Chapter Text
"Bunny-woman! I once again CHALLENGE YOU to answer my EPIC RIDDLES THR-"
The fucked up little bird monster hopped off the branch, right before Allison's body smashed through where he'd been perched. The big finch fluttered on the wind, escaping the deluge of after-image limbs, untouched by the magenta blur of his hunter's blade.
And then the overlapping Allison-form fell, tumbling through branch after branch. When she hit the dirt path, though, she flowed into right back into a crouch.
Her jacket scuffed and beaten by her repeated falls, enough little leaves decorating her fur to represent every shade of late Fall, the bunny Punk rose, apparently bothered neither by repeated injury nor repeated bird-humiliation.
What she was was literally growling up at the thing, which had crossed over to the other side of the path. He continued to watch them from the branches above.
Melody ran after them, panting. She sketched out a quick First Aid spell with her wand hand and threw it towards her girlfriend.
"Hey, sweetie, could you maybe not use the sword near the trees? I don't think we can stop a fire if we start one!"
The bunny folk was pacing side-to-side, as if trying to get at some new angle on their hawkish opposition; the ghostly copies overlaid over-top her form had started to fade, now lagging further behind her. They were melting, collapsing lower to the ground, losing detail; as if they were bunny-lady bodies covered in some ethereal blue-white silk, motioning, specifics of their expressions left vague, only implied.
"Right, no, fair, sorry," Allison murmured, scabbarding her blade without looking back - it glanced off the scabbard on her first try, sending out a small shower of electric sparks onto the dirt.
"You're good!" Melody arrived alongside her, looking Allison up and down as she caught her breath.
Her girlfriend reached up, brushing some of those leaves out of the hair she'd been experimenting with cutting short and wearing down. Her focus, though, stayed on the bird - an expression like she'd tuned the rest of the world out. Honestly? It was just kinda nice seeing her like that again.
In the zone, engaged, moving.
Gently biting her lip-
Okay, well. Alright.
"You're, uh, having fun with the Spellbook, at least?"
Allison huffed, then smiled.
"Yeahh, well, figure that's beginning to-" she picked a twig out of the fur on her jacket, and actually winced this time, "to wear out."
Allison had picked the book out from Cathy's new stock a couple of days ago - 'we're adventuring again' cost-covering it, in her mind. In the colorful wars for appeal that made up most of the magic store's bookshelves, shed gone for the one bold enough to go for 'understated' - even gesturing at Authentic Goth Magic, though Melody was pretty sure it was still from just as corporate a brand as most of the others.
Dark purple, austere black metal trim, abstract minimal icon of a glowing lantern on the cover. Finding out it was primarily a self-buff book had sealed the deal, in a world where they weren't always sure they'd get to have Claire out with them, at least for a little while.
Turned out to be right on that call, huh?
Melody opened her mouth to offer encouragement, "Hey, you're getting cl- Oh!"
She was cut off by a rising humming noise - their bird, making an inquisitive, pointed, old-man-esque sound from a throat the monster didn't have, that seemed to project itself farther than was natural.
Allison tensed- and the thing hurgled and, from his mouth, shot (threw up...?) a spellbolt of yellow-white lightning downwards.
Allison went for it with a forearm - but the bolt singed past her, hitting behind her: Melody felt the impact. Mythril rung out as she took it on one of the pauldrons haphazardly clipped around her shoulders. She rocked back a step.
The look was weird. There was a magical self image thing she vaguely knew things about, where clothes she liked were supposed to get magic-based protection depending on her own magical ability. But, well, the blouse of her Fall-colors casualwear outfit's neckline went below her shoulders, so...
"You okay, babe?"
"Uhh..."
Here was the thing: the Mythril was fine. She wasn't even sure the impact had been enough to bruise her. She even didn't bother going to heal it. And that was her entire thing!
They werent in any danger of the monster hurting them in any way Melody couldn't immediately fix up. If Allison could get to the thing... he was different, creepy with his masculine elf face on an orbular bull-finch body, but decidedly low level: nothing indicated he could even take a punch from the bunny folk Punk.
Now, unfortunately, though, Melody had been a bit silly. She'd failed to think; she'd failed to have certain thoughts that you were supposed to have before going after a monster. And so they didn't actually have a way to make that happen.
"Annoying," she murmured. Probably too low for Allison to hear - Melody only heard Allison on a delay, and only after a hot second blinked up at her, "Oh, yeah- I'm fine! I mean... I'm whatever?"
