Sylver Seeker

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 7 (273) - Black Crown

It looked a lot like a parade, mainly because of the colorful clothing, the matching masks, helmets, and headwear.

But as they looked at Sylver, he saw something inhuman in their eyes, not merely not-human, but a polar opposite to such an extent that the hair on the back of his neck stood up straight.

They were revolting in a way very few creatures were.

“Is this Tenochtitlan?” Sylver asked at the nearest woman kneeling barely a meter away from him and the door.

She had thin light blue bird feathers glued into her bald scalp, the feathers were wrapped around her skull like a swimming cap, and as she lifted her head and looked at him, Sylver saw two giant orange orbs where her eyes should have been.

They were almost as big as apples, and as her pupils expanded, he was close enough to her that he could see the back of her eyeballs through the giant holes.

“Is this Teno-ch-ti-t-lan?” Sylver repeated.

The woman just looked at him. He stared back at her, and his eyes darted to his left as he saw someone stand up from the kneeling crowd.

It was a bear shaped like a man, covered entirely in fur, with the muscular proportions of a gorilla, and a flat snout like one of those small dogs instead of a long nosed bear. The bear-like creature just stood there, Sylver turned back to the woman looking up at him.

“Can you understand me?” Sylver asked.

Her pupils contracted to the point her eyes were completely orange again.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

Sylver used the chance to use [Arcane Insight] on the woman to get what little clues he could about their abilities.

[Teixiptla – Lesser Fragment Of Quetzalcōātl - 99]

[HP: 99,000 – 100%]

[MP: 99,000 – 100%]

[Stamina: 99,000 – 100%]

[Corpse – Inferior]

[Soul – Inferior/Grand]

It would certainly be an uphill battle, but even if everyone else was twice that it wasn’t insurmountable.

The only part that worried him was that word, Quet-whatever, because there was something unmistakably holy about it. In a deeply unsettling way that worried him in more ways than just the fact that he was undead standing next to one of his few natural enemies.

Sylver held out his right hand, the one without the gauntlet, towards the woman’s face and snapped his fingers directly in front of her eyes.

She flinched, leaned backwards, and then awkwardly regained her balance by leaning on the woman behind her, without once looking away from Sylver’s face.

Sylver looked around, three more people had stood up, a man with light green skin that had a smoothed out egg-like face, a woman with fuzzy bright red and orange hair all over her body like a dog after a bath, and a normal looking human man with cactus like barbs sticking out of his skull.

Sylver looked up towards the sky, and held back a sigh of relief as the thing up there didn’t seem to be doing anything.

When he looked back down, every single “person” was looking directly at him.

It did occur to him that this might be a hive mind situation, but members of a hive mind generally didn’t verbally talk to one another.

But if they were all silently speaking to the real mask Sylver had on his shoulder, then it just told them what he said to Klara, and the mask was likely explaining to them how best to attack him.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

The amount of repeating messages was literally blinding, they moved so quickly they became blurry.

He waited for the messages to slow down, and couldn’t believe it never occurred to him to use [Arcane Insight] as a weapon.

He heard something on his right, it was like a draft whistling through a tiny crack. Sylver lifted his hand up to his face, and pulled a tiny barbed glass bead off the exposed part of his face. The glass bead was the size of a cherry pit, had a small toothpick thick needle sticking out of it, and as the light caught it, he saw that the inside of the glass bead and needle was hollow.

He looked in the direction the bead came from, and saw a brightly colored man shaped frog creature. It’s black eyeballs were outside it’s head, like bubbles, and it’s skin looked oily in a way that made him think it smelled awful.

He dropped the bead down to the floor.

“Can you guys talk?” Sylver asked.

He waited for a response, waited a little more, and when a second bead flew at him from his left, he caught it mid air with his thumb and forefinger without looking.

The liquid inside was pale yellow, Sylver brought the needled bead up to his mouth and licked the needle.

He spat on the floor shortly after and flicked the bead up into the air.

“In that case I’ll talk, and all of you sit and listen. There is a woman somewhere here named Nelson Magia. If she’s alive I need to speak to her. If she’s dead I need to see her corpse, or whatever is left of it. That’s all I want,” Sylver said.

There wasn’t anything as obvious as a big dramatic gasp, but he saw a reaction from more than a few people, although some of that might have just been because the few that stood up had sat back down.

He waited a while and carried on.

“If you want people I can find and bring people that fit your exact specifications. If one of your rituals or spells broke down back when the sky flashed red, I’ll probably have more luck fixing it than anyone else here. There’s a deal to be made here, just tell me what you need,” Sylver offered.

