Sylver Seeker

Chapter 272: Little City

Chapter 272: Little CitySylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 6 (272) - Little City

The “city” was fairly small, just over 800 individual buildings, with a population of exactly 1,023 “people.”

To Sylver’s complete and utter surprise, Nels wasn’t just walking around amidst the crowds.

She also wasn’t any of the skins the shades found in every single house, they were soaking in oil in golden boxes, or were draped along the roof to dry out.

Oddly enough there weren’t any corpses anywhere, or rather the shades hadn’t found any so far, but for some reason Sylver couldn’t imagine Nels was just laying around dead somewhere.

Edmund was in his indestructible coffin, guarded by a dragon, even if the “people” here didn’t know who she was and what she was capable of, it didn’t make sense for her to just die and be eaten by whatever these things were.

The buildings were all made of the same black glassy stone he’d seen below, and there was a suspicious amount of gold everywhere. And no other metals, at least the shades hadn’t seen anything other than gold so far.

Plates, forks, bowls, buckets, chains, wells, doors, window frames, even the beds, everything that could conceivably be made of gold, was made of gold.

All the “people” the shades had found had at least one piece of gold on them, ring, necklace, tiara, gauntlet, boots, one woman initially didn’t seem to have any gold, but when she opened her mouth to speak the shades saw that every single tooth in her mouth was golden.Current theory was that the gold was acting like a stabiliser, alternate and equally likely theory, they just really liked gold.

Normally by now he would have had an understanding of their culture, beliefs, combat strength, but they had no books, no carvings on walls, no prayer mats, there was nothing personal for the shades to look at and figure out what their priorities in life were.

The entire city felt like a poor attempt at imitating something they saw, the roads were all far too wide, the beds had never been slept in, some of the buildings had doors that opened into a wall, stairs that didn’t go anywhere, the ceilings were either too high or too low, and there were light switches on the walls even though there weren’t any pipes connected to them, or more importantly, lanterns on the walls or ceiling to be turned on or off.

The closest comparison he could make was a village he once visited that was inhabited solely by vampires. They didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep, everything in the village was performative, an act, they knew what a living village was supposed to look like, but had been vampires for so long that they forgot the tiny details that immediately gave them away to anyone who was alive.

But this was different, there was a distinct smell in the air that only living people could produce, some of the men had scabs along their jaws where they cut themselves while shaving, he could hear someone’s stomach rumbling somewhere on his left, these “people” were alive.

So why didn’t the place they lived in reflect that?

Sylver’s unconscious, bruised, and bleeding, body was carried to a building that he had initially thought was an empty library by the way the shades described it, but as he crossed the giant golden doorway’s threshold, he saw that every empty bookshelf was overfilled with golden pots of various shapes and sizes.

Some of the gold pots had materials inside that were leaking holy energy, just enough that it made his skin feel itchy, and more than enough to make make the shades blind to their surroundings in this enclosed space.

They lifted him onto a long golden slab that was about knee high off the floor, and then all four men who carried him here left the room, and closed the giant doors behind them.

Sylver waited for a good while for something to happen, the shades returned with more of the same, and after a while he was informed that the two men sent to “wake Belo up,” had entered one of the houses with a woman chained to the wall, and punched and kicked her in the head until she fell to the floor and went limp.

The Spring piece watching her said that he couldn’t feel anything change, but the two men who had beaten her lowered their heads, got down on one knee, and were visibly shivering as the bloodied woman stood up from the floor.

She took the golden key one of the men was holding out for her, unlocked the golden collar around her neck, and made her way towards Sylver.

Everyone who saw her on her way did the same thing the two men did, they got down to one knee, and kept their heads down as if they were afraid of making eye contact with her.

The Spring piece watching her said she was limping as she walked, that she seemed to be permanently out of breath, and this was pure speculation on his end but he was pretty sure she was blind.

When she entered the room Sylver figured out what was happening.

She was casting illusion magic.

It was quite weak, but subtle might have been the better word to use, he could feel the gentle waves of mana circling around his head, but at this point his everything up there was so far away from anything even remotely synonymous with a human brain that her magic couldn’t find a gap to enter.

She was dressed in a thin material that looked like wool, white fluffy wool pants, with a matching white long sleeved wool jacket that made her look like she was wearing pyjamas.

If not for the white boots, silk white gloves, and the glistening porcelain mask on the lower half of her face.

She had curly shoulder length black hair that looked like it was wet from how oily it was, the mask covered her nose, mouth, went all the way down to her neck, and wrapped all the way around to the back of her head.

The only uncovered skin, the top half of her face and her ears, were smeared in something black and shiny, like ink that hadn’t dried.

As for the blind part, Spring was completely right, it was twice as bad as the worst cataracts Sylver had ever seen, twitching light grey circles that sat uselessly in the middle of her slightly bloodshot eyes.

