The City of Chello was famous for three things: 1) its beautiful choir which starts singing at high noon, 2) its fertilizer production, supplying 60% of Lyrica’s neds, and 3) Lord Crisens.
All three were interrelated. Lord Crisens, after all, descended from a lineage of mages famed for their Skill at constructing ritual spells. One of their best and oldest works was Chello’s song—O Bountiful Harvest—to be sung by every adult and elderly in the city, at noontime every day.
Each human had about 1MP. The song itself consumed 0.5MP when sung in its totality. With a population of 120,000, that was easily tens of thousands of MP being dumped into Chello’s surrounding soil, every single day.
It was around noon that Inquisitor Djarren Yal arrived at the outskirts. He had fewer escorts now, having sent the others on reconnaisance missions. His carriage hadn’t been washed in too many days, though few would point it out, not when it was blood that stained it.
A wagon train passed them on the wide road, carrying more loam soil out of the city. A large contingent of Soldiers on horseback escorted them from the sides and on the wagons themselves. Further beyond, out in the barren fields, were crews of weed-reapers and firestarters staving off nature from sucking up Chello’s brown gold.
Chello wasn’t Lyrica’s largest city, but its unique function couldn’t ever be replicated. The ancient Crisens lineage traded the city’s fertilizer, after all, for increased autonomy from the Throne. Its ritual spell, a splendid synergy of the whole city’s sing-chanting and the massive magic circle that surrounded it, was entirely too difficult to reproduce, its most important components being hidden deep inside Castle Choir.
Castle Choir’s spire was shining. As his carriage drew closer, he could hear the famed song of Chello humming in the air.
…As if it was just business as usual.
***
Ivory and bone…Castle Choir was made of so much of it. The rest of it was stone, of course, but wherever there were glyphs and carvings, on the walls and on the doors, Lord Crisens’ ancestors never failed to inlay all of it with some amount of horn or bone, sometimes even stained with different colors.
Yal stood in front of one of those place. It was a mural, of sorts, filled with carvings inlaid with stained bone, flush against the curves and dots in the gray-black wall.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
Yal turned to face Lord Crisens, who had just come into the private study—as far as “private” went for the Inquisition.
“My ancestors believed that animal parts amplified magic, somehow,” Lord Crisens continued. “Of course, one of them eventually realized that it didn’t really do anything. Nevertheless, the art of boneworking is still something of a sentimental culture. I have my own works, if you want to see.”
“As much as my interest is piqued, I am here on urgent business, Lord Crisens.”
“Of course, Esteemed Inquisitor. Shall we speak of it over tea?”
“In front of the works of your ancestors will do,” Yal said. He looked back to the glyphs on the wall. “This region is under much duress. I am surprised you haven’t reported such to Violentum.”
“Ah, but I had sent a report some days ago, you see.”
“How curious. As neither I, nor anyone I know, have seen it, would you care to enlighten me on the details?”
“But of course. Of the 5,000 troops belonging to my household, 4,500 have been dispatched to patrol the surrounds, and 500 remain to garrison this city, besides the 1,000 auxiliaries protecting this city at all times. Of the twenty-two towns in the surrounds, four have had to be abandoned in light of constant attacks by these…monsters.”
Crisens paused. “We still do not understand what they are, nor where they come from.”
Yal turned to face him. “Is that correct, Lord Crisens?”
“It is so, Esteemed Inquisitor.”
For a moment, Yal sharpened his every sense, reading even how the Lord’s eyebrows twitched and how one corner of his lips pulled back ever so slightly.
“So it seems,” Yal continued. “If you do not mind, I am willing to direct certain assets towards resolving your problems here. I will merely be requiring your hospitality.”
“Why, of course, Esteemed Inquisitor. The house of Crisens opens its doors to you.”
Yal left through the door, where a passing Maid bowed. Crisens couldn’t recall ever seeing that particular Maid, but he employed many staff in Castle Choir, and personnel management wasn’t really his job.
Another Maid saw Yal to a guest bedroom and left him be. The area had already been secured, and all present espionage devices, disabled. In the Lord’s defense, those devices had been turned off before the Inquisitor arrived. Why let them be, however?
A shadow appeared behind him.
“He is suspect,” Yal said. “It is clear that he is genuinely frustrated by the situation, but he knows of something, and wishes to hide it. Find out what it is.”
The shadow slinked away.
