Legacies of Blood

The ground beneath Elaina’s feet lurched as a crack formed between her and the vault door. She took a step back as the landgraf took one forward, her gaze falling on Herrog.

“Mr. Hardcoat, do we have a problem?” She asked sternly, glancing between him and the glowing sigils on the vault door.

“Erhm,” he grunted, shuffling forward from the pillar where he’d sought cover. “I don’t know. Give me a moment.”

Elaina frowned, her attention focused on the deep gouge the lonruyanu had left in the vault’s surface. She glanced back at Royce, looking over Resius, who was knocked out cold from the blow he had taken from the creature. Beating it about the head with an iron rod may not have been the smartest idea he’d ever had, but it had provided precious time at a critical moment. “Can you get him up?”

“Maybe,” Royce muttered before clearing her throat. “But I can’t promise he’ll be in a state to get right to work.”

“He might not need to,” Herrog remarked from his station at the door. “If I’m not mistaken---and keep in mind I’m not an expert on all the magic bits---that damned creature may have done us a favor and severed the last few magical components of the locking mechanisms.”

“Does that mean we can open it?” Elsebeth asked skeptically.

Herrog shook his head as he slipped some thin tools Elaina didn’t recognize into an innocuous seam. “Not yet, but I should be able to get it open without the occultist if yer’ wanting to get him out of here.”

Elsebeth’s eyes glazed over briefly before her attention snapped to the fallen soldier nearest to her and then to the remaining wounded. “Yes, we should get them out.”

“I’ll order it immediately,” Kitch declared with a courteous bow. Though she had some minor burns and cuts of her own, she hadn’t let them get to her yet.

“Very good,” Elsebeth said with an absent nod. Most people in her position wouldn’t have cared much for the fates of the soldiers serving under them, but Elsebeth Amberdeen was slightly different in that respect. She’d wanted to risk as few people as possible and had Kitch pick the most capable.

Another lurch under Elaina’s feet caused her attention to shoot back toward Herrog. “Why is it doing that?”

Herrog answered without taking his eyes off his work. “The magic infusing the wards is looking for an exit now that they’ve broken.”

“Artificing imbues the mundane with magic,” Elsebeth continued, looking over to Elaina. “The magic worked with it isn’t like other spells. It doesn’t dissipate quite as cleanly and harmlessly as other forms.”

“So where is it going to go when the doors open?” Elaina wondered with an arched brow.

Herrog paused a moment in his tinkering to think before answering. “We’ll open the doors nice and slow, give everything a chance to bleed off slowly, I guess.”

“You guess?” Trevik asked incredulously. “Is that really going to work?”

“Dunno,” Herrog admitted with a shrug of his bulky shoulders. “Like I said, I’m not an expert on the magic aspect of things. My expertise is in stone and metal---it’s construction, how it fits together---that sort of thing.”

“It’s alright,” Elaina assured him. “I’m sure you have everything under control. The worst this vault has to offer is behind us, right?”

A smirk tugged at the corner of Elsebeth’s lips as she glanced sideways at Elaina. “Careful you don’t jinx us, Woodlock.”

Kitch returned with more soldiers and prioritized those alive but in the worst shape. The rest followed soon after, with Resius among them.

“Hold on,” Elaina called, holding a hand up to the pair carrying the occultist out. As she approached, she pulled the amulet from around her neck and placed it around his. She didn’t know for sure if it would help, but if he was having trouble sleeping, perhaps it was related to the amulet. The landgraf appeared beside her and placed the crystal orb inside his coat. At some point in the confusion, Elaina had dropped it.

“Take good care of him,” Elsebeth instructed the soldiers. Each gave the landgraf a respectful nod before carrying him out of the chamber. A hissing sound followed by a low groan pulled their attention away from the occultist and back to the door, which had slowly begun to open.

“Looks like I got it,” Herrog said, leaning into his crowbar before pushing back with all his strength. Sure enough, something inside the door popped, and the combination of hissing and groaning continued. They all moved to join him, grabbing other tools to help the process along, fastening ropes to a bar that they slipped through the narrow opening before turning and pulling.

“Woodlock, can you slip through?” The landgraf asked with a grunt, nodding toward the narrow space.

Elaina nodded before abandoning her position on the line where she’d been pulling and squeezed through the gap to the other side. The darkness beyond prevented her from seeing anything, which made it all the more unsettling to be the only person standing there. Ignoring the feeling as best as she could, she placed both hands against her side of the door and put all her weight into pushing. The door crept open further, much faster than it had before. With her boots scraping along the stone floor, they gradually built momentum until, finally, the opening was wide enough for the bar to come free and clatter to the ground.

