Chapter 49
The End of Isolation
Mary stared at Sylvia disbelievingly, the words that the often-mischievous maid had uttered having not quite registered properly in the young princess’s mind.
“You helped mother build a hidden room in the palace?”
Mary questioned the silver-haired maid, doubt thick in her voice.
Immediately Sylvia pouted at her princess's doubt, the battle maid showing visible disappointment that her audacious claim hadn’t been believed by her not entirely gullible princess.
“I could have helped build a secret room, you know? I know magic! Really, what do you think of me?”
The maid asked her princess with a strange mixture of faux disappointment and mischievousness.
“Aren’t you clearly a headstrong battle maniac?”
Mary answered mercilessly, causing the maids' pout to deepen in what Mary took to be a blatantly false offence. Sylvia, seeing that her princess wasn’t going to continue her verbal examination and perhaps add a more positive observation, sighed in disappointment; subsequently, the maid gave in, admitting defeat.
"Ok, princess.”
The maid said with what Mary assumed was reluctant admission.
“The hidden room already existed when we found it, but as far as we could tell, it had been forgotten by the royal family centuries ago; if it had ever been known to them at all.” Sylvia explained, “Elizabeth was never really certain if the hero had ever told any of his descendants about it or if it was genuinely hidden...”
The maid trailed off, her eyes momentarily losing focus as she allowed nostalgia and memory to grip her.
Unbeknownst to the princess, Sylvia fell deep into the memory of discovering the hidden room and many others like it. It was a secret of the palace that the maid had learnt alongside her friend; as far as the maid was concerned, the strangest part of the entire design was that the rooms were shockingly clean and well maintained for something that hadn’t been entered in what they had presumed to be centuries.
“I helped Elizabeth find and stock it though!”
Sylvia suddenly announced defensively, her eyes snapping back into intense focus.
Mary sighed in acceptance. “If you say so," she said teasingly.
“So, where do we go then?”
The princess asked, immediately switching focus back to leaving her increasingly restrictive chambers.
Sylvia smiled and turned towards the door; with a quick heave, she pulled the heavy-looking door open, revealing the hallway beyond. Stepping forward, Sylvia mischievously cast her eyes backwards to where she knew the princess was standing and answered.
“Follow me.”
And promptly walked out into the hallway.
Mary let out another far more frustrated sigh before quickly rushing to follow and, for the first time in her new life, found herself outside of the chambers that she had spent the last year living in.
As she followed her maid, the princess found herself scanning the hallway that she had just entered; to her eyes, what she saw appeared to be… strangely normal. Or rather, it was exactly what she would have expected given the room she had previously inhabited.
Something within the princess had thought that magic would have changed things, but it appeared that this was not the case.
Before her lay a grey stone hallway, one that stretched to the left and right of her chamber’s door. Lining the walls, Mary immediately noticed a series of light runes that were placed at regular intervals, imprinted deeply in the stone; the aspiring mage didn’t need to be told that these were clearly a replacement for the torches that would have otherwise been present in a less magical world.
They were extremely bright runes that illuminated what should have been a relatively dark hallway, so total was their brilliance that she couldn’t see any shadows in the hallway at all.
That at least was abnormal.
Mary eyed the runes in slightly awed wonder, almost reluctantly finding herself comparing them to the modern lights that Alexander had been so used to and concluding that the difference between them was so marginal that she couldn’t tell which was better.
‘Magic really is amazing, isn’t it?’
Mary noted to her second mind with an increasingly awed tone.
‘By conventional logic, Midgard should be centuries behind Earth, but those runes look about equal to some of the best lights that were available.’
{Well, there is the matter of powering them; for now they need to be manually recharged. Obviously there must be more to it than running wires in the walls, or it would have been done by now. And I do have to wonder what else could be added to the runic mix; if we consider our current invisibility, that alone is proof that they aren’t using them to the best effect.}
Mary nodded in agreement, visibly considering the possible avenues of improvement.
‘Lights that can reveal stealth would be rather fancy, wouldn’t it? Then again, if you’ve gone that far, wouldn’t it make sense to go full big brother and have internal cameras too?’
{The latter would probably require far more modification and some sort of observation room to receive signals. But then again, if you’re tearing down the walls to install some sort of power transmission system, you might as well go all the way, right?}
The currently invisible princess listened as the collective of Marys all echo varying sounds of agreement before turning their eyes back towards the hallway. On both sides, she quickly noted the doors that lined both walls and beyond even them, the intersections at either end that branched off to a seemingly endless number of branching causeways.
For a moment, Mary considers the sight before her and ultimately comes to a strange conclusion, one that she had already reached but sought to internalise.
‘It looks surprisingly normal, doesn’t it?’
Mary remarked internally.
The second mind within Mary hummed in affirmation.
{It’s not that surprising really. Terra never had a chance to create its own unique culture, and that extends to architecture too.}
Mary nodded in agreement as she pursued Sylvia down the hall, passing the first set of intersections and what she immediately realises was a stairwell.
{Clearly, this area of the world was heavily influenced by ancient Europeans. That this palace looks like a relatively average European castle/palace should be expected really.}
‘I’m not sure what I was expecting to be honest, but somehow I thought that it might have involved more magic… All I can see are the light runes.’
