Chapter 97. Don’t Tell Me You Touched It?
My head felt like it had been poured full of swamp water. I sat in the chair that Minnelil had sat in earlier, and leaned back. “Right, I’m sitting down, I’m feeling fine. Start talking already.”
Minnelil jumped to sit on the table, and I wrapped my fingers around her ankle. It felt safe to touch her, feel that she was still warm and soft.
“The presence got mad, as you probably noticed. Most undead don’t get mad. They are at peak anger constantly,” Minnelil said. “You had already said it’s alive, but it took everyone a moment to figure out what it meant or what to do about it.”
I leaned forward, resting my elbow on the table and my chin on my palm. My legs felt like they had been cramping for an hour. “I had a hunch earlier, but it never really clicked before. The rot and the mold. The real Null doesn’t smell like anything. How could it?”
“Indeed,” Falar said. “We knew the entity lingered on the outskirts of death, with an anchor here in the world, but that is what all undead do. This is something else. Something both here and there, alive in a way that the undead are not.”
Minnelil tousled my hair and I let my eyes close. If the thing would come for her, it would pay. I had no idea what I would or could do, but it would pay. I would tear the mountain down and grind it to gravel and whatever monsters lived there with it.
“What an atypically unacademic explanation by our Lecturer,” Jextor shouted. “Couldn’t have said it better myself, though. It’s all pretty mystifying.”
“All that better have actually meant something,” I said, snapping my eyes open. “So help me, if that whole thing was another wacky and dangerous experiment with nothing to show for it.”
“Lina, don’t worry,” Minnelil said, smiling and working on my scalp with her fingers. “It was mystifying, but also very illuminating. Organizing and figuring out everything we learned and can still learn will take a while. This ritual served its purpose and more.”
A groan came from somewhere on the floor. Grit still lay on her back with Fek crouching beside her.
“I think she’s pretty knackered,” he said, poking her in the side with a finger.
“Stop it,” Grit said weakly. “But I bet she’s right. I had to focus on holding the circle together and couldn’t pay that much attention, but things actually went surprisingly according to plan, didn’t they?”
“What?” I said.
“Quite,” Falar said. “If outright capture or destruction turned out to be unfeasible, as we suspected from the very beginning, the secondary goal was always for you and the Chancellor to drive the entity to overreach.”
“…The plan was that we make the thing mad?”
“Sounds like a pretty solid plan to me,” Fek said.
“And to me too,” Jextor said, nodding with a serious expression on his ridiculous face.
I groaned. “You know, I guess I can’t even fault you for that. So, I guess it worked? Why did I pass out again? I seem to do it a lot.”
“You drive yourself too hard,” Minnelil said softly, brushing my cheek.
“Bah, there’s no such thing as too hard,” Falar said. “You passed out because of the combined backlash from the entity’s attention snapping off and from the circle being overloaded by the overeager boy.”
“So, Fek did the same thing that Jextor did back then on the mountain? Why isn’t everyone all happy and running around the place?”
“No,” Falar said, looking up at the ceiling. “This ritual circle was a wholly distinct magical construction from the—”
“Fine, fine, whatever,” I said. “The entity got booted out and it knocked me out. What next?”
“That is an excellent question!” Jextor said. He walked to Grit, grabbed the front of her robe and lifted her to her feet with one hand. “We will go through everything that happened with the Lecturer. I expect we will learn much. Much like on the mountain, we’ve dealt a blow to the entity.”
Grit wobbled with her arms held wide as Jextor paced along the burned-out circle of runes. “The ritual circle worked similarly to the Etherthorne Weave, building a barrier around this room. When it was forced to flee, the entity had to shred itself to get away. The damage must have been serious, but it won’t be enough.”
“If we accept what you said about the entity not being dead to be true,” Falar said, “it can’t be dealt with in any one simple way. We will need to destroy it simultaneously on both the physical and metaphysical levels.”
“So, back to the mountain?” I asked.
“Back to the mountain!” Jextor shouted.
“But not before proper preparation. There are no tents to rent and you know what happened to the undead escort on the last try,” Falar said.
Minnelil steadied Grit and walked her to the table. I sat up, letting Minnelil put Grit on the chair.
She slumped and sighed deeply. “Why am I the most tired?”
“I have a lot of energy,” Fek said.
“I just took a nap,” I said.
“I have been just standing here,” the janitor said. “But I think I’ll go now, if it’s all the same to everyone. I’ll sweep up the place later once you’ve finished your chat.”