***
She was Inquisitor Yal’s shadow. Blessed by the Shadow Goddess, she could slink in and out of anywhere devoid of light—or more specifically, anywhere that wasn’t being observed.
Her name was Osellia, and she was being worked much too hard the past couple of days.
Even if she genuinely liked her work, it didn’t mean she liked Slinking Season, when she and her fellow shadows would be worked to the bone and be constantly put under the threat of discovery and death. Ah, well, it wasn’t as bad as the Deep Cover Academy graduates. Those girls were essentially in the same situation, but 100% of the time instead of just 20%.
But at least, if push came to shove, the Deep Cover graduates always had a redundant “99 contingencies” exfiltration plan to get them out. Meanwhile, they, the Shadow Academy graduates, universally had to just figure things out as they went along. More often than not, they would leave a trail of bodies in their wake, and the whole point of being super-secret gets tossed off the battlements.
Still, there were things she could look forward to. Castle Choir’s counter-intelligence staff weren’t anything of note. At best, they might catch a spy or two every year. They were competent, but they weren’t good.
That wasn’t the annoying thing, though. Castle Choir had too many anti-espionage devices, of both the mechanical and magical sorts.
They weren’t even complicated! Every single door had anti-lockpicking alarms. Every single restricted area had a guard post with motion sensors. Every single guard had a motion sensor on her back.
On top of that, there were heavy duty doors that needed a magic key to open, and they’d make the loudest noises when they did. At some point, there was some sort of puzzle door where she had to collect missing carved bone pieces and slot them into the right places, then rotate the whole thing, before even louder mechanisms started to rumble and the whole door swung open with a foreboding, hollow noise.
Truly, the Crisens household was leaning into its strengths in this department. Half of her magic usage had just been to muffle the noise, at this point.
With all these mechanical gimmicks, she couldn’t help but think, “This is starting to feel more and more like a Republic facility.”
It’s not as if using mechanical technology was illegal in Lyrica, and there hadn’t been any real evidence of the Lord’s collusion with Icassius-Artemia. It wasn’t a problem until it was a problem, and she contented herself with that.
Finally, she came upon every shadow’s most hated obstacle: a guard at the end of a long, narrow corridor.
For once, she envied the Deep Cover graduates. They could just casually walk up to this guy and knock them out or something, but no, she was a shadow.
If only…if only this guy would blink an unnaturally long blink! Come on! Anything so she could slink in!
“I know you’re there.”
H-huh? H-how?! She was in perfect cover! Osellia, don’t panic!
The guard sighed. “Of course there’s also nothing today…”
T-this bastard! Muttering scary things like that just because you’re bored!
Osellia sighed. Hopefully this was also the sort of person who’d randomly turn around and bump her head on the wall just because the silence was driving her crazy.
After ten minutes of nothing, the guard…she turned around!
…S-she’s hitting her head on the wall!
“I’m! So! Bored! Aaaa.”
Not letting this chance escape, Osellia slinked up to the guard’s back and waited for the right timing.
“Aaaaaa.”
The guard bumped her head on the wall, and with a light application of sleep magic, that was the last thing she remembered. She would wake up wondering how she’d managed to knock herself out.
Finally, Osellia confronted the door—but to her horror, there were ten different keys needed to open this last door. She quickly pulled up all the hundred different keys she’d stolen, both magical and mechanical, and picked through them, matching together labels and engraving patterns one by one.
It took a while, but to her relief, she already had all ten keys.
She stepped into the room. It was dark, but with her Blessing of Shadow Sight, this was no problem. She lifted up her blindfold and opened her eyes. All around her, in the grayscale that Shadow Sight allowed her, were runes and inscriptions covering every single square inch of the room—from the floors, to the cylindrical walls, to the conical dome ceiling.
What is this place? The inscriptions looked nothing like the magic circles that she knew. They felt more chaotic…more ‘organic’? They were more like…the Inquisition’s anti-magic runes.
She committed the room to Photographic Memory and slipped out of the area.
…But not before putting back all the one-hundred keys she stole to where she found them. Sigh.
Announcement (2023-04-30) Sooo originally, I wanted to bump posting up to twice a week, but IRL strikes again and I'm sticking with once a week for the foreseeable future.Also also, check out The AI Overlord is a VTuber. It's a short story about a superintelligent AI whose only motivation is to stream as a VTuber. I was possessed by GPT-8 of Christmas Future to write it, so I guarantee it's…well, it's a plot, alright.
