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4.8 A feast for four
🕑 Added 2024-08-17 04:50:48 +0000 UTCDifference: Minimal
The Wind’s Cradle was massive on the inside. Just the lobby seemed taller than three usual stories and wider than most warehouses. Gold line chandeliers hung from the ceiling, massive paintings hung from the walls, and there was a literal carpet mural covering most of the floor - as if someone had seen the one outside and decided to reinterpret it onto a piece of furniture. At the far end of the lobby, there was a dual stairway leading up and double doors in between them leading elsewhere.
“It is getting quite late,” Asemo noted as they entered, looking back outside - the sun would soon set. “Feel free to explore, that is part of this place’s charm. I shall see you again upon dawn. The dining room is behind those large doors, eat whatever you wish.”
She left them with those words, smiling. Understandably quite peckish, the lot of them moved to explore the dining room. It was really more of a hall, enough space to fit a feast, maybe two. The aesthetic was similar to the lobby with the exception of a dozen long tables – wooden even! – being placed across the room. At the far end, there was a feast laid out in a buffet of sorts, except it was placed on layered displays, each with several plates of individual meals stacked onto them. There must have been hundreds of servings including desserts, soups, and appetizers. Irwyn did not bother counting exactly.
“Not poisoned, at least anything near us,” Elizabeth noted, using one of the countless trinkets on her person. “I will double-check anything you choose.” she then proceeded to pick some kind of exotic… salad? It had green, blue, and red presumably vegetables diced in it. Then Elizabeth grabbed three more meals, hovering them on a plate of Void magic.
Irwyn eyed the full portions and didn’t think he had more than two in him even as hungry as he was… but then again Elizabeth always maintained a lot of enchantments on her body, which probably needed more sustenance.
“This is far too much food just for us,” Irwyn was not quite over the sheer quantity of it.
“Yeah,” Alice said and Waylan nodded.
“Eh,” Elizabeth shrugged with a smirk. “I have seen bigger.”
That certainly helped dispel their hesitation at least. Irwyn personally picked rich stew and some kind of apple roll for desert. Alice and Waylan likewise made their picks. Then they all gathered at the edge of the nearest table, Elizabeth erecting a veil of privacy around them – she was still the best at it.
“Strange, there are no servants here,” she immediately noted.
“Maybe we just haven’t seen them,” Irwyn opined.
“No,” Elizabeth shook her head. “There are no servant entrances at the back of the dining hall. Those should be there. But I spotted nothing.”
“Maybe hidden?” Waylan offered.
“I am feeling no secret passages or even crawlspaces,” Alice scanned shook her head as she spoke. “Maybe… they just walk in through the same entrance as the guests?”
“Asemo did not seem particularly sympathetic with the lower castes,” Elizabeth disagreed. “Unless our dear librarian is an outlier, we can assume most of the powerful here would not want to share the door with a servant. As I said: Strange.”
“Did you find anything in the library,” Irwyn moved the conversation elsewhere since no one seemed to have any more insight.
“Quite a bit,” Elizabeth presented. “Apparently, this desert is not really ruled by a nation. Instead, there is about 60 city-states that span it. Some deities might control multiple cities but from what we have found, none more than 5. Prosperity controls 4 alongside the Skyhunter. Alliances and rivalries seem to be more based on religion than reasonable geopolitical needs. I expect these city-states would only work together on a wider scale when faced with an external threat - though I can only speculate.”
“We did chart a path North though,” Alice chimed in. “We go through the City of Glass, City of Grain, City of Steel, and City of Ramparts. The last one is on the very edge of the desert. The information about anything further North was scarce though.”
“Just a few landmarks,” Elizabeth nodded. “Like mountains and a giant tree that can be seen from the City of Ramparts. Little information on what is North of it geographically. I managed to get a book from another section that talks about the ‘barbarians’ that apparently attack it from time to time but the term might just be straight propaganda. They seem to use the term for any people from outside the desert.”
“There were a few interesting places that could be on our way,” Alice seemed to like telling the information in turns and spoke again with a smile. “The Stairs of Vul, which is supposedly a massive mountain further North; a Lying Forest, whatever that means; or a Graveyard with capital G. And most interesting was the Mount Wisdom, which is noted to be ‘three years of travel on foot’ from the city of ramparts, three times as far as the second furthest landmark mentioned.”
