Ch. 448 - Wandering in the Dark

Simon rarely had trouble sleeping, at least when he was indoors, and there was no risk that a goblin might sneak up on him. Still, no matter how comfortable the bed he found himself in, lying in it with someone else was strange enough to keep him awake for an hour. It was even stranger when, later that night, Millie rolled over in her sleep and started cuddling him.

It was innocent enough. She’d put her weapon on the bedside table, and they were both clothed, so he saw no need to push her away. She obviously needed to be comforted, but he just didn’t feel right embracing a complete stranger.

Still, he ignored the smell of her hair and focused on the carvings downstairs, and eventually, slumber took him. In the morning, he woke to find himself alone in bed, with no evidence that he’d been attacked or robbed.

He went downstairs, munching on a half-stale loaf of bread, and found the girl cleaning the kitchen of all things. “I don’t think that’s part of your job description anymore,” he told her.

“As long as I stay here, I need to keep it clean,” she repeated, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “We’ll get rats otherwise. The others left a frightful mess, and when a new lord arrives, well, they wouldn’t want to keep me if that was the case, now would they?”

“So that’s your plan?” Simon asked, still confused. “To stay until a better master shows up and earn your keep?”

At that, she nodded enthusiastically, and when he asked her what she would do if the next one was no better, she smiled for the first time and said, “As long as they’re human, I promise you, it will be better.”

They chatted for a few minutes longer, and Simon tried to pry out her reasons for staying as opposed to leaving, but she changed the topic enough that eventually he felt rude for trying. So, he made his excuses and went down into the basement to renew his research.

Nothing had changed there, but before he started on the hallway he’d been working on last time, he made a thorough audit of every room he could find in that vast, sprawling basement. He looked in every storeroom, main room, and dead-ended hall, looking for altars, summoning circles, or anything else that was so significant that it deserved to be the focus of his attention. As he did so, he also looked for the portal to the next level, which he still hadn’t found, but he was disappointed on both fronts.

He even swept the floors in several likely places looking for magic runes hidden beneath the dirt floor that might indicate what had happened here, but he was out of luck. There was no portal, and there was no altar of accidental vampire creation. What there was were endless rants, poems, screeds, and research notes.

Why did the madman write across the walls instead of in a tome or grimoire like a normal warlock? Whoever they were, Simon didn’t know, but it would have made his life a lot easier.

Very little of what he found was even about magic. In fact, there was only enough scratched into the stones here and there like a trail of breadcrumbs to keep him interested. More often than not, though, even those bits were nonsense.

The most dominant element among the scribblings was about his wife. Sometimes he’d saved her, or regretted saving her. Other times, he hadn’t yet worked out the secret to preserving her life. That was the only element that gave the madness some sort of chronological order.

He found an ode to the word of healing, Hyakk, that began, ‘Words of healing, most archaic, Hyakk is the key to life’s mosaic…’ before trailing off into nonsense. While the rhyme and meter felt tight, there was no art to it.

Hyakk was, unsurprisingly, the word that this warlock returned to the most often. Sometimes he tried to compare the words to each other, using pseudomathematical proofs, like they were variables in a grand equation. He’d only discovered four, to Simon’s nineteen, and yet he declared that there were only twenty-one in total, and that all things were made from these twenty-one shape-sounds, as he called them.

Only two things about that theory really interested Simon. The first was that 21 was only two more than he had, and implied that he’d collected almost all of them, which was interesting to consider. The second point was purely aesthetic.

The reason that the warlock thought there had to be 21 was because they lined up neatly in a pyramid that way. On the top row, there was one, then came two, followed by a row of three, four, five, and six words. That shape put exactly six words on each side, and when they were folded, he contended they became a single, striking symbol that would unlock the truth of everything. The way the warlock's ramblings described it, he imagined it as a malformed Rubik's Cube shaped like a Murani pyramid.

For a moment, he paused as he studied the term Rubik’s Cube, which had been dredged up from deep in his memory. It was a toy he’d once owned with spinning colorful sides, but not something he’d thought of in lifetimes. He couldn’t remember much about it, besides what it looked like, but it was an apt metaphor for what the warlock was discussing.

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His theory was more holistic than any Simon had ever come up with. Really, it was too holistic to be sane, yet still somehow more sensible than the dominant three-element theory that Simon had heard time and again during his lives as a healer.

‘The shape of the word is nothing but the sound of its speaking,’ the anonymous warlock insisted, ‘which makes it quite different, the opposite, even, to normal words which are drawn in shapes that are merely convenient to write.’

