12 - 3 [Magus] Enlightenment Sown, Of Ken and Crone The Lone Sparrow - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

The bricks and mortar here were of a darker variety, the touch of the sun having not graced them much if ever. No moss nor greenery of any sort grew in the cracks, only dust that promptly fell by the wake of their passage.

Barry would have to take a good washing to his mop of hair come the night, elsewise he wouldn’t sleep right with the grating of coarse grains against his scalp.

“Alba, dare ad me Tua Inquantum Lumen.

“Luna Lucernam.”

[Alba, give unto me Thy Guiding Light.]

[Moon-Candle]

With a mutter from her cracked lips and flinty voice, Emilia conjured a wisp of purest neveian white. It was a ball of fuzzy yet solid light that lay atop the tip of her cane.

As she intoned in a queer tongue most often heard during Dominidas preachings, the words were spoken twice at a single time from a single mouth; once by herself in Old High Vitaen—the language of the Sevenfold Faith—and then twice by her soul.

It was the same hum of the spirit-given door, yet where one was atonal this was downright harmonic like a bell rung on a Lord’s Day morn. Without ever having apprenticed to a parish of any kind, the Lone Sparrow understood the Priestess’ incantations.

“Sorry if I spooked ya, Bare.” Croked out Emilia, her voice a church’s stained glass; holy and brittle both. “Can’t rightly put our feet down where we can’t see, now can we?”

“No worries, Emi. It would take much more to give me the spooks after what I’ve been through.”

Barry couldn’t help but notice the sympathetic lighting of the stars upon her staff and claws as Emilia had cast her spell. It was a single wave and subsequent ebb and abrupt cessation, yet the mana therein sparked another pang of sheer want in his spirit.

Hungry to Bind Them in the Web.

The want was beginning to wear at his scruples. He’d have to feed himself sooner rather than later, for the rumbling at the base of his flesh-made-simpler was baleful and inexorable.

It hummed an eld song, one of famine nigh blinding. Deep as the endless firmament that hung up the Earth, and neverending as the Pit; where the Hells met the Void.

It was a herald of Song and Name twain.

“Break apart its bones and suck the marrow dry,” spoke his soul, giving voice to the unspeaking Center of his Inner Shadow; the First Basin or subtle stomach.

It beckoned him to gnaw on a piece of mana like a hound does to bone: grinding its teeth against a hardy substance.

His will clamped tight upon the lowest cavity of the spirit. Like trying to hold in wind that ached to be breaked, the act was no easy feat.

Great, just compared me spirit with me arse.

Barry released a sigh of frustration and unwanted mirth, letting go of the building ire in his chest to the depths of the spiral steps and the Flowing-River breath.

I truly am losing my wits, he thought with a crackling smile. One of a man feeling his sanity and scrupules slipping through his fingers like the bright blood of a wound gone too deep.

It’s getting cramped in ‘ere, what with all these nine-damned voices in me head.

Might not even hafta take a bath tonight.

I’ll end up ripping my bloody scalp off come morn’.

With a final, commanding exhale, Barry steeled himself and brought to bear his hardened grit accumulated through the two winters of plying the man-killer’s trade.

Slowly, the want bled into the background, yet did not immediately cease. Instead, it thrummed like a lute's deepest string plucked violently; left as a reminder of what lay therein.

Hungry to Bind Them in the Web.

When the atonal buzz finally passed into the Pale, it left silence most uncomfortable in its wake. A lingering aftertaste of dissonance.

Unto the bowels of the earth, they went.

It reminded Barry of his visions of a beast swallowing the Earth in a single gulp, its maw toothless yet all encompassing. It needed not teeth as its gullet and jowls were grander even than Terra Herself.

The vinegar of its guts would be more than enough to break down a whole, godsdamned world.

A shiver went down his spine, whether from fear or excitement, anticipation or dread, Barry was not sure.

The steps downward were many, the Lone Sparrow having counted twenty or so thus far down the spiral stairs.

The difficult part would be coming back up these steps. He pitied the wise woman’s tribulation to come.

