers enough of her wits and asks herself, what will she do?
End of the Road Part One (?) End
End of the Road: Passing of the Torch
It was a swift, decisive movement slamming a book shut, an echoing sound that defined a moment. With withered hands Lady Magister Mathilde Weber returned the tome to it's appropriate spot, a complicated but necessary ritual, with a finality to her strides and gestures. It took her but a handful of minutes, longer than the day before, and left.
***
"Eike, there you are."
Magister Eike Hochschild turns from her students, her hand giving them a casual wave of dismissal, as she focuses on Mathilde, a bright smile on her face.
"Greetings Master, it's rare to see you come down from the tower these past couple of months, has something happened?"
The wizened wizard gives her a soft smile. "You could say that. An important matter has come up. I'd like you to come back to the tower, I have one last lesson to teach you."
If it was possible Eike's smile grew wider, "Master, I think you called my last last fourteen lessons your 'Last Lesson' for me." She still sidles up next to her teacher easily, and pries. "What could be so important that you had to come down and get me yourself? You could have sent any number of messengers, you didn't have to go out of your way for me."
"Well Eike, I figured it would be good for me, to get out of that dusty tower and walk around the Karak. I even spent some time with Belegor, making sure he's been paying attention to his Master of Scouts." Mathilde gleefully pokes back before her verbal riposte, "And speaking of, are there any, hypothetical, stories you could share with an old woman?"
It's a blunt redirection of the conversation, but one Eike allows her, grumbling only a little before delving into the latest actions of Karak Eight Peaks Scout Corp, specifically the recent assassination of an Black Orc Warboss that had sent Eike and her team on a two week hunt across two mountain ranges and ended in an abandoned section of the Underway that he had claimed as his base.
It's a good story that takes up the boring trek back to Mathilde's Tower and by the end of it both Wizards are engaged with swapping stories, little moments from adventures long past.
"Noooo! Your undergarments?! Master! How scandalous. Just imagine what others would say!" The wizards share a laugh as the climb the last leg of their journey, entering Mathilde's personal library.
"Oh, the young beautiful Wizard and the rough but kind Witch Hunter, locked in a room together, it's right out of a romance novel." The wizard lord settles into her preferred reading chair, the one made out of the dragon skull she had stolen from Alkharad or Alhazred or whatever his name had been, and all but collapses into it. And as her breathing settles the mood shifts. With each breath she sits taller and straighter, the mists and shadows draw around her, and finally she opens her eyes and meets Eike's, whose already sensed the change in her master's mood and shelved the random book she had been perusing.
Wizard and wizard, master and apprentice, surrogate mother and all-but-adopted daughter. The weight of a relationship built over decades hang over the two of them and Mathilde hesitates. What she's about to do could not be undone.
"Eike, within the walls of this room lies the greatest secret I have ever kept. In all the decades I've lived, I have breathed nothing of the truth. I've skirted it, talked around it, but no one should ever, could ever, expect the truth. Not Belegor nor Algard, not Heidi or Mandred, not even Pan. It is protected by the greatest defenses I could devise and hidden to the best of my ability. And I know that you will be able to find it, I've taught you everything I know." A small smirk breaks through Mathilde's façade, "Well, I suppose not everything, but certainly every other conventional and unconventional trick and application of magic I know. Here, take this key," she holds out a plain bronze key and waits as Eike comes close to do so before resting her empty hand on Eike's shoulder, drawing her close and whispering, "the key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password: Senthoi. I have full confidence you'll know what to do with it."
Eike straightens back up, already mentally tearing the key apart to understand it's role in her master's puzzle, and casts her eyes around the library. "Right, so any other cryptic hints, perhaps on where to start Master?"
The little Damelichter walks towards a random shelf, before prompting her teacher again, "Well Master? No witty insult or obtuse lore?" Two, three, four more steps echo in an eerie silence.