"Whatever how?" Allison was stretching on her toes and bouncing up and down, restless. But all of her attention was on Melody, now.
"Oh, I dunno," Melody sighed, "Sorry, I just- this kinda sucks, right? I should've brought a Chronomancy, or something."
"Ba~aa~be, this was literally practically a date. I mean I didn't think of it either! You're goo-"
"BUNNY GIRLL!" clamoured down the buzzy (but still weirdly low and masc) voice of the elf-guy-bird at them, "You have interrupted the riddles of me! I will start over! Prepare to answer my AWESOME-"
"Oh my god just shut up" Allison breathed. On her feet, smooth and without hesitating, she slunk over to the side of the path, grabbed a solid little pebble; like a skipping stone, with a cocked backstroke, she flung it up at the bird. The power throw like a bullet, it split the branch their target sat upon on right off of the everamber tree.
Melody actually found it a really hot move for Allison to just be able to casually pull out. But... the bird failed to respect the lesbianism of it, hopping away to the tree behind - reacting as soon as Allison had moved.
"Nice try," Melody said, soft, as Allison grumbled out something frustrated and sore.
"You just know they're gonna be really annoying riddles," Allison murmured, "and we're gonna have to sit here while it takes pot-shots at us, and bluuuurgh. It'll suck the worst. The worst ever."
The words fell into the background of Melody's thoughts, being the umpteenth time Allison had repeated the sentiment in the last fifteen minutes.
They hadn't taken a monster bounty since -
Actually, outside of figuring out what was going on during Summer, we only ever screwed up going after that one boar, huh? The one that... came back after us when we were doing the ritual...
She guessed the Paladins had been doing a fine job of their job.
So this wasn't how they'd ever really done stuff before, but Melody had thought - she knew how this was basically supposed to go.
Instead, apparently, she'd been outright silly.
See, what Melody'd thought to grab in terms of a Spellbook had been - being brutally honest - a security blanket. The tiny amount of thought she'd employed was to just pick something to reassure herself, tell herself that she could deal; because even if she was rusty, even if they ran into some sort of imaginary Very Dangerous Woods Monster, she'd have some big magic attacks on her as a fall-back.
So - out of everything, out of all of the books Melody had taken out of team hammerspace(-not-actually-hammerspace-just-Verena's-house-actually-apparently), and all of the ones she'd bought with an excited Allison... she'd picked out the orange Spellbook with a fire icon on the cover. She'd just grabbed the first all-attacks-all-the-time sorta one she'd spotted off of the magic shelf.
For a forest.
So, so silly, in hindsight. Adventurer 'team comp' was something Claire and Jodie usually chit-chatted about over picnic breaks, and that Melody never really thought about - didn't consider her wheelhouse.
Even once I became the... field leader? I think? At some point?? I guess???
But standing here, hunched with her lungs burning, unable to do anything to help other than try to keep pace, she was thinking on it. Ever since her and Allison had taken the ritual - ever since she'd stopped just being the water girl - their team had finally started to come together around... debuffs, holding opponents down. A variety of options, rather than just attacks. Which actually let Allison and Claire wail on the target safely, let Melody... stand back and heal, safely.
Basically.
"I'm gonna go again," Allison said. She was idly thumbing at the buckle that held the Ghostlight Spellbook to her adventuring jeans, "I can jump, I can platform, I can do it. Parkour bun, I can get'em."
She looked back over her shoulder at Melody, licking her lips, "You ready?"
Oh. Oh! Melody stood up straight, blushing a bit. She was waiting for her. Letting her catch her breath.
Wind rustled through the canopy; the light was moving towards a golden tone, as the sun came to the end of her day.
"Go getter, tiger," Melody said, in a voice that came out kind of small. And she didn't actually know where she'd heard that one.
But Allison smiled, wide and bright, for just a moment - before she scowled, then turned.
"Oh my god, I wish Jodie was here."
Allison thwipped out the Spellbook, swept through the pages: they landed, as always, right on the one she wanted. Runes glowed in an ectoplasmic pale blue and rose off the page, and the self-buff swept over her, coating her in those after-images once more.
She lunged forwards into a running pose, and then the speed the ghosts brought was back with her.
Melody didn't think it was actually about not wanting to answer the riddles. Well, there wasn't a guarantee just doing it would defeat the thing, anyway. She thought that it was about... A lot of little things, really, for Allison.
