Chapter Two
Well...technically "girl" wasn't the word. Not by a longshot. The young woman standing now across the corridor from him was perhaps equal in height to his own—rather embarrassingly short—stature, clad in a garment that was equally rather similar to his. The difference being, however, that in spite of the almost simplistic style of the traveler's garb, it was easily of far better quality (and probably rather more expensive) than his own. The tunic, somewhat baggy on her almost slight frame, was a creamy white in color, virtually unstained, which was surprising, and was trimmed at the fringes of collar and sleeves with golden thread. Her trousers, baggy like his own, were the same faint beige color as the tunic he wore and as fancy as her own tunic, were tucked into the tops of a pair of mid-shin height boots. Draped about her shoulders was a light mantle or cloak, white with an interior lining so black it seemed almost to swallow what little light was available. By far the accessory that caught him most off-guard was the quite wicked-looking battle-hammer hooked at her belt.
Her face was lean, narrow, leading down to a small, almost petite chin, and was framed by locks of long and bright golden hair that seemed to reflect more light than was natural. The most unique feature of her face, however, was her eyes: solid black, pupil and iris both, that same light-engulfing black of the inside of her cloak. She looked to be roughly the same age as himself, judging from her features, so at least the height-issue wasn't too terribly embarrassing.
"...Whoa..." he repeated, not sounding any more intelligent than the first time.
The girl, for her part, frowned just a tiny bit, somehow managing to make even that expression almost "cute". "Hn. No offense, whoever you are, but you make a lousy bandit. If you're trying to rob me you're not doing a very good job."
"Um." Yeah. The old Winterbourne charm shines through every time.
The blonde folded her arms in front of her chest, shifting her weight casually from one foot to the other. "Well, if you're going to try to rob me let's get this over with. I don't have all day to stand around down here."
"Well, um...you see...that is..." Think, you fool! Quite possibly the most stunning female specimen this side of the Lord of Nightmares Herself is talking to you and all you can do is tie your tongue in knots?
The young woman waited patiently.
Aric raked the fingers of one gloved hand through his hair, scratching the back of his neck with the same hand. "I'm not here to rob you, I'm...uh...looking for someone."
"Well, if you're going to greet them like that, I certainly hope they're armed or at least armored..."
He cleared his throat into the top of a fist, then glanced back up. "Yeah, well...um...yeah..."
The blonde shook her head, waves of the waist-length golden hair that shone so brightly cascading momentarily forward over her shoulders. "Yes, well...Do you at least have a name?"
Ah! He knew that one! "A-Aric..." He cleared his throat again and managed to find a firmer voice. "Aric Winterbourne."
The young woman nodded slightly, then lifted a hand to hook a few stray wisps of her hair behind one ear. "Ellisia," she countered simply, then glanced first to one end of the chamber and then to the other. "Well...as far as I know I'm the only person in here...why would you be looking for me, though?"
"Well, um...er..." Aric lifted a hand to the back of his neck.
Before he could think of something, though, she shrugged a bit. "Yes, well, I suppose I'll let you tag along for a bit until I find what I'm looking for. If we bump into somebody else in here, maybe they'll be the one you're looking for. Only thing that makes sense, the way I see it."
Aric didn't even have time to respond, much less argue, before Ellisia started walking again. He rolled his eyes ceilingward and threw his hands up, but saw little other option than to follow.
Ellisia went on talking as she walked, as though taking it as a given that Aric was going to follow her. "Now, let's see...from what I can tell, even if this place doesn't have what I'm looking for it's bound to contain something important, as thickly layered as the traps I managed to sneak past were. I must admit, I actually almost tripped one or two."
The same traps that Aric had tripped, every last one of them, on the way down here, no doubt.
"Tell me something," he said, finally managing to get in a word, "Why exactly is it you're so positive that you're not the one I'm looking for?"
Ellisia didn't even miss a step. "Well, that should be obvious. I've never seen you in my life." That was that. She said no more on the subject, walking onward.
"Ehrm...by the way, might I ask what it is exactly you were looking for here?" Seemed like an innocent enough question.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I'd much rather you didn't...we'll find it much faster without unnecessary talk, and when I find it you'll know what it is."
Aric frowned as he walked. He was about two steps away from placing a very satisfying Dil Brand right under her feet...one very large one of those steps being the total lack of magic-use capable here. Of course, nobody ever said that a good right hook couldn't serve just as well, but he wasn't about to punch a girl, no matter how rude and haughty she seemed.