Again, nothing big, but there was a universal reaction to the second sentence. Something had gone awry when the moon flashed red and they didn’t know what to do.

And yet, everyone remained where they were.

On some level, in a looking back on it sort of way, the fact that they were stonewalling him so hard he was starting to consider doing something drastic to get things moving impressed him.

He decided to do something small, to force a small reaction from their hands.

“I’m going to go over there now,” Sylver said with a pointed finger at a nearby pyramid that looked eerily similar to the sacrificial altar the shaman in the first village used to sacrifice people to their spirit guardian.

He made a show of lowering himself as if he was using his own two legs to jump, and as he swung his arms, his robe released the spring like tension it had created, and flung Sylver’s body towards the building he had pointed to.

Nobody attacked him while he was airborne and incapable of dodging, no one apprehended him when he landed on the road, and as he walked one step at a time towards the pyramid, not a single person did anything more than slightly turn their heads to look at him.

Even for him, this was weird.

He kept his head forward as he walked towards the pyramid, and as he turned the corner and saw the whole thing, he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at.

The magical framework flickering along the base of the pyramid was primitive in a way he hadn’t even seen in ancient texts, and at the same time, there was something oddly lucid about the whole thing. It wasn’t that there weren’t any wasted movements, it certainly wasn’t the peak of efficiency, but aside from the flickering it was…

He couldn’t think of a good word for it, just saying it worked wasn’t quite right, but it didn’t look like it had been made with “good enough” in mind.

More than anything he couldn’t figure out what the magic was doing, or what it was meant to do since it looked like it was starting over every four seconds, it wasn’t demonic, or at least this side of the pyramid wasn’t.

When Sylver placed his foot on the first step, he watched the mask on his shoulder with a microscope, but it didn’t do anything, it didn’t react.

Were all of these “people” just golems that were given orders, and Sylver was such an unexpected anomaly that they couldn’t figure out what to do with him?

He turned around and looked at the distant crowd, they were all looking at him, and what’s more, they hadn’t bothered to open the golden doors to get Klara, or Belo.

Spring said she was sitting in the corner, and was resting her chin on her knees.

The higher Sylver walked up the stairs, the stranger the energy pulsing under him felt.

He’d experienced enough odd magic that he usually could make a fairly accurate educated guess at what was happening, but it had been a while where he saw something, and had absolutely no idea what it was.

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It wasn’t demonic, if this was a deity it was foreign in a way he wasn’t sure deities could be, and if it was such a foreigner, why was it inside a hollow vault in Eira of all places?

The hollow-vault wasn’t separated from the outside world by anything more than the magical equivalent of an extremely well made door, there were probably hundreds of fae living near the mountains that were fully aware of what was going on inside.

He reached the top of the stairs, and as far as he could see, and as far as the shades reported, not a single “person” had done anything other than just sit there.

It was difficult but he managed to hold in a laugh.

So many different people, creatures, religions, civilizations, groups, cults, sects, countries, continents, did so many different things to keep him out, or make him leave, when apparently the answer was just to ignore him.

Hilarious and impressive as this was, he still needed to find Nels.

Unlike with Edmund he didn’t have a tracker to follow, aside from Chrys’ word the only real clue he had was the words of the cannibals down below and that Klara heard Nels’ name mentioned.

The very top of the pyramid Sylver found what looked like a golden sacrificial altar.

Only difference was that it was taller and wider, and unlike the shaman’s, it was so clean it was almost sparkling.

There were scratches near the edges of the rectangular gold slab, presumably from where whoever was performing the sacrifice had cut too deep into people’s necks.

But there were also odd grooves on the sides of the slab, at first he thought they were there so the person doing the sacrificing knew the exact position to place their legs, but as he looked up, and looked back down at the grooves, he decided they likely came from a giant hand reaching down and slightly crushing the slab as it lifted it up into the sky.

It’d certainly explain why there were skins everywhere’s but no corpses.

Sylver got down on his knees, pressed his ear up to the black stone, and punched the floor with his fist.

The pyramid was hollow, but it looked identical from all four sides, with no entrance that he could see. He lifted the golden slab up slightly and looked for a lever, button, or just a hatch, but there was nothing.

He sat down on the slab, and after a few seconds of thinking it through, laid down on it.

Sylver closed his eye, and focused in on the stuttering energy jaggedly jumping around and underneath him.

The focus of the thing was clearly the sacrificial gold slab, but was the magic meant to take something from the sacrifice, or add something to it?

Sylver got off the slab, reached into his robe in case anyone was looking, and placed down a human woman’s severed foot onto the golden slab.