But whatever those were, it was also about getting to run.
Allison ran. The wind seemed to pick up in recognition, sweeping through the autumnal forest around them, and Melody jogged after her.
Her girlfriend let out a big 'whoop!', that came out sounding gargled and freaky and interesting through the Speed of Death effect. Melody called back with her own light "whoo!" in response; for encouragement; because it was fun. The piercing, monster-yellow of the birds eyes watched them, as Allison curved around the path below.
Then he flapped away, scared out of position by Allison. But Allison didn't jump, continuing the curve.
And Melody saw the play. They'd chased the bird from a back-trail overlooking the coast east of Greenridge: they'd been walking and chatting, and Allison had spotted the flash of shifting beast-monster purple in a bush.
She'd gone off after what she'd correctly guessed was the 'annoying bird that harassed me' they'd taken the bounty page for from the quest-it board. The further they'd chased him in (realising they didn't actually have any way of getting the bird down from the trees), weaving between paths and then off of them altogether, the more everamber trees appeared.
Melody hadn't noticed that until now, but by that indicator they were probably coming up on the National Park boundary proper. The everambers the pride of the park: Stouter trees, lower trees; tougher trees, trees unbothered by Winter's approach.
Allison went past the bird, only feinting with any jumps she did make. The bird flitted onto another amber-bearing branch, peering down unsurely at an Allison following along on foot.
Until she wasnt.
In a blur of her selves, Allison ran up the trunk of the bird's tree, and swung around that branch like a pole athlete. Landed on it in a crouch-
The thick branch bowed down, but didn't snap.
And then the chase was on for real. Their quarry flew away, and Allison pursued, bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce in ghostlit arcs through the canopy after him.
Parkour bun.
Melody let herself slow to a comfier jog as she lost sight of them.
- ♫ 𝅥𝇔 𝄪 𝇔𝅥 ♫ -
Hey, it's good for her to have... an actual adventuring thing to do for once, right?
Thats... what, enrichment?
Melody... hadn't been up to much, lately. But, she'd started to think that boredom might've been pretty completely normal for her in ways it just as much wasn't, for Allison.
There'd been the recovery from... What was turning pretty swiftly into just 'Summer' in her head and the guild group-chat, and would probably remain 'Summer' well into the next Summer.
No strenuous activity or magic use for a while, in case their bodies got confused that they weren't in their... Well, Melody didn't really remember it clearly.
Their 'altered states'. As Zinnia had put it.
There'd been a period of burn out, but also, 'hey, what do we do next?' that had come after that, basically. Maybe some point before everything, the vague plan had been to go around the major island towns and take quests there at some point - probably never Brightport - but...
But being better adventurers had always been a vaguer thing than, oh, 'once we defeat the Goddess of Magic and save the world'. It hadn't really been an actual thought, at least to Melody. And with Verena (who was squarely interested in staying in the valley, after waiting a millennia to be with her wife) taking on Claire as her apprentice... And with Verena in general, really...
So, Melody had been spending time on her laptop not finding answers: not finding answers to the lingering questions of Summer, not finding a clear next thing to do, not telling enough of what had happened to her internet friends to get advice. Then, every day, she'd go back to what she used to do every day, which pretty much involved a lot of browsing on that same laptop.
Just, now, sometimes she had Allison cuddling up with her.
Slow days.
Jodie had been researching as well, but she'd mostly been going around between the mainland and here, with Faith: running support.
Claire had been doing well, and if Melody and Allison weren't just chilling together, the three of them were usually crashing at Zinnia's place. Which was fun! And was a good excuse to get to know Beverly some more, the times she'd been able to come.
Melody thought she'd been fine with all that. But had Allison? It was nice to spend the time decompressing, but...
They'd started taking jobs again a week and a bit ago. Jodie had been there for a few, but she couldn't commit to all of them, just taking what she could as... probably just time with them to catch up, as she moved around with Faith.
Allison and Melody had had chatted a bit about inviting Claire, but... she was invested in her training, anddd they were mostly all just simple fetch quests.
It would have made it all more of a pain to schedule.
So then... Was that why Allison'd pushed for this?
What'd happened was: they'd gone out, to the independent town theatre - the one Melody kinda enjoyed just being in, for its dogged committal to some cheesy art deco style all gimmicky and unique and out of place in Greenridge - to see a weird indie movie Allison had wanted to see, that had had a lot of partially-dressed women smoking. Melody, if put into the corner and demanded of an opinion, would have without hesitation described the film as "Very Gunky", and then not have been able to explain what she meant by that at all.