"Master?" Eike turns back to her Master's chair and knows. "Master Mathilde!" The key drops from her hand as she scrambles back to what she knows but doesn't want to acknowledge, wrapping her arms around the still body. There's no heartbeat. No breathing. Just a small satisfied smile at a job well done.
***
The puzzle Mathilde had left for her was as obnoxiously long as it was complex. Having the key to open a chest or a safe or locked door was all well and good, but without knowing where the lock is, everything else is useless. But Eike was always a clever girl and her master had given her more to work with than Eike had originally thought. 'In this room'. Three simple words that kept the grey magister from having to search not only the entirety of Mathilde's Tower but also Karak-Eight-Peaks, the Colleges, or even Mathilde's Fief in Stirland, cutting the work down from an impossible feat for one person to merely impossibly stressful for one person.
With the search area secured, the next thing was to start looking. A prospect easier said than done. Lady Mathilde's personal library was incomparable to most in the world, deviating by scope, scale, subject, and organization, but to start with, her master's bibliophilia prevented her from maintaining anything approaching a small collection of books for her personal perusal and it had more in comparison with the libraries of established settlements or the wealthiest of collectors than that of a mere hobbyist. To end with, it was the work of nearly two days to reorganize and categorize her hoard with a small team of borrowed apprentices. They didn't find anything obvious, but Eike expected that. Whatever secret a Lady Magister decided was her greatest wouldn't be kept out in the open for anyone to casually stumble upon.
All the usual tricks were checked, hidden doors, false walls, pocket dimensions, the ceiling, the floorboards, the furniture, illusions, and mind tricks and found nothing outside of the expected defenses. Even the books were doublechecked. With the simplest solutions coming up empty, more to make sure there wasn't a bluff, it was time for the real work to begin. The books were returned to where they were before their efforts and Eike set her borrowed help on their way.
This would be the second roadblock. Where again was she supposed to look? The second clue, was of course the bronze key Mathilde had given her. A cursory look into it revealed that the key could extend and rotate in places by a series of grooves and locked into place by sets of pins, revealing hidden holes and precise lines that denote length and angles behind the surface. It was by a passing memory and a quick test that Eike realized the tool in her hand could be placed on a page of a book then through careful adjustments and turns would line up and display the letters underneath. A cypher key to point out hidden messages.
But she would still need to find the book her master's secret message was written in, and the answer came as Eike delved into Mathilde's favorite novels and found a copy of Miriam Webb's Hunters in the Dark, her master's attempt at writing a romance novel of her own, under a pseudonym of course. And there on page 281, and just like Matilde had said, "The key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password." It's a Witch Hunter, talking to the main love interest, a Wizard. The next line read "She leans in and and whispers her repressed feelings, 'I love you.'" A romance between a Witch Hunter and a Wizard. Subtlety never was Matilde's strongest suite.
Ignoring the sappiness of the moment Eike laid down the cryptic key and began adjusting it, starting at the most logical place; 'password. S', then e, then n, rotate the key to find the nearest t, h, o, and i, making notes on what letters line up with the holes along the way, the lengths and angles, what letters are pointed out by the key's bitings and tip, even the number of times she has to reset the key. Anything could be useful in figuring out her master's cypher and she'd rather have useless information than missing information. At the end of the day she had a mix of capitol and lowercase letters and a trove of numbers and all that was left was decrypting it all.
Two days and almost two dozen false starts later Eike strikes gold when she realizes the result of of initial decryption has two parts, capitol letters for part of one incomplete code and lowercase for another which combined with an Aethyic formulae Mathilde had penned while plugging in the angles in a reverse alphabetical order that they were obtained leads to a second Eltharian word and a page number. From there the process repeats three more times. And then it doesn't. Blank spots appear in the key, the information she needs not there and for a moment Eike had sat terrified that she had made a mistake.
But a decade of training and decades more of utilizing that training stops her; One: Don't Panic, and Two: Explore Every Other Avenue Before Restarting.
