Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 899
🕑 Added 2025-06-03 00:08:18 +0000 UTCCallie and I struck out on our own this time. I was going to need to do some serious sleuthing, and that meant lots of downtime. If Bethy came along we could have used her Domain to store the others, but despite being much more savvy than she usually let on, Bethy was not a patient or quiet person. She wasn’t really suited for a long term stakeout like this, and honestly aside from Callie none of the others would be a huge benefit.
My wife, on the other hand, was going to be KEY to this endeavor. Mostly because she was going to help me expand the reach of Dantalion through the shadows.
It was something I hadn’t considered before, not on this scale, but once the idea popped into my head I couldn’t shake it loose. One of the major benefits of Callie’s ability was the boost to Perception. Not in quality, but quantity. Her ability to see and perceive through shadows boosted the range of her senses exponentially, and Dantalion was basically built off magical senses.
Which was how we found ourselves posted up on a rooftop staring at a massive tower of dark stone perched RIGHT on the edge of the cone shaped cliff that the city was situated on. Or rather, it was situated PAST the edge, because the rock between the island of stone it was on and the main cliffside had been sheared away and replaced with a very sturdy looking bridge that may or may not be holding the whole tower up.
“So…that doesn’t seem stable,” I observed with interest. “Like, even if that bridge is SUPER sturdy. Unless there’s like…a core of whatever that material is inside the island?”
“You’re assuming that thing isn’t just floating,” she pointed out. “It’s not like it would be the first floating island we’ve seen. Or the tenth. But I’m less worried about the bridge and more worried about the brief flashes of light in the air around it. Those seem…unfriendly.”
I nodded slowly. “They do.” I held out my hand. “Give me a boost?”
She beamed at me, grabbing my hand with one of her own while she placed the other against the shadows on the corner of the rooftop. I triggered Dantalion as I felt my senses falling through the bond and into hers, emerging from inside the darkness and into…infinity. Or what felt like it.
I staggered, and only her hand on mine kept me upright. Gritting my teeth, I triggered Piece of Mind, not just once or twice, but a full SIX times. My ability to withstand it had been boosted a lot by the condensation of my Chronicle. But beyond the soul weight, the sheer influx of information was staggering. Callie, still holding my hand, reached through the bond and triggered another two instances of Piece of Mind herself, and only once we reached eight parallels and ten consciousnesses total between us was I able to slowly start to digest the overflow.
It was a lot. Dantalion worked by slowly grinding away at potential information, starting at the surface and slowly deepening its scan as I spent more time. Due to this quirk of operation, Dantalion worked best with lots of surface area. Or at least, it worked most COMPLETELY with lots of surface area. I could get a more detailed read if I focused on a smaller area, but I ended up with WAY too much incredibly pointless information. People claimed knowledge was power, and that was true in some measure, but there WAS such a thing as too much information. Focusing Dantalion too hard gave me a lot of extremely niche info without much context to understand it with, and I’d long since realized that an expanded view, while slower and taking much longer, made for a much better comprehensive grasp on the situation.
First thing I did was close my eyes and try to block out my NORMAL senses. Dantalion actually used my Eye of Revelation as one of its bases, so normally sight was useful when scanning, but since me Perception was all coming through the shadows, my actual eyeballs were mostly just wasting bandwidth in my brain.
Once that was done, I retreated to my library. Pride was busier than usual, because in order to best manage this new type of input, I’d manifested all of my parallels inside, and they were all currently filling out books worth of information at top speed, which really helped me process everything. Callie and her two parallels were also inside, but to my surprise, they weren’t manifesting books to fill out, but rather using her shadow manipulation to create a three dimensional rendering of the tower based on the information pulled from the other sources.
I strode up to the table, leaning over to examine the model, and I was absolutely floored by the amount of detail. Not just in the building itself, but in the surrounding area and energy flows. Dantalion was extending its range THROUGH the shadows, which meant we were getting the radius of that effect, not just the shady areas themselves.
Still, I could feel that it wasn’t something I could push much further, or something I could keep up for long. Luckily, I had an alternative to just sitting around here and waiting to figure something out.
With a brief effort of will, I triggered the Wisdom of Solomon. My Ten Demons Tree was a reincarnation tree in its original form, and it had bloomed spiritually inside my soul. Since then, I’d been able to use the tree’s ability to create alternate lives and timelines combined with the library to simulate possible outcomes and process data.
The tree flashed brightly from its spot above the tome, and my Chronicle actually groaned at the combined weight. Not enough to be dangerous, but it showed how truly staggering the effort I was putting into this was in terms of soul weight. If I hadn’t already had my tome, this operation likely would have instantly shattered my soul like cheap glass.