They walked on in silence for some time, after that. Apparently the traps had been more thickly-placed further aboveground. Most likely, whoever had set them hadn't expected anyone to get this far past them. Thus, travel through the dank ruins was for the most part rather uneventful...
Aric was the first one to feel it, as they passed through that last doorway; Ellisia, if she felt it at all was too focused on the hallway ahead of her to show it. The sudden surge of power coursing through the air around them once more, that inaudible "hum" he could feel down to his very bones. Magic But...this ruin was devoid of Magic...
They were screwed.
"Tch—! Ellisia, hold up…!"
As before, the blonde disregarded him.
"Dammit, Ellisia, I said wait a second!"
She didn't wait. "That's what the person who set the trap wanted, Aric. I'd recommend moving at least a body-length forward if not more."
Aric didn't move; instead, he cleared his throat quietly, and politely, lifting one hand to point forward and up, over Ellisia's head. "You might want to take your own advice, there..."
"Now what are you talking abou—?"
"Diem Win!" Aric didn't give her time to finish, taking advantage of the odd "bubble" in the Astral-void that allowed contact with the Plain to send a formless burst of air at Ellisia's back, propelling her a good several yards toward the opposite end of the room...
...and out of the path of the massive stone slab that was about to drop onto her head.
She whirled abruptly, and from the look on her face was about to chew him out good, when she saw what was standing on top of the slab.
"Damn...!" Aric snarled, drawing his hands down and back as formless bluish light began to gleam between them with a faint hum. "I hope you know how to use that hammer...!"
The...thing...in question was about four times the size of a horse, and it stood on four heavily muscular legs. However, its size was far from the only difference. For the most part, the creature's body resembled that of a lion, but the similarity ended when one saw the head that rested on its shoulders. Rather, all of them. The traditional lion's head was there, to be sure...no mistaking that. However, sprouting from the thing's unnaturally broad shoulders to either side of that head were two additional heads: on the right, a goat's head, and on the left, an eagle's. In addition, as opposed to a tail ending in a tuft of hair in keeping with the rest of its body, the body of an unnaturally large snake sprouted from where the tail should have been, arching up and over the creature's back so that the serpent's baleful eyes glared at Aric along with all the others. Ellisia was lucky she was behind it. That end probably looked prettier than what Aric Winterbourne was faced with right now.
"I don't think there'll be a need for that." Before Aric could ask what she was talking about, her voice rang out again, "Bram Blazer!" A flash of pale blue light exploded against the bizarre creature's posterior, sending it hurtling forward—conveniently enough, right at Aric!
Of course, he wasn't standing there any longer when it landed, having dived to one side before it could crash into the floor, and more importantly, as the abomination crashed into the floor where he had been, he cast his two hands forward, releasing the gathered Magic he had drawn between them. "Freeze Brid!" The light he cast forth, roughly in the shape of a glowing blue globe of energy, exploded against the beast's right shoulder, crystallizing on contact in a great explosion of frost and leaving a thick layer of ice to encase the area it struck.
It took nothing more than a subtle flexing of shoulder-muscles to shatter the ice left behind, but the damage was done. The burst of cold had been intense enough to damage the flesh: instantaneous frostbite. Enough of those, and he could do some serious damage to this thing.
Between the space of one breath and the next, before he could even blink, Ellisia was abruptly standing next to him with her mace in one hand, and the other lifted as though ready to hurl another spell. "It'll take you all day to run it down, at that rate..."
"You got any better ideas?" he shot back, cupping his hands and gathering more frosty magic energy between the palms.
"As a matter of fact..."
He waited.
"...not particularly."
He nearly fell over, at that, but restrained the urge to yell something severely insulting in her direction. However, the momentary distraction was enough for the creature to regain its bearings and turn on the two of them.
Aric sighed. Well, guess who that left the hero-stuff up to? Par for the course. "See if you can keep it at a distance..."
She gave the slightest of nods, surprising him ever so briefly in her willingness to cooperate. "I hope you know what you're doing..."
"Yeah, me too..."
Ellisia didn't argue that. The main reason was that the thing had decided to pounce again, and her voice was occupied at the moment. "Goz V'row!" As she cast her free hand toward the floor, the darkness of her own shadow erupted upward from the ground in a writhing, almost fiery mass of blackness, a searing conglomeration of Astral magic that roiled along the ground and into the charging monster. The resulting blast as the spell dissipated on contact send the beast reeling, and the consequent attack to the Spirit that the Goz V'row spell also entailed left it panting with lionish knees half-buckled as though it had run a good, solid mile.
"Perfect...!" Aric hissed. Now was his chance. Drawing his cupped hands to his right side, as he had for the earlier Freeze Brid, he began to chant in an unearthly echoing voice.
