Lucky Rabbit

In spite of Augustus’s words, Pandy knew she wasn’t contributing much, if anything, to this mission. This idea was further supported when they all stepped back out into the hall and saw two more Shadows slumped against the wall. Another pair lay around the corner, and there was definitely more blood than Pandy was comfortable with, though they had been trying to kill her boyfriend, who didn’t seem to be bleeding in turn – she cast a quick heal to be sure – so they probably deserved whatever they got. Still, she didn’t look too closely as they all made their way to the door to Bryan’s office.

“Shadows are usually better trained than this,” Augustus murmured, absently stroking Pandy’s ears as he looked down at one of the bodies. “I’m worried that these are new hires or the dregs, which means their best operatives are elsewhere.”

“Where?” Dorian asked, coming up beside Augustus. He was a little green around the gills, and studiously avoided looking at the crumpled forms around them, but he held the knife Augustus had given him with an easy confidence that reminded Pandy of his in-game avatar.

“An excellent question,” Augustus said, glancing back as Edgar joined them as well. He’d taken a bit longer to gather himself, and now Pandy could see why. A pair of bent wire glasses now perched on the bridge of his nose, presumably retrieved from wherever his assailant had thrown or dropped them. They didn’t exactly seem stable or comfortable, but he looked right with them on.

“What happened to you two?” the chancellor asked, stepping inside the office as soon as he saw that both boys were ready.

Dorian and Edgar exchanged glances, and Edgar grimaced. “When we realized Lian wasn’t in the school library, we went looking for him. We found a note hidden in one of his books, directing us here. I presume you found the same one?”

At Augustus’s nod, the boy continued. “I have a pair of excellent horses for the carriage I take to school. We rode them to my father’s estate about halfway here, then swapped them for fresh mounts.” He paused, and the briefest flicker of embarrassment flickered over his face. “We didn’t even think to be cautious coming in, so they caught us immediately.”

Dorian cleared his throat, and Edgar sighed softly. “Fine. I felt certain that we could handle anything we might face, and speed was more important than discretion. I was wrong.” The taller boy looked satisfied and allowed his friend to continue.

“We’ve only been here twenty minutes or so,” Edgar finished. “We didn’t even get to see Lian, though I believe I heard him when we first arrived.” An indecipherable look passed over Edgar’s face, and Dorian rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“He’s fine, Edgar,” Dorian murmured, and Pandy remembered her suspicions about Edgar’s romantic preferences. Was Edgar worried about something happening to his friend, or something more?

Augustus had made his way across the destroyed office by the time Edgar finished speaking, and now he peered through the remains of the doorway leading to the tower. Someone had very thoroughly torn this room apart, and not only in the ‘looking for something’ way. This had to be deliberate destruction for destruction’s sake, and Pandy was certain both Bryan and Lian had felt it when Daedalus or his minions had torn the pages from every single book on the shelves.

“I need you two to leave the manor,” Augustus said, shifting his grip on Pandy so he could lower her over the worst of the debris. Parts of the wall erected to block the tower away from the manor were still clinging tenaciously together, but most of it had become rubble on the floor. Pandy wondered why Bryan had felt the need to do such a thorough job of disconnecting the two buildings, but even if anyone here would know, she couldn’t ask.

Edgar was having none of it. “I’m not leaving without Lian!”

Again, Dorian laid a hand on his shoulder. “I told you it would be better to notify the Knights. They’ll-”

“Not the Knights,” Augustus said sharply, stepping over a knee-high section of wall. “There’s a troop of soldiers outside, led by Captain Corbin Reedsley. Report directly to him, and tell him what you told me.”

“But we don’t know anything!” Edgar protested, moving to follow Augustus, only to be stayed by Dorian’s heavy hand. He glared at his taller friend as he said, “I’m not leaving without Killian.” And there was all the emotion he never showed to Clara.

“We’re in the way,” Dorian said, and Edgar flinched at the direct hit. “If Chancellor Blackwood and Lady Eurydice hadn’t had to stop for us, they might have found him already.”

Edgar’s expression grew anguished, but he nodded. Turning to Augustus, he said, “If he needs me, I won’t stay away.” This sounded more like a threat than a promise, but Augustus nodded.

“I understand. You know the way?”

Dorian hefted his knife, whose edge glittered with glass-sharp ice crystals, the precursor to his Glacial Gladius. “I do,” he said, and Edgar nodded. The boys turned and headed back toward the hall, though Edgar lingered, staring back toward the opening in the wall. Augustus ignored them both, heading up the winding steps of the staircase, with Pandy hot on his heels.

“I tried the tower door,” Augustus muttered quietly as they climbed. It wasn’t a rapid ascent. Augustus tried each step carefully, and avoided touching the walls or handrail. “It was locked in a way I’ve never seen before. I could feel the cold radiating off of it without even touching it. Captain Reedsley has been running regular patrols out this way, and would have reported anything like that, so it must be new.”

He glanced back at the broken wall and demolished office, frowning. “That looks like the result of frustration, so I assume Bryan or Lian refused to do or give their captors… something. That’s a bit concerning, especially since these people have Aetherbane shackles, and Bryan is supposed to be magicless. That means he and Lian have no magical means of fighting or healing themselves.”

Once again, Pandy thought of that shadowy thing that had been clinging to Bryan when she last saw him. At first, it hadn’t seemed important because Bryan wanted nothing more than to be with his sons. He wouldn’t do anything to risk that, which meant he wasn’t going to hurt Augustus or any of the students at Falconet. Frankly, in spite of his admitted necromantic past, he didn’t seem like the type to intentionally hurt anyone.