“That of all of them seems like a place we should visit, even if it’s out of our way a bit,” Elizabeth nodded. “But that’s mostly it, the rest of what we did was math. What did you uncover, Irwyn?”
He naturally recounted his findings about the city being rather young, their calendar beginning with Prosperity’s godhood, and a few other details he found interesting enough to include in his summary. Then he turned towards the last person who had been quiet for a while.
“And you?” Irwyn smiled at Waylan, channeling all the friendly malevolence he could. He had no doubt that Waylan would have found… limited information in the time he had to study. Never much of a bookworm – though Waylan could read faster than most. He was just not interested in anything much longer than memos most of the time. Without interest efficiency faltered.
“The library goes a lot further back than we had been brought,” their sneak replied. “Until the rooms stop being numbered and there might be only a few books or tablets in each, locked in glass or even metal cases. Further still, there are stone doors without handles or keyholes, leading into massive rooms - at least judging by their spacing in the hallway.”
“They had that in a book?” Alice raised an eyebrow.
“No,” Waylan grinned. “What they did have was a few very nice private reading rooms. With locks, even. Very convenient. I noticed them on the way and managed to guess at a nearby section to borrow a few random books from as an excuse.”
“I, a fool, thought you might have shown an actual interest in literature,” Irwyn sighed.
“I have always been very interested in the value of literary works,” Waylan grinned back.
“What else did you find?” Elizabeth inquired with an amused smile.
“I waited around a bit but no one ever entered the entire back section the whole time I have been there, nor did I spot anyone already present,” Waylan recounted. “There were a few pathways so unused a visible layer of dust had settled on the ground - couldn’t go there without leaving footsteps. Eventually, I gave up on the dead ends and tried to gleam something from the sealed writings. Books and scrolls were closed but the tablets I could read a bit - They seemed like big rituals of sorts.”
“Can you describe a few?” Elizabeth nodded for him to continue.
“Some were kind of normal - like 50 people standing in a circle, singing a song and dancing around a pile of coins to make them ‘lucky’,” he said, then his usual smile slipped right off of Waylan’s face. “Some were… well, fucked.”
“How bad?” Alice’s expression also darkened.
“I found one in a particularly hidden room, near the stone doors all the way in the back,” he grimly nodded, “About how to ‘restore fading fortunes’. Apparently, all you need to do is take the child of a merchant who stole great wealth - no older than ten - then have a single person from every craft and profession in the city stab them one by one with a jagged stone knife.”
“Sacrificial rituals,” Elizabeth said with more disapproval than horror. “How incredibly… barbaric. And inefficient. The human body doesn’t actually contain that much energy. Especially those underdeveloped, like children’s. I cannot imagine they are particularly mana efficient either.”
“They wouldn’t keep them around if they didn’t think it worked,” Waylan grunted.
“It might be different with gods,” Alice hypothesized. “Maybe it’s not about the person but about the worship itself. Special occasions and the crazy zealotry it takes to kill someone as an explicit human sacrifice - it might provide a lot more power to the target than regular worship would. And if they get a lot of extra power, they might share some back to encourage… this kind of behavior.”
“Rituals can be used to better attune to particularly powerful spells,” Elizabeth nodded. “In a similar way as chants but the comparative improvement is usually not that large. Perhaps it is different with deities.”
“What do we think about the stone doors?” Irwyn redirected. “Ritual chambers of some sort?”
“That, or Vaults,” Elizabeth half agreed. “The lack of any mechanism to open them means they rely on magic - or miracles in this case. There ought to be more than a sacrificial slab to make entry basically require the god’s consent.”
“Or it’s just to keep out the smell,” Waylan said without mirth. “They seemed airtight.”
That conversation caused a minute or two of silence as they dug into their meals. Chatter returned eventually though it stayed relatively light while they ate.
“It’s probably dark out already,” Alice commented with a sigh. “We should find bedrooms and whatnot.”
“It is,” Irwyn confirmed. A rarely useful side effect of his affinities – he could feel when it was nighttime. Not that it often came up given most people could do the same with a glance.
