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Ch255-Not A No

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“Are you trying to gather all 8 keys to free it, or to make sure it stays in its cage?” Sylver asked.

He had about a thousand different questions he wanted to ask, but if their answer to this question wasn’t what he wanted to hear, there wouldn’t be any further questions.

“We’re going to trade with it,” Medusa answered.

Her tone was calm, and careful, as if she could sense that one wrong enough word could create an enormous problem for them.

“You’re going to trade with the Leviathan to remove your curses?” Sylver asked.

To him, because he knew what he knew, and knew who and what the leviathan was, what Medusa had just said was so ludicrous that he would have been chuckling if the lives of 3 women weren’t on the line.

“We are, yes,” Medusa answered.

Sylver furrowed his brows, rolled his shoulders, and leaned his head to the left and to the right to relieve the pressure in his neck.

“And you… How… Why do you think you’ll be able to trade with it?” Sylver asked.

In hindsight, given the presence of the Leviathan, he should have been able to guess the answer.

“A few years after… we became like this… our god told us…” Medusa explained.

Something about the way she said it rubbed Sylver the wrong way.

“How did it tell you?” Sylver asked.

“What do you mean?” Medusa asked.

“Was it a vision? A dream? Were you awake when you were told this? Did you hear the god’s voice, did you see them?” Sylver asked.

“It…”

As Medusa’s voice trailed off there was a silence. And a short while later Stheno answered in her place.

“It wasn’t a dream. We were hiding in a cave, and it took us to a white room and spoke to us,” Stheno said.

“White as in you could see a painted white ceiling, walls, and floor? Or white as in there was a distant light everywhere and you were sorta floating in the air?” Sylver asked.

He felt all 3 women tense up at the question.

“The second one,” Stheno answered.

“When it spoke did you hear actual words? Did you hear a voice you recognized? Was the voice coming from inside your head, from somewhere in front of you? Or did you simply know what it wanted you to know?” Sylver asked.

All three women went from standing a fair distance away from him, to standing almost directly behind his back.

“Why are you asking this? What difference does it make?” Medusa asked.

“Because I know what a genuine message from god sounds like. And I want to know if an actual god told you this, or if this is…” Sylver tried to figure out a way to say it politely, given that the topic of discussion was the only hope these three had had for whoever knows how long, “-something else,” he finished after an uncomfortable pause.

It took a great deal of effort to coax the information out of them, but going by their descriptions, they had indeed been spoken to by a god.

Once all 3 were done speaking, Sylver cleared his throat and used that time to consider the wisdom of his next words.

“Was the name of this god… Amphitrite?” Sylver asked.

Their response was silence.

Followed by 3 thuds.

Slowly, Sylver turned around and saw that all 3 of them were on the floor, seemingly unconscious.

What little breath Sylver kept inside him was knocked away as his eyes fell upon the 3rd woman, the one he was yet to see, Medusa.

Her half-open eyes were the red of fresh cherries, and Sylver felt genuinely weak in the knees as he ordered his shades to pick them up and check their pulses.

The shades moved them so they were flat on their backs, and while Sylver stood there and stared at them like some love-struck teenager, Spring pressed his fingers up to the women’s necks and confirmed that their hearts were still beating.

After he was done with that Spring walked over to Sylver, and shoved his shoulder, which caused him to stumble, but the shade caught him before he had a chance to fall. He was able to cobble together something resembling a solid thought now that he was no longer looking at them.

“Do you think it’s part of the curse?” Spring asked, as he handed Sylver a thick piece of cloth, and helped him tie the knot at the back of the makeshift blindfold.

“Probably not… Unless the curse is meant to make them appear hideous, and because of the way I perceive the world it has an inverted effect on me… Or maybe they really are as beautiful as they seem, and you’re being needlessly pessimistic,” Sylver answered, as he adjusted the cloth until it completely blocked his sight.

Normally he would trust himself to simply close his eyes and keep them closed, but this was a new experience for him, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to react. And the reason he was using a blindfold as opposed to pulling his eyes out was that he was hoping this reaction was temporary.

While Sylver stood near the unconscious women, he had the shades scout the area out. Most of the tunnels and rooms had been sealed off using wooden planks, that were covered in salt crystals that made the wood swell up enough to take up the entire doorway.

3 rooms had furniture that resembled a bed, and nearby there was a kitchen, a toilet, a shower room, a small library, a room with makeshift gym equipment, and the rest of the available rooms were used as storage.

