Chapter 154: The One Who Stole the Young People's Shadows

After a twenty-minute walk from the inn, the mill came into view.

Plants covered a third of the building's exterior walls. Dead vines still clung to the stone, their leaves long gone.

"The front door isn't where we'll be working today."

Mrs. MacNeil explained as she bypassed the main entrance.

"Today, we're going around to the southeast corner of the outer wall to start applying the strips."

"Why the southeast corner?"

"Because the southeast corner is closest to the cellar entrance. That side of the cellar is where the manifest layer and the hidden section are pressed most tightly together.

Laying the strips outward from the tightest spot is the most efficient method."

Richard silently committed this principle to memory. It was another small piece of knowledge he wouldn't have found in a book.

A crack ran along the southeast corner of the outer wall, wide enough at its thickest point to fit a finger inside.

Mrs. MacNeil stopped in front of it.

"This is a new crack." She reached out and touched it, her fingertips turning red from the cold. "It just split this autumn."

"How can you tell it's new?" Theodore leaned in.

"There are no plants, moss, or cobwebs inside," Mrs. MacNeil said, pointing. "An old crack would at least have a spider web."

"...Makes sense."

"Before applying the silver strips, we do a step called 'clearing the crack.'"

She took a few items from her satchel: a small wooden plane, a Cloth Bag filled with coarse salt, a small glass bottle of rice wine, and a bundle of dried rosemary tied with a red string.

"The principle of clearing the crack is to remove everything that 'shouldn't be there.'"

Mrs. MacNeil demonstrated as she explained.

"Animal carcasses, moss, plant roots, dust, and gravel.

These things don't carry ether themselves, but if we apply the silver strips over them, they'll be sealed inside.

Once they're sealed in, those bits of garbage will eat up the silver strip's efficiency."

"Understood." Richard took the small wooden plane.

"Give it a try."

He crouched and pressed the plane against the edge of the crack, scraping inward.

The blade slid into the crevice, digging out a few flakes of dust, half a dried cobweb, and the curled-up carcass of a small beetle.

Every time he scraped something out, Theodore used a cloth brush to sweep the debris into a tin box.

"Keep the box safe," Mrs. MacNeil supervised from the side. "We'll take everything we clear out back to the village later and burn it."

"Why burn it?"

"Because they've been sitting inside that crack."

Mr. Hutton had taught a similar principle, and Richard put the pieces together. "Things that have been steeped in the edge of a seal can't just be tossed into the dirt."

"Correct." Mrs. MacNeil raised an eyebrow. "You've improved quickly over these past two days."

After scraping for a while, the blade suddenly snagged on something.

Richard paused and leaned in to inspect the crack.

"Ma'am." He looked up. "There seems to be something wedged at the bottom of the crack."

Mrs. MacNeil walked over and crouched down.

Squinting, she took a thin hook from her satchel, slipped it into the crevice, and tugged.

The hook pulled out a small, hard black fragment.

"...Old sealing wax." Mrs. MacNeil pinched the piece between her fingertips, examining it. "Made by the early Church."

"The early Church?" Theodore leaned in beside them. "The Church set up a seal here before?"

Mrs. MacNeil nodded.

"For the seal here at Whitcom Mill—the one beneath our feet right now—there are at least three layers."

"Three layers?" Richard stopped what he was doing.

"The bottom layer is the oldest." Mrs. MacNeil gestured with her hand.

"It's a Boundary Stone Array erected by local druids in the pre-Roman era, carved with a True Name Stone, pinning down 'She Who Eats Shadows' right here."

"The middle layer was laid down by the Medieval Church."

She studied the old wax again. "The exact era depends on the wax's composition, but it can generally be traced back to sometime after the Norman Conquest."

"The Church handled a pagan seal?" Theodore couldn't quite understand.

"They did." Mrs. MacNeil's tone turned slightly sardonic.

"The pre-Roman druids were all slaughtered by the Romans, leaving the seal unattended.

The thing stewed down there, causing trouble for hundreds of years, until the local lord couldn't take it anymore and asked the Church to intervene."

"The Church stacked a layer of their own right over the pagan seal, and they did it quite crudely."

"Crude how?" Richard asked.

"They poured a fresh layer of wax over the original seal and recited a new chant over the thing inside."

"They chanted a new name the Church had given 'She Who Eats Shadows'—they called her the 'Female Demon of the Underground.'"

"...They just changed her name?" Theodore was dumbfounded.

"The Church at the time believed all pagan deities were demons."

Mrs. MacNeil continued her explanation.

"And since they were all demons, there was no need to distinguish exactly which one was which.

They treated them all uniformly as 'demons' and suppressed them using the exact same set of 'Saint's Protection' rituals."

"That is why I said it was crude."

"Wouldn't that... cause problems?"

"Of course it caused problems, massive ones at that."

Mrs. MacNeil wrapped the chunk of old wax in oil paper.

"The seal's efficiency was halved from the very start, all because the name was wrong."

