Chapter 99: Mole Chase (Patreon)

In this biography, I will not try to paint him in any light bu the truth, but here in the foreword I will say this:

When that young mage looked at me, and offered to help me, I saw that he genuinely cared about me and my friends. It shocked me then, and to this day still surprises me with all the more I learn. As he prepared to fight the war that would follow—with the fate of Kaltis on their shoulders—he and his friends stopped to help a group of nobody urchins find a fresh start.

Foreword of Tallen Elmheart A Biography by Rail Dahnchild

—

Underbrook left shortly after explaining his absence. There had been another incursion of the snake hyena monsters, and his aid had been required.

“So… the dungeons probably still open to that same plain then, right?” Kole asked the group once they were alone.

“Maybe,” Zale said. “If we are right.

“Want to go check it out?” Kole asked.

“Yeah but…” Zale began but then glanced at the doors around them. “let me get something first.”

She ran to one of the doors, grabbed the handle, and pulled. Instead of opening, the door vanished revealing bare stone, and Zale was left holding the handle. She held it up triumphantly.

“How’d you do that?” Kole asked, even as he went up to another door to try himself.

“You just have to want it to work,” Zale explained, “If of course you’ve been picked by mom to be able to do it at all. I was kicked off my list after I gave mine to Herald, but it looks like she returned the privilege without telling me before she left… or since she’s been gone.”

“Could she do that from afar?” Kole asked.

“I don’t know,” Zale said, then began to chew her lip. “I don’t even know where she is. I’m starting to get worried. She left a note that she had to go get something for Uncle Tal, but she hadn’t seemed too worried about it and thought she’d be back in a day or two.”

“Maybe we can have Amara build a tracker?” Kole suggested, but Zale shook her head immediately.

“You can’t track mom, she’s got some sort of anti-divination item or Blessing or something. I never got the sense she could turn it off at will.”

“She’ll be fine,” Rakin said, “Aside from me ma, yers is the toughest I know, but… maybe we send me ma a message to let her know she’s missing.”

While Kole suspected the first part of Rakin’s statement was meant to reassure Zale, it was the mention of his own adopted mother that helped.

“That’s a great idea!” Zale said, her worry gone.

Rakin excused himself to go get word to his mother.

“Wait, aren’t we going to search for Amara’s sister?” Kole asked before the group broke up.

“I can’t,” Zale said, “I have plans. But I’m free tomorrow. Let’s meet up at the study hall room and start our search from there.”

“I… also have plans,” Doug said after a moment.

“Bah!” Rakin shouted, “I’ll help, let the lovebirds go and waste their time.”

“I could reschedule,” Zale suggested in a tone that suggested she’d really rather not.

“It’s fine,” Kole said. “Just go, we’ll be fine.”

“Okay, but don’t go through any magic doorways without out us,” Zale said, gesturing at Doug and herself with the rod she still held.

They separated with plans for Rakin to meet Kole outside Amara’s workshop in an hour ready to explore.

***

“What did your mom say?” Kole asked Rakin as they traversed the hallways to Amara’s workshop.

“She said she knew what Zale’s ma was going after, and told me she was already working on it. She was… a little mad.”

“Why?” Kole asked

“Well, I never told her I was out of the dungeon,” Rakin confessed. “No one had told her I’d even gone missing in fact.”

“How mad is a ‘little mad’?” Kole asked.

“She went to the effort to use a Sending scroll to yell at me.”

Kole let out a low whistle. A scroll of Sending was valuable, and to use one to just yell at Rakin was an expensive way to get your point across.

When they got to Amara’s door, it only took a few heavy bangs from Rakin to bring her to the door.

“Oh, hey!” she said, surprised to see them. “What’s up?”

“Are you ready to go look for your sister?” Kole asked, “It’ll just be us today, but Doug and Zale will help tomorrow.”

“Of course!” she said, “Just let me get my things and clean up what I was working on.”