“Probably sleep in pairs, just in case,” Elizabeth nodded. “Asemo seems to want to get on our good side doesn’t mean we should let our guards down too much
“Well, the bedrooms will probably be more than large enough,” Irwyn looked around the massive dining area - it certainly indicated scale. “Maybe they even have bedhalls instead. Sleeping parlors?”
“Slumber expanses?” Waylan suggested.
“Dream galaxies,” Alice chimed in.
They ended up leaving their empty plates on the table and headed upstairs. The halls were unsurprisingly needlessly wide and tall, the side rooms led to various leisure areas. Some were clear, like the pool room, the room with a pool, one with some kind of darts variation, a bowling alley, and the room with plentiful tables and board games - mostly chess and its apparent half-siblings. Some seemed rather esoteric to say the least though. Irwyn had no idea what kind of game the room filled with large geometric glass shapes was meant to be for. Or the one with six turning mirror panes.
The third floor was for bedrooms. Some were massive with a single truly loyal bed large enough to fit five people yet clearly intended just for one. Others were still for a single individual but only large rather than unreasonably spacious and luxurious. Then there were several bedrooms with four beds each. While not crammed and still clean, the difference was stark. Especially since all of them were placed on the same floor, right next to one another.
“This is meant for an entire delegation,” Elizabeth explained when Irwyn brought up the strangeness. “This society is clearly segregated. I imagine that Chosen would take the largest one. Diplomats and other people of import will be in smaller but still personal chambers. Their servants or whatever equivalent they utilize are then relegated to these smaller rooms. It is honestly not that far from what I have seen in the Federation – though we would put them further apart.”
The fourth floor was inaccessible. There had to be one based on what they had seen outside somewhere but their group could find no stairways. Alice quickly confirmed the existence of hallways above them – at least 3 floors as far as he could feel, maybe more – but there were simply no stairs or doors to reach them. Elizabeth shut down the suggestion that Alice could teleport up to snoop around. A needless risk, not to mention it was getting late and they were all tired from much travel and walking throughout the day.
They ended up taking two of the ‘servant’ bedrooms that were right next to each other, splitting into pairs as they settled in for the night. The two thieves did not need to even make arrangements. It was honestly not even hard for Waylan and Irwyn to essentially resume half-a-decade-old habits. There used to be times when they would lay side by side every night in the Tears’ mess hall – back at their own hideout. The two had changed since then beyond recognition… but some things remained close enough to be familiar.
“Kinda makes me nose-talgic,” Waylan grinned.
“Kind of makes we… what is negative nostalgia?”
“Nose-talgia.”
“...” Irwyn glared at his friend. Then decided there was no winning an argument like that with Waylan and conjured a far more malevolent vengeance with a bit of magic. Then dismissed the Light he had been providing. “Goodnight.”
“ ‘ight.”
Irwyn smiled despite the half jab. He never really got the complaint personally but Irwyn did remember one peeve echoed by many people. He wondered how Waylan would enjoy both sides of his pillow being uncomfortably warm.
****
Elizabeth woke before dawn and forced everyone to follow suit. If Asemo was coming for them, she reasoned, they better appear prepared. Probably eating to show their nonchalance. The feast had changed for breakfast, though Irwyn was pretty sure some items were the same. The plates had been cleared somehow through the night which was worrying in its own way. They still had yet to see so much as a trace of any staff.
Asemo arrived midway through their leisurely meal. And she did not come alone. Alongside the second librarian - or rather, in front of her - walked a tall lady in a long, azure blue dress. Her similarly cerulean eyes almost glowed and no person could possibly claim her features or posture were anything but perfect. As close as a person could really come to an idol of beauty.
That all paled before the most defying feature, of course: The woman’s hair was literally woven from gold. Not blond or painted but dazzling with a slight reflective sheen. Yet it still acted as normal strands would, gently shifting with the newcomer’s gait - to the point it did not even seem as heavy as the literal metal must be. Well, it was not difficult to guess who they were at least.
Goldenlocks, Chosen of Prosperity.
Comments
Jonathan Crandall
Bruh a minor god is going to roll up to Irywn thinking she's hot shit haha
Joseph
Irywn needs to increase his eating portions after what Johnson said.