"But the people of the Church back then didn't care about what would happen in the future. All they cared about was keeping it pinned down for the time being so they could report the job done."

"As for whether the seal was stable, that was a problem for future generations."

"..." Theodore swallowed hard, suddenly feeling that Henry VIII's Great Dissolution had happened for a reason.

"What about the third layer?" Richard asked.

Mrs. MacNeil stood up.

"We won't see the third layer until we reach the middle phase of our work. That layer is from a few decades ago."

She patted Richard's shoulder. "Let's finish sealing this crack first."

"Right."

Richard crouched back down and guided the small wooden plane into the crevice.

The clearing process lasted about forty minutes.

Even with gloves on, his hands were numb with cold.

Once the crack was clear, Mrs. MacNeil grabbed a small handful from the Cloth Bag of coarse salt and sprinkled a line along the gap.

"The salt's purpose is to 'reset' the area."

"It neutralizes any lingering ether on the surface of the crack. Local coarse salt is enough for the job."

"Why not use sea salt?" Theodore thought for a moment before asking. "Isn't sea salt purer?"

"Purity isn't what we need for this step," Mrs. MacNeil said.

"Sea salt carries the 'scent' of seawater. This place is the highlands, hundreds of miles from the sea. The seal rejects seawater.

This local coarse salt was mined from a salt mine. Land seals require land salt."

"So there are rules like that too." Theodore looked thoughtful, beginning to understand.

"Are there no such rules at your mine?" Mrs. MacNeil asked casually.

"At the mine, the rule is 'well water cannot breach the wellhead.'"

"What kind of rule is that?"

"Water drawn from the bottom of the well can't be poured directly into your mouth from the bucket at the wellhead."

Theodore explained, "It has to be scooped into an earthen bowl first."

"Why?"

"...I don't know. That's just how my dad taught me."

After scattering the salt, Mrs. MacNeil uncapped the small bottle of rice wine and shook a few drops into the crack.

"The rice wine is the 'primer' for the next step."

"The salt resets, and the wine activates. That way, when we apply the silver strip, it will properly bite into the crack."

Lastly, she took the dried rosemary and swept the bundle back and forth over the crack three times.

"The scent of the rosemary is a 'marker.'"

"Once this section is finished, this spot in the seal field is marked as a 'new seal.'

When other practitioners patrol here next time, they'll smell this scent and know that this section was newly done this year, ensuring they won't re-seal it."

"So it's a marker left for colleagues." Richard understood.

"Our profession strongly forbids overlapping work." Mrs. MacNeil tied the rosemary back onto her satchel.

"If a section of a seal is done twice, the second layer will clash with the first.

The result is that neither layer works. That is exactly why this seal constantly requires people to come fix it."

Clearing the crack, scattering the salt, priming with wine, and sweeping the scent. Only after these four preparatory steps were complete did it come time for the silver strip.

Mrs. MacNeil pulled a length of silver strip from a metal cylinder.

Once she unrolled it, Richard noticed inscriptions etched into the silver.

"Are these... Ancient Gaelic 'chain' inscriptions?" He leaned in for a closer look.

"Chain inscriptions," Mrs. MacNeil confirmed. "They've been around since the pre-Roman era. Each segment of the silver strip is a chain link, and the links must lock into each other to form a 'closed lock.'"

A very soft, brief click sounded between the silver strip and the wall.

"It's done," Mrs. MacNeil nodded.

"...I felt it." Richard breathed a sigh of relief.

"Felt what?"

"When the silver strip merged with the wall, the wall's side 'let out a sigh' as well."

Mrs. MacNeil paused her work.

"You could feel the wall sigh?"

"...It wasn't very obvious." Richard hastily tried to downplay it. "It might just have been my imagination."

"It wasn't your imagination," Mrs. MacNeil said, shaking her head. "Anyone who can feel the wall sigh has Inspiration a cut above an ordinary Newcomer."

She glanced at the boy from the horse farm.

"Did you feel anything like that when you applied it?"

"...No," Theodore answered honestly. "I just felt like I was pasting a piece of paper."

Applying the silver strips to the outer wall took up the entire morning.

After lunch, Mrs. MacNeil led them around to a small door on the mill's north wall.

The door opened into the mill's cellar, its entrance hidden behind a sunken flight of stone steps.

Mr. Hutton, Edmund, and Maggie were waiting at the cellar entrance.

The doorway was extremely low; Richard had to duck his head to get inside.

A stone sarcophagus rested in the center of the cellar.

A mural covered the stone wall beside the sarcophagus.

Most of the mural had faded, leaving only a few blurry humanoid figures visible.

A curved line arched above the figures' heads; Richard could tell it was meant to be a bridge.

Mr. Hutton used a fine bristle brush to gently sweep away the loose dirt on the mural's surface.

The lower half of the mural was revealed, displaying a line of Latin inscription.

The text was heavily worn, but the outlines of the letters were still legible.

