Luca DR
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Accidentally summoned 26
🕑 Added 2024-02-12 14:29:44 +0000 UTC26 – Riddle quest
Melina was like a storm on a clear day when she finally met with her two teammates. They were talking animatedly when she arrived, something about the best monsters to use as fuel for a ritual she had never heard of before. But her dark mood got their attention, and as one they turned towards her.
She brushed a stray lock of auburn hair away from her face, but it fell back to where it was immediately afterwards. She noticed that Ishrin saw her involuntary pout. Cheeks burning, she asked: “What quest are we doing, then?”
Ishrin thought about teasing her, but Lisette beat him to it.
“We did not pick a quest.” She said.
To which, he said: “we actually did. Well, I did, a while ago.”
He took the envelope from his inventory. The paper was smooth like silk under the almost vertical rays of the sun. No spillage of ink peeked through while it was still folded, making the paper thicker than it looked.
“This should save us an unpleasant trip back to the guild,” Melina said in a much better mood. She examined the paper, face scrunching up. “A poem? Why would the Quest Board cough up such a cryptic thing?”
Ishrin thought about it. He didn’t have much knowledge of the magical construct, but he did know from what Lisette told him that someone was seen tampering with it. Coud it be? It didn’t matter much, though, as he was too curious to pass it up and it was the only quest they had anyway.
“All the good ones were taken,” he said with a shrug.
Melina’s eyes turned mischievous. “Ah, about that. The new guild master, Syrma, might have some work to do. I left him a little gift before he arrived. I told all the adventurers that they were up for a promotion if they completed enough quests and let’s say that they took to it with more fervor than I anticipated.”
Ishrin exhaled through his nostrils. Lisette, instead, didn’t seem to get it but didn’t say anything.
“It’s going to get bad, isn’t it?” Ishrin asked in the end.
“He’s looking for the multiversal traveler, but still doesn’t know about you. It’s just a matter of time though. Hopefully we have enough time to prepare.”
“Well,” he said, “I have a hunch that this quest might help.”
His intuition had worked its wonders while he was pacing around and chatting with Lisette, and an idea about what the quest was about had formed. And in any case, he had a ritual that could help him should his intuition not be enough.
“Do you now?” She asked with a sly look. Like a fox. “Show me the quest again?”
Ishrin took out the envelope and gave it to her. She read through the poem and then gave the parchment to Lisette, who also took the time to read it. She was much faster, and gave the paper back to Ishrin with a disgusted expression on her face.
The glade was still in the morning air,
And the owl and the dove rested at peace
For the ring of light watched the heir
His son and his niece
Whomst among your own
Who went far and wide
Can find the lost spawn
And bring them back to light?
“It’s like a riddle.” Ishrin said. “Do you like these kinds of quests, perchance?”
“I despise them.” Lisette said.
Ishrin smiled again at her antics. “I could tell.”
Melina sighed. “I usually like riddles, but this? This is just not fun, you know? It’s too generic.”
Ishrin crossed his arms. “So, you won’t get angry if I cheat a little with a ritual.”
“No.” Lisette said immediately.
“Of course not. In fact, please do it for our sanity.”
“Oh, I always planned to cheat, but then you smiled, and I thought…”
Melina shook her head. “It was a fake smile, you dummy. Nobody likes riddles if they are hard! And they are useless if they are easy!”
He began to prepare for another ritual, feeling good for having made the gloomy fox smile a bit. Liù fluttered around, playing with them, but Melina didn’t give her much attention because she was looking closely at what Ishrin was doing, beginning from his strange spatial power that allowed him to store items without apparently any limit.
He took out a large cauldron, making her wonder when he even had the time to purchase it, and as it passed through the opening of his inventory the rift expanded almost comically to let the voluminous items out of its internal space. Then timber appeared, and before long a fire was roaring beneath the now-full cauldron.
Then Ishrin nodded and Liù flew to the bottom of the cauldron and stepped in the fire, putting her hands against the metal of the container, which rapidly turned red. The water quickly began to boil.