“We are done,” Falar said. “Everyone has earned a moment of rest and reflection.”
“I’ll start sweeping, then.”
“I wanted to stay and watch,” Fek said. “I bet he was going to burn the whole room. The stuff you used to draw the runes was really sticky.”
“Don’t tell me you touched it?” Grit said.
“What, why? What was it?” Fek asked.
Minnelil made a burping noise and lifted a hand to cover her face.
“Actually, don’t tell me. Do you think it’s dinnertime already?”
I shrugged and pushed my hands deeper into my pockets. My legs were sore and I took stiff steps, trying not to bend my knees. We were passing the massive group of skeletons standing in a tight cluster on the open ground below the Academy. Their bones rattled, buffeted by the cold wind. “How long was I out?”
“Not more than fifteen minutes,” Minnelil said. “But you and Jextor spent almost five hours standing in place before the entity found you and you started twitching and muttering.”
“Five hours! Well, I guess he did say our sense of time might be affected.”
“Yeah, it was really boring,” Fek said. “We played a lot of cards with the janitor.”
“I had to keep running around the circle the whole time,” Grit said.
“Bah, Falar kept calling you his good little assistant, so I bet you loved it,” Fek said.
“Hee hee,” Grit said, smiling and wiggling her hips.
I groaned. “I want to miss the next five hours too, if you all are going to be like this.”
When we reached the dorm, a student startled and started to run down the stairs toward us. I think he was the guy from the reanimation class, the doofus who had sat behind Fek and me. Was his name Bumbert? That would be weird, but I was too tired to care.
He stopped next to the stairs and coughed into his fist. “Ahem,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, stepping into the dorm past him. I walked to the two beds pushed next to each other and sat on the edge. Clickens popped out from under the covers and came to sit on my lap. “Can you knead me a bit? My thighs are really sore.”
Clickens mewed and started to push its paws into the knotted muscles in my legs. I groaned and tipped back to lie on the beds.
“Um, Lina,” Grit called.
“What?” I asked, shutting my eyes.
“Humbert had a message for you.”
“Is it important? Tell him I’ll get back to him once my cat has tenderized my legs.”
“Um,” Humbert said.
“I can take it,” Minnelil said. “What is it, Humbert? We’ve all had a long day.”
“Frederik asked if I could come and invite you over. You and her. He’s serving dinner in his quarters. Just a small gathering of three.”
“We’d be delighted,” Minnelil said.
“Nooo!” I howled. Clickens screeched.
“She’s excited too,” Minnelil said. “The cat probably trod on a sore muscle. Tell Frederik we’ll be there dinnertime.”
“Great!” Humbert said. “Lucky that I caught you. The last guy peeked in when you were gone and the cat hissed at him. He refused to try again.”
“Why do you run errands for stupid Frederik anyway?” I called from the bed, still staring at the ceiling. “Why doesn’t he send a skeleton like everyone else?”
“Your boss took all the council skeletons,” he said. “So we’re all running errands for each other. It’s pretty fun.”
“I should go and check up on her,” I muttered. The Bursar had sent me a card telling me to get well soon. I had got well, but the ritual had swallowed the whole day already, so hopefully tomorrow would be soon enough. I had already faced one baffling non-living entity today, and it was enough.
“I hope the Bursar gets the skeletons moving soon. Having so many of them just waiting around unnerves me,” Grit said.
“Why did you say yes to the invitation?” I asked.
Minnelil sat next to me on the bed. She had pulled Clickens to her lap, and was shaping its ears more pointy. “I know you’ve had a long day, but it’s better to get it over with. And Frederik has probably organized everything already. Most people accept an invitation from a Rodn.”
I groaned. “We aren’t people. I’m a feral goblin and you’re an elf.”
“You keep saying you aren’t, so you have to go.”
“Ugh, fine. But you’ll owe me something in return.”
“Of course,” she said, smiling.
I smiled too. I rolled to my side to bury my face in her side. “You don’t, actually,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
Big day, big day! Book Two finished on Patreon this morning! If you want to rush ahead and read the whole second book, you can use discount code BOOK2 to get your first month 30% off. The discount is up until Nov 5.There's also a new bonus chapter coming on Thursday about what Grit and Lian get up to afterwards. If you do start supporting me on Patreon, check out The Academy by Night collection. There's some very extracurricular activities going on there...