Much of it was nonsense, especially the mathematical proofs where he compared the values of Hyakk and Gelthic to determine that life was greater than death, but not by as much as he’d previously assumed.

“How does a nut like this make a vampire?” Simon wondered aloud whenever he came across a particularly crazy line. Only his sympathy for the man’s ill-fated quest to save his wife, and the occasional true word of power, kept Simon going.

He immersed himself in that search completely, looking everywhere for some new piece of information that would justify all of these efforts. In doing so, he lost all track of anything but the walls and the melting candles that allowed him to read them.

So, he practically jumped out of his skin when Millie suddenly appeared by his side and studied the wall beside him. She was so pale that for a moment, he’d mistaken her for a ghost because of the way the light of her bright lantern reflected off her pale skin.

“Will you be finishing soon?” she asked nervously as Simon noted with only a little envy that the oil lamp she was using was much brighter than the candles he’d been using all day.

“Eventually,” he said with a sigh. “There’s so much to translate, but if you’re tired, you can go to bed without me. I’ll find somewhere else to sleep tonight so I don’t disturb you.”

“Oh, it’s not time for bed,” she answered with a shake of her head. “It’s dinner time, and I thought you might like to join me.”

His stomach growled at that. He’d completely lost track of time and hadn’t eaten all day. He almost said he wouldn’t want to impose, but at the last moment, his hunger flared stronger than his manners, and he said, “That would be delightful. What are we having?”

“The soup is almost done,” she declared. “You can join me in the kitchen whenever you’re finished here.”

Simon promised that he would, and quickly packed things up, unsure if he’d made enough progress for the day to keep digging. “Is there even anything here to find?” he wondered aloud as he followed her up the stairs, only a few minutes behind Millie.

In the kitchen, he found her ladling a thin vegetable broth into wooden bowls. She asked how his day was, but rather than burden her with his arcane ramblings, he focused on the soup.

“I didn’t even know we had this much food left in the castle,” he said with a smile. “What a feast.”

She blushed uncomfortably beneath his compliments, explaining their bounty away as the last of the usable scraps, then the two of them carried their meal into a nearby room that turned out to be the servants’ dining room.

Simon found it interesting that she’d chosen to dine in the cramped servants' quarters with him instead of the main dining room, or even the parlor, but he didn’t say anything about it. Force of habit, he assumed, as she busied herself serving him instead of just sitting down so they could eat.

Despite the fact that she said the soup was made out of scraps, it actually smelled quite good, and he shared what little bread he still had with her. Together, his stale bread and her thin soup actually made for a nice pairing, and in that quiet room, they had as lovely a dinner as one could ask for in a creepy abandoned castle.

It was there that she told him why she didn’t want to go home, and about the lottery that had sealed her fate, placing her in the service of the castle’s former master. It wasn't even something he tried to draw out of her this time. He was just complimenting her meal, and how much she’d done with so little, when it was like a dam broke inside of her, and it all started coming out.

“Twice a year, before the planting and after the harvest, we draw stones from a kettle, and if you draw the black one you…” Her words faded. “Why did I have to choose the black one?”

Simon tried to comfort her, but from across the table, he could do little. The most he could do was sympathize and tell her how awful that was.

While that felt right, that sent a storm of emotions across her aura that reduced her to tears. “Maybe it would have been less so if Sophana or Freddi were still alive when I arrived,” she sobbed. “I-I knew that we’d have to serve the monsters that lived here, but I didn’t think they’d eat us…”

She broke down in tears then, and Simon had to get up and walk around to the other side of the table and give her a shoulder to cry on. He tried to explain that it was over now, but she kept bawling and talking about how common the practice was. Apparently, the tithe was the only way to keep the monsters away, but they still ignored it half the time, and people still disappeared.

“Especially from small, isolated homes in the country,” she told him. “Whole stretches where there’s just nothing but fallow fields and empty pens for miles in any direction.”

Well, that certainly explains why Helades dropped me off where she did, Simon reflected. But it doesn’t explain why one family should be more important than any other.

By the time Millie calmed down and they finished their meal, the soup was cold. She apologized for that, but Simon didn’t mind. “I’m just glad we have something to soften the bread,” he said with a smile, trying to give her some small piece of normalcy.

That night, they went to bed together again, but Simon still didn’t let his guard down and locked the room down tight as best he could. That included moving the heavy wardrobe in front of the window. They might be four stories above the ground, but some part of him feared that a flying visitor would appear in their sleep.