Chapter Text
“Why did you call me, out of everyone who’s surely available at this wonderful hour?”
Tricolor threw open some curtains for dramatic effect, letting in the light of naught but the stars and the moon and several lanterns and the torch someone was holding outside his home.
“That’s a motley crew I would never let myself be with after dark, if I were sensible. Why, there’s Fire-Starter in the Rushes, standing in the middle of a grassland with his spark-makers. I can see a very droopy brim; that must be Uneven Stitches of Miraculous Mending. And something’s gleaming in the starlight enough to show a silhouette. That’s Defender in Stalwart Armor, for sure. And you. Couldn’t you have done this in the morning?”
If Darkness had eyebrows, he would have raised one. In their absence, he settled for a level, eyeless, mask-obscured stare. “Done monologuing yet?”
The witch of colors gave a small smile. “Yeah. Just needed to get it out. What’s going on this time?”
“Angel just got us some very nice intel.” Reaching one gauntlet into the shroud-of-night around his shoulders, he produced a slightly creased letter with a broken seal. “There’s a new report that details the storage of some old confiscated spellbooks and contraptions. They’re all really, really old. It’s… Python’s stuff.”
The name slapped Grian across the face. Brims always called each other by names taken for the cause, except in a few cases.
One; when someone died with the brim on, they were called by a combination of a given name and their original name.
Two; when someone deserted, whereafter they were only called by their original name.
And three; when someone had their memory taken in the name of the brim, whereafter they were given a new name entirely.
Python had never been Python in life. To Darkness and the rest of the brims, he had been Silent Serpent Waiting in the Barley. But Serpent was gone, stolen by the black talons of a Knights Moralis long since hunted by the more zealous among their number. A new name and a sad memory was all that remained of the lost witch of wild beasts.
“Dragon above. We’re getting it, right? Right now?”
If that mask could have grinned, Darkness would be giving the sun a run for its money. “You bet we are. All his stuff is in the care of some outland atelier, nothing but a teacher, two apprentices, and a watchful eye. Gear up and be ready for anything.”
-
“When he said be ready for anything,” Armor screamed from one part of the burning garden, his sword at the throat of the unconscious teacher, “that metal-horned bastard did not adequately communicate that this was a possibility!”
“Shut up and get on with trussing them, you idiot knight!” Stitches danced back from where Fire-Starter stood, spinning like a madman with his twin staves and summoning flames like there was no tomorrow. “And you, arsonist, should really tone down the burning! What if we damage some of Python’s stuff?”
“But then I wouldn’t be a Fire-Starter in the Rushes, would I?” Almost absentmindedly, he aimed a great column of fire at the dueling pair of Tricolor and the watchful eye of the atelier, a woman with long, blonde hair and strange goggles.
Tricolor barely dodged the gout, wings beating desperately upwards. “Curse you, and watch where you’re shooting those things!”
“Get back down here, you criminal!” With a swing of her great sword, the pointed witch sent an arc of lighting cleaving through the air as well as some of Tricolor’s ribbons.
He retaliated with a badly aimed crossbow bolt that took her on the hat. “Sorry, what? Was that lightning?”
“Yes, it was, and next time I won’t miss you, bird!” She threw a different cut, more of a stab, forking electricity straight up. “How are you so agile on those awkward wings?”
“Awkward? Awkward?!” Tricolor tore free a spell outline from his sleeve and hastily began modifying it mid-flight. “I’ll have you know that these are my proudest achievements!”
Pressing the seal onto his hand, he scratched it closed and immediately dove for the earth. He landed for only a moment among Fire-Starter’s roaring bushfire before launching skyward again. With him he pulled the earth, sharpened to a glasslike edge with the heat and serrated like a tooth. The Watchful Eye had to clack her sylph shoes together to dodge it, and still a shard managed to catch her calf.
“Impressive,” she growled with some measure of grudging respect, “if nothing else, you criminals are good at fighting.”
Tricolor gave her a cheeky smile. “We’re not just good. Armor!”
With a sigh, the witch of steel finished trussing up the captive and cleaved a path through the burning foliage. He raised his sword in a high guard at the raised earth. “How many?”
“As many as you can!”
“Fine. But you’re re-setting all my circles!” With a barrage of quick motions, he carved a simple seal into the ridge with his sword, closing the circle just moments before kicking it. Hard.
It shattered, shining in the firelight as a thousand spearpoints took shape and floated suspended in the air. The Watchful Eye openly gaped, still half a pace above the ground. Fire-Starter stopped his whirling for a moment to give Tricolor a thumbs-up, and even Stitches nodded approvingly. Tricolor slowly descended to the ground as everyone stood frozen.
He held out his left hand threateningly, a seal almost complete on the palm. “I don’t want to hurt you, Watchful Eye. Will you stand aside?”
She snorted. “Firstly, my name isn’t Watchful Eye. My name is Symmetry.”
“Symmetry, then.”
“And secondly, no. I cannot stand aside and let this atelier, Vintage’s atelier, my atelier, be destroyed.”
Tricolor sighed, raising his restone pencil. “Apologies, then. You won’t die, at least. I can guaranteed that.”
As he closed the seal and pressed his hand to the closest spearhead, about half of its twins took formation and darted towards Symmetry. They caught her by the cape, the hat, and the sleeves, pinning her to the ground. The rest remained floating, moving slowly but in tandem with the control instance Tricolor held.
