Chapter 39 #2
Now, he faced a fun conundrum. He couldn’t ask Luna about it without revealing he scanned her. Without asking her, he couldn’t continue on the lead.
If it was a lead at all.
The dungeon entrance appeared below, the familiar opening in the hillside that they’d first entered weeks ago with Garrett’s group. The area around it was undisturbed. No campfires, no tracks visible from the air.
He slowed down, descending.
He flew in. The first few floors were easy to navigate. He only summoned himself a light, and flew through.
Alsen flew toward the lower levels. Nostalgia washed over him as he passed the destroyed statues.
In a way, this was his first real dungeon. The first real quest with the adventurer’s guild.
He headed for the lower levels, toward the path Luna had taken after the kill chute dropped her.
As he descended, the corridors narrowed. The architecture tightened, ceilings dropping.
He noticed scratches.
Claw marks on the floor. Long, parallel gouges scored into the stone, spaced about a foot apart. Three marks per set, deep enough to scar the ancient stone.
He landed and crouched, running his fingers along the grooves. Fresh compared to everything else in the dungeon. The stone dust at the edges hadn’t fully settled into the scratches.
He stood, looking ahead. The corridor widened into a junction. No scratches on the floor there. He walked to the wider section, checked. Clean stone.
He walked back to where the corridor tightened. Scratches resumed.
The pattern held. Wherever the corridor was wide enough for something large to fly through, the floor was clean. Where the passages narrowed, forcing whatever it was to walk, the claws dug into the stone.
Something large like a drake.
Drakes had been here. Flying where the architecture allowed, landing and walking where it didn’t. Their claws scored the floor only in the tight sections, because in the wider halls they never touched the ground.
Interesting, yet irrelevant to his current purpose.
He flew ahead, retracing the route they’d taken to reach the inner sanctum. At the junction where the path led to the main sanctum, he instead flew into the corridor where Luna had come from.
He walked here, looking for details.
The light orb drifted ahead, illuminating a graveyard of constructs.
They filled the chamber ahead, all types and shapes of constructs scattered over the next chamber, and the one deeper in too. Scorpions, various fighting statues, even one huge one with massive blades for arms.
He walked among them.
Every single construct bore the same damage pattern.
Clear, precise punctures, obviously made by a spear. No sign of any claws or teeth or even anything of a great weight.
He took his time going through the constructs, counting dozens of them. An incredible feat of combat skill, and an explanation for her having a higher level than him.
Emotions clashed inside him.
On the one hand, he had an explanation for the greatest discrepancy. On the other hand, he still had no other suspect besides Luna.
And, in a way, this confirmed her capability to wipe out a larger group of adventurers.
With a sigh, he flew back to the temple’s sanctum. He wanted to check something.
Everything looked like they left it, except for extra scratches in the floor. He focused on the temple map.
Indeed, the mountain temple matched a location on this carving, The Temple of Eternal Frost.
With three locations, he could now find the main temple. He just needed a map of the general area.
With a sigh, he flew back to Vellhorn.
On the way, he racked his brain to come up with an alternate theory about the murder. Something other than it being Luna or the summoner hypothesis.
Nothing good came to mind.
Well, a shapeshifter possibility did, but that was like the summoner hypothesis, just less likely, as it required the shapeshifter to perfectly clean all the blood off himself and leave no tracks.
He flew back into the inn, into Luna’s room. She slept in her sleeping bag on the roof, tucked behind the chimney.
He found all his things from Arleria in the room, stacked not-so-neatly by the wall.
Thanks, he uttered in his mind, and went to wash and sleep.
Alsen woke with the obligatory shooting pain in his arm. He must have turned wrong while he slept.
The morning light filtered through the shutters in thin, pale bars.
Luna wasn’t in the room, just her pack against the wall, and the window was cracked the way she always left it when she slept on the roof.
He sat up, washed, dressed, and somewhere in the motions, the name he’d been trying to bury surfaced again.
Lunariel Laen’Ash.
He pushed it down.
Without evidence, he had no thread to pull. He could confront her, and she would lie or deflect or tell him something half-true, and he would have no way to verify any of it.
Or, worse, she would say yeah, so?
And there was no so. Or, well, so, two hundred years ago, we had a mass murderer with the same surname as yours in my world, where you’ve never been. Suspicious, isn’t it?
He couldn’t say that.
