As he passed, each sconce flared to life with an elemental will-o-wisp, bright and hungry. The flames unspooled from their fixtures with a rattle and drifted to encircle him—every one of them, even those technically closer to Nico.
Zhou didn’t bother looking at them and kept his attention upward. He swept his foot across the floor, leaving a sharp trail of purple mana in its wake. The earth split along the arc he drew, and jagged stone thrust upward, curving into the air to spear the wisps one after another. Each wisp flailed helplessly on the stone that impaled it until they eventually went limp, dimming out in a display that felt quite pitiful, leaving the ruin to fall back into darkness around them.
Nico, who was just standing there watching, figured he should contribute. He raised a hand and split a steady gold flame into a cluster of smaller lights.
|| Skill Activated: Foxfire Wisps ||
[7/7 active | Duration: 45 min | "up to 7 lil guy"]
The orbs cheerfully bobbed overhead, offering a warm circle of light. Nico watched over the mana blobs with a faint protectiveness as each one sprouted little triangle ears and a thin, wisping tail. Admittedly, witnessing the fate of the sconce wisps left him feeling a little shaken. Also, he needed to finish editing that caption.
As he walked up to Zhou, metallic locks clacked open somewhere in the dark: one to the north, one to the east. Neither were accompanied by a triumphant unlocking jingle.
Zhou chose east without hesitation. Nico, realizing that splitting up would be the more efficient strategy—assuming the rift required every room to be unlocked—also chose east.
He had no idea how Zhou and Kai wandered around in the dark like this. Well, he did in the mechanical sense. Kai relied on scent, sound, and reading shifts in temperature and water vapor. Zhou probably let his earth affinity map the place for him. It was how they emotionally did it that baffled him. Wasn’t the dark a primordial fear? Wasn’t this place fucking scary? Why did these two keep testing his sense of normalcy?
Nico simply unraveled rifts during the day. Rifts already had a terrible sense of time; it wasn’t hard to make that work in his favor. Yet on missions with Kai, the light-to-dark ratio always favored darkness by an offensive margin. Kai never bothered to light his way with his fire affinity, even when stealth wasn’t involved. Not that they conducted reconnaissance often, if ever. Nico theorized that was just Kai being a jerk.
And now Zhou, with no fire affinity nor light generating equipment, walked confidently as if seeing didn’t matter. He didn’t even adjust his gait to match what the foxfires illuminated.
“Scared of the dark?” Zhou asked, still facing forward, yet addressing Nico behind him.
Oh. Another mind reader in his life.
“Yeah.”
“Keep up then,” Zhou suggested, with a soft chuckle alongside the words.
Nico decided to interpret that positively.
***
The narrow corridor opened into a long, vaulted exhibit hall. It was half carved from pale stone and half collapsed in ruin, all of it covered with a heavy film of dust. A soft, steady sound threaded through the chamber—maybe wind slipping through cracks, or sand spilling somewhere unseen. It grew louder the deeper in they walked.
Nico sent a few foxfires forward, illuminating the alcoves along the walls. Each seemed meant to hold a sculpture or a relief carved into the stone, but most were ruined, seemingly smashed rather than worn down by time. Chunks of stone littered the floor where figures should have stood. Partial carvings ran the length of the walls—faded inscriptions etched in the same older language as the observatory’s seal.
Zhou’s stride slowed. He lingered over the intact reliefs, brushing the grooves with his fingertips in careful attention. When Nico floated a foxfire toward him, Zhou raised his hand beneath it, cupping it gently. His purple mana shimmered into the flame, bubbling in like a lava lamp. The sage then guided the wisp himself, engrossing himself in the carvings.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Nico’s eyes glimmered with fascination, watching an aether elemental in use. But it didn’t feel like the right time to nerd over it. The hall felt like a silent museum; it’d be awkward to break the quiet. With the exception of Zhou’s occasional muffled chuckle at something in the half-preserved stone, the only sounds were their footsteps and the constant sift of grit falling from above.
It was strange, feeling the need to stay on high guard while shadowing an infamously strong Sage. But Zhou’s focus was fixed elsewhere. He was brushing his hand along the walls, tracing each relief as if committing it to memory by touch.
Nico stayed alert for the both of them. It felt important to leave that space for the Sage. After all, how many people were still literate in this script?