A closer examination of the page shows her exactly what the niggling feeling in her gut said would be there, invisible ink. Reworking the page a second time accounting for the new letters puts her on the right path once again. And when the cypher changes on a random page she calmly decyphers it and moving on. Again and again little problems are added to the gauntlet, different types of invisible ink on the same page, a second cypher that that needed to be solved by using the information gained from the first to reveal the true letters, and even spontaneously changing the formula are thrown at her.
And by the end of the week Eike is left with a stack of pages full of instructions. At first glance they seem to be another code. SOW, PAOS, PGODC, and FIN and more. But decades of living alongside the Head Librarian of the world's greatest library turns the next hurdle into a complete non-issue. Shadows of War, Practical Applications of Silk, Primer Guide on Dwarven Culture, and Frolicking in Nature. Book names, and ones Eike knows from personal experience are waiting on the shelves above her.
With practiced precision she goes down the list, dancing from 'Studies on Conjured Alcohol' to 'Autopsies of Deep Sea Creatures', a growing pile of books in the center of the room containing a seemingly random assortment of literature that keeps getting added to. From a pile, to stacks, to what can only be called a mountain of paper and ink that Eike begins to refer to as Mt Knowledge.
Eventually the list comes to an end and Eike casts her eyes over the ravaged racks, the shelves looking pillaged and in many places pitifully barren. Each empty space causes a twinge in Eike's heart and she can't help but take a break from the numbing effort of solving her Master's last mystery, dragging her hand across the ranks of shelves.
Book, book, book, empty space, book, empty space, book book, empty space, book, empty space, book, book, book, empty space, book...
Her stomach lurches and her eyes grow strained for just a second. Was something there?
With a growing sense of something that she had long ago learned to trust she presses her thumb into the shelf's edge and runs it along past the book, book, book, and notes how far she's actually walked back.
Forcing herself to maintain her calm, Eike focuses her eyes on the three books section of the wall as she stumbles backward, blindly grasping for the discarded list of books before returning to her place. Marking her place with a solid grip on the edge of the mysterious space she tears through the pages, cursing the lack of foresight in not creating an additional list where the books were organized in any manner other than the seemingly randomized manner revealed by her master's puzzle. But experienced librarian's eyes accurately rips through the list nonetheless, every book from this shelf standing out among the rest, one, two, three...fifty-six books from the section and fourteen from this row in particular.
She turns to the mountain of literature, before quickly deciding to trust her gut over diving into madness trying to find fourteen specific books out of nearly five hundred stacked high. 'Maybe,' she wonders, 'I shouldn't have rushed to get everything off the shelves...' before dismissing the thought. Organizing the books was obviously going to be her next step, she just either got sidetracked or jumped ahead. Whichever it was depended on what happened next.
Drawing on memories of helping Mathilde work on Defensive Memes: Weaponized Clichés for the Purpose of Tricking the Mentally Unwary and How to Circumvent Them, Eike focuses on the feelings of her windsight and and gut feelings, trusting in all of her training, and reaches out towards the three books . And it's only then she feels the subtle magic woven between the shelves, like a clear piece of glass in water, hidden unless you knew exactly what to look for.
The mentally trickery is simple, as it should be, as she probes it out. Too complicated a mental suggestion and it sticks out as odd, too basic and it might not work, or even work too well. She had vague memories of a rotten apple both she and Mathilde had forgotten about in a test chamber for several months until a passing dwarf commented on the rotten fruity smell the two of them had known about but could never truly pinpoint.
Probing the spell requires a great deal of focus, but the numerous techniques and tests Eike was equipped with had solved the mystery of more than one exotic magic. In the case of this enchantment it simply filled in the gaps, so to say. On a full shelf wandering eyes would simply skip over the patch, seeing it as merely more books, and when the shelves were empty it would look empty as well. That was why it was so noticeable now, the magic was caught in the extreme between the two states, half-empty and half-full, making it stand out against close inspection. A cold sweat trails down Eike's neck at the thought. Strained to the degree that it was and it was at worst noticeable to a trained Magister-grade Grey Wizard upon a literal up-close examination.
'Just what are you hiding Master?'