All he would accomplish would be telling her that he’d scanned her, damaging their relationship for no benefit.
He decided, sitting on the edge of the bed with his boots in his hand, that he wouldn’t ask. Not today. Maybe not ever, unless something provided an answer to the question later.
Luna landed through the window, producing barely any sound. “Morning.”
As if nothing happened.
Well, maybe nothing did happen from her side. “Morning. Thanks for bringing my stuff from…” his words trailed off. He couldn’t bring himself to say her name.
“Let’s grab breakfast. Garrett will be here soon.”
He got out of bed, readied himself, and they had breakfast. For how expensive the inn looked, the meal felt mediocre. Cooked well, but still just eggs, ham, and bread.
Luna’s sausages also looked like a better-presented but worse-grilled version of what she got at the street stands.
Garrett arrived just before they finished the meal. He wore his usual armor, just with a traveling backpack on his back. He didn’t have that yesterday. He joined them at the table. “Good morning.”
They greeted him back, finished the meal, and headed out.
Garrett led the way through the city. Everything moved as always, except that people seemed to glance at them carefully, whispering something among themselves.
The news had spread.
That made them the last adventurers left in Vellhorn, so obviously suspicious, especially the mage. Everything really bad that happened had to have a mage behind it. Everyone knew that.
Nobody met his eye. A woman pulled her daughter across the cobbles to avoid their path. A man watering plants in a window box ducked back inside and closed the shutters.
Garrett cleared his throat. “Volsk lives at the edge of town. Behind the blacksmiths’ district. I asked around yesterday, and everyone told me the same story.”
“What’s the read on him?”
“Not much. Nobody wants to talk about him. From a smith too young to know to shut up, I learned that he once summoned a fire spirit into their forge. Supposedly, it makes the forging easier.” Garrett glanced sideways. “Didn’t hear anything negative about the man, though.”
“Did anyone mention him being capable of anything big?”
“Nobody does anything big around here. That’s the thing. Everyone capable of a third of what happened has long since moved from this city. Savnoj was the strongest adventurer in the city.”
And he didn’t seem to be capable of doing much when it happened.
“I also spoke to Renauld in the morning. They’ve got nothing, as expected. They just noticed that the anti-magical shackles Savnoj ordered weren’t found. The merchant who brought them swore he delivered them to Savnoj, even showed him the payment.”
Alsen nodded. So, they really did get anti-magical shackles for him. Anger stirred inside his chest, against all reason.
“He was also missing a bracelet.”
Wait a second. Alsen narrowed his eyes. “What did it look like? That could be a lead.”
Garrett shrugged. “Everyone who knew died that day. The guard only found the mark of a bracelet on Savnoj’s arm, too fresh to be from earlier. He had it removed after death.”
Alsen focused, firing a magical scan on Luna. No hits. “Was it known he had one?”
“Nope. Never heard of it, and I’m usually pretty in on the adventurer gossip.”
They reached the house. Volsk had an old house tucked at the city’s edge. It was probably built back when fields filled the area. Now, he had a small garden behind the house, and other houses surrounding everything that belonged to his property.
A small brass bell hung over the door. Garrett knocked.
Shuffling sounded from the inside. A long pause. Then the door opened onto a room that smelled of coal dust, steeped tea, and something faintly herbal.
The man in the doorway was in his seventies, maybe older. White hair at his temples, bald on top, hands gnarled with a lifetime’s worth of small burns. He wore a knitted shawl over a simple tunic, and he blinked at them with the mild confusion of someone who didn’t get visitors often. “Yes?”
Alsen’s heart dropped. Far too old to be a suspect, a detail everyone forgot to mention.
“Master Volsk?” Garrett asked. “I’m Garrett Landon. This is Alsen. We were hoping for a moment of your time.”
Luna glared at Garrett from the side. Yep, they forgot her again.
Volsk’s eyes settled on Alsen, and something shifted behind them. The confusion cleared. A slow, delighted smile broke across his face. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, you’re the mage. Do come in, come in. I have tea.”
Alsen exchanged a glance with Garrett. Garrett shrugged. They went in, together with Luna.
The room was small, cluttered in the style typical of old men who lived alone.
Bookshelves sagged with unmatched volumes.
A narrow table held an open ledger and a half-eaten piece of bread.
On a shelf above the hearth sat a small glass jar, and inside the jar, a flame the size of a thumbnail was dancing in slow, patient circles.