On an inhale, Nico snapped his fingers, listening to the sound echo cleanly off the stone. That meant the end of the hall wasn’t far. He exhaled.
A few more strides brought them to a shallow set of steps that rose into a larger, shrine-like alcove. A foxfire drifted into it. At the center stood a pedestal where only the base of a sculpture remained. Unlike the alcoves leading up to it, the foxfires identified no broken remnants nearby.
“So that’s what that is,” Nico muttered.
“Mn.” Zhou didn’t look at the pedestal, but chuckled softly at the final relief before the steps.
***
Neither of them mentioned that the shifting sand sound had followed them since they entered. Very early on, when he sent the foxfires through the alcoves, Nico caught a glimpse of the source. At the edge of the glow, a shape clung to the ceiling: humanoid, but twisted. It moved rigidly, crawling sluggishly on all fours with its joints bent in every wrong direction—like a certain grudge-holding horror. With each motion its stone joints met in a slow scrape, like mortar to pestle, shedding grit that drifted down onto them. Cool.
It followed them loyally along the ceiling, somehow always keeping high away enough that the foxfires were only able to highlight how uncanny its form was.
Nico was stricken silent by its… everything. He explicitly did not make eye contact with the grudge-adjacent Riftborn. He had no idea what to do about it, but knew he wasn’t about to take the curse home with him.
Nico stayed close to Zhou after executing a thorough analysis of the situation. He concluded that being left alone with the thing was the worst possible outcome. The problem was Zhou looked so genuinely interested in the alcoves that it felt rude for Nico to freak the fuck out. Even in their broken and distorted states, the pieces on exhibit had obviously been crafted with care. And after the grandma lore, it felt especially inappropriate to cut Zhou’s time short to start blasting at the Eldritch horror inhabiting this intimate chamber.
But Nico 100% noted that the ceiling and walls were earthen, meaning Zhou could pin that thing instantly with his elemental affinity. He just had to want to do that.
What he did instead was maneuver the foxfire in his palm to underlight the thing from the creepiest angle possible whenever it crawled overhead—exclusively for Nico’s viewing pleasure.
The final straw was when something resembling a toothy grin entered Nico’s line of sight. He immediately tried to extinguish the foxfire with a snap. To his despair, Zhou had already fully taken over the little wisp, ears and all. It now glowed a soft lavender, sustained by his mana.
Nico let out a long exhale that was more of a poorly disguised internal scream. He saw Zhou’s shoulders shake with a stifled laugh.
***
Zhoumin finally turned his attention to the pedestal; miraculously in a way that did not acknowledge that whatever it was dedicated to was obviously missing. He went up the shallow steps with the purple foxfire turning in his palm, illuminating the carved surface of the altar as if it were the main attraction. When he leaned in, some loose hair fell forward, turning the silver strands lavender in the glow. His eyes followed the etched lines in silence while he delicately brushed dust away from its surface.
The Riftborn (that perhaps bore a grudge) followed in lockstep with Zhou, bound to him like his shadow. The sage diligently held the wisp high enough for Nico to see every angle of the thing’s unnatural crawl. When Zhou, and in turn the humanoid Riftborn, came to a still at the altar, the noise of spilling sand and grit finally stopped.
Crrrrr- Crr- Crack. Crack. Crack.
It tried to turn its head and failed, over and over, until it was finally able to rotate its chin, in forceful stutters, to where the top of its head used to be. This sound was much worse. Nico winced at every crack.
Zhou did not. He raised the foxfire, letting the light cross his cheekbones so he could read, which also happened to bathe the thing’s jaw in a garish purple uplight. The sage made a point to study the glyphs with surgical precision, leaving no doubt that all of his attention was devoted to the altar. It was pure coincidence that he was casting long nightmarish shadows all over the room.
Who watches the watchmen? Who keeps Sages in line? Who ensures their checks and balances? Why was their power allowed its own set of rules, while everyone else was tethered to their ranks?
Nico ran through this line of questioning as an alchemist who was fully complicit in, and regularly reaped the benefits of being an A-Class in the ranking system.
His pupils dilated as he watched the creature peel one arm off the ceiling, then the next, falling into a dangling limp. His heart was hammering at the acrobatic display, tail bushed.
It finally dislodged itself.