With a series of careful 'tugs' she gains enough 'slack' to take a full look at the 'weave' of the spell and identifies the crucial aspect. With a 'pinch' and a 'pull' she draws the 'slack' 'tight' once more and hesitates...admiring the masterpiece of mental trickery her master had devised, before letting out a sigh. With a 'cut' she severs the borders of the magic and like water it spills out of the space it had been sealed to.
She does not hesitate in approaching the shelf a final time, taking in the hidden books before her:
A Full and Accurate Census of All Varieties of Undead within the Hunter's Hills, 2476, By M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), E.C. Abelhelm Van Hal (Templar) (S·T·T·L), J. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)
The Neglected Front: Economic Warfare against the Vampiric Bloodlines, by E.C. Roswita Van Hal (Templar), E.C. Abelhelm Van Hal (Templar) (S·T·T·L), M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), Chaplain Kasmir Heinz (Stirland), Steward Rodebrecht Brennen (Stirland)
The Premier Primer on Dhar and Those that Use It, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)
Her own sharp breath in disbelief draws Eike from her stunned discovery. Mathilde's most controversial book had only eight copies that she had known about, one each for the colleges in Altdorf, plus possibly one in the possession of the Ice Witches of Kislev and even less likely one shipped off to the White Tower on Ulthuan itself. It shouldn't have been a surprise to see her master had kept a version of it for herself, but it still was.
Which was why it was baffling why one of the rarest books in the world would be in the same spot as two of the most mundane papers she could think of.
With trepidation Eike pulls the books off the shelf one by one, left to right. She opens them up and skims them cover to cover but finds nothing that stands out in them. If the cypher continues through the mountain of books behind her into these three she's in for months of difficult work, so she holds out for a hope she's simply missing something, and so it's only barely by chance that as she tucks the three books under her arms that she looks straight-on at the mysterious shelf space and notices the slight discoloration of the natural rock wall. A minute detail only picked out by her years living in Karak-8-Peaks alongside the Dwarves.
Drawing her closer in curiosity the discoloration seems to glow...because it was! As her finger probes the mark, tracing it, the slightest of light reflecting off of the digit grows brighter, though it fades as her hand flinches back. Then a second time with more confidence and the glow returns. She finally stands back from her spot, amazed and shocked at the same time. A dwarven rune.
With sudden clarity Eike scrambles to every spot she had pulled books from and notes how each shelf section also have runes carved onto the walls as well. Grabbing a set of parchment she gets to work copying the runes down, listing them in the order they would have been revealed going down the decrypted list of books, searching out a pattern.
Just how much work had her master put into this challenge? Surely she couldn't be far off from finishing it? There's dozens of phrases that could be used, Branulhune or Unseen but not Unfelt, it could be something personal and private to Mathilde for security or something so mundane and generic it could be anything else.
Eike stands on the precipice of the latest obstacle for what feels like days, hands massaging tired eyes, her mind analyzing and working over every idea and thought. Had she by coincidence managed to skip ahead of her master's laid out challenge and now found herself needing knowledge hidden along the path she skipped? Or was there some other riddle at play? Did she risk wasting months doublechecking everything so far, or risk wasting an unknowable amount of time searching for a path forward blindly? Would there be a punishment for failing this section of the puzzle, whatever secret destroyed rather than be risked?
Thoughts war in her mind, every memory of Mathilde playing through like a hundred theater plays running at the same time, searching for some clue. From her earliest meetings with her before discovering magic to the years of her apprenticeship to the life they made in Karak-8-Peaks. And inevitably, their final moments play out, as she stares at the dragonchair. The desire to just collapse into it pulls her close enough brush her hands across bone and silk cushions.
"The key doesn't matter, as long as you know the password."
It's not a burst of energy that revitalizes her, but it's enough to get her moving again. Translating Eltharin into Dwarven Runes isn't easy, but by this point she had faced far harder challenges in this final test so it's almost a trivial issue, more a matter of time before she makes her way to each sequential rune and pressing it in the correct order. Senthoi, the elven word for unity, loyalty, and broken promise.