"In nomine Sancti Cuthberti... (In the name of Saint Cuthbert...)"

"Saint Cuthbert?" Maggie tilted her head. "He shouldn't be a saint from this region, right?"

"A saint of Northumberland," Edmund explained. "A figure from the seventh century."

"Why would his name be on this wall?"

Mr. Hutton spoke up then.

"The Medieval Church had a standard procedure for dealing with pagan seals."

"They would find a national saint and transfer his name and protective duties onto the original seal."

"It was equivalent to having the saint take over the job of sealing."

"Would the saint actually come?" Maggie asked, finding it hard to believe.

"Of course the saint wouldn't come," Edmund shook his head. "But through ritualized transfer, the Church could make the ether layer recognize the name."

Mr. Hutton pulled a notebook from his pocket and flipped it open.

"Therefore, our job is to figure out the true name of the sealed entity, or at least establish a substitute name."

Over a dozen short phrases were copied into the notebook, each extracted from the mural or its inscriptions.

"Taker of Men Beneath the Bridge"

"Walker in the Shadows"

"She Who Cannot Be Approached by Salt"

"She Who Does Not Emerge Before Dusk"

"And this line..." Mrs. MacNeil used ether to telekinetically peel away a flake of pigment, revealing a phrase underneath.

Mr. Hutton leaned in closer.

"...Ancient Gaelic, Sí a ghoideann scáth na n-óg."

"The One Who Stole the Young People's Shadows," Maggie translated.

"The preparatory work is complete. Tomorrow, we begin evacuating the villagers."

Mrs. MacNeil began arranging the final tasks:

"Tomorrow, we'll go door to door and ask them to stay in the village center for the night."

"Will they listen?" Theodore asked.

"They will. Over the generations, the people around here have grown used to our rules."

The evacuation proceeded very smoothly indeed.

The first household was a shepherd living half a mile southeast of the mill, the same old shepherd Richard had met on the hilltop on his first morning.

The old man sat by his hearth while Mrs. MacNeil spoke a few words to him in Gaelic.

The old man listened and nodded. He fetched a wool sack from his home, packed a pot, matches, and a few strips of dried meat, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and left. He didn't ask a single question the entire time.

When he reached the door, the old man looked back at Richard.

Using his free right hand, he touched his own chest, then traced a diagonal line toward Richard's chest.

Richard thought for a moment, then mimicked the gesture.

The old man smiled.

The second household, the third household... Everyone was completely evacuated in less than half a day.

After the evacuation, Mrs. MacNeil took the four Newcomers back to the inn.

The fireplace in the inn's lobby was blazing brightly. She took a small Cloth Bag from her leather case.

Inside the Cloth Bag was an ancient deck of Tarot Cards.

"Tonight," Mrs. MacNeil said, setting the Cloth Bag on the table, "I will perform a proper pre-crossing divination for you all."

"How is a proper divination different from what we learned before?" Theodore asked.

"What you learned before was reading stones or reading wax."

Mrs. MacNeil tapped the wax strips and bag of Runestones that were also in her toolkit:

"Those are only suited for asking small things, like 'Will it rain tomorrow?' or 'Should I buy this?' They can provide a sense of direction."

"And Tarot Cards?"

"Tarot Cards are for asking about the contours of major events."

She untied the strings of the Cloth Bag.

"Specifically, before the next large-scale ritual, the advantage of Tarot Cards is that they can unfold all the potential 'nodes' that might appear during the ritual process."

"A complete crossing of the veil will pass through several critical nodes.

Every node is a point where things can go wrong. It's always better to know the rough outline in advance so you know how to react, rather than being caught blind when a problem arises."

The Cloth Bag was opened.

Seventy-eight cards spilled out and were spread across the table.

The card faces featured hand-drawn block print designs, their colors faded with age.

"This deck was passed down to me by my teacher. Once she advanced to Major Adept, she no longer needed external tools for divination."

Mrs. MacNeil didn't even need to look at the patterns on the faces; she knew which card she held just by the feel of it:

"By the time she passed it to me, she had used it for twenty years. I've used it for another eighteen."

"...Thirty-eight years in total," Edmund said softly.

"Thirty-eight years. Every single card has been flipped thousands of times."

She gathered the cards into a stack.

"With tools like Tarot Cards, the older they are, the more accurate they become.

The ether trace of every flip is etched into the cards themselves. The deeper those traces are carved, the more accurate the resonance between the cards and myself."

"Can't others use them?"

"Others can't flip what I can."

Mrs. MacNeil wore an enigmatic expression. "This is the 'union of person and tool' for the Secret path. An old master's tools can never be lent out."

The medium pressed her left hand over the deck and began to shuffle.

Her hand didn't move, yet the deck itself automatically fanned out in four directions before the cards slid back into the stack one by one.

This was a 'shuffle' on the ether layer.

Activating his Spirit Vision, Richard could see that each card was enveloped in a wisp of gray mist, and those mists wove together into a web across the table.