On their way back, past the fountain, Allison had seen the bounty on the board, and, either after finding the movie slightly disappointing, or just because she still had an XL cup of caffeinated soda working through her, Allison had said they should just drop their (gay and not that detailed) plans in order to go monster hunting that evening.
All that time... All those quests finding something someone dropped. Cuddling and not doing much.
Not wanting to bother Claire, not seeing much of Jodie.
All that time, had Allison just been-
Melody blinked. Amber rays of light poked through the canopy above. Was the sun setting by now?
"Allison?" she called. It felt like it was starting to get chillier.
This far off the path, the trees pressed in on her. There was a vertigo to being in a place you didn't know. She couldn't pin where she was, relative to anything in the park, and the trees gave nothing away in their quiet intent.
Melody was pretty alone. She was out of breath, again - not that she'd been running.
She slowed - shook her head and breathed in the crisp air, deep, the proper way; steadied herself against a trunk. Brought up an artefacted JPEG of an informational poster on her phone: the screen glowed bright, and her eyes had to adjust because the day had gotten darker.
She made herself look around the ray-speckled undergrowth for any markers she could recognise: did she know where she was?
She listened. All around her - past the blood in her ears. She could hear normal birdsong from normal birds: all of them having their little tweet-tweet chit-chat discussions about the end of their little days.
You couldn't have gotten that far in, you're probably, like, five minutes from the park entrance. You're okay.
Melody Amaranth told herself that she was okay.
It went like - You've done this. You're literally good. This isn't anything tough, to you, anymore.
You're...
There was nobody there. Plus, Allison wouldn't have gone that far away from her.
Right?
Not who you used to be. Melody breathed, not who you used to be.
She swallowed.
"Well, I'm not sure it's the worst date we've ever been on," she said, and managed to get herself smiling.
And then she heard a big weird explosion.
It happened close-by enough to shock all of her pink fur on end; The BOOM of it warbled and howled and then trailed off like a breathless voice-
"Ohmygod- Oh my god, okay, o-okay-"
The birds all took off. She looked around, and through a break in the canopy saw a corona of blue-white light, rising past the trees and fading into the blue sky, a bit west-northwest.
Melody started running again.
- ♫ 𝅥𝇔 𝄪 𝇔𝅥 ♫ -
The buff was sloughing off of Allison when she caught up to her, and her hands and knees were dug into the cover of fallen leaves on the forest floor. She didn't appear much more ruffled, for what it was worth; but she looked despondent.
"Mellsss," Allison cried, with a put-on sob, "I was so clo~ose!"
It didn't look like the explosion had actually literally physically blown anything up. Flitting wisps the color of the Ghostlight magic rose off of the tree Allison was prostrated in front of. She couldn't see the monster.
"Did he fly off?"
Allison opened her mouth - and then Melody heard a cascade of flaps behind her head, interrupting her.
The monster landed amidst the canopy a bit off to the side of Melody.
"Well, hey, OK, apparently not yet," Allison said, "oh boy."
Melody braced, turned to look up, body turned horizontal to put a pauldron first... But the yellow lights of the monster's eyes were turned away from her: fixated on Allison, still.
Allison tried pushing herself to her feet- slipped a bit on the composted leaves, letting out a cut "ack!" as it turned into a bit of a scramble.
In that interstitial moment, Melody blinked. Then blinked again, a few times. Her brain hadn't really re-entered 'processing a monster fight' mode yet, but...
"BUNNY LADY!"
And then, before he could continue, an arm-length twig blurred towards the loud bird.
He hopped to the branch to his side, letting the impromptu spear split apart the one it'd been on. Allison had gotten herself up to a one-leg kneeling position to make the javelin toss: one last moment of speed. A fake out.
"Well~llp," Allison drew out, "frick. I don't... Mel?"
Melody had one hand out towards Allison in a 'stop' motion, and her expression... Must have been giving off some sorta energy, because Allison tilted her head at her. The couple streaks of electric blue the pair of them had put in the front of the bunny folk's new hairdo fell over one eye. She looked over at the bird and then back at Melody a few times.
Then, she got to her feet, and, saying no more, backed off a few steps.