Melina was not surprised that the pixie was not hurt by the fire, but she was very interested in how she communicated with her master. By what she knew, Ishrin couldn’t have had the pixie for more than a few weeks, and even then… the guild incident with Goddard told her that she was freer to do whatever she wanted than most summons usually were. So how was she doing exactly what he needed her to do without any verbal command? Did she know the ritual already? Was it so obvious that she needed to heat the water?
Her curiosity only increased with time. Melina knew very well that rituals were no easy feats, and in her long years as an adventurer, she had never seen many in the first place. The fact that Ishrin, who usually did magic without much effort, was wearing his most concentrated face ever complemented the fact.
“How do you know so many rituals?” Melina asked.
“I spent my entire life studying them, creating them, mastering the art.” Ishrin said. Not the whole truth, but close enough. He had been very polyhedric in his studies, up until the death of his wife.
He took out a small metallic needle and a cork. It was like a wine bottle cork, and Melina thought she could still read the name of the maker on its side as it floated on the water, although the characters were not in a language she could read.
“I have a very good memory when it comes to rituals,” he added. “This one was among the very first I developed, back when I wasn’t very powerful. I never liked wasting time in my youth, and even when I became immortal the thought of wasting time always left a sour taste in my mouth. I know I said I became lazy, but that was a choice.” He said.
She narrowed her eyes at the explanation, not entirely sold on the latter part about laziness. She had been alive a long time too, and she knew that the laziness that comes with a changed perspective is not something you can easily control. It’s not even real laziness, is it? It’s more like… time feels different. Even a simple ‘wait a moment’ could become weeks just because those weeks feel like a moment to you now. She remembered that story about an immortal vampire keeping a grudge for ten years just because someone sold her bad apples. Adventurers had it a bit different because the constant danger they were exposed to kept them grounded. She only began to feel the effects of her ‘old age’ when she took a sabbatical.
“It’s a simple ritual.” Ishrin said.
“Simple, yeah. I can see it doesn’t have too many strange steps involved.” Melina said, a bit distracted. In her mind, she was replaying their old conversation at the Guild about immortality, trying to see why Ishrin had become like that. Either he was much, much older than she had initially thought, or something else had happened to him.
Then she stopped. Why was she so interested in him anyway? Shaking her head, she refocused on the present.
“Well, there might not be visible strange steps, but the workings of magic are a bit more complex than they look at first glance.” Ishrin said.
She frowned. She had been keeping an eye on the process with her magic sight as well, but had not spotted anything weird.
“Maybe I just get them,” she mused.
“Maybe.” Ishrin teased.
She glared at him. He ignored her, instead simply tossing the quest paper into the fire below the cauldron. It burst into flames immediately, which exploded upwards, engulfing the cauldron and the water, sending out a shockwave of heat and compressed air towards the three. Lisette, who was the farthest from the cauldron, had to brace herself and grit her teeth as the pain and heat hit her in the face. Melina, two full tiers above her, a hundred times more resistant than her, flinched. Ishrin, standing right next to the source of the blast, was unfazed.
“You could have warned us.” She muttered.
The man responsible for the explosion looked at her with an unreadable expression. “Sorry,” he said, unable to look at her in the eye, “I’m not used to… this.” He trailed off, eyes glazing over for a moment. Melina felt a surge of emotions at seeing the man clearly think about something in his past, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was feeling. The moment passed, and Ishrin directed her attention to the cauldron. “Anyway, look!”
The needle floating on the surface of the water was now pointing somewhere, deep in the forest, slightly to the side of the still smoking mountain that contained the spatial rift leading to the unexplored realm that had opened there. Ishrin plucked the needle out of the water and handed it to Melina. She took it, noticing that it wasn’t just the needle that had come out.
It was a whole cylinder of water, held in shape by unseen forces, with the needle floating on the surface, held in the center. She tried to turn around, but the needle kept pointing at the forest slightly off from where the smoking mountain was, like a compass.
She wanted to ask so many questions.
“Let’s go!” Ishrin said.
***
Meanwhile, behind a desk on the second floor of the Guild, gilded hands were revieing the contents of a magical ledger. “Melina, Melina, Melina. Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Creating a party with a lowly D-ranker four full tiers below you… sloppy work.”
