"And the new village?" Aureum asked.
"They came centuries later. There are all the basic things needed for life, so it's not a surprise. People will live where there is a place to live. They call themselves 'Oblitus' after the stone."
Spesavia gestured to it, the large gray thing. It didn't look like the rocks Aureum had seen around the village. Too dark. But then again, Aureum was no expert of rocks or the village. She did have a moment of imagining Spesavia carrying it around on her back despite that.
The old woman nodded at it and walked past Aureum, as if everything that needed to be said had been.
Aureum didn't feel the same way.
The delivery of this loss had been dry, but Aureum could almost imagine the young woman Spesavia had been. It was difficult to imagine her with a smooth face, but her alacrity over scouring into the truth came alive to Aureum.
Did she really come up with nothing? No one to blame for the destruction of her life?
But you couldn't force an old woman to tell stories when she didn't care to.
The elder's extra room was dusty but tidy. It looked like it had once been his son's. There were too many personal items for it to only be a guest room. Aureum let Spesavia have the bed and slept on the floor.
The next day, they had a heavy breakfast with way too many buns and left while waving at the villagers. Then it was up the hilly paths and down the slopes.
Spesavia walked, so it made no sense for Aureum to fly. It took only a few days, compared to a few weeks by boat, but the effort of walking made the last stretch of the journey drag. There were some breathtaking views of the foothills and mountains as they went. As they went up, trees stretched out for miles, only broken by the line of the Flumengems River.
Were there beasts? A few.
None of them dared approach with Spesavia around. Everything was very secure, even in the middle of the wilderness. On dryer days, sometimes they slept under the stars.
After four days, they came to a place where the trees opened up. A large field stretched out before them. It was impossible for Aureum's eye not to be drawn to it because of how flat it was.
"Here it is," Spesavia said.
"This?"
"Well, unless it's some other ruins around these parts."
Spesavia clambered down towards it.
"Looks like a field," Aureum said.
"It is a field now. No trees can grow because of what's underneath, ah."
Spesavia stopped talking and looked ahead.
There was a little rock at the edge of the field. Old words were carved into it.
Aureum squinted at them. Difficult to read, with the moss and strangeness of them.
Spesavia sighed as she bent over and clawed the moss off.
"This was more common when I was younger," she said.
"It says?"
Aureum could maybe make out one word in three.
Spesavia cleared her throat.
"'Children of the future, beware. For your fathers and mothers have sealed what is beneath. It is poison to the future, as it was poison to the past. That even our enemies may never use it against you, we have cursed the lands below. Only suffering awaits the searching of it."
Aureum and Spesavia looked at the little stone with its ominous words for a moment.
"And we're going to just ignore that?" Aureum said.
Spesavia shrugged as she stood back up, wiping her hands on her skirt.
"We're not the first," she said. "It's already been opened. And it's the only place we have to hatch the egg."
Spesavia began walking forward again. Aureum was less hasty in following behind.
"And the curse? Are we going to ignore that, too?"
"Come off it!" Spesavia said, not even bothering to turn around. "It's only a rudimentary draw of mana to a sigil in the bottom of the ruins."
Aureum was forced to follow behind Spesavia only so she wasn't left behind.
"And what does that do?" Aureum asked, as she hurried to catch up.
"Do? It creates a mass of mana from centuries of death that we can use. It would suck the life from you if you entered without protection, of course."
"Fantastic."
After a few more minutes, they came across a big hole. Aureum stepped closer to look into it.
Spesavia shot her arm out to stop her.
"I thought you weren't too keen on entering this place?"
"That's the entrance to some cursed tomb?!"
"It's not a tomb. And this isn't an original entrance. The original was closed off. This was dug."
Aureum looked at Spesavia.
So, after all that warning, people just dug it up?
"Did they die?"
"There's nothing written about the people who dug the new entrance. They could have died, or still be living rich after selling their stolen loot."
"…that's not encouraging. What are we going to do? Just go in?"
"Well, you definitely can't," Spesavia said, hunkering down into a seat again. "You would die. I might be fine. Us ascended sorcerers generate mana. A sorcerer of your training would need a decoy."
"And—
"And I'm currently sitting here trying to sense what amount of decoy will be required."
"Oh."
Aureum sat down as well. If she focused, she could sense Spesavia's mana trickling into that dark little chasm.
But the hole snatched all that sense away from her. She couldn't follow Spesavia's mana, and she didn't know what the older woman was doing.
Aureum lasted minutes before she began to fidget with the grass.
The sun began to lower itself. Aureum's head began to sink.
"Yes, it seems like there'll be nothing unexpected. Even when dealing with a curse this old."
Spesavia spoke, after taking incredible caution to send a tiny stream of mana throughout the depths to the core of the curse beneath. It wouldn't do any good if the decoy became useless halfway there, after all. She turned around, but Aureum was asleep sitting up.
"You can't leave an old woman to set up the tents, get up!"
"Wha—oh, are you done?"
Aureum woke up to Spesavia standing over her.
"More or less. Seems the rest can be saved for later."
"Later?"
"I'll tell you the plan after the tents have been set up. It will rain tonight."