Melody had never actually attacked the monster. Those searching person-like eyes and dialogue made him seem more intelligent than normal monsters, sure, but he was just kind of repeating the same-
"BUNNY WOMAN! You have interrupted my riddles! I will start again from the beginning," he crowed down from on-high.
The same script, yeah. Almost like...
Does he even know I'm, like, here?
Melody began to approach, as she started to feel kind of offended.
"All right," Allison said, tone neutral, "let's see what you've got."
Melody wanted to kiss Allison for understanding - She's so good at this, I swear.
Monsters were weird. There was the same shifting, not-quite-physical sort of body and yellow eyes she'd seen before, being one of the dimension-hopping kindsa monsters that you could call 'native' to the Isles, Hole Hounds and other things Melody had had to chase out of her garden a few times. So were the riddles, the script he was sticking to, just kind of another thing he could do? Really good mimicry, more than internality.
I mean, there were computer programs that could do that nowadays, right? All of the social media companies had started talking overnight about wanting to find ways to integrate chat-models or whatever into their sites - she'd seen a lot of people with strong opinions on it on her dash lately. Claire had a tag for making fun of news stories on it all.
The finchy creature seemed to stop doing the riddle thing at times. To observe, to shoot. So, maybe that implied 'running' the riddles for a specific person took up all of his attention?
She crept towards the tree.
"SOMETIMES," intoned the bird, "I am a BABY. AND YET! I do not-"
The Gust spell ran a hole through the canopy, leaves irresistibly stripped off in an instant of violent and tearing wind. The arcane howl of it carried away branches, making them dance up into the heavens, all up in a whorl.
The weird annoying bird riddle monster squawked, voice like an actual bird for once, and was launched backwards and out of sight - falling somewhere on the forest floor with an audible thump.
"YEAHH!!" Allison hollered. She crossed the distance between them in the blink of an eye, literally bouncing on her feet as she came up beside Melody, "I love my paladin wife!!!"
Melody laughed - both of them sounded kinda loopy and relieved. She play-pushed Allison away, but not before the punk landed a smooch on the pink fox's cheek.
"Do you think that was enough, though?"
Allison didn't waste any time, "C'mon!"
She darted off, and Melody followed, both of them winding through tree-trunks, navigating together. Scanning for the bird, or any looking for any drops he might've left behind after being taken out.
It got easier, here, because the trees were getting thinner, less frequent. Maybe they were coming up on a park path proper, finally un-lost from their unplanned backwoods misadventure. Except, Melody didnt see any of the plaques that sponsored the park, anywhere...
And with no glints of gold dropped by the bird, and with Allison noting a few snapped branches further in, leading them forwards, Melody felt her hope and relief wane a bit.
"Oh, the trees open here, this way!" Allison said, bounding ahead in a burst of energy.
"Hey, Allison, wait-"
And Melody came into the brightness of the clearing, and had to let her eyes adjust.
She hadn't ever been here before. She could see the rise of the mountain foothills in the distance, over the trees - again, they were definitely in the park proper, by now.
But the grasses here were short, yellowed, struggling things. A bit weedy, but the clearing was mostly completely flat.
It felt cold. It felt colder than it was supposed to be.
A few bits of rock jutted out from the ground. Lichenous boulders and spikes through the earth. The eye was drawn to the centre of the clearing - where, in front of the widest hump of that raised rock, fluttering down...
"Come onnn," Allison said, dejected.
The adventurer pair approached the bird's purple form, slowly - Melody didn't see the glint of his eyes, so she wasn't sure they'd been seen, yet. Allison's hand drifted to her Spellbook.
And then Melody noticed what she was looking at. Between the raised hump behind the bird and them - the hump actually being the higher back wall of...
"Wait, is that a chasm?" Melody whispered.
It split the rough circle that was the blighted clearing in half, as far as she could see. Melody got on her tippy toes, tried to gauge - It was, what, some 30 feet to the other side? More?
And she couldn't tell how deep it was from here. The temperature seemed to drop the further from the trees they got.
"Hhuh. If one of us goes around, it'll go fly away," Allison murmured back. "It's gonna get away- I gotta go, I'm gonna go for it-"
"Babe, no. You could fall- I can't heal you from a fall into that, Allison, you might be too far away-"
"It's fine!" Allison's voice hissed, "I can make that, babe, I've been jumping all day, you don't have to-"
"I said no," Melody said, voice raising, wavering a bit.
To her credit, Allison stopped dead still immediately.
Weird that she could do that. To her.
