The bedehouse.

It had taken a few days to find. Alyssa hadn’t wanted to ask anyone she knew about it. Kasita, under various guises, managed to get the location from a guard. The building wasn’t close to the city. Not like the blacksmith, anyway. That was within an easy walking distance. The bedehouse wasn’t as far as Teneville, or even the nearest village. It had still taken Alyssa and Kasita four hours of straight walking to get to it.

Setting her eyes on it, she wished it had taken a little longer.

It was an ominous building. Rectangular with a pitched roof. Grass near it was brown. Dead. A tree nearby was nothing more than branches of crooked wood without a leaf in sight. The path leading to the entrance was uneven, giving an eerie lopsided sensation when she looked directly at it. It would have looked like a haunted hospital from a movie except for the fact that it lacked windows of any sort. That only made it more unnerving.

The building itself, Alyssa might have been able to ignore. It was, after all, only a building. Stone and wood. Just like any other. But there was an atmosphere around it. An oppressive, daunting air that made Alyssa want to keep back. She couldn’t explain why she wanted to stay away, only that she did.

“I don’t like this,” Kasita said. There was no trace of amusement or her familiar giggles. Her tone was shaky, but serious.

“Me neither.”

Neither had moved since cresting the hill the bedehouse stood beyond. It was down in a bowl-shaped caldera. Alyssa doubted that it was volcanic in nature, but the crater-shape was the same. Three walls had been built in the valley around the building. As far as Alyssa could see, there was only one gate in each of the walls. The clear space between them had to be for watchmen to spot anyone who might escape.

“You know? Why don’t we just head back. I’m sure we can find some old man with one foot already in the grave. We can just… give him a little shove.”

“I’m not going to kill an old man, Kasita.”

“An old woman then.”

Alyssa managed to tear her eyes off the building in the distance. “Are you… Just… No. We’re going to go in there, find the first zombie demon whatever thing, and tear out its soul with a scythe.”

“And what if we find one like the Taker, hm? You said you were having trouble tearing out his soul. What are you going to do then, huh? Fight it? You had to blast him into the moon to kill him! And what if we agitate a lot of them. What if they start trying to escape. We could wind up accidentally destroying Lyria!”

Alyssa tried to get a word in edgewise, but Kasita was still not finished.

“Then there is the whole demon thing. You know, monsters have stories about the Monster Lords. Especially that Monster Lord. Her betrayed the other monsters. I mentioned that there were four confirmed surviving Monster Lords, right? Well, five survived the First City. Her killed Dasu, the elf progenitor, a few years after.”

Kasita finally stopped, almost looking like she was short on breath despite her body not needing oxygen in the same way that humans did. “Or… so the story goes, anyway,” she said, a little calmer. “The way I heard it, the other three banished Her to the underworld for that crime, along with all of demonkind. But… if demons are related to Tenebrael somehow… I don’t know.” Shaking her head, she tried smiling. It wasn’t that great a smile. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to kill an old man?”

“No.”

“Well, I tried. When we’re dragged down to the Pit and have all sorts of tortures inflicted upon us, I’ll be the first to say that I told you so.”

“That’s not going to happen, Kasita. I’ve got Fractal Locks, Spectral Chains, Spectral Axes, enough Annihilators that I should be able to destroy the entire valley if it comes to that, and I managed to create an Accelero without screwing up.” She was actually looking forward to testing that one out. It was a Time spell that the Pharaoh had used, one that was supposed to make the user move and take action at extreme speeds.

Of course, she wished that she had an opportunity to test it out that wasn’t potentially life or death… or worse than death. It was just… too complex. She had screwed up oh so many attempts over the past few weeks. The one she had successfully completed had actually only been her sixth try, but there had been plenty since. She hadn’t wanted to waste the one good one on delivering potions across the city.

But… that was neither here nor there. Kasita was here. And the bedehouse was there. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“Ufu~ You think you can get rid of me that easily? Afraid not. You’re stuck with me, sister.”

The whiplash between frightened and nervous Kasita and smiling staggered Alyssa. She could only shake her head. It wasn’t a perfect smile, but she supposed that it was all she could really ask for.

“One question,” Kasita said, raising a finger. She pointed that finger down toward the first gate. “There are bound to be guards around. I doubt they’ll just let us in. Have you got a plan for that or shall we just turn around here?”

“I figured that there would be guards. Not three separate gates to get past, but I should be able to handle it. You might want to hop into my pocket for a short few minutes.”

“Oh?”

Alyssa allowed a small smile to cross her lips. She meant to smile a bit more as a reassurance to Kasita, but even from a distance, the aura surrounding the bedehouse was… oppressive. “I’ve got a new spell I want to try out.”

As Kasita vanished from view, Alyssa walked forward. Not toward a gate. All three were closed and opening them would alert the guards. Turrets periodically dotted the walls. They probably held guards that would be watching the bedehouse and the empty gaps between the walls for escapees. A simple Empty Mirror would keep her out of sight.

