Chapter 117: Roommate (Patreon)

[A picture of a wooded glade where a dryad is relaxing against a tree as a bird nests on her head.]

T is for trees, so tall and mighty, they house the dryads and birds small and flighty. Some trees can talk, while others can rove, but they all find themselves home at the Grove.

-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic

—

There was a brief flurry of chaos following Amintha’s disappearance and the implications therein. Another search mission was executed across campus, and this time Kole got to witness it. The visiting adventurers scoured the campus, most heading into the Dahn to examine its far flung halls, but some explores the outer buildings which as Kole well knew by now were also connected to the central building through magical means.

Professor Dongeflore borrowed Amara’s tracker—which they’d noticed had stopped working—and tried to improve the design to get it working, but nothing he could do could get it tracking.

Divination magic was used on Amara, to try to find her sister, but that too produced no results. Kole’s team made a half-hearted effort to join in the search, but once they were told not to by the staff, they quickly agreed to watch over Amara. They were exhausted, and while they’d been riding high on the success of their second succeful rescue—possibly third and forth if you counted possibly real girls and elemental foxes—the hardball match had shown them that they had met and exceeded their limits and needed rest. By then, even Doug was exhausted.

With campus in chaos, they retreated to Zale’s house, where they sat around playing a card game to distract Amara. She’d never played before, but her analytical mind quickly picked it up and provided a good distraction.

 Once Amara settled down, and Zale had run returned with a catering cart laden with food, Kole decided it was time to broach the elephant in the room.

“Amara,” he said, waiting for her to look at him. “I think your sister might have been working with the spiders.”

She fiddled with her cards, flicking them nervously for a moment before saying, “I do too. It… fits.”

“How?” Doug asked, looking between the two.

“The spider’s behavior?” Kole asked, more than said, looking to Amara for confirmation.

Amara nodded.

“Even if the spider’s could borrow the power of our Font, Understanding is shared through the desire to be understood. The spider’s couldn’t have learned to cooperate like an ant colony unless they had someone who knew how one functioned and wanted to teach them.”

“And the room,” Zale chimed in. “She had a nice room, nice clothes.

“But how?’ Rakin asked. “Hawk didn’t go missing ‘til after yer sister. How’d she get the spider ta not eat her?”

“She always wanted to get out of the hive back home,” Amara said, not really answering the question. “She came here, because it was the only excuse she could come up with to be allowed to leave. I expect she went pocking around in the depths of the library and stumbled on a door to the mage slayer. If she was caught, and kept alive in a cocoon—“Amara shuddered at the thought”—eventually she could have reached through to the spider through our magic, especially if the spider was drawing the power from her.”

“Then why’d they need Hawk?” Rakin asked.

When no one answered, Kole spoke.

“I don’t know. Maybe it made the connection stronger? There was that third captive, the dead one on the end. Maybe they were a Bond primal and it was needed the whole time? Or maybe it helped her spread the connection to the othe spiders?”

“Nah,” Rakin, said. “That was a stoneweaver. I’d bet me beard on it. Those caves had been carved out with Earth magic—proper Earth magic, not that weird stuff on the road and armor. Wherever those spiders were before that crazy place, they caught a dwarf.”

They talked about it some more and eventually moved on to lighter things, until one by one they went off to find a couch or bed to sleep on. There’d been an unspoken agreement to not leave Amara alone that night.

Before going off to her own room, Zale did something, touching a small crystal on the wall, and while Kole couldn’t exactly pinpoint what, the room somehow felt more dangerous.

She caught him watching.

“Extra security,” she said. “I expect the headmasters are going to enact some of their emergency powers over the Dahn and cast off as much of the extra-dimensional portions as possible. I expect only the library will remain, and that will have tightened security.”

“Oh…” Kole said, happy to hear the school was going to do something, but not happy to learn it would be harder to sneak into his room.

While the Chancellor of the school had given him tacet agreement to stay there, he didn’t think the librarians would take his word for it.

“That’s good, I suppose.”

He’d been meaning to ask Zale something—well, lots of somethings, but this something was more relevant—and being alone he went for it.

“Why did that prophecy put you so at ease with your mom’s situation?” Kole asked.

Zale stiffened, visibly clamming up as she contemplated what to say. In the end, she settled on saying little.

“I can’t say,” she said apologetically, but when she saw the disappointment on Kole’s face, she hastened to add, “It’s not that I don’t trust you! I do! Totally and completely!”

Kole felt a flutter in his chest and the earnestness in that statement, that pushed away the minor letdown of not receiving an answer he’d fully not expected to get.

“I can’t tell anyone. I think in the whole world, only mom, Aunt Dagmar, Rakin and I know this. But I can say this. It’s not a prophecy, or anything like that, there have been times where my mom has been inexplicably right about things yet to come. She has a proven reliable source that has given her a heads-up a time or two. She wouldn’t send that note with such confidence if that wasn’t the case here.”

“Thanks, for trusting me,” Kole said, not sure what else to say.

Zale left then, to her own room, and Kole walked into a room he thought to be the privy, and found himself back in his own room as well.

“Umm,” he said, looking back and forth from his bed to the room Zale had just left through. The door on the opposite side, which had once led to the library, was now gone.

Suddenly, Kole was very glad Zale’s mother was missing, because he didn’t want to have to explain this at all.