There were rooms filled with nothing but rolled-up carpets, sealed clay vases with drawings of fruits and fish on them, a room that had towers of discolored leather that reached the ceiling, and a room with bars of metal, ranging from gold to platinum, all the way down to zinc and copper.

One room had a bunch of metal shackles, chains that were very neatly rolled into compact balls, another had a bunch of wooden logs that had bent and twisted from being soaked in water, another room was filled with crates of multicolored broken glass, another had blacksmithing tools, hammers, tongs, crucible of every shape and size imaginable, and next had a similar overstocked supply of medical tools, scalpels, bone saws, syringes, along with very oddly shaped drills.

The shades stopped their reporting, as Sylver allowed the woman standing behind him to pull him down to a more comfortable height. The crook of her elbow was underneath his chin, around his neck, and she was using her other hand to hold a blade to the side of his neck, where a Carotid artery would be on a normal man.

The woman’s breathing was stable, and since the other two were still where the shades had put them, Sylver was able to deduce that Medusa was the one currently trying to choke him out.

Sylver waited a good 30 seconds and didn’t so much as lift his hands to his throat.

He spoke up when Medusa tried to readjust her grip, to get more pressure on his neck.

“Stheno and Euryale will be fine. They will most likely wake up by themselves in a few minutes. And if it makes you comfortable, I have no issue holding a conversation like this,” Sylver explained.

“Tell me what you did to us, or I will cut off your head,” Medusa asked in a calm but noticeably tense voice. The small snakes coming out of her head had positioned themselves along Sylver’s neck, with their tiny needle-like fangs one tiny push away from biting into his skin.

“I said the name of the god that cursed you, and it made it so you couldn’t hear me,” Sylver explained.

He could feel Medusa’s pulse increase through the arm under his chin, and more noticeably, the subtle sound of snake rubbing against snake got faster and louder.

But aside from that, she didn’t do or say anything. She had enough raw physical strength that he didn’t get the feeling he would be able to get her arms off him, but between [Fog Form] and that decapitation wasn’t going to do anything, he didn’t feel the need to do anything.

“Alright… Here’s the deal I’m offering…” Sylver said loud enough so that Euryale, who was at this point pretending to be unconscious, could clearly hear him.

“You’re going to tell me how to remove the curse on Tristen and Amelia… And you’re going to come with me to the surface. And when I remove your curses, you’ll give me your Gorgoneions. I’ll find something for you to do and a place to live while I gather what I need to gather to remove your curses. That’s the main gist of the deal… we can discuss the finer details later…” Sylver offered.

Again, he couldn’t say how much time passed, but Medusa had had her elbow under his chin long enough that her skin had become warm from Sylver’s body heat.

She let go of him as soundlessly and as smoothly as she had initially wrapped her arms around him.

Sylver remained as he was, with a blindfold over his eyes, and his arms hanging by his side.

In the direction he was facing, he heard a metal door being opened and then felt a foul-smelling breeze blow into his face.

Either Medusa or Euryale placed 2 small glass vials into his hand and closed his fingers around them.

“The one with the cork is for the boy, the other is for the girl. They need to drink the whole thing,” Medusa said.

Sylver moved the vials in his hand, carefully hid the two ice-cold glass bottles into his sleeve, and had his robe move them up near his chest, to keep them safe.

“Alright. And the coming to the surface and working for me part?” Sylver asked.

On the one hand, he didn’t love that they took so long to answer. It helped that he was distracted enough that he barely felt the silence stretch far beyond a reasonable length of time.

But on the other hand, he respected the fact that they took the time to think things through.

“I realize this is all confusing and unusual for you. So you don’t need to give me an answer now, you can tell me what you decided when I return,” Sylver said, as began to walk towards the wide-open metal door.

He stopped after about 5 steps, had Spring split himself into 2 in his shadow, and summoned the shade on his right. He placed his hand on the half Spring’s shoulder.

“This is Spring. He’s a shade. He doesn’t need to eat, breathe, or sleep. He’s also functionally blind so he can’t see you. I’m going to leave him here, so if you have any questions, he will be able to answer most of them…” Sylver explained.

“…” Sylver got the feeling Medusa nodded.

“One last thing before I go… My priority is to have you work for me. And I’m very flexible regarding what I’m willing to pay or do to get that. So, keep that in mind. Anything up to a castle, or marrying into royalty is on the table… I am a very rich man, and I have a lot of extremely rich and influential friends,” Sylver said.