“It’s open!” Herrog barked from the other side before letting out a triumphant laugh. “Finally!”

“McKenna,” the landgraf called. “Get some light in there for us.”

Royce stepped through the opening almost immediately, casting a few globes of light into the darkened chamber with a flick of her wrist. “Are you alright?”

“Better now,” Elaina breathed, offering the witch a smile. “How about you?”

“Shakey, but holding on,” Royce admitted. Behind her, Kitch stepped through the opening with the landgraf, and the others followed soon after.

“*La Vache*,” Kitch exclaimed under her breath as she looked beyond them and further into the vault. Elaina and Royce’s gazes followed hers, earning similar gasps of awe from both.

The vault went on well beyond the magical light provided by Royce. On either side of the wide corridor, stacked shelves carved from the stone of the walls themselves overflowed with treasure to the point that it had spilled onto the floor. There was nowhere they could walk that they wouldn’t be forced to step on something of value. Elaina could feel the magical auras in various forms scattered amid the treasure. Just a few of them would have been enough to outfit an elite squad or fund dozens of soldiers for their value in coin. Elaina couldn’t imagine what could be done with how much more there was.

“Woodlock,” the landgraf said, looking over at Elaina. “I want you to accompany Mr. Arkere down to the other end so he can begin his cataloging.”

“Uh,” Elaina muttered, glancing at the knocker and nodding. “Do you need to grab anything?”

Trevik hoisted a bag over his shoulder and shook his head wordlessly. The two began down the long corridor in complete silence. Elaina glanced back at Royce who directed one of the motes of magical toward her. It came to rest just over her head and followed them as they continued.

“I have light,” Trevik murmured, motioning to a lantern hanging from his pack.

Elaina held her hands up defensively. “I’m just trying to help. Not looking for a fight.”

“Yeah,” Trevik snorted through his nose. “I know. Wish I would have been a little quicker to figure that out. Could have saved us both some trouble.”

The redhead’s pace slowed as she looked over at him, tilting her head to one side. “You’ve changed your mind about me?”

Trevik offered a stiff nod in reply but didn’t dare look at her yet. “Seems so.”

“Why?” Elaina asked plainly, resuming her previous pace alongside him.

Trevik seemed to be struggling with what he was going to say or how he would say it. “I was positive it was you, but I was wrong. The lonruyanu threw me off. I never thought something like that would be here... nightmare from my childhood made real.”

Tempted as though she was to gloat or rub it in, Elaina placed a hand on his shoulder instead. He winced slightly, looking at her with a mixture of surprise and horror. Elaina squeezed gently. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not, but I appreciate you saying as much,” Trevik muttered morosely. “I was way off. A few similarities between you and it shouldn’t have been enough for me to get so mixed up.”

“Similarities?” Elaina responded, pulling her hand back slowly. “What similarities.”

“C’mon,” Trevik scoffed as he came to a stop. They’d nearly reached the other end of the vault. Slinging the pack from his shoulder, he traced a small rune on the lantern's surface to cause the interior to magically ignite with cold white light. “I can see it even better now that the lonruyanu is gone. You’re not from this world.”

Elaina regarded him silently before briefly turning her attention to the stone shelves, each overflowing more than those closer to the entrance. “I don’t want everyone to know.”

“Why not?” Trevik asked as he pulled a long sleeve of parchment from his pack, followed shortly after by ink and quill.

Elaina turned to face him even as he began to count the shelves and decide how he would organize his inventory. Though the knocker served as the cook for the delve, his duties as the quartermaster took precedence. His obsessive attention to detail made it so that nothing went unaccounted for, but he had his work cut out for him when it came to the vault’s contents.

“Because I escaped,” Elaina finally answered. “And I don’t want to go back. No one should have to.”

The knocker’s quill paused as he looked over at her. “You escaped through the Faen?”

“Yeah, I was found by accident,” Elaina responded, leaving Kaethe’s name out of it. She didn’t want to drag her into anything without good cause.

Trevik lowered the parchment slowly and shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t think so. I might not have gotten it right before, but the Wyrd still hangs about you. Your rescue wasn’t an accident. It was fate.”

“Fate?” Elaina laughed shortly. “Are you serious? I’m some kind of chosen one?”