The wind was picking up, and she felt underdressed for being here some, uncomfortable. She tried to sound more leader-y than petulant.
"We're both tired, this has gotten... I don't want you fighting near that, just in case, okay? I just... Am I allowed to put my foot down?"
"Yeah, Mel, of course," Allison said, coming off genuinely surprised that that was a question.
"We can see if..." Melody rubbed at her eyes, "We can try and do the riddles. And then go, I think."
Allison shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky. Grimaced, as if she didn't like what the sun was telling her vis-a-vis how much of the day had already passed.
The bird had turned to face them, at some point. Observing them talk, gleaming monster eyes all intensity.
"Sorry, I didn't- think this would take this long, in my head, I-" Allison sighed. "Sorry, Melody."
"No, no, it's okay! I genuinely had a good day today, sweetie, promise. I think both of us just... need this to be wrapped up, now, huh?"
Allison nodded, arms going slack to her sides as she seemed to lose some energy, "Yea~ah. Yeah."
Taking that for what it was worth, Melody started to approach the chasm, slowly - free hand out towards the toward the bird now, Lunar Wand held behind her.
The wind screamed in her ears.
Those yellow, unblinking eyes dug into her: vertically slit, she could see now. Definitely the same kind of thing as a Hole Hound - the same shifting, slightly glowing purple form that didn't really make sense when you looked at it. Which made the statuesque guyface suck even harder.
But he didn't fly away over the chasm.
"Hey," Melody said to him, light, surprising herself by using the tone she'd use on an animal she'd like to pet, "you gonna be helpful? You gonna be oka-"
"PINK FOX!" he projected, right into her face. Melody reared back, pauldrons jangling with the movement and upsetting her balance a bit, "I challenge you to unravel my INDOMITABLE riddles three! I shall begin- BUT! Prepare yourself!"
A beat passed.
"Uh, okay, I'm- I'm pretty prepared, I think-"
"For the riddles shall begin NOW" he finished.
And then stayed silent for another beat.
"Oka~ay then sure right okay," Melody murmured to herself. She stopped just out of arms reach of the big bird - moved her gaze off of him.
Something was glowing magenta inside of the chasm. She could just barely make it out - bright lines, on the walls.
She wasn't just hearing the wind. There was something wrong in it.
Like hearing electricity through wires. Magic in the air? It had to be.
What the hell?
"When DIFFERENT TONES MEET, I sound most agreeable!"
Melody got startled out of her thoughts, jumping in her fur a bit.
"Ooh, it changed it", Allison commented, voice distant behind the mountain gale, "Damn. Not gonna lie, now I kinda wanna know-"
"I bring MEANING! And emotions!" said the bird, over Allison's interruption.
"Uh huh! Cool, alright, we got emotions."
"Into SONG!"
"Mhmm!.. Oh, w-"
"And dance."
"Oh, wait." Allison finished, sounding a bit dejected.
Melody licked her lips. She tried to drag her attention away from the glow and actually process what the riddle-
"Whether perfect or in discord, when united in flow, MY presence... will be known."
Those thin lips were locked in a smile, now.
Melody was cold. And it was a cold the wind was insisting on, pulling through her fur and saturating her.
It was like all the buzz and adrenaline of running around questing with her girlfriend had fallen out of her. She felt heavy.
"Oh, wait. Thats a really easy riddle, actually. That's a really clunky- that's a really bad riddle," Allison was saying, far away.
What was in that chasm? Why was there a magical hole somewhere in the national park? That didn't seem regulation. Had she been wrong about the monster's intelligence - had they been led here? Why?
Why did she feel like this?
Melody picked with her free hand at the buckle attached to the side of her belt, idly, anxiously. Swallowed.
You're fine, you're okay.
Be okay in front of Allison.
"Mel?" her girlfriend's voice cut through the thought - already concerned some, just because she'd gone quiet, "do you, um-"
"WHAT AM I?" the bird belatedly demanded of her.
The monster looked smug. As if he had won some victory.
Melody held that gaze. She opened her mouth, and hoped the wind covered up the bit of croak that fell into her tone.
"Harmony."
"CORRECT! But that was only the beginning," the bird actually hopped a trot towards her as he spoke, "prepare yourself for my second NIGH-IMPOSSI-"
It probably wasn't a smooth motion - she hadn't practiced it, hadn't planned to do it, and Melody didn't think that anybody could ever say that she was naturally dextrous with her hands.