He waited a beat before he started walking again, and for the rest of the walked hoped to hear a question, or at least something from the Gorgons, to imply that they were interested.

But he reached the threshold of the metal door, walked through it, and the door closed behind him.

***

The ceiling had a line of light embedded into it, and Sylver followed it quietly, at a leisurely pace.

“That half won’t be able to understand them without you being nearby,” Spring said, as he materialized next to Sylver and walked alongside him.

The shade was a smidge shorter than the necromancer, but despite his steps being smaller, he didn’t have any trouble moving at the same pace as Sylver.

“They speak Eirish, they just couldn’t understand me,” Sylver said.

“Right… So… The Leviathan,” Spring said.

“Giant hairy snake. Kind of looks like a monkfish, but much longer,” Sylver said.

“And it’s going to defeat the Sun Demon?” Spring asked.

“Or die trying,” Sylver offered.

“I see… And the very fact that I’m asking, means you’re not certain this is a good idea?” Spring asked.

“It’s an idea. I haven’t developed it enough to know if it’s a good idea or a bad one,” Sylver said.

“But the fact that you thought about it hard enough that I then felt the need to say it out loud means it’s a bit more solid than simply being “an” idea. You don’t think Edmund will like it,” Spring explained.

“No, I know for a fact Ed won’t like it. We barely managed to deal with it back then, if it gets out now… Still, at least we know what the Leviathan is capable of. We know it’s weaknesses-”

“-which you are incapable of exploiting without a 3rd Arch-”

“-whereas the Sun Demon is an unknown. And in terms of damage, a snake big enough that it can split a contentment into two just by moving through it is significantly more manageable than what sounds to be a stream of concentrated light,” Sylver said, without acknowledging that Spring had a point.

Although it wasn’t as if the Leviathan was at its full strength.

It was trapped.

And it had hopefully starved a little.

And it wasn’t that dangerous…

Sylver stopped walking and removed the blindfold from his eyes. He rubbed his face with his hands until it warmed up and ran his fingers through his hair.

“One step at a time. First, we undo the curses on the kids, get diplomatic immunity for Tuli, and then have the Gorgons agree to come with us,” Sylver said.

Spring chose not to say what he wanted to say because Sylver knew what he was going to say, and at this moment in time, he didn’t want to think about it, let alone hear it.

Sylver walked slowly, on the off chance someone might catch up to him, but even though he dragged his feet he eventually reached the end.

The corridor he had walked through was clean, and felt like it was level, and yet Sylver could feel the Spring half he left with the Gorgons so far below him that he was barely within range. He turned the wheel on the metal door, walked through it into the enclosed room, and closed the door behind him.

Sylver cracked his knuckles, adjusted the [Mage Cap] growing out of his skull, and waited for his magic to finish enveloping his body. He reached up for the wheel on the ceiling, and although it took him a couple of tries, it eventually budged and began to spin.

He had expected the water to smash into him, he was ready to be shoved down to the floor.

Instead, the circular door opened barely a finger’s width, and instead of being thrown around like a doll, Sylver was merely sprayed in the face with sand.

As the water level in the room rose, the circular door opened more and more, and although the spurting water was somewhat violent, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it would have been if the door had opened all at once.

There were a series of gears along the edge of the door, that were somehow reacting to the difference in pressure to maintain a slow but steady stream of water.

Eventually, Sylver was floating near the ceiling, and the cylindrical door opened all the way.

He swam up to it and looked around in the endless darkness of the deep ocean.

Sylver heard a faint click beneath his feet and was pushed out of the doorway by a powerful wave of water. He didn’t get very far, but he saw that the door was inside the doorway, and through a series of turning gears was gradually closing.

Sylver looked left, nothing but smooth sand, looked to his right, sand, behind him, fucking sand, and in front of him, believe it or not, sand. He could see even now that the loose sand was moving, and in a matter of minutes, the clearly visible door would disappear.

He ran his finger along the gap of the door, there was a tiny bit of space between the metal frame and where it was embedded into the stone ground, and left 10 shades inside.

He then reached into his robe and produced the piece of vellum with Tristen’s contract. Sylver scrunched the page up into a tight ball, and as he pressed his palms together to further compact it, a thick cloud of ash leaked out from between his fingers.