When the men who followed her here closed the golden doors behind them as they left, she slowly walked forward with her hands stretched out in front of her, and reached one of the tall shelves.

Sylver watched from the floor as she walked from one shelf to the next, she reached out and touched the first golden pot on the bottom shelf, and when it wasn’t the one she was looking for, she walked to the next shelf.

She stopped at the second to last shelf, counted two rows up, and walked out of Sylver’s line of sight as she felt her way from one pot to the next.

Spring said she put her arm into a pot that was as big as a barrel, and took out a small gold whittling knife out of it. The blade was two inches long, and the woman put it into her jacket pocket before she closed the pot and started feeling her way back.

She got on her hands and knees about ten meters away from Sylver, and very slowly crawled towards him while she moving her hand along the ground.

When her hand bumped against the low platform Sylver’s body was on, he felt something really really strange.

The soul in her mask was barely alive.

“Alive” in air quotes because he still wasn’t completely certain what these things were to call then alive, but compared to the mask on his shoulder, and the soul he’d felt when he was first touched, the soul in the mask on the woman’s face was on the low end of 1% alive.

She took the small knife out of her pocket, gently moved the blade towards Sylver, and tapped the blunt side of it against him until she tapped the fake hardened mushroom mask on his face.

She smelled like vinegar, blood, vomit, and he was close enough to her that he could hear the bones of her broken ribs rubbing against each other inside her chest, like someone was rattling dice around in a cup.

She was very careful not to make any physical contact with him, she used the blade of the knife to feel the outline of his head and mask, and lined it up with his left eye.

She took a very slow breath, held the small knife by the handle with her left hand, and held her right hand in a fist, like a hammer and chisel.

Even if Sylver wasn’t Sylver this wouldn’t kill someone, at most they’d lose an eye, at this angle she wouldn’t even hit a good blood vessel to make someone bleed to death.

He used [Fog Form] to get up from the slab, and materialized on the other side of it.

“Don’t scream,” Sylver said quietly.

Body language wise she was shrieking, he could also hear her heart rate triple in that moment, but despite that she didn’t make a single sound, she just dropped the knife she was holding and wrapped her arms around her head.

The magic she’d been trying to force into Sylver’s head increased to the point it would have made a living person pass out from the pressure, but in his case it was about as uncomfortable as a pair of flies buzzing inside his hair.

He waited for her to calm down and spoke when she eventually lowered her hands.

“I’m not one of them, I haven’t been possessed. I’m not here to hurt you,” Sylver said.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

She made this really odd gesture with her shaking hands, like she was flicking water off her fingers.

It wasn’t until she lowered her hand to the gold slab that Sylver realized she was pretending to write something with a pen.

He had paper with him, but he’d left his pens and pencils with Mora, so Sylver took a small droplet of [Black Mass], shaped it into a pencil, placed the paper under the woman’s hand, and put the pencil shaped darkness between her fingers.

It worked more like a crayon than a pencil, but it was good enough for now. She turned the paper around so Sylver could read it, and with shaking hands slid it towards him.

‘Please get me out of here, I want to go home,’ the woman wrote.

He waited a moment before he spoke.

“Alright,” Sylver said.

Her whole body relaxed, it was like the world’s heaviest weight had just been lifted off her shoulders.

“Do you know a woman named Nels?” Sylver asked.

The weight slammed right back down on her, and after a short pause she pulled the paper back, turned it over, and scribbled out an answer.

‘I’ve heard her name, but that was many months ago,’ the woman wrote.

She started to turn the paper around again.

“I can read from here. What did you hear about her?” Sylver asked.

Understandably her answer was short, and what Sylver expected.

‘I don’t remember. I’m sorry,’ the woman wrote.

“Was she possessed by her mask?” Sylver asked.

’I don’t know, I’m sorry,’ the woman wrote.

Her hands were shaking so much her handwriting had deteriorated to the point it was getting difficult for him to read what she was writing.

“I just want to be clear, you getting out of here isn’t contingent on Nels, the two are separate… What’s your name?” Sylver asked.

She took a moment to compose herself, didn’t manage to do it all that well, but she wrote slower, and tried to stop her hand from shaking.

‘Klara. I was in a troupe. We worked for Marquess Martimer De’Leon,’Klara wrote out.

It took him a second, but he recognized the name of her employer. It always caught him off guard how small the realm he lived in was.

“I’m Sylver Sezari, of Arda. Do you mind if I touch your face to see if I can get the mask off?” Sylver asked.

Before he had a chance to do anything she recoiled away from him, and almost protectively wrapped her arms around the white mask on her face.