He couldn’t feel any change in the energy underneath him and the slab, but there was now a low pitched groaning sound coming from the sky.

When Sylver looked up he made eye contact with a face. It didn’t have a head, ears, hair, just lipless teeth and enormous eyes that were bigger than lakes.

The severed foot on the altar floated up into the air, and as the face’s teeth opened a thin strip of carpet thin bright red meat slithered out and reached out towards the floating foot.

The tongue wrapped around the foot like a snake coiling around it’s prey, and as the tongue pulled back into the thing’s mouth it closed it’s enormous eyes and the groaning became faster, louder, and became more and more high pitched until it sound like a terrified woman moaning directly into Sylver’s ear. A soggy clump dropped down from the tongue, there was probably a better word for it, but the skin had been licked clean off the meat and bones.

The moaning continued even as the face and eyes disappeared into the white sand in the sky.

He looked over at the crowd of “people” sitting around the building Klara was in, and even from here Sylver could see some of them were smiling.

He decided to try talking to them one more time.

Because he needed to make sure there was nothing to be gained here, and also because he needed time to come up with a way to see if Nels was in that things stomach without actually being swallowed by it himself.

He walked all the way back to the building, crouched down near the man who was sitting at the very edge of the crowd, and he and the man looked at one another. The man had white glass crystals growing out of his head, it looked a little like Stheno’s sea salt curse, but these crystals weren’t random, they sat comfortably on his head like an artisanal glass helmet.

“What do you need? Or what do you want?” Sylver asked.

There was nothing in the man’s eyes. Sylver thought that this must have been what it felt like when priests tried to talk to feral undead.

He reached out with his hand, and touched the side of the man’s face.

Sylver could see the knots the creature had woven around the man’s soul, trying to tear it off would just make the other threads tighten and potentially slice into the thing they were wrapped around.

Completely removing it was within the realm of possibility, but not without the aid of a ritual.

He looked at the blank empty look in the man’s eyes, and something in Sylver’s head clicked into place. He took his hand off the man’s face, stood up, and got preemptively pissed off even before he proved himself correct.

It can’t be that easy, Sylver thought.

“I order you to stand up,” Sylver said.

The man didn’t scramble to his feet like a soldier caught asleep at the post, he just got his legs under him, and stood up straight.

“I order you to stand on one leg,” Sylver said.

When the man remained as he was, Sylver was glad for a half second that he was wrong, but sadly he’d seen this song and dance before, and knew how to push forward.

“I order you to stand on your left leg,” Sylver said.

The man lifted his right foot off the floor, and Sylver had to turn away from him so as not to swing at the man.

He rubbed his jaw, mumbled curse words under his breath to himself, and after a while, calmed down.

This was a good thing.

And he wasn't an idiot for taking this long to realize it.

I’m wearing the king’s crown, so therefore I’m the king, Sylver thought to himself as he reached up and ran his fingers along the mushroom made replica mask on his face.

He tried to remember if he’d given the mask on his shoulder any orders, and as Spring tapped out what Sylver said to the thing word for word, the only command he gave it was to blink once for yes, twice for no, and it didn’t do anything.

He turned back to the man with the crystals in his skull.

“Put your left leg down,” the man did so, “sit down,” the man did so.

“Tell me where Nels is,” Sylver said.

The man just looked at him.

Sylver lifted his head towards the crowd that had been given the command to “sit here and listen.”

“Raise your left hand into the air if you know where Nels is,” Sylver yelled.

More than a hundred hands shot up into the air, or more accurately, lazily and limply were lifted above their heads.

Sylver pointed to the nearest “person” whose hand was up, a woman with wavy white and blue wraps around her body that with her curly white hair made her look like a skinny ocean wave. She had copper colored duct tape wrapped around her head, with a long slit for her eyes, and a slightly smaller slit at her mouth.

“Come here,” Sylver said, and pointed down at the ground in front of him.

She walked very oddly, like the muscles in her legs were numb, but one awkward step at a time she walked around and above the “people” between her and Sylver, and stood in front of him.

“Tell me where Nels is,” Sylver said.

“In the North Star,” the woman said.

“When did you last see Nels?” Sylver asked.

The woman didn’t answer because he’d asked her.

Calm down, he thought to himself.

“Tell me when you last saw Nels,” Sylver said.

“Sixteen months ago,” the woman said.

Sylver looked at her.

“Tell me how to get to the North Star,” Sylver said.

The woman lifted her hand, and pointed at the direction behind Sylver.

“It’s through that eye,” the woman said.