Every step closer felt like it added a penny to her boots. One step didn’t do too much. Neither did two steps. Ten steps? Twenty? Her legs felt leaden. Which was a terrible thing for the spell she wanted to try. If the oppressive atmosphere was literally oppressing her, the spell might fail. If it failed, the guards might catch her. She would probably be thrown into the cell next to Cid.

No. That was her paranoia talking. Empty Mirror was working, so even if she failed to get past the wall, nothing worse would come of it. The real challenge would come once she got into the building. The wall was just a hurdle.

Literally.

Alyssa activated the spell and kicked off the ground without breaking her sprint.

The ten foot high wall flew underneath Alyssa as her jump carried her right over it. Her stomach dropped just before reaching the height of her jump. She had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming the entire way back down to the ground.

It was not a flight spell. After a bit of research at the Observatorium, she was beyond glad that she had decided to not use any that removed her own tether to gravity. One of the books, Malapropisms, Misapplications, and Misusage in Magic, was full of warning tales about all kinds of magic. They had a chapter especially dedicated to anything that granted the ability to fly. Unsupervised usage had resulted in plenty of deaths over the history of arcanists trying to fly. Even those experienced in using such spells could suffer serious accidents seemingly at random. It was probably one of the main reasons why she hadn’t ever seen a bunch of arcanists fly to and from the Observatorium.

The spell Alyssa used was a Physical spell similar to Lighten Load, except instead of affecting the weight of an object, it affected the caster. Lighten Caster. Simply named, which Alyssa liked. Trying to figure out the purpose and intended effect of Fractal spells using just the name was a nightmare.

Alyssa landed. Hard. A lot harder than she had expected to land. She stumbled forward, tripped, and, thanks to her light weight, skipped straight over face-planting to instead land on the staff strapped to her back. It was an angelic weapon, so she wasn’t worried about breaking it.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she mumbled.

The same couldn’t be said about her back.

For a moment, Alyssa just sat on the ground. Standing seemed like an impossible task. Her legs weren’t broken. Neither was her back despite the ache she felt. It was just… the air. She felt light as a feather. She could probably do a pull-up with one arm. Getting up was not a question of physical strength.

This place, Alyssa mentally groaned as she clenched a fist. How do the guards stand it? Maybe a chocolate bar makes the depression go away, she thought with a glum smile.

Sitting on the staff was oddly comforting. Not physically. But the staff had this warmth that it radiated. With most of her body lying on top of it, she could feel that warmth all the more. Shifting so that her weight wasn’t completely on the staff, Alyssa undid the buttons on the leather guard. She pulled the golden staff out of its holder and just touched it. Directly.

The warmth flooded straight into her. Alyssa took a breath, feeling like she could actually breathe for the first time since landing. It wasn’t as intense as when she had been connected to Tenebrael or even when she had destroyed Adrael’s traps. But it was enough to make her feel like the sun was shining again.

Alyssa got to her feet. As expected, it really hadn’t taken much effort at all. She took a deep breath as she stared down further into the valley. Two more jumps. That was all. Then a Spectral Axe. Then she could leave. Easy. Nothing could be easier.

Keeping the staff in hand this time, Alyssa started running again. The less time she gave herself to think, the less likely she would be to hesitate.

Running with Lighten Caster active was a bit odd, Alyssa found. She couldn’t run the way that she was used to. Every time her feet hit the ground, she bounced up into the air. Not as high as she had gone while jumping over the wall, but it still sent her five times the distance that she expected between each step. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong must have felt a similar sensation while hopping about on the moon. Though they had two hundred pounds of gear weighing them down.

The second jump was easier. The running was a bit awkward, but she knew what to expect from a jump now. More importantly, she knew what to expect from a landing. This time, she didn’t jump quite so high, choosing to do more of a long jump over the top of the wall.

Although she stumbled on the landing, she managed to keep running, holding her staff tight.

She cleared the last and smallest of the walls with barely a hop. For some reason, it was the smallest wall. Alyssa thought that it would have been the opposite. It made sense for the largest wall to be the first line of defense. But that would probably have obstructed the view from the other walls. There were turrets around this one, but Alyssa couldn’t spot any actual guards.

A sign of the nobles withdrawing their support from the city? Or maybe they just knew that the bedehouse’s aura was just that heavy. She had to be thankful for Adrael skewering Irulon. Without the staff, she probably would have fled back after the first wall.

Even with that warmth flowing up her arms, even with the sun beating down on her, she felt… chilly.

Kasita wasn’t in direct contact with the staff. In fact, she didn’t much like it. It was an unnatural object, like Tenebrael’s feathers or Tenebrael herself. Hopefully Kasita would be alright. The best thing Alyssa could do now was to hurry up.