Sylver grabbed the tiny red toothpick with his thumb and forefinger and waved it through the water until the ash finished coming out of it. He didn’t bother with a string since he could actively feel which direction the thin piece of enchanted blood was going towards.

Given the strength of the pulling, he had to guess he was a lot closer to Finland than the crack he had come in through, which meant he was going to go straight to Finland, without meeting Edna on the way.

For a moment Sylver considered trying to find her, but the very idea of getting lost deep underwater made him reconsider before he had even begun to consider. He would go to Finland, remove the curses from the kids, and have someone with a superior sense of direction find and tell Edna that he wasn’t in the crack anymore.

***

To his surprise, he reached Finland without any incident.

A group of underwater spiders tried to catch him in a razor-sharp net, but the strings weren’t sharp enough to pierce his skin, and he simply tore it open with his hands and continued on his way.

Getting into Finland was a bit trickier, the guards couldn’t understand him, and Sylver couldn’t remember the names of the 2 nobles he was trying to get to. Luckily for him, a butler or something, a creature involved with Amelia’s father, recognized Sylver and sorted everything out.

Sylver followed behind the fast-swimming creature and was shown inside.

Amelia’s stomach was caved in, so low that her skin was resting against the front of her spine. He could see the tendons in her shoulders, and even through the cloth covering her, he could count her ribs.

Her father was standing over her, towering, as if he had somehow gotten taller and wider during the time Sylver had been gone. He was speaking very quickly, but his words were inaudible to Sylver’s ears.

“I tried to explain to your man, but I’m not sure if he understood me. I’ll need you to step out of the room for a while, and ready a team of healers, as many as you can,” Sylver explained.

The girl’s father said something in response, and Sylver caught a couple of words, but the man’s Eirish was incomprehensible under the best circumstances and given that he was in a state of panic right now, there was no chance Sylver would understand him.

“The sooner I remove the curse, the sooner the healers can start, and the sooner she’ll be back to how she was,” Sylver explained while gesturing with both hands toward the door.

Instead of leaving, the father continued speaking.

“With all due respect, I know what I’m doing, so unless you’re trying to tell me you’re unable to hold up your end of the deal, we really don’t have anything to talk about,” Sylver explained.

Thankfully the man understood that Sylver had a point, and with an unreadable expression on his face, he left the room and closed the door behind him.

Sylver walked over to the girl and opened her eyes. Both were bloodshot, with tiny white bubbles escaping from the edges, but the pupil of the left eye was ever so slightly glowing with a white light.

Sylver moved the girl so she was sitting up and waited for her to speak. Her jaw hung loosely, and without moving her tongue or lips, sound came out from her mouth.

“-eave immedia-”

It was as if someone had spoken while running past the room.

“Take a deep breath and calm down. Is everyone in Arda alright?” Sylver asked.

The immobile and hollowed-out woman came to life for a moment, sat up higher in her bed, and in a very Lola-like fashion, placed her hands on her lap.

“You need to leave immediately,” Chrys said.

“Why?” Sylver asked.

Amelia sat motionless for half a minute, as the light in her eye flickered out and through what appeared to be great effort was stabilized.

“They know you spoke to the snake women, and they’re going to kill you,” Chrys said.

“Who? Is it the Council or something else?” Sylver asked.

There was almost a full minute of silent flickering.

“I don’t know. They’re watching the building. And-”

Sylver flinched as a puff of red flew at his face but didn’t quite reach him.

Where Amelia used to have her left eye there was now a burned-out hole, with jagged scars that spread out from the hole to her other eye, her nose, forehead, and ear, as if someone had shot her in the eye with a lightning bolt.

Sylver spent a couple of moments reflecting on the decisions he had made during the last 2 or so years of his life, but lucky for the people he was reflecting on, he was still in a pretty great mood from seeing those 3 incredibly beautiful women. Even this didn’t really bother him, or sour his spirits.

So instead of focusing on the fact that Chrys’ vague warning came at the cost of Amelia’s eye, Sylver thought about the Gorgon sisters and daydreamed about going to the beach with all 3 of them.

Sylver held Amelia's head by the jaw and carefully lifted her chin so the liquid inside the vial would flow down her throat.

The small vial was placed in his hand by his robe, and Sylver looked at the slightly green-tinged liquid. It had the consistency of warmed honey, and although the tiny bubbles inside made it look like it was about to start boiling, it was ice-cold to the touch.

Sylver removed the glass cap, and as slowly and gently as he could, he lifted the bottom of the vial up and allowed the green liquid to pour out into Amelia’s mouth.