There were buildings in the way so Sylver couldn’t see what she was pointing at, the shades that had searched that area had said there was nothing there, but now that Sylver knew that they couldn’t see the pyramid properly, he had to assume there were other things they hadn’t been able to see properly either.

“Everyone make a path!” Sylver yelled as he made an opening motion towards the two giant golden doors.

Nobody was in a rush, a few “people” even helped other “people” stand up from the floor, but after a bit of moving around they cleared a path for Sylver to walk through.

He walked a little faster than he intended, pulled the door open with a bit too much force, and must have walked too heavily towards Klara because she curled up into a ball and wrapped her arms around her head.

“Hey, it’s me, everything’s good. I’ll explain things a little later, but we need to go now. I’m going to need to move fast, do you mind if I carry you?” Sylver asked.

He’d had very similar experiences to this a few times in the past, but unlike back then he didn’t fully grasp what specifically was making them follow his commands. So to be safe he was going to assume there was a time limit, and if there wasn’t, he didn’t particularly want to stick around here longer than necessary anyway.

After a second to process what he said Klara nodded, and luckily for Sylver she was small and light enough that he managed to sit her down on his shoulder. He came out of the double golden doors, and walked over to the woman who had told him where Nels was.

“Lead me to the eye now. Run,” Sylver said.

As the woman started to jog, he turned back to the giant crowd.

All of you kill yourselves, Sylver thought with suppressed grin, but thankfully had the foresight to keep things civil, on the off chance going that far would break whatever it was that was making them follow his commands.

“Stay where you are until this light goes out,” Sylver said, as he leaned down and dragged his hand against the black stone.

A half sphere of white mushroom grew on top of the stone, and glowed bright enough that it hurt a little to look at it. By his estimate it would last for four or five hours.

Sylver turned away from the crowd, and caught up with the jogging woman.

He was so much taller than her that he walked faster than she was running, which made following behind her incredible annoying.

Spring sent shades ahead to look at where they were running, they came back with nothing but smooth stone wall, alongside more smooth stone wall. He couldn’t blame them for not seeing it, because even as he looked right at it, Sylver struggled to properly see it.

It was there, and it was not, he could see the edges of the circular hole in the wall filled with white sand, and if he looked even slightly away from it, it was like it had never been there in the first place.

The hole was about as wide as Sylver was tall, he had to put Klara down on the ground so she didn’t hit her head on his shoulder.

“Take me to the North Star,” Sylver said with a gesture at the hole he could barely perceive.

The woman didn’t even nod at him, she just turned around, and speed walked directly into the white sand. Sylver tried to listen for a head hitting the ground in case this was a trap, but the second she disappeared into the white sand, he couldn’t even feel her footsteps through the ground he was standing on.

He turned back and looked around at the city.

It might be a good idea to come back here and grab all the gold, Sylver thought, but changed his mind as he looked up and remembered why he was in a rush in the first place.

He touched the white sand with his bare hand first, then touched it with the gauntleted hand, and when neither reacted to the sand any more than getting mildly warm, Sylver kept one hand pressed firmly against Ria on his chest, and half guided, half carried, Klara forward into the white sand.

He watched her mask, watched his mask, and once again, neither reacted in the slightest to the white sand running through them.

It couldn’t be that the mask on his shoulder was as defective as Klara’s was? On the other hand, if it was her mask’s other half then it kind of made sense.

It took Sylver three steps to walk through the sand to the other side, and just like when he went through the white sand to enter the trials, he felt Mora’s location relative to him move from somewhere underneath him, to being somewhere in front of him and to his left.

The city here looked identical to the one he’d just left, absolutely identical, the only difference was the thing in the sky in the significantly dimmer white sand here felt like it was in a deep slumber. Similar to Tuli, but on a smaller scale.

Sylver followed the fresh footprints the woman he’d followed left in the dust, placed Klara back on his shoulder, and after a few quick steps, caught up with her.

Spring sent shades out to scout, they came back with news that Sylver found worrying but couldn’t figure out why.

The shades found nothing.

And nobody.

The buildings were all empty, no beds, bowls, not even golden boxes with human skin floating around inside them.

He followed the woman along the oddly wide roads, passed by a perfect copy of the pyramid he’d sacrificed a foot too, and only when he ran past the building he and Klara had met in, did he realize this “city” was a mirrored copy of the one he had come from.

As for the question of how a hollow-vault could occupy three layers of space, Sylver decided not to worry about that right now.

He followed the woman to another circular hole in the wall, and followed her through the white sand sitting inside the barely perceivable hole.

Once again, neither his nor Klara’s mask so much as twitched, and exactly like before Mora’s location moved and it now felt like she was somewhere high above him.