The City of Chello was famous for three things: 1) its beautiful choir which starts singing at high noon, 2) its fertilizer production, supplying 60% of Lyrica’s neds, and 3) Lord Crisens.
All three were interrelated. Lord Crisens, after all, descended from a lineage of mages famed for their Skill at constructing ritual spells. One of their best and oldest works was Chello’s song—O Bountiful Harvest—to be sung by every adult and elderly in the city, at noontime every day.
Each human had about 1MP. The song itself consumed 0.5MP when sung in its totality. With a population of 120,000, that was easily tens of thousands of MP being dumped into Chello’s surrounding soil, every single day.
It was around noon that Inquisitor Djarren Yal arrived at the outskirts. He had fewer escorts now, having sent the others on reconnaisance missions. His carriage hadn’t been washed in too many days, though few would point it out, not when it was blood that stained it.
A wagon train passed them on the wide road, carrying more loam soil out of the city. A large contingent of Soldiers on horseback escorted them from the sides and on the wagons themselves. Further beyond, out in the barren fields, were crews of weed-reapers and firestarters staving off nature from sucking up Chello’s brown gold.
Chello wasn’t Lyrica’s largest city, but its unique function couldn’t ever be replicated. The ancient Crisens lineage traded the city’s fertilizer, after all, for increased autonomy from the Throne. Its ritual spell, a splendid synergy of the whole city’s sing-chanting and the massive magic circle that surrounded it, was entirely too difficult to reproduce, its most important components being hidden deep inside Castle Choir.
Castle Choir’s spire was shining. As his carriage drew closer, he could hear the famed song of Chello humming in the air.
…As if it was just business as usual.
***
Ivory and bone…Castle Choir was made of so much of it. The rest of it was stone, of course, but wherever there were glyphs and carvings, on the walls and on the doors, Lord Crisens’ ancestors never failed to inlay all of it with some amount of horn or bone, sometimes even stained with different colors.
Yal stood in front of one of those place. It was a mural, of sorts, filled with carvings inlaid with stained bone, flush against the curves and dots in the gray-black wall.
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
Yal turned to face Lord Crisens, who had just come into the private study—as far as “private” went for the Inquisition.
“My ancestors believed that animal parts amplified magic, somehow,” Lord Crisens continued. “Of course, one of them eventually realized that it didn’t really do anything. Nevertheless, the art of boneworking is still something of a sentimental culture. I have my own works, if you want to see.”
“As much as my interest is piqued, I am here on urgent business, Lord Crisens.”
“Of course, Esteemed Inquisitor. Shall we speak of it over tea?”
“In front of the works of your ancestors will do,” Yal said. He looked back to the glyphs on the wall. “This region is under much duress. I am surprised you haven’t reported such to Violentum.”
“Ah, but I had sent a report some days ago, you see.”
“How curious. As neither I, nor anyone I know, have seen it, would you care to enlighten me on the details?”
“But of course. Of the 5,000 troops belonging to my household, 4,500 have been dispatched to patrol the surrounds, and 500 remain to garrison this city, besides the 1,000 auxiliaries protecting this city at all times. Of the twenty-two towns in the surrounds, four have had to be abandoned in light of constant attacks by these…monsters.”
Crisens paused. “We still do not understand what they are, nor where they come from.”
Yal turned to face him. “Is that correct, Lord Crisens?”
“It is so, Esteemed Inquisitor.”
For a moment, Yal sharpened his every sense, reading even how the Lord’s eyebrows twitched and how one corner of his lips pulled back ever so slightly.
“So it seems,” Yal continued. “If you do not mind, I am willing to direct certain assets towards resolving your problems here. I will merely be requiring your hospitality.”
“Why, of course, Esteemed Inquisitor. The house of Crisens opens its doors to you.”
Yal left through the door, where a passing Maid bowed. Crisens couldn’t recall ever seeing that particular Maid, but he employed many staff in Castle Choir, and personnel management wasn’t really his job.
Another Maid saw Yal to a guest bedroom and left him be. The area had already been secured, and all present espionage devices, disabled. In the Lord’s defense, those devices had been turned off before the Inquisitor arrived. Why let them be, however?
A shadow appeared behind him.
“He is suspect,” Yal said. “It is clear that he is genuinely frustrated by the situation, but he knows of something, and wishes to hide it. Find out what it is.”
The shadow slinked away.