"You who goes through both Air and Earth;
Gentle flow, floating Water;
Gather to my hands and make a glacier!
Vice Freeze!"
Casting his hands forward, Aric unleashed the rapidly growing orb of blue Magic forward, its diameter continuing to increase even as it sailed through the air between the two of them. He took the brief consideration of snagging the fringe of Ellisia's cloak before sprinting with utmost haste to the furthest corner of the room from the blast-radius, screeching to a halt just before the two of them could collide into the wall. His back was turned, so he caught only the brilliant blue tint the explosion of light cast on the walls before him...
Turning, after releasing a very irate Ellisia's cloak, he slowly folded his arms across his chest, unable to conceal a small smirk of professional pride. Where only moments before a slavering, ravenous beast ready to do rather unpleasant things to the two of them had stood, now there was naught but a fog-enshrouded ice-sculpture of a slavering, ravenous beast ready to do rather unpleasant things to the two of them. As further testament to the power of the spell, the very walls and floor closest in proximity to the beast were caked with a thick layer of frost.
"Well," Ellisia said, straightening the fringe of her cloak and lifting a hand to smooth out her disarrayed wisps of hair, "That was certainly ostentatious."
Aric merely shrugged. "I like that spell."
"What was that thing?" Ellisia asked, her tone disgusted. Aric could tell, as he led the way this time, that the blonde young woman was more shaken than she'd probably care to admit.
"How should I know?" he shot over his shoulder, "Whoever built this place must have had a twisted imagination to put a chimera like that in here." A chimera was a combination lifeform created by magic from the pieces, or sometimes merely the blood or hair samples, of other creatures. A chimera wasn't necessarily bound to its creator's will, one of the many reasons why the practice of creating them was unpopular as well as frowned-upon. After all, it didn't do one much good to make an elephant-sized, humanoid, ant-headed moose with a hyper thyroid problem, only to get gruesomely mutilated by it not a day later.
"They were probably just trying to protect their interests," Ellisia shot back, almost a touch defensively. The tone surprised Aric, but he just shrugged it off. She was probably just mad because he'd showed her up back there.
"Yeah, well, right now we have our own interests to be concerned with."
"Like what?"
"How about that?" Aric pointed ahead.
He had stopped so suddenly that Ellisia nearly bumped into him from behind. "H-Hey, would you watch where I'm—!" she started, but before she could work up any further protest, her eyes were caught by the target of Aric's index-finger. "Altar...?"
"No, it's an armchair for an ogre," he quipped, then shrugged. "Come on. Let's see what somebody was so determined to protect."
In a heartbeat, Ellisia was suddenly in charge once more. Breezing past him with the air of regality, she lifted up one fragile-seeming hand to tuck a few strands of golden hair behind her ear, sliding effortlessly up the stairs and to the altar. Once again, Aric found his attention frozen again. It was all he could do to stifle another "whoa", before his momentary awe was interrupted by her next words.
"...is this it?"
"Huh?" Aric blinked a few times.
She had lifted something up from the top of the altar, a small glass box, and was studying it intently, having ignited a small magic light-globe to float in the air over her head. Outlined in shadow inside the box, was the object of her skepticism.
"Lemme see that!" Aric demanded, vaulting up the steps two at a time, himself, and almost snatching the box. When he saw what was inside, he felt his jaw drop.
"We...did all...that...for a single...lousy..."
As it turned out, the small object that he had seen silhouetted within the box was a single, round and flat disc. A coin...judging from the color and the way the Lighting spell made it shine, platinum or something remarkably similar. A single, platinum coin.
"We..." Aric's right eyebrow twitched, a warning sign of things to come. "We...almost got killed...we came all the way down here, past all those traps, past that big stupid monster...all...for a lousy...stinking..."
"Coin?" Ellisia supplied.
"Coin!" he snapped off, finishing.
"Well, I admit, it's a bit of a disappointment..." Ellisia started. Aric didn't let her finish.
"I can't believe this! This is the most ridiculous—A bloody Gods-cursed coin! I swear by the Soiled Trousers of Lei Magnus…who in the lowest bowels of Hell would possibly be so devilishly stupid as to set up all that guard on a measly stinking piece of metal? Are you sure this is the lowest floor? There must be some mistake here! This is just—Whoomphhh!" The last of his rant, of course, did not come out as expected. Primarily, this was because a very large, heavy, and hard something had crashed into the back of his skull. To be more specific, as he would find out later, the blunt side of Ellisia's battle hammer.