There was this muted hissing sound coming from her face, after looking closely Sylver saw that there were tiny holes in the mask underneath her nostrils, about as big as a matchstick. If the air wasn’t so rich with oxygen here she would have suffocated long ago.

He waited until she put her hands down.

“I should have mentioned I’m a mage, and I know a thing or two about possession. I only want to check if there’s a way for you to talk,” Sylver said.

He remained where he was without moving. After a while Klara reached for the paper and pencil she had dropped.

‘It’s fused to my bones. It took my teeth and tongue,’ Klara wrote out.

He took a long look at her.

She was small, even for a woman, and he could tell from the way her skin sat on her skull that she’d lost what little weight she might have started with when she first got here.

He was iffy about operating on grown living men who had health to spare, at her size and he didn’t trust his skills without a proper operating table and a barrel of high grade healing potions.

“I’d still like to take a look. I’ll at least know if I can remove it myself, or if you’ll need to wait for a healer,” Sylver said.

Klara thought about it, and after a bit nodded her head, as much as she could since the mask had locked her neck in place.

She flinched like a beaten dog when Sylver placed his comparatively giant hand on top of her head.

He had hoped the real mask on his shoulder would try something when he made physical contact with Klara/Belo, but he didn’t feel any reaction from it.

He knew it was aware of him touching her, but either it knew he was trying to get a reaction out of it and had a perfect poker face, or it genuinely didn’t care about him being near his “other-half.”

Just like that, his initial plan of using Belo as leverage and negotiating with the mask on his shoulder went out the window.

As for Klara her skin was cold, and with a single pulse of mana he saw everything he needed to see.

It had very literally replaced the bottom part of her skull and jaw, not just the mouth area that was visible, it went all the way up to her eyes.

It had also grown downwards, towards her heart and lungs, but unlike the face the growths down there were thin, and flexible, he felt them bending as Klara breathed.

On top of the physical, the mask’s essence was tangled around her soul in a way that Sylver couldn’t untangle without the aid of a ritual. But it was different from what he felt when the woman near the elevator touched him, this was more like two different colored sands mixing together, as opposed to a string wrapping around a body.

Removing the mask physically wouldn’t be enough, the souls would need to be separated first. On the bright side, he couldn’t feel anything demonic, so at least there was that.

Sylver took his hand off Klara’s head and tried to figure out how to approach this now that plan B was out.

“You’ll need a healer… Do you know if the thing in the sky ever came down?”Sylver asked.

She wrote out her answer a fresh sheet of paper.

‘I don’t know. I’ve only been continuously aware for a month or so. I’ve only had a couple hours of sporadic awareness before. But if it happened no-one around me talked about it,’ Klara wrote.

Somehow Sylver got the feeling he would have been able to guess the exact date and time the mask lost its grip on her.

“Did anyone ever mention the sky flashing red or something of that nature?” Sylver asked.

’Yes. Something broke because of it, but I don’t know what. A lot of other people woke up like I did around that time too. But as far as I know I’m the only one whose mask didn’t start working after the red flash ended,’ Klara wrote.

“Did you hear about Nels before you were fully aware, or after?” Sylver asked.

‘Before. Maybe a year ago, maybe more,’ Klara wrote.

Fuck… Sylver thought to himself.

“Alright,” Sylver sat up straight and Klara flinched at the slight sound he made.

“Something happened after those men hit you and you stood up. I need you to tell me what you did, and I need to know if there’s ever been a time where it didn’t work on someone here,” Sylver said.

Klara spent a long time writing out her answer, she started writing over her words at one point, but Sylver didn’t say anything since he was reading what she wrote by looking at the movement of the pen in her hand rather than the scribblings she left on the page.

“I have a trait called [Wishful Gaze]. It makes people see what they want to see. So everyone sees me as what the mask on my face was. But it only works as long as I don’t do anything that the mask wouldn’t do.

‘Whenever the trait stops working, they beat me to wake the mask up. I don’t know if it ever stopped working because someone was immune, or because I did something the mask wouldn’t do, but it’s happened at least twenty times, since I woke up,’ Klara wrote out.

“Does the trait only work on you?” Sylver asked.

Klara nodded.

“Thought so…” Sylver said.

The goal was to find Nels.

Getting out was secondary, if he couldn’t get out on his own, Mora had [Xander’s Waystone], and if that didn’t work he could always tell Chrys to get Edmund to crack the mountain open and then everyone and everything would get flung out.

Including the giant thing high in the sky, along with all of the white sand it was sitting on, but if the situation devolved to the point Sylver was crying for help, then whatever had to happen for Nels, Klara, and Sylver to escape, would have to happen since he wouldn’t have any alternatives.

The best play here would be to do the same thing Klara was doing, pretend to be the mask on his shoulder. Which was his original plan anyway, he didn’t have the shades beat him up for the fun of it.