“No, idiot,” Trevik snapped irately. “Just that the Wyrd has an interest in your fate. Perhaps you’re meant to serve it in some way. It could even be a matter of someone else interfering in fate, and you’ve been tasked with correcting it.”

Elaina stared at him, seeing no hint in his eyes that he was joking. “How would I know?”

Trevik shrugged. “There might have been clues that you just haven’t picked up on. Maybe you haven’t arrived at the point in your life where you’re even supposed to know. My understanding of this comes from the stories I heard growing up, like the lonruyanu shit. But what I know is that the Wyrd doesn’t make mistakes or do things by accident. There’s always some weird purpose---a rhyme or reason, you know?”

“I didn’t have much of an education growing up,” Elaina remarked uncomfortably. “Not even stories like what you had. I crammed as much as I could when I got here, but there are still a lot of gaps. I should probably learn more about the Wyrd and the Faen.”

Trevik returned to rifling through the nearest shelf, pausing to annotate what he found in one of a few different columns. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Faelings seldom know much about their heritage.”

“Really?” Elaina looked at him curiously. “Have you known many?”

“Only a few,” Trevik answered without taking his eyes off his task. “But most didn’t even know they were faelings, that’s what I mean. Your lot can turn up as grandchildren or several generations down the line. Sometimes whole families manifest as faelings. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it.”

“I guess the Wyrd’s rhyme and reason doesn’t apply to us, eh?” Elaina remarked with a little smirk.

“Not to us, anyway,” Trevik responded without acknowledging her humor. “You should probably get going. I’ll be fine here for now.”

Elaina glanced around at the shelves and the high ceiling before turning her gaze back on Trevik. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” Trevik confirmed, giving her a brief look and reassuring nod. “Thanks, though.”

Elaina offered the knocker a warm smile before thumping the armor over her chest. She knew he hadn’t technically given it to her of his own volition, but it didn’t change that it had probably saved her life. “No, thank you.”

The swordmage turned and started back toward the front of the vault in silence. Trevik didn’t seem terribly bothered that she wasn’t in the know when it came to her heritage or all things fae, but it was starting to bother her. She supposed the next time she had a chance, she would stop somewhere with books on the subject and do some proper research.

“Everything alright, Woodlock?” Elsebeth asked as she approached the group at the front of the vault. She’d fixed the state of her hair and appeared to be in better spirits.

“Yeah, he’s getting right to it,” Elaina replied with a brief motion toward the rear of the vault. “Already writing everything down.”

“Excellent,” the platinum blonde said, a gentle smile beginning to find its way to her lips. “I’ll have some more men sent down to assist him with the sorting.”

“I’m sure he’ll love that,” Elaina laughed. “Guess my work here is done, then?”

“It would seem so,” Elsebeth acknowledged. “It’ll take a little while to tally up the value and to get you your share, but until that’s done, you can consider yourself my guest.”

Elaina smiled. It was a nice gesture to have brought her on as a member of the delve in the first place, considering Elaina had come to Willowridge under different pretenses on an errand for her sister and ended up being offered a generous portion of what they stood to recover from the vault. “Thank you, that’s very generous.”

Elsebeth took a few steps closer to the redhead, enough that she could smell the remnants of the perfume the landgraf had put on that morning despite the battle they’d been through since then. “Perhaps a little celebration is in order. I’ll be throwing something special for everyone once we know the final tally, but some unofficial celebrations are in order until then, don’t you think?”

“Uhm,” Elaina wavered briefly as she tried to figure out what Elsebeth was getting at. “I think that sounds like a good idea, yeah.”

Elsebeth’s brow arched. “So you’ll join me then?”

“Do you mean just us?” Elaina clarified, glancing past the landgraf toward Royce, looking for some assistance with the situation. Instead, what she got was Royce nodding emphatically as she gave her two thumbs up.

“Indeed,” the landgraf replied, her voice a little lower. “It would have been unethical before. But your work is completed.”

Elaina’s eyes darted back to Royce, who repeated her silent, enthusiastic encouragement. “I understand,” she said as she met the landgraf’s gaze, a little flutter in her stomach. “Where and when would you like me to meet you?”

“Evening, in my chambers,” Elsebeth instructed with a little glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “Nineteen bells. Is that alright with you?”

“Perfect.” Elaina hadn’t even given it a second thought at that point. She could have said any time she wanted, and the redhead would have agreed to her invitation. Elsebeth offered her another soft smile before turning her attention back to her work of securing and organizing the vault.