***
She was Inquisitor Yal’s shadow. Blessed by the Shadow Goddess, she could slink in and out of anywhere devoid of light—or more specifically, anywhere that wasn’t being observed.
Her name was Osellia, and she was being worked much too hard the past couple of days.
Even if she genuinely liked her work, it didn’t mean she liked Slinking Season, when she and her fellow shadows would be worked to the bone and be constantly put under the threat of discovery and death. Ah, well, it wasn’t as bad as the Deep Cover Academy graduates. Those girls were essentially in the same situation, but 100% of the time instead of just 20%.
But at least, if push came to shove, the Deep Cover graduates always had a redundant “99 contingencies” exfiltration plan to get them out. Meanwhile, they, the Shadow Academy graduates, universally had to just figure things out as they went along. More often than not, they would leave a trail of bodies in their wake, and the whole point of being super-secret gets tossed off the battlements.
Still, there were things she could look forward to. Castle Choir’s counter-intelligence staff weren’t anything of note. At best, they might catch a spy or two every year. They were competent, but they weren’t good.
That wasn’t the annoying thing, though. Castle Choir had too many anti-espionage devices, of both the mechanical and magical sorts.
They weren’t even complicated! Every single door had anti-lockpicking alarms. Every single restricted area had a guard post with motion sensors. Every single guard had a motion sensor on her back.
On top of that, there were heavy duty doors that needed a magic key to open, and they’d make the loudest noises when they did. At some point, there was some sort of puzzle door where she had to collect missing carved bone pieces and slot them into the right places, then rotate the whole thing, before even louder mechanisms started to rumble and the whole door swung open with a foreboding, hollow noise.
Truly, the Crisens household was leaning into its strengths in this department. Half of her magic usage had just been to muffle the noise, at this point.
With all these mechanical gimmicks, she couldn’t help but think, “This is starting to feel more and more like a Republic facility.”
It’s not as if using mechanical technology was illegal in Lyrica, and there hadn’t been any real evidence of the Lord’s collusion with Icassius-Artemia. It wasn’t a problem until it was a problem, and she contented herself with that.
Finally, she came upon every shadow’s most hated obstacle: a guard at the end of a long, narrow corridor.
For once, she envied the Deep Cover graduates. They could just casually walk up to this guy and knock them out or something, but no, she was a shadow.
If only…if only this guy would blink an unnaturally long blink! Come on! Anything so she could slink in!
“I know you’re there.”
H-huh? H-how?! She was in perfect cover! Osellia, don’t panic!
The guard sighed. “Of course there’s also nothing today…”
T-this bastard! Muttering scary things like that just because you’re bored!
Osellia sighed. Hopefully this was also the sort of person who’d randomly turn around and bump her head on the wall just because the silence was driving her crazy.
After ten minutes of nothing, the guard…she turned around!
…S-she’s hitting her head on the wall!
“I’m! So! Bored! Aaaa.”
Not letting this chance escape, Osellia slinked up to the guard’s back and waited for the right timing.
“Aaaaaa.”
The guard bumped her head on the wall, and with a light application of sleep magic, that was the last thing she remembered. She would wake up wondering how she’d managed to knock herself out.
Finally, Osellia confronted the door—but to her horror, there were ten different keys needed to open this last door. She quickly pulled up all the hundred different keys she’d stolen, both magical and mechanical, and picked through them, matching together labels and engraving patterns one by one.
It took a while, but to her relief, she already had all ten keys.
She stepped into the room. It was dark, but with her Blessing of Shadow Sight, this was no problem. She lifted up her blindfold and opened her eyes. All around her, in the grayscale that Shadow Sight allowed her, were runes and inscriptions covering every single square inch of the room—from the floors, to the cylindrical walls, to the conical dome ceiling.
What is this place? The inscriptions looked nothing like the magic circles that she knew. They felt more chaotic…more ‘organic’? They were more like…the Inquisition’s anti-magic runes.
She committed the room to Photographic Memory and slipped out of the area.
…But not before putting back all the one-hundred keys she stole to where she found them. Sigh.
Announcement (2023-04-30) Sooo originally, I wanted to bump posting up to twice a week, but IRL strikes again and I'm sticking with once a week for the foreseeable future.Also also, check out The AI Overlord is a VTuber. It's a short story about a superintelligent AI whose only motivation is to stream as a VTuber. I was possessed by GPT-8 of Christmas Future to write it, so I guarantee it's…well, it's a plot, alright.
