My Best Friend is an Eldritch Horror - Chapter 246 (Patreon)

It took Damien a little time to figure out where the North Mountain was. Since he was currently at the south one, it wasn’t particularly hard to guess that his target was across from him, but there were several mountains clustered in the area.

Luckily, the signs on the roads did the rest of the work for him. After a short walk – this time, up the mountain – Damien found himself standing before room one hundred.

It was completely unadorned, aside from a metal plaque bearing Quinlan’s name and her door. The finely carved metal door at the front was flush with the stone, leaving no gaps for him to peek through. Damien knocked on it and stepped back.

There was no response. Henry chuckled slightly and Damien mentally waved him away with a grumble.

“Quinlan?” Damien called. “It’s Damien. Are you here?”

Still, there was no response. After several more seconds, Damien frowned. Henry rose up from his shadow, taking his cute spherical form and rubbing his tentacles together.

“Do you think she’s hiding from us?” Henry wondered.

“Not really. I don’t see why she would,” Damien replied. “I don’t even know if she’s in here. Or she could actually be doing that meditation stuff that Xil was talking about.”

“You really think she is?”

“No,” Damien admitted. “With how badly she wanted to learn rune crafting, she’s almost certainly working on something to do with that. But I can’t think of any project that would take this long. She must have been at it for a few weeks at least.”

“So… we break in?”

“I didn’t expressly say that.”

“You aren’t saying no.”

“I am not,” Damien agreed. He tried the door handle first, but it was locked. Henry scoffed at him, but he only shrugged in response. “You never know. Maybe it would have been easy.”

“It will be easy,” Henry said, extending a tentacle. It pushed through the keyhole and there was a click a moment later. Several runes lit up along the door, but tendrils of dark magic sliced through them, killing the spell before it could take form. “See?”

“She’s already putting the runework she learned to good use,” Damien said as he ran a finger over the cut runes. If Henry hadn’t destroyed them before they went off, a considerable amount of heat energy would have been channeled on their location, likely setting them on fire.

“Hopefully to more creative things than such a mundane trap.”

“It got you.”

“No it didn’t. I deactivated it.”

“You still triggered it,” Damien pointed out. “I didn’t even notice the runes among all the other carvings in the door. It probably would have gotten most people.”

Henry grunted. “Settling for mediocrity is a great way to ruin a student. Let’s just figure out what she’s doing.”

Damien nodded and pushed the door open, keeping his Ether close at hand in preparation for another trap. The room was dark, with light only coming from a small rune drawn in faded chalk above his head on the doorway.

Snapping his fingers, Damien brought a mote of purple light to life at his fingertips. Quinlan’s room was plain and barren. The bed was neatly made, its sheets covered with dust and untouched. Her bathroom door hung open, but there were no personal belongings on the sink or at her desk. It was as if the room was completely empty.

“Secret room?” Damien guessed.

“Almost certainly. She was using one at Blackmist as well, so I suppose she’s got an appreciation for them,” Henry said. “She didn’t make that one, though. That was something the school gave her, since she didn’t know any runework at the time beyond the horrible stuff she kludged together from books.”

“So it might be a little harder to spot,” Damien concluded. He extended his senses, brushing over the walls in the room and scanning them for anything that seemed out of place. Henry pushed the door shut behind him, locking it with a click.

“We don’t want anyone stumbling in on us messing with her stuff,” the companion explained when Damien cocked an eyebrow.

“Ah, good idea,” Damien said. He pursed his lips and shook his head. “This room seems pretty clean, though. Maybe the bathroom?”

Henry bobbed a nod and the two walked into the other room. Damien swept the walls with his senses, finding nothing once more until a tiny prick gave him pause as his mental energy swept over the drain in the shower.

“I think there’s something over here.” Damien knelt beside it, blowing some of the dust that had gathered on the floor away. Faint, tiny runes encircled the drain entrance.

“What, did she shrink herself? That’s tiny,” Henry said. He floated down to the runes and examined them. “Huh. Well, that makes more sense.”