The final rune is pressed, but nothing happens until, with a fatigued sigh, Eike returns to the mysterious shelf space and presses the rune there as well.
In an unceremonious motion the rock wall behind the last rune swings open like it's on a hinge and she nearly cries as she realizes how literal "within the walls of the room" her master's last words were.
But all fatigue and frustration flee with a fearful rush of adrenaline as she recognizes the book Mathilde had built this entire test around. Plain, battered leather, unadorned by filigree or illustrations, it nonetheless possesses a pull to it that churns in Eike's gut. With hesitant hands she draws it into the fading light of dusk and candles, marveling and terrified at how stable the magic contained is. She opens the cover to the title page and finds what she already knew.
The Liber Mortis. The original Liber Mortis. Written in the hand of the man that saved and doomed Sylvania, Baron Frederick Van Hal.
In a decisive movement she slams the book shut, the echoing noise ringing out defining the moment, and throws it back into the safe.
"Oh Master! What have you done?! You'll know what to do? With that?" Does she? Is she supposed to keep it safe, like Mathilde herself did? Or, the dark thought swirls, was she to use it? The lessons taught to her, by Mathilde herself, of Grand Theoginist Kurt III and his use of a mere copy of the book before her to stop the Third Vampire War rise unbidden. "Or...," as the sun sets behind the ring of mountains, the image of Mathilde's body comes to her. No one would think anything of her visiting the catacombs where her adopted mother lay preserved, still awaiting the rites and ceremony for her funeral. Still in near perfect condition...
Eike, stricken and paralyzed by the surge of competing emotions gathers enough of her wits and asks herself, what will she do?
End of the Road Part One (?) End
I had a vision of an omake. One that's been kicking around in my head for a while now. This is not that omake. This is like the second or third idea I had that spawned from the first. I thought this would be a fairly short work, but I kept thinking up more ways to add to the central challenge, and while I am proud of it, it grew wildly from what I envisioned. It didn't help that I lost progress at one point and had to redo a chunk it, making that section twice as long in the process. And just in general I'm not the happiest with the whole thing. But...
I did enjoy going through and rereading a bunch of early bits of the quest, looking for info to flesh this out. There's a bunch of references to things from all over the story, and even some direct parallels to certain events. I also had a blast expanding and extrapolating a potential future for Mathilde and Eike, and even the world a little bit.
I do hope the whole challenge gauntlet of mystery Mathilde set up makes sense, there is a lot more I could have done to show things like, Mathilde purposefully put the hidden section at Eike's eye level, Eike did in fact skip at least one or two steps to actually be pointed in the direction of 'look at all these half-empty shelves', and that by the end Eike was really burning the candle at both ends for awhile trying to solve the puzzle as fast as possible, even though that one was a fairly late idea added because of my own fatigue, but I needed to finish this. I even planned out this whole section that showed Mathilde's body was still being preserved because the Belegor was going to throw this massive funeral for her and invited people from all over the Old World, but just never fit.
In the end though, I am satisfied.
I did enjoy going through and rereading a bunch of early bits of the quest, looking for info to flesh this out. There's a bunch of references to things from all over the story, and even some direct parallels to certain events. I also had a blast expanding and extrapolating a potential future for Mathilde and Eike, and even the world a little bit.
I do hope the whole challenge gauntlet of mystery Mathilde set up makes sense, there is a lot more I could have done to show things like, Mathilde purposefully put the hidden section at Eike's eye level, Eike did in fact skip at least one or two steps to actually be pointed in the direction of 'look at all these half-empty shelves', and that by the end Eike was really burning the candle at both ends for awhile trying to solve the puzzle as fast as possible, even though that one was a fairly late idea added because of my own fatigue, but I needed to finish this. I even planned out this whole section that showed Mathilde's body was still being preserved because the Belegor was going to throw this massive funeral for her and invited people from all over the Old World, but just never fit.
In the end though, I am satisfied.
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