But if they beat her when they thought she was acting out of character, what would they do if Sylver acted entierely out of character since he didn’t even know what he was supposed to sound or speak like?

The thing was, he couldn’t fight these “people.” Not only because he had no idea what they were capable of, and didn’t know what sort of foreign magic they possessed, but even if he assumed the thing in the sky wasn’t part of the equation, Sylver’s needle was outside his body, in Ria, and both she and the needle were one good kick away from being exposed to the elements.

It would have been fine if there was somewhere for him to retreat to and hide, but the shades hadn’t found anything remotely resembling an exist. The black stone everything was made off including the ground ignored [Advanced Earth Manipulation] like it was a mere suggestion, and most importantly, there were items with holy energy in the pots all around him, which likely meant there were “people” with holy magic at their disposal.

The memory of Sophia almost ending him was still fresh in his mind, and unlike then he was on his own for the moment, Edmund’s sword wasn’t going to swoop in at the last second to save him.

There was of course the nuclear option.

Although the danger with that was that in the event Nels was saved, and Edmund found out what Sylver did, then he would never hear the end of it.

Aside from that the other issue with the nuclear option was that it needed the locals to have a clairvoyant who could sense distant and external threats, and if Chrys struggled to see Sylver’s future even when he let her, then the locals weren’t going to be able to see that killing him would result in their entire civilization being incinerated.

They’d have to take him at his word, which wouldn’t work with people that were this isolated, and also Sylver wasn’t as well known now as he used to be, and his word didn’t have the same heft and danger it did when he was a full Lich.

Sylver got an idea at that moment, and looked up at Klara.

“When they hit you to wake Belo up, do they give you anything? Like did they pour something on your, or inject you with anything?” Sylver asked.

Klara shook her head.

“Hmm…”

If the only risk was a beating, then there wasn’t a risk at all. Unless the only reason they stopped beating Klara was because of her perk, in which case…

Sylver didn’t like either of the plans he came up with.

Pretend to be the mask on his shoulder, get found out and beaten, or possibly executed.

Or come out and make it seem like his mask was defective, like Klara’s, and negotiate for Nels’ location and freedom? Presumably they needed him to be “alive” for the mask to take over, so they wouldn’t kill him from the get go…

The biggest problem was that nobody was talking. Sylver had nothing he didn’t even know what his mask’s name was, the whole entire city had gathered in a dense semi-circle around the building he and Klara were in.

After thinking it through, Sylver decided it was best to start off with acting like the mask was defective, and at the very least that would buy him some time to figure out what the mask was meant to look and sound like.

He reduced the swelling on his face, wiped the fake red mushroom blood off him, but left some smeared in his hair and around his neck.

Before he stood up and left to gamble with his life, Sylver looked at Klara and decided to try something.

“Could you think the word Chrysanthemum as hard as you can in your head?” Sylver asked.

Klara nodded, and he could see her temple pulse with the effort of thinking the name.

Sylver waited a good long minute before he decided it was enough.

“You can stop now, thank you,” Sylver said.

Either Chrys couldn’t see in here, very possible since this was a hollow vault, plus there was that thing in the sky, but there was also a good chance she thought that interfering now would jeopardize Sylver’s chances of finding Nels.

Even though Klara had confirmed that Nels had been here at one point in the past, but…

There wasn’t much point worrying about that now, Sylver was here, he was on his own, and if things went really south he would have to sandwich his needle between Ria and SAM, have Aleri carry them away, and the hope that Edmund got here before someone caught the flying shade, pulled Ria and SAM apart, and his metalic needle fizzled out into nothing.

“I’m going to go outside now, and I’m going to try to talk to them. If they talk to me, and we manage to reach an agreement, then all three of us are leaving… And if something else happens, just do what you can to keep yourself safe while I figure things out, alright? I’m going to try to wrap everything up quickly, but I can’t make any promises,” Sylver said.

Klara handed him his paper and pen, and he couldn’t quite get a grasp on what she was feeling through her soul, but he had other guess is was some odd mixture of uncertainty, fear, and maybe hope.

She nodded at him, he helped her stand up from the gold slab on the floor, and as he was about to leave, she pulled at his robe, and held up the small gold whittling knife.

She gestured towards the bookshelves, and Sylver walked her to them.

She started touching the pots with her hands, and when she took the lid off the golden pot, Sylver considered leaving Ria, SAM and his needle in one of them.

But if either Ria or SAM woke up and started moving around, he preferred to have the needle close enough to at least try to protect it.

As he approached the door, he felt Klara’s magic pass through it, could almost see it wrap around people’s heads outside, and as if it were a perfume Sylver tried to nudge the trait’s effect onto himself.

The trait ignored him, and as he pushed open the left golden door, Sylver stepped out into the light.