Moving over to where Royce stood, Elaina took the witch’s arm and pulled her aside. “What the hell was that?”

“What do you mean?” the blonde laughed. “You want to fuck her, right?”

Intense heat filled Elaina’s face at how brazen the vishanti was about it. “I mean you cheering it on and pushing me toward her. You’ve been acting strangely. First, there was the outburst at the end of the battle, and now this.”

Royce jerked her arm away and waved a hand dismissively. “You’re reading too much into it. I got a little carried away in the fight because of how badly it was going. I might not like Resius, but we have history, and seeing him get smacked around like that was unexpectedly disturbing.”

Elaina nodded, understanding a little of what she meant. He could get on her nerves sometimes, but at the end of the day, the occultist was usually trying to help.

“And the idea of the same happening to you really got to me,” Royce continued. “Honestly, the idea of losing you hit me hard, and I had this knee-jerk reaction.”

“Really?” Elaina couldn’t help but swoon at the thought of Royce being so protective of her.

The witch smiled as she took Elaina’s hand. “Really. But don’t make a big thing of it, or I’ll deny it up and down.”

“I’ll try,” the swordmage mumbled, a little of the swooning magic gone with the disclaimer. “And Elsebeth?”

Royce shrugged slowly. “It doesn’t feel right to constrain you while I’m trying to keep things light and fun between us. If there’s an attraction there, I don’t want to hold you back while keeping things from getting serious. It’s a shitty thing to do.”

Bobbing her head from side to side in loose agreement, Elaina supposed there was a wisdom to it. It was an unconventional relationship and required an unconventional approach.

“Of course, even if we were an item,” Royce went on. “I don’t think I’d be so quick to restrict you. We’re both pretty free spirits, after all. You being faeling means there are certain urges and needs in your blood that might be hard to ignore. And so long as we’re open about it, there really isn’t a need to.”

Again, Elaina nodded. It was strange that she brought up her heritage like that when she’d just been speaking with Trevik about it before. She even used the same term of faeling, which struck her as unusual. It wasn’t such a rare term that she hadn’t heard it before. Indeed, she’d become frustrated with how often she’d heard it recently from things that wanted to kill her. But Royce had typically avoided using the term, though no reason had ever been given as to why.

“Does that make sense?” Royce pressed, cutting across Elaina’s internal monologue with ease.

“Yeah,” Elaina agreed, offering the witch she regarded as her girlfriend a smile. “It does. I appreciate that.”

“Good!” Royce concluded with a warm smile. “Besides, I’m going to be working late in here helping to identify what I can now that Resius is recovering. You might as well have an evening of fun while I’m stuck here.”

“We’ll do something when we get a chance,” the redhead assured her, tilting her head girlishly to one side.

“I’m more worried about getting it done and getting out of here,” Royce laughed as she glanced into the vault. There was a lot of work to do, and the witch was growing increasingly eager just to be done with the job. “Won’t be long now.”

“Royce!” Trevik’s voice echoed from the other side of the vault. “You going to sit there with your thumb up your ass, or can I trouble you to come do some actual work?”

“Duty calls,” Elaina chuckled as Royce rolled her eyes in exasperation. Knockers had such a way with words. Even when they were trying to be nice or needed something from someone else, they were always on the abrasive side. The moment of civility Elaina had shared with him was likely to be the only one outside of interactions with the landgraf he would have in quite a while.

“Yeah,” Royce snorted in acknowledgment. “Have you thought about what you’re going to wear?”

Frozen with the sudden realization, Elaina stared at Royce for a terrified moment. “Oh, shit.”

The witch let out a distinctive cackle before giving Elaina’s shoulder a playful shove. “Relax, we got plenty to choose from. I’m just teasing.”

“Gods!” Elaina snapped, realizing she’d been toyed with yet again. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help it,” she responded apologetically. “Grab something loose. Maybe a little revealing. Show off those tits a little and maybe make it easy for her to get to your---.”

“Royce!” Trevik interrupted, this time much louder. “I ain’t got all fucking day down here!”

As the two parted ways, Elaina couldn’t help but chew her lip as she stepped out of the vault. She had to remind herself that the previous encounter with Elsebeth, the one in her dream that the landgraf had long forgotten, had gone relatively well. There was no reason to believe she would be repulsed by the swordmage when the clothes came off, right?

No, Elaina thought. Elsebeth had invited her. She was interested specifically in an intimate encounter now that she felt the restrictions of ethics had been lifted. She was going to have a fun night. Everything was going to be fine.