Her pistol wasn’t going to help here, so she didn’t bother even thinking about drawing it. Staff in one hand, Alyssa withdrew all of her cards. Only after double checking that she did indeed have all the spells that she had mentioned to Kasita did Alyssa approach the rectangular building.

It had one door, as far as she could tell. Obviously, she hadn’t done a full loop around the building, but it didn’t make much sense for a prison like this to have a back entrance. Thinking about it, the place probably didn’t even have lights. It wasn’t so much a prison as it was an execution chamber. Execution by starvation.

There was no guard at the front entrance. Just a heavy gate. A crank on the outside looked like it was the only way in. Luckily, there were no locks or other mechanisms keeping the gate shut. Just the crank.

Alyssa tried to one hand it, keeping the other hand on her staff, but it just didn’t work. The staff was too unwieldy and the crank too heavy. Why couldn’t Adrael have used something simpler. Like a ring. A magic divine ring would have worked perfectly. Nothing big. Nothing bulky. She wouldn’t have needed to spend practically everything that she had earned or stolen on a holster. It would have been just perfect.

She slammed the staff into the ground.

The moment her fingers left the shining metal, it was like the entire world came crashing down onto her shoulders. Her fingers trembled. Her skin went clammy and cold. The insides of her mouth dried and her lips chapped. Nausea churned in her stomach.

The tip of her finger trembling back to the staff kept her breakfast down. The warmth from the staff was the only reason she managed to keep from throwing up.

Breaths coming in ragged waves—her lungs felt like they were full of liquid concrete that was slowly hardening—Alyssa dropped to her knees. She clung to the staff with both hands, hanging on tighter than when she had used it as support for her broken leg. Her knuckles shook with how hard she gripped it. The spiral in the golden haft bit into her fingers, but she didn’t care. She held on like it was the only thing keeping her attached to the ground.

Alyssa didn’t move for minutes. Her phone said ten, her body said hundreds. Only when she felt like she could stand without immediately collapsing did she use the staff to hoist herself to her feet.

How did the guards manage to bring prisoners in? she couldn’t help but wonder as she stared at the heavy gate. Maybe without a staff, walking the long distance down into the valley slowly acclimatized the body. With the staff having shielded her from the effects on the way in, it all had slammed into her at once. Too late to change that now, unfortunately.

As much a warning as that would have been to anyone else, Alyssa still needed to get inside.

Hiking up her pant legs enough to expose some skin, Alyssa ripped the staff out of the ground and pinched it between her ankles. She wouldn’t be able to move like that, but she didn’t need to move. Just crank.

And crank she did. The mechanism ratcheted—perhaps elvish work—as the chain lifted up the gate. It was hard work, but not impossible. It would have been easier had she been able to have her feet spread apart for better grounding and stability, but she didn’t want to risk the staff falling out of contact with her again. Not until she was far away from this place.

She stopped a quarter of the way up, hoping that the distance between the building and the nearest guards was great enough that they wouldn’t be able to see the partially opened gate.

Crouching, Alyssa slid underneath.

“What happens if the gate shuts behind us?”

Alyssa jerked, glancing to her side. Kasita was holding tight to the staff as well.

“We’ll blast our way out of here.”

“Good,” Kasita said with a poorly concealed shudder. “It’s dark in here.”

“That it is.” Alyssa wasn’t sure if it was magic or just something weird about the area, but the light from the gap underneath the gate did not reach far into the room. It was… making her nervous even with the warmth from the staff flowing through her. “There aren’t any… things in here, are there?”

“You think I would be sticking around if there were?”

“Well, you did follow me in here.”

“I would have said something,” Kasita said, shaking her head. “No. It is a larger room. There is some kind of tabley-desk-counter thing near the far wall with a chair behind it. The wall is covered in hooks with a bunch of keys hanging off it.”

“But no monsters.”

Alyssa let out a sigh of relief. Deck of spells in hand, she tossed a light up into the room. Just a regular old light. Apparently Night Vision, and other enhancement style spells, did have detrimental effects over long use. The body grew used to them and stopped trying to compensate for poor lighting on its own. At least in the case of Night Vision. She did still have a few in her deck, but only for emergencies.

True to Kasita’s description, the first room did have a desk and keys and a chair. It looked like a hotel. Or maybe a police station. A very low security police station. The original intent had probably been to keep guards here. Flicking her eyes to the staff, Alyssa shuddered. It wasn’t hard to imagine why they stopped.

Four hallways led off from the main room, two on the left and two on the right. To the side of the desk, a staircase led up to an open balcony area where more hallways sat directly above those on the first floor. Willing the light to near the closest hallway on the right, Alyssa quickly spotted barred doors. Lots of them.

“Do we get a key first?”

“Let’s just take a peek around first. Depending on how deep those rooms are, I might just be able to swing a scythe from the hallway.”

“Whatever we do, let’s hurry.”

“No arguments there.”