Before Damien could ask what he meant, Henry sent a pulse of Ether into the floor. The runes lit up, filling the room with faint light. Damien took a step back, but the floor didn’t change. Instead, a section of the shower wall rumbled and slid down, revealing a path behind it.

“Huh. That’s why I didn’t feel anything. There was no magic in the rock,” Damien said, checking Quinlan’s work out for himself. “She just had a spell to physically move the rock rather than some sort of magic entrance. Smart.”

The path wound down in circles, quickly turning into a stairwell. There was still no lighting, so Damien kept the Ether at his fingertips for light as they descended. As they grew deeper, a faint light source bloomed in the distance.

It grew brighter until Damien no longer had need for his Ether light. It was coming from the bottom of the stairwell, where an open archway led into a small room. Damien reached the end of the stairs, still keeping his magic ready, and peered inside.

A large, crystal coffin sat in the center of the room, propped up by stands made from black stone. They looked like they had been melted and squished into shape by hand. Within the glittering blue crystal was a young woman.

She bore striking resemblance to Quinlan, with long black hair and a button nose. If she had been a few years older, Damien might have mistaken the two for each other.

“What in the Planes?” Damien muttered, edging around the coffin to get a better look at the rest of the room. Dozens of books were piled along the floor and a large box of chalk rested on its side, its contents spilled out over the ground.

Runes had been drawn all over the ground and up the legs of the coffin, but the circles weren’t complete.

“A sister, maybe?” Henry suggested. “She’s not exactly the same as Quinlan. Her eyebrows are a little thicker and her nose is a bit wider.”

“Why is she in a coffin?” Damien asked. “Or, before you answer that, maybe I should ask why she’s here? Quinlan didn’t strike me as the type of person to keep a dead relative sitting around in her basement.”

“Why would I know?” Henry asked, bobbing in a shrug. “Lots of runes here, though. She mentioned wanting to work with something that had gotten sealed and drawing the energy out of it, didn’t she?”

Damen walked up to the coffin and reached out with his mental energy, brushing across it. His void-heightened senses tingled. Faint amounts of Ether were leaking out of the coffin. He pulled the tendrils back with a jerk. “She’s not dead.”

“Who would have thought,” Henry said dryly. “She certainly isn’t alive, though. This looks like some form of stasis.”

“Maybe this is who Quinlan was trying to help?” Damien guessed. “Her sister might have mistakenly bonded with a companion way too powerful for her and gotten sealed for her own safety, either by her companion or by someone else. Quinlan figured out how to communicate with it and is trying to make a circle that lets her sister actually draw on its power without going kaboom?”

“Reasonable enough guess,” Henry agreed. He bobbed over to the chalk markings covering the coffin. “But that doesn’t explain where Quinlan is. These runes aren’t even close to done. She had the right idea, even if a fair bit of the execution was wrong. But she just stopped halfway through. That doesn’t strike me like her.”

“There aren’t any signs of a struggle,” Damien mused, walking in a circle around the coffin. “And there’s another question. Why was Quinlan so reluctant to tell us about this? This is something we could have helped with.”

“Presumably because whatever is stuck inside her sister is something she thinks dangerous,” Henry said, his voice growing colder. “And, after seeing our strength, something she probably doesn’t think we will permit to exist.”

Damien’s hair prickled. “Void?”

“I don’t know. I can’t sense through this damn crystal,” Henry said. “It could be Corruption as well, or just something else that poses a threat to the world. It’s impossible to say. Whatever it is, though, I doubt we’re going to like it. We could always end the problem here and now.”

“No,” Damien said, shaking his head. “We don’t know anything for sure. And, even if we did, I’m not killing Quinlan’s sister on a suspicion. That’s what people would have done to me if they found out about you.”

“In their defense, that’s what they should have done,” Henry said. “The Void spells the end for everyone on the Mortal Plane – at least from their perspective. I doubt they’d appreciate the intricacies of how the Cycle works.”

“Maybe so, but I’m going to be better than that,” Damien said resolutely. “Besides, what if she could be on our side? Having more Void creatures to combat the Corruption would be huge.”