Kole watched in a trance as Amara ran around her workshop, touching and manipulating half a dozen works in progress as she went.

“How many projects are you currently working on?” Kole asked.

“In total? Or today?”

“Either? Both?”

She looked up in the air as if counting a list written on the ceiling behind Kole.

“Twenty, but only seven today.”

She grabbed her gear of the mannequin, putting on her belt and then grabbing Gus up as she walked out. The rat as always looked relieved to get out of the workshop.

To start, they headed over to the dungeon entrance chamber on the off chance that the staff had stopped manning the opening after Kole and his team had emerged.

They had not.

From what Kole remembered from their initial exit, it seemed the amount of people flittering about in the room had increased if anything.

On of the researchers within caught sight of them and came to meet them at the door.

“Amara, you’re not snooping again are you?” the human woman said.

Judging by her age—only a few years older than himself—and the familiar tone she used, Kole guessed she was an assistant to Professor Donglefore.

“No!” Amara squeaked out.

The woman raised an eyebrow not believing her at all.

“Well, then you better move along,” she said, looking over her shoulder. Then added in a whisper “And be careful this time.”

Amara nodded, turned around, and quickly walked away, leaving Rakin and Kole to catch up.

“Well that was a waste of time,” Rakin grumbled.

“No it wasn’t,” Amara said, already fiddling with a device.

“It wasn’t?” Kole asked.

“Nope,” Amara said, transfixed by her task.

Kole weighed his curiosity against the potential long-winded explanation. The former won out.

“Why wasn’t it a waste of time?”

Amara looked up at him with a familiar smile and fire in her eyes.

“I figured it out!”

***

Several minutes later, Kole thought he sort of kind of understood what Amara had done. While they’d been standing outside the door, her ants had been busy at work altering the runes on her tracking device ever so slightly to block out the strongest connection to her sister. Once that had been isolated and ignored, the tracker would then look for the next closest signal.

She’d had to devise this system herself. While tracking runes was common, no one had ever had to track a person who was simultaneously multiple distances away from the tracker.

There were a few downsides. With the ad hoc nature of the runes, Amara had to manually power the device herself with the custom intent developed to block the new pattern. She could eventually place that into a gem, but it was likely the signal would change before she could finish.

So, they followed the signal through the Dahn. Frequently stopping and changing directions as the signal either disappeared completely or changed directions on them. As before, it led them deep into the library, but after a few hours of searching, they had to call it a night.

“This is a rabid mole chase,” Rakin said after the signal had changed directions once more.

“A what?” Kole asked.

“A rabid mole,” he explained. “They go crazy, digging through tunnels and compromising the structures. So ye chase them, but they keep escaping through the maze of tunnels they already made.”

“How do you catch them then?” Kole asked.

“We just get a Stone weaver to crush them in their tunnels.”

“Well, that works I suppose.”

“I think I know what to do,” Amara said, interrupting.

“Really? The mole thing gave you an idea?” Kole asked eagerly.

“No,” Amara said flatly. “That was dumb, they should just put runes around the tunnel exits to kill the moles when they exit. There must be more than one way to my sister. This device is not equipped to handle the additional paths. At first, I thought the doors were just moving, but I’ve now determined they are simply more than two paths total—also the doors are still moving.”

“Well, that sounds like a pain in the arse,” Rakin said.

“I think I can figure it out, but I need to go check the dungeon signal again to see if it changed.”

They left the library with surprising speed, Kole could have sworn they’d spent far more time walking toward the edges than it took to exit. When they got to the door to the dungeon chamber, they found the door completely gone, only a small team of porters remained in the hallway outside loading crates onto a cart.

“Where’d the door go?” Kole asked.

“Oh, that?” one of the men in workers coveralls said, pointing to the wall. “I’m not sure where it is not, but the eggheads said they were going to ‘isolate the dungeon’ to see if it made them all those weird scaley horses stop showing up. And the snake dog things.”

“Flood,” Kole curse, and Rakin agreed with his own stream of Torcish words.