The reaction was immediate.

Pulsating veins as thick as the girl’s index fingers stretched out of her belly button and spread out until there was barely any visible skin underneath the dark lines.

She began to convulse, so violently that Sylver ended up lifting off the bed, and did his best to stop her head from shaking hard enough to snap her neck. For a fraction of a fraction of a second, Sylver saw writing on the veins, some of the symbols he knew, but there were more than a few that were completely foreign to him.

When the dark veins faded and she stopped convulsing, she opened her one remaining eye and began to scream.

Sylver was gently, but very firmly, pulled away from the girl, and all but shoved out of the room, as roughly 40 healers of various ages, races, and abilities gathered around her from all sides, and blasted the small screaming girl with enough healing magic that Sylver had no choice but to back away from them.

***

One of the healers spoke enough Eirish to convey to Sylver that Amelia was stable.

And that the “commission” Sylver “pled” with “the lady’s papa” would “transpire thusly.”

Further attempts at communication were more frustrating than they were fruitful, so Sylver wished everyone the best and left.

He’d have Edna double-check that the area around Tuli was being sectioned off when she returned from waiting at the faraway crack.

Treating Tristen initially seemed like it would be as simple as treating Amelia, but there were 2 obstacles.

The first was that somehow, through some unknown method, his left eye had exploded and scarred his face.

If Sylver had to guess, someone realized that blinding a person Sylver was tasked with saving wasn’t going to help him, so that unknown someone made the decision to blind Tristen’s eye, to make it appear as if the eye explosion was due to the curse.

So, the missing eye wasn’t so much an obstacle, as much as it was an inconvenience. If someone asked, Sylver would mumble a few made-up words to explain why their left eyes were missing, and that would be the end of that.

The only remaining problem was the convulsion.

With Amelia, the biggest risk was her neck breaking but with Tristen…

In theory, Sylver had enough mana to restrain the boy with pure [Advanced Water Manipulation], but even with that he would break bones, tear tendons, and with the open cuts already on him, it wasn’t out of the question that his muscles would squeeze enough blood out of him to kill him.

One idea Sylver had was to use [Mutating Override] on the kid to make his bones bendy, his muscles weak, and toughen his skin enough so that the blades of salt coming out of them couldn’t pierce it.

But that kind of interference came with its own dangers, and given that Sylver got a bad feeling about messing with this boy’s biology, he decided against it.

A large number of shade-infused [Black Mass] tendrils that would immobilize him, and… that wouldn’t solve the issue of his insides contracting. Even if Sylver plugged up the holes, the blood would go somewhere, and although internal bleeding was leagues better than external, it could still kill him.

As Sylver stared at the tightly sealed door, he considered not doing it.

He got what he wanted from these fish people, and truth be told, he wasn’t all that certain what he was going to ask as payment from Tristen’s father. He had come here solely because he had assumed Amelia couldn’t be saved without saving Tristen as well.

As Sylver sat there and stared at the door, a part of an “idea” formed in his head, and as he turned it over, he realized he was approaching the situation from the wrong angle.

His goal was to remove the curse.

He never promised the boy would be able to walk after he was done.

If I sever the ligaments, the only issue will be the muscles contracting.

And if I seal off the torso, the arms and legs can contract all they want… Healers will be waiting in the next room, I’ll need… 4 limbs, 8 incisions, 5 seconds per blood vessel, roughly a minute for the curse to disperse, half a second to open the blood vessels up…

It was of course possible Sylver was overthinking this, and that the kid would just stay still, and nothing would happen. But as weakened as he was, even a small spasm in the wrong spot could kill him.

By the time Sylver had figured out an acceptable plan to make sure Tristen survived the curse being removed, he also figured out what he was going to ask for as payment for helping.

He wasn’t certain how the dark elves would react to the prospect of living underground again, but even if they didn’t want it, that metal underwater maze would be a perfect spot for him to set up shop.

Even if it was deep underwater, and deep underground…

On the plus side, it came with a built-in defense system, although getting it to work for him would require Ria’s help, and that was likely to be its own challenge.

Truth be told, Sylver just wanted to leave and never come back, but the location was too perfect to throw away. If he ever ended up at war with the High-King, that giant metal maze was better than any necropolis Sylver would be capable of building for a very long time.

Sylver cracked his knuckles, stretched his body, and with a team of 38 healers on standby, entered the room and began the operation.