“If it is a Void creature inside her, then chances are it’ll work with It Who Stills the Seas to restart the Cycle.”

“Then we’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Damien said. “Quinlan is our friend. I’m not killing her sister.”

“Suite yourself,” Henry said. “I’m just pointing out opportunities. And – look at that, you aren’t a complete depraved monster yet. So stop worrying so much about if you’re becoming evil.”

Damien blinked. “You could tell?”

“You think very, very loud.”

“Ah. Right.”

He and Henry stared at the coffin for a few seconds, not talking.

“So… what now?” Damien asked, rubbing the back of his head. “Should we just wait around for Quinlan to come back?”

“What makes you think she’s coming back?” Henry asked. “And, even if she is, it might not be soon. We could be here for days. I doubt that would go over well with the rest of Mountain Hall.”

“True,” Damien admitted. He scanned the room with his mental energy, but there were no signs of other secret passages. “Then I’m at a loss. We’ve got nothing to go off.”

“Well, we’ve got one thing,” Henry said, patting the crystal coffin with a tentacle.

“She doesn’t seem to be in a very talkative state.”

“She’s alive. That means she can communicate,” Henry said. “We just have to get inside her head.”

“Like that one girl at the tournament?” Damien asked with a grimace. “That kind of magic is disgusting.”

“It’s just advanced mental energy application with a little twist,” Henry said. “And we won’t be trying to hurt her. It’s just going inside her mindspace. We might even be able to find out a way to figure out what’s wrong with her.”

“I suppose,” Damien said, rubbing his chin. “It’s the only thing I can think of right now. Maybe she’s aware and saw where Quinlan went. How much danger are we inside her mind?”

“A fair amount of it,” Henry admitted. “We’ll be at a disadvantage since we aren’t on home ground, but to be frank, I’m strong enough for it to not matter. You are too, at this point. Even if there’s another Void creature in there, we should be able to overpower it long enough to escape.”

“Then we might as well try,” Damien decided. “Let’s do it.”

“Oh, no. You do it.”

“Huh? I don’t know how.”

“You’ve got Void magic. You’ve got direct casting. Use your head.”

Damien sighed, but he couldn’t argue. He couldn’t pass up the chance to practice with his powers. To this point, he’d only used direct casting for gravity or space based magic. However, Void magic worked in a very similar manner. While he didn’t know what Void runes corresponded to a mental incursion, he could easily imagine a normal rune circle that would hypothetically do what he wanted.

The runes sprung forth in his mind. Damien gathered his Ether into the same pattern, gently drawing on the expanse of gray energy and infusing the spell with Void. He kept a firm hold on it, making sure the spell wouldn’t accidentally go off if Henry told him it wouldn’t work.

As the Void corrupted his spell, the runes warped of their own volition. Smooth curves turned jagged and solid lines broke. Yet, somehow, they still felt correct.

“Will this work?” Damien asked, his voice slightly strained. The Ether bucked and twisted against his grip, trying to break out of the unnatural form. It was significantly harder than casting normal magic, especially without Herald forming the runes for him.

“Good enough,” Henry said. “There are some places I see room for improvement, but this will do for now.”

Damien nodded. He sat down at the foot of the coffin and released the spell. A lance of purple and black magic shot from his forehead and pierced through the crystal. It traveled through the blue rock instantly, striking the girl on the forehead and sending ripples of energy washing out.

The world warped around Damien, and then he was falling. Blood rushed to his ears and ice washed over his skin as he plummeted. If Herald hadn’t done the exact same thing to him before, Damien would have panicked.

Instead, he held his breath and kept himself as focused as possible. A second later, the sensation was over. Damien opened his eyes and shook himself off. Even though there wasn’t any water actually on him, it still felt right.

Henry stood at his side, but his companion had taken on his humanoid form. Several dozen eyes blinked down at Damien. “Not bad.”

“Thanks,” Damien said, pushing the Void magic away before it could meddle with his emotions any further. He took his first look around the girl’s mind. They were standing in a small, cramped room made from solid stone. There was no doorway or any way to enter or exit it. “Uh… how do we get out of here?”