Aureum didn't question her teacher. She had plenty of practice by now, and the tent was set up in short order. Dinner was a dry affair, meal-wise. The same in conversation, too.
"The decoy has to be a lump of mana that's bigger than yours," Spesavia spoke after wiping her chin. "I must isolate it from being touched by the curse, or we'll need to replace it repeatedly. It also needs to be directly next to your head."
Spesavia wasted little time for small talk this night.
"Oh, so… We do what?"
"We get a beast's pearl. I'll make a barrier around it, then we wrap it in a headscarf and tie it to your head."
"Will that even work?! I'll look stupid!"
"It should."
"SHOULD?!"
The ascended sorceress stared at her rude pupil.
"Is there any way we can test it out, hopefully before I die?" Aureum asked in a subdued voice.
"No, but it should follow all the principles of those who successfully went inside about a decade ahead of now."
"Oh," Aureum said, relaxing.
"You won't trust me, but you'll trust my tales of the future?! Who even brought us back into the past?"
"It was you! It was you! Who else could it be but you!"
"Enough with the cheap praise! I'm within reasonable doubt it won't kill you. But we need that pearl."
"So we need to kill a magic beast?"
"We?" Spesavia said, a smile widening on her lips.
She pointed at Aureum.
"You need to," the crone said.
Aureum's mouth was shut. She had a strong sense not to make this situation worse.
"It'll be good training," Spesavia said.
You just got mad and are using it as an excuse to make me do the chores, huh?
———————————————————
The next day, Aureum sat and pondered.
"How big does the pearl need to be?" Aureum had asked the night before.
"At least twice as big as yours. Better if bigger."
"Can't I just get multiple pearls?"
"The little barrier I have in mind works only with a certain size and a stable surface. It's the same reason I can't just form a barrier around your body directly."
"Didn't this barrier get used by the people who truly entered first? What did they do?"
"Absolutely not. The barrier is my own creation. They just used a hoard of pearls to get through it. You can do the same if you like... But you'll have to hunt more beasts. And if you get one too small, the curse will drain you first instead."
Aureum turned those words over in her head.
Why am I doing this again?
She didn't know. Spesavia demanded it.
As eager as she had been earlier to hunt beasts, having it so suddenly thrust upon her wasn't pleasant.
Should I think of this as an opportunity?
She couldn't.
An opportunity for death, maybe. And who's to say there's a single beast in the vicinity with wind mana?
Attacking a beast unprepared was asking for death. Aureum tried to remember what she could about what Sitis had said about hunting.
Mostly… there was nothing!
She couldn't remember him going on at length about anything other than questioning her cloak's abilities.
My cloak.
That was one thing she had in favor over any land beast. She could create distance quickly.
The vines from the wolves shot forward in her mind's eyes.
That won't be enough!
She held her head. Thinking.
Those wolves had larger pearls than anything I'd need. I just need to target one.
Target…
That's the point of hunting. I need to find a specific target and figure out a way to draw it out to a level playing field.
I guess I won't need to worry about the beasts finding me.
Aureum knew nothing about hunting. But she did know how to reach her sense of the wind out to take in her surroundings. Not that she'd ever had to stretch it out over a mountain, or find something specific without a lead to it.
At least this way I won't have to leave Spesavia's side. For this part at least…
The ultimate protection was Spesavia. If anything so much as annoyed the old woman too much in her presence, she'd send it packing.
Well, Aureum had no idea what to do and no limits placed on her other than "do it yourself." She had little to lose.
Aureum stretched back and laid down. She released her mana onto the wind in the calmest state she could think of. Following all the meandering breezes.
Spesavia, looking at the hole a few yards off, turned her head.
"Finally…" she murmured.
Who knew it would take so long for the girl to begin with the basics?
"Should I be happy she's so comfortable around me?"
She was, but that wouldn't do Aureum any favors in the future.
More than having the skills to solve a situation, knowing when and where to use them was more important. And how could somebody figure out how to use them?
Mostly by watching someone else do it. Naturally, one would learn the answers by following behind, as long as they paid attention.
Two problems with that solution here.
One, Spesavia didn't have the same set of skills. More than being a wind sorcerer or a water sorcerer, she was on a completely different level. Even if she tried to imitate what Aureum would do to deal with a beast, her bias of habits would show up in her solution to the problem. Spesavia wasn't even confident she could remember what it was like to be so weak.
Her solution to this problem could serve Aureum much less than Aureum's solution could.
And two, it would teach Aureum nothing of how to deal with the situation on her own terms. Thinking for one's self was also a skill. A skill Aureum wasn't usually lacking for, but Spesavia needed it to grow.
What does she do in an entirely new situation? And how can I see her shortcomings, and give her possible solutions before those shortcomings tangle her up on her own?
These were the thoughts in mind when Spesavia placed this 'test'.
Wrong answers?
Right answers?
Doing a trial within a set time to impress so Aureum could prove her worth as a student?
Spesavia didn't have so much time that she'd waste it on such idle practices. Black and white had mixed so much within her world that all was gray. Like fog clouding the day.
What Spesavia could learn about Aureum was more important.
Except that the crone enjoyed it more when her experiments didn't go as planned.