Both in a blink and slow as mollassus down a spoon, they reached a door at the bottom of the stairs. It too was steelbound yet not entirely wrought of the stuff as the previous one was.

This time, at least, the Priestess opened the thing in a reasonable insertion of a key and subsequent twist.

Why all this for a few dusty tomes? Barry wondered. This place was no big city to hold knowledge proper such as Tristam or Arvenpyre, the two major settlements in the South with the Pyre holding vigil over the eastern shores and the City on the Hill closer inland, near the Ydden.

From the Lone Sparrow’s recollection, a good and mundane lock was more than enough for most books. Perhaps this was because these were magicking treatises, yet that still was not enough warrant digging a whole godsdamned dungeon beneath the earth and imbue a door with a living spirit o’ sorts.

Another question joined the long list of many in the cramped space between his brows.

What made scholars hold vigil over ken in the dark?

The door opened noiselessly, not a creak or hitch in its hinges and well balanced too, for the thing slid without need for effort on the Priestess’ part.

Well-oiled, he thought as the light of Emilia’s will’o wisp glinted off the joints with the tell-tale sheen of elbow grease.

They entered into a place of no dust yet with air most infertile; barren and like the breath of the dead. Barry no longer thought of this place as a dungeon but instead a catacomb for the remains of knowledge.

Bones of times long since past.

Rows upon rows for the coffins that were tomes, wrought of a dark stone cold to the touch, were shelves erected through the room beneath the earth.

The walls of this place were strange: large blocks of quarried stone wider than five men abreast. Probably square in dimensions as Barry doubted a quarry-master could get his cutters to make stone as thin as a pastry dough and wide as a barn, lest it just crumble to dust and all their work be lost.

Not even a heavy bag of the King’s silver talents would tempt a quarrier to do such folly.

The archives or libraria were a small cavity; the floating wisp of conjured light, when at its apex, illuminating the thresholds of the hewn-and-mortar walls. Around the same measurement as the courtyard above, twenty span long by fifteen span wide.

Yet, when the conjured spark ebbed—dipping beneath the confines of the stone hewn shelves—the darkness reigned. It was a deep black, a breathing nothingness that beckoned forth fools to venture into its waiting, toothless maw.

To fill the belly of the beast.

A thought entered Barry’s head, a thing of distraction and revelation both.

The measurements are the same; the courtyard is just above this place then. The Crone’s temple was built atop this room.

A treasure hidden beneath the floor of the chest.

After having climbed up the stone-hewn shelves and gotten various heavyset tomes gilded with silver and steel, they retreated from the Libraria—as Emilia had called those catacombs of ken—locking the bottom door on their way out.

Barry was already half way up the stairs with his burdens when he looked back into dark being parted by the Priestess’ conjured candle. She was a good ten steps behind him.

The Lone Sparrow had not even thought of that; needing a source of light. His newfound spirit-sight had slowly but naturally come into being as he stole into the dark. Like breathing, it required no conscious focus.

He simply saw.

Darkness-that-stares-back, indeed, Barry thought with a chuckle.

This spirit-sight did not even need his bloody eyes for it to function. The gesture of looking back was more so a reflex than a need for Barry’s spiritual vision.

Another questing, another parching curiosity he would endeavor to sate in his time here in the Temple of Mahna.

He would have his answers soon enough.

“Emilia, wait ‘ere a moment. Let me drop off these buggers up by some table and then I’ll come back to give ye some help with the steps.”

Pushing past the woman’s reticence and complaints that it “wasn’t necessary,” Barry rushed up the stairs and left the three, arm-thick tomes atop a wooden bench.

Going back, he helped Emilia up the steps in case she fell. With a shadow arm hooked under hers, they threaded up the black.

The woman had saved his life, it was the bare minimum Barry could do.

Surprisingly his spirit-limbs were stabler than ever, not a hitch in their forms. Even the constant writhing and shifting had calmed down to all but stillwaters.

Intention, Barry realized, is vital for the qualities of these arms o’ mine.