“Would you disarm and bind her, Armor? You’re the only one I trust won’t slit her throat.”
-
Fire-Starter poked one of the sconces to set it alight. “So… what exactly are we looking for?”
“Dunno.” Stitches pressed an ear to a wall before shaking her head. “Darkness just said ‘you’ll know it when you see it’. And we haven’t seen ‘it’, or the apprentices, for that matter. You sure they didn’t make off with the goods?”
”From where I was flying? Sure as the sun will rise.” Tricolor pulled the hasty sketches produced by Angel of the teacher and apprentices. “There’s only two apprentices here, whom Angel does not know the names of. A blond boy and a brunette girl. Vintage’s unconscious in the kitchen, Symmetry’s still pinned like a butterfly to a frame in the garden, and no way the kids could have taken half of Python’s stuff. Especially the big stuff that won’t even fit through a window-way.”
Armor took his sword by the scabbard and tapped it grip-first on the floorboards. “If I know anything about ateliers, and anything about secretive witches, there ought to be a spot that’s too solid, too sturdy, and only accessible by earth-moving magic.”
“And I know dirt about dirt.” Stitches flicked through her ready spells, counting off seals of healing, mending, fire, and air. ”Anyone got anything on hand?”
Tricolor took to shaking whatever experimental nonsense he had stuck in his wings, resulting in a haphazard pile of light-focusers and glass cutters. “Nope. Not unless you want me to do a Making Mountains—“
“No. Just… no. I’d rather strangle the answer out of that eye than watch you pull up one of those things in the middle of an atelier. Who knows what kind of traps that could trigger?” Armor unsheathed a knife from somewhere in his sash and poured ink onto the circles carved onto the blade. “I’ll just do this.”
Spinning the dagger to fill the circles, he promptly stabbed it through the floorboards. All of the nails holding them down flew up, hovering a half-pace above the ground. Pushing them out of the way, he began stomping hard on the now loose boards. Most of them made hollow, resounding noises, but soon enough, his foot came down with a solid thunk.
“Found it.” Pulling the board up, he revealed the corner of a solid stone that seemed to extend for paces more. “Are any of you hats going to help me, or do I need to flip this onto your hard heads?”
“Don’t get your cloak all in a tangle!” Darkness’ voice wriggled out of some doorway in the atelier, swiftly followed by the rest of him. “I’ll get that.”
Tricolor paled considerably, his feathers standing on end. “You didn’t do anything to Vintage, right? This is extremely not his fault.”
“Oh, nothing totally damaging. He’s still physically intact and fully unconscious. I just took some memories.“ He flicked out a paper, already inked with a seal. ”This is how you’re supposed to open the vault.”
Stamping the paper onto the corner of the stone, all the floorboards in a four pace square began slowly floating up. Once they reached shoulder height, a small staircase peeked out from the darkness.
Darkness pulled his axe from somewhere within his cloak-of-the-night. “I’ll stand guard. Fire-Starter, Tricolor, you stay with me. Armor, Stitches, go down and confirm if Python’s stuff is there.”
-
Armor looked concernedly at the pile of contraptions. “I honestly forgot what a nut job Python was at times.”
“I don’t even want to know what he was planning with this.” Tricolor held the strange small chest at arms length, studying the redstone patterns as carefully as he dared. “Wasn’t he working on something with resin, prismarine, and… what was it? The stuff he found in those ruins.”
“Sculk.” Armor hefted a small box, topped with a purple crystal. “He called it sculk, a sort of fungus that shares some characteristics with redstone. I think this is one of them.”
“No no no no—“ he nearly tripped over a large table in his attempts to back away from the thing. “Ow! What’s… oh. I think this is the big one.”
“The big one? The thing he got raided for?”
“It has to be. Python never worked on anything else this large.”
Pulling the cloth from its top, Tricolor revealed an intricate black glass surface worked over with redstone in an endlessly complex circle. Other smaller inlays seemed to be inked, while some were made of amber resin, turquoise prismarine, and a strange, brown substance that shimmered ever so slightly. In the corners were set brilliant blue stones, cut into pyramids and polished to a mirror shine.
The real eye catcher, however, sat in the center: a great tome bound in leather and embossed with gold, the old language stamped across the cover. It seemed to rotate ever so slightly above the table, a seal in a strange purple substance holding it aloft.
Tricolor gasped as the book suddenly spun to face him, opening to a page papered in the old words. “It’s the real deal, alright. Old Serpent Waiting in the Barley’s magnum opus. The enchanting table.”
“No wonder that Watchful Eye fought so viciously, especially for a non-Knight. This is a real prize.”
“Yeah… how’re we going to get this out of here?”
Before Armor could reply with something snarky, Fire-Starter came running and shouting down the stairs. Somehow, he wasn’t on fire yet, and more than anything that fact seemed to be dampening his otherwise very chipper countenance.
“Up swords and spells, folks! The Knights have arrived!”
Armor and Tricolor shared a look, and the former smiled. It was an expression of teeth and glee that wouldn’t be out of place on a wolf. He drew both his sword and dagger, pouring ink on each in turn to set their inlaid seals glowing blue-hot.
“Took them damn long enough.”