It took about twenty minutes for the simulations to finish, and I was starting to get a serious headache from the process, so as soon as it was done, I dismissed the parallels and disconnected from the shadows. Dantalion was dropped, and I returned to my normal state of consciousness as I fell over within an audible groan, holding my head in my hands. Callie caught me, propping my head up on her lap, and started rubbing my temples slowly, waiting for my brain to catch up with the WAY too much I had just tried to do with it.
“Ow,” I rasped as quietly as I could manage. “That was…deeply unpleasant.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, I got a bit of the pain. We knew it was risky. With your Chronicle you weren’t in any danger of real damage, but it seems like that was a little beyond your current powers. I THINK I might have contributed a bit though. My Path skill isn’t the same as it used to be. Like I told you, I pick up information about the Void now. I think broadcasting Dantalion through it put you in a spectrum of data you don’t normally access. I could feel details about the Void structure of this place through the information I was sifting from the bond.”
“Ow,” I agreed verbosely. She giggled lightly, which made me cringe because it was loud and kind of high pitched, but then went silent, allowing my head to recover. It didn’t take too long given my Vitality, and I eventually sat up with a groan. “Ok, yes. Too much. We’re lucky we decided to test it on such a relatively small area. Nothing around here except the tower, and one building wasn’t too much to handle.”
She laughed at that. “Well it seemed pretty close. But fair enough. So, I take it from the ceasing of our collaboration that you now have a plan for how to get us in there?”
“Pretty much,” I agreed. “We’re going to need a few of our people to pull it off. But from what I can tell, this is the best possible entry path we can take. Wisdom of Solomon works best with lots of data, and we had a TON this time. Probably could have gotten some more depth if we’d stuck it out, but since most of the defenses are surface level, we didn’t really need it. I don’t need to know the name of the guy who built the cabinet in the fifth floor drawing room if I know there’s a secret passage in the back of it.”
“Is there?” she asked excitedly. “I love secret passages!”
I laughed. “I know, and yes, it connects to the wine cellar. The whole place is swarming with the damned things. I caught some of the historical context as I was working, and it’s pretty wild. Apparently they built them for assassinations, affairs, smuggling, coups, and pretty much any other nefarious action they were interested in. Since they’re spatially expanded, some of them actually butt up against each other, even within the same WALL. I don’t think anyone in there even KNOWS about all of them, because no one consults anyone else when making them.”
“Does that make our job easier or harder?” she asked slowly. “Like do we need to worry about people randomly popping up from nowhere?”
I shook my head. “Not really. My scan made it clear which ones don’t see regular use. There are a few of them that everyone knows that get traversed often, a few only a couple people use, and a bunch no one is aware of. Aside from lots of dust and a couple of nasty critters we can work around, we’ll be much safer traveling through them than almost anyone else would be.”
“Then why do you have bad news voice?” she asked flatly. “Because you don’t sound happy at all.”
“Because,” I sighed. “While everyone and their brother made passages all over that place for every reason under the sun, they did NOT see fit to connect any of them to the vault. Presumably even the idiots who came up with such gems as the midnight snack slash axe murder passage and the affair passage that connects to six different rooms knew better than to build a secret back entrance into the place where they keep all their money.”
That got another giggle. “Hence you needing some of our people to help. I’m assuming the vault itself is going to be a bit too involved for us to manage on our own?”
“We could do it,” I hedged. “But not fast. I have a few helpers in mind. Abel, Bethy, and my sister, namely. Though I’m also bringing Dayna and Sable. I got the specs on that thing and it is NOT going to be easy to get into. But if we bring the right tools, we can crack it within an hour or so. At the most.”
Popping to my feet, I stretched languidly, groaning at the feeling of releasing all that excess tension. Apparently mentally doing ten things at once had twisted my back into knots. After cracking my neck, I offered my arm to my wife. “Well, this was a fun little outing, want to go get our friends and then break into someone’s creepy fortress house and steal their key?”
Sliding her arm into mine, she beamed at me happily. “I thought you’d never ask. Although, since we’re going to be in their vault anyway, maybe we can snag a few extra odds and ends. Seems like a waste of good loot to just leave it there to rot.”
We spread out wings and took off, Murmur covering us as we made our escape (we’d been concealed by shadows until takeoff). In her head, I teasingly told her we’d have to do a bit of research on the city lord first. I hoped he was as big an asshole as his ancestors were, because that would really help solve our money problems.