The second mind hummed again and answered teasingly, {Maybe most of the magic is hidden in the walls. We can see the magical lights, and we know that the walls have been enhanced for toughness, but what about that magical observation system we mentioned? One of those would work much better hidden, no?}
Mary considered what she recognised as a joke for a second before dismissing the possibility.
‘Not likely. One of the primary jobs of maids seems to be recharging magic; unless they also recover the local records, then it would just be a waste of energy. I would be willing to bet that power would be easier to transmit than images.’
The princess felt agreement from her second mind at the dismissal.
{And Sylvia would have presumably told us if there was a system like that in place.}
Mary blinked owlishly at her oversight and instantly agreed with the assessment.
In front of her, Mary saw Sylvia slow come to a stop, her arm reaching out to deliberately grab one of the doors. To Mary the door looked indistinguishable from any of the other doors in the hall, looking no different from her own chambers. But she supposed that if you were to hide a secret room, you would do so in such a way as to make it difficult to find.
The maid pulled the door open and then she waited, looking straight at the princess.
Mary lightly sighed, still annoyed that her stealth spell was so subpar, but stepped forward into the room nonetheless.
*Slam*
The princess heard the door close behind her almost as soon as she had passed the threshold, causing Mary to flinch at further proof that the maid knew exactly where she was.
As Sylvia stepped forward, back into the princess vision, Mary took the time to scrutinise the room that allegedly held the entrance to a secret room.
The first thing Mary said was that she was once again alone with her maid; the next was mildly surprising.
“… A storage room?”
Mary asked verbally, staring at what she would call junk that had been stacked in the room.
“That’s right, it’s just a random storage room; almost nobody comes in here.”
Sylvia answers consideringly.
“Maybe the secret that this room holds would have been discovered sooner, but the Midgard palace is honestly too large for the kingdom. To be honest, many of the rooms are like this… Elizabeth had theorised that it was intentional.”
Mary frowned at the explanation, wondering if the maid was truly saying that her ancestor had designed a palace with functionally useless rooms.
“The palace was designed so that the secret rooms remained secret then?”
The princess asked doubtfully.
Sylvia turned her head towards her princess and smirked.
“Oh definitely, we found most of the secrets of the palace, you know? Some of them were very interesting, but this one was unused.”
Mary allowed her frown to deepen as she considered the maids' words.
“Unused secret rooms?” The princess asked again in disbelief, “You’re joking.”
“No.”
Sylvia answered simply and then continued thoughtfully, “Well, most, if not all, of the secret rooms are linked by equally secret passages; they’re much more difficult to find, though. Even with all of our dungeoneering experience, we never found all of them.”
At that piece of information Mary understood broadly what had gone on here. Clearly, the original Midgardian hero had been of the opinion that a royal palace needed to have secrets and thus created a genuine labyrinth of secret passages and equally secret rooms.
{No doubt there’s a personal library and/or laboratory hidden in there somewhere. Maybe even a treasury.}
Mary mentally grunted in agreement, privately wondering when she was going to stop being surprised by the depths that her predecessors habitually fell to.
“I’m sorry to say your ancestor was more than a bit strange.”
“Apparently.”
Mary sighed in agreement.
“So where is the secret room? I don’t see any conspicuous candlesticks or bookshelves.”
The princess asked sarcastically, scanning the chaotically stocked room for any hints.
“The second one was a good guess.”
Sylvia said, chuckling, “But as you saw in the hallway, a candlestick would be a bit too conspicuous to work.”
“By which you mean there are absolutely bookshelves that have hidden switches?”
“There are. But they’re not hidden in books; those tend to get moved about, you see.”
Sylvia answered.
“Buttons built into the shelves though? That’s a relatively common means of accessing the passageways.”
Mary took in the explanation and scanned the room again, but once again saw only stacked junk, the sort of leftovers that are accumulated over the course of decades and inevitably end up being stored in a typical basement or loft.
Dismissing the moveable junk in the room, Mary checked the walls for fixtures but saw none.
Frowning, she threw her mind back to the long-memorised layout of her chambers, trying to see if there were any differences in the walls, but again found nothing of note.
“Can’t find it, princess?”
Sylvia said teasingly, “Well, it is a secret room after all.” She chuckled again.
“Where is it then?”
Mary sighed in defeat.
“Over here.”
Sylia immediately answered, stepping towards the back wall and pointing at a stone block that looked identical to all of the others.
“It’s a stone block.”
Mary said, her eye twitching in annoyance.
“So, it is.”
Sylvia said in agreement.
“Don’t feel bad; the switch is hidden by extremely powerful magic. Even I only noticed it because your mother pointed it out.”
The maid revealed grandly.
The princess frowned again, staring at the stone block with her mana sight, but still, she could see nothing.
“As skilled as you are for your age, you’re not going to see it, princess.”
Sylvia said almost chidingly.
“Unless you’re a B-ranked mage, you’re not going to spot it without aid. Even then, it would depend on the mage’s skillset.”
Mary scoffed in reluctant agreement, mentally deciding that she was going to figure out how to spot the palace's secrets before she left the palace.
The princess watched as Sylvia pushed the stone block inwards; what happened next caused Mary to flinch as she was bombarded by the memories of the moments preceding Alexander's death.
The wall folded away, the bricks simply disappearing as a person-sized entrance appeared; beyond, she saw what she recognised as a library, one that she knew she would be visiting often in the years to come.