When she and Augustus had been summoned to the palace, she was worried about being overheard by someone who might hurt Bryan in an effort to remove the thing, and then, well, she forgot about it. But the fact was that even if Bryan himself had no magic, that wasn’t true of his elemental companion, if that was what it was.

Pausing, Pandy stood on her hind legs and held up her front paws in a classic ‘pick me up’ pose. For an instant, as Augustus looked back at her, she would have sworn his eyes got all huge and twinkly, just like an anime character presented with something irresistibly adorable, but then he pulled himself together and shook his head.

“We need to keep going,” he said softly. “There’s no way they haven’t noticed the loss of everyone they left in the main part of the house, and the simple fact that no one has come to do anything about it makes me very nervous.”

She waved her paws insistently, and he gave in, picking her up and placing her on his shoulder so he could continue upwards with his knife ready in his hand instead of a rabbit. Leaning hard against his neck – purely because that might help him hear better in his brain or something – she thought, <Bryan has an elemental. Maybe a Tenebron? I didn’t recognize it.>

Augustus froze mid-step. “A Tenebron? Did it laugh?” Pandy remembered the rather creepy giggle she’d heard the first time she glimpsed the thing and nodded. Augustus completed his step. “No Tenebron locked that door. They’re decent spies so long as you give them simple enough instructions, but too weak and unintelligent to do much else. They’re the most common elemental to come to a young Dark mage during their awakening because of their curious nature.”

Pandy thought about that. The only other time she’d possibly encountered a Tenebron was early on in her time as a teacher. She’d seen something in a tree, but when Isidor tried to find it, it was gone. Gacha Love didn’t have much to say about Tenebron either, and while they were mentioned in the Dark magic primer she’d found in the abandoned school library, that book hadn’t exactly been detail-heavy.

She’d only guessed at what it was, because she was fairly certain she knew what it wasn’t. Was Bryan’s disturbing passenger a Tenebron, or something else? Did he even know it was there? And a more immediate concern, how many stairs could there possibly be in a single three-story tower, especially when they’d started on the second floor?

Pandy’s eye caught on the chipped corner of a stone block just a little above Augustus’s head. He was still proceeding with caution, though she thought he, too, had realized something was wrong. Twenty steps later, she caught sight of a stone with the exact same chip in the exact same spot, and leaned into Augustus’s neck again. Before she could think a word, however, he said, “I know.”

Pausing, he looked behind them. “There are approximately twenty to twenty-five steps in a full circuit of a tower like this.” He gave her a Mildly Twinkling Glance. “Don’t ask how I know. We’ve gone sixty-seven steps, which should have brought us to the top of the tower, even if we’d started at ground level. Obviously the locked front door is not the only magic at play here.”

No, and that magic is mine.

Or was.

Pandy almost fell from her perch as the letters floated in front of her. They were oddly translucent, not Keros’s usual emphatic font. <What?> She was still touching Augustus, and she must not have her various bandwidths separated yet, because she saw him frown questioningly and held up a paw to stop the question she could see forming on his lips.

Something is draining me.

Almost as much as when you used the gacha button.

I think we’ve stumbled onto whatever my magic has been doing, and it doesn’t want us to interfere.

Leaning away from Augustus, Pandy focused on Keros and thought, <Isn’t your magic supposed to be stupid? Or at least not…not sentient, or whatever it is. But you talk about it like it’s aware of us and intentionally trying to keep us out of the way.>

…

Magic is… more complicated than most people believe.

And yet very, very simple.

There are three kinds of magic.

But also only one.

<That makes no sense at all, Kappa, and it doesn’t explain how your magic can be trying to get in our way.> Pandy definitely sounded testy, but she couldn’t help it. They were stuck in a tower with no end, and the god in her head was being obtuse. Or obscure. Ob-something.

Magic is spells, guided by carefully chosen words.

Magic is elemental, limited by affinity.

Magic is innate, and intention can create worlds.

Pandy nodded. That went along with what she’d learned since arriving in this world. The common people, most of whom had weak magic, used worded spells like the one Isidor taught Thaniel. All the spell did was summon a small, weak light, but it was the only non-Dark magic Pandy had ever seen Thaniel successfully use.

The nobles formed contracts with elementals, which allowed them to use magic with – or possibly through – their contracted companions. This magic only seemed capable of working along elemental lines, however, unlike the worded spells, which could allow someone to do magic that wasn’t ‘their’ specific type. This made the nobility far more powerful than those without contracted elementals – which meant most of the population, since the noble families jealously guarded the knowledge of how to form contracts – but also caused the problem West Altheric was currently facing. Nobles could only form contracts with ‘their’ elementals, and if they didn’t have the right affinity for what they needed to do, everything started to fall apart.

Then, of course, there was Pandy and her spell, Innate Magic. People in West Altheric threw around the term, ‘innate magic’ – lowercase – as a synonym for an elemental affinity, but for Pandy it was something much more specific. She hadn’t even questioned it. It was just another way the System made her life here more like playing Gacha Love.

Magic grows, Pandora.

The letters were a little woobly now, and Pandy could see the stones of the wall through them.

It exists.

Everywhere.

Some beings can catch at the edges of it.

Sometimes it gathers on its own.

Humans and elementals and gods.

We are not so different.

We are all magic.

Until we are not.

<Kappa?> Pandy asked, leaning closer to the fading letters and very nearly falling through them in the process. <What happens if the magic grows too much? Where does it go?>

Magic

Does not

Die

The last word hung there, lasting far longer than the ones before. <Kappa? Kappa!> Pandy screamed into the silence of her mind. <System, Status!>

Name: Pandy

Race: Rabbit? (Deceased)

Age: 25

LF: 14/14

Mana: 947/956

Stats▾

Skills▾

Spells▾

Boons▾

Corruption Points: 514

Where was her Mark of Keros? Where was Keros?

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