But any decent Spellbook always opened to the spell you wanted, nowadays.
The preface page behind the front cover of the Firedancer Spellbook promised 'concentrated and controlled' core temperature points at 'up to 9,219 degrees Fahrenheit'. This ludicrously high number didn't mean anything - that wasn't how magicked fire worked.
Obvious nitpick: Spell intensity varies based on the level of the spellcaster. But, going past that, deeper theory:
Evocation magic - magic as loose energy as a weapon - fought to justify its existence whenever and wherever you brought it into the world. Area conditions could make that becoming harder or easier on the caster.
She'd lived an example of that, fighting Verena, but adventurers used it to their advantage every day: it was just more difficult casting unwanted spells against any combination of: enchanted armor, really well made regular armor, high level well-conditioned individuals, or a magic target with a general immaterial aesthetic vibe opposed to the nature of the spell.
'Not today - you're chaotic, and I'm ordered, and you don't get to come in, because I'm already here and you're just a fleeting idea.'
Plus, Claire made a good point the next day, when Melody showed her the book, and the Evocation Witch saw and had to tear down the absurd number: like, how do you even measure that? What thermometer could cope with that? Or, rather, if they were doing it in an environment where they had those kinds of measuring tools up, how hard were they greasing the wheels and setting themselves up compared to field work? They would have had to cast a lot of magic just to contain that. Area conditions, same thing.
So. Melody engulfed the riddle bird in the perfect 1.5 meter radius ball of fire that the Spellhop Accessories Ltd. corporation insisted measured up to a small amount cooler than the sun, and that under any rigorous review would likely top out at, say, an 'a bit better than a Scorch spell'.
But oh, it looked like a star. An azure core, orange iris and burning white corona. A brilliant spell; a spell Melody probably shouldn't be looking at directly. And it did hold in place for the full advertised 4.2 seconds.
And then, all at once, it sputtered out with a few embers like it had never been larger than a candle, and she had to blink a lot.
A blackened circle - the impoverished little grasses turned to ash. Two gold coins, glowing a dangerous orange around the edges. Not worth bothering with.
"YEAH!!" Allison shouted, dashing up to catch up to Melody, "that's my girl!! Fuck yeah!"
The heat bleed into the clearing could've been better, but she wasn't too uncomfortable. Holding together that spell was probably one of the uppermost magical feats Melody had ever accomplished, really.
So much for being rusty.
Embers on the grass. She stared down at them, head... loud and empty.
And then Allison bumped into her with an 'uuf', and bright, amazing laugher, and pulled her into some impromptu adrenaline-crash celebration dance.
"Melodymelodymelody Melmelmelmelmel-"
And Melody did smile. She put on a smile and got pulled around, and kind of just savoured the body-warmth that held away the wind, as the residual warmth from her feat faded fast.
"Y'know, it is kinda unfair I got the Best Adventurer as my girlfriend. Like the best one out of all of them ever?" Allison was beaming, "I mean I feel kinda selfish keeping her to myself but also I don't actually care do you wanna make out??"
Melody's smile wasn't quite as wide, and she kept her eyes down, at the grass at their feet. But, all the same, she felt something inside of herself coming back to herself at the... the ridiculous, cheesy presence of Allison.
"I guess it is kinda unfortunate you're literally, permanently stuck with me," Melody said. She almost leaned in, but blinked, "but- um, hey, before that, can we make sure the fire's put out?"
"Oh! Yeah! Oh yeah. Oop!"
So then they went around stomping on the embers around the disk of blackened earth where the monster had used to be.
And during that, Allison saw the glowing chasm.
"Heyy, what that?" Allison said, hopping on over to the edge before Melody could get a word out. "Ooh, okay, this might've been worth it after all, cool cool."
"Careful! Don't trip-"
Melody approached the edge for the first time as well, and peered over.
Andd realised the chasm was only actually about twelve feet deep, with a smooth rock floor. Well, smooth, except for quite a few gold coins randomly scattered around. All things considered? It was less imposing than she'd fallen into imagining.
But the markings were still pretty weird.
"Oh. Huh, I expected..." Melody said - shook her head, "Just... it could be a trap."
The glowing pink lines on the wall were definitely spell circles - but not in any style Melody had seen.
Not leftover Javis stuff, at least...
They were rough. Imperfectly proportioned circles binding... Hard to make sense of arrays of lines. But the circles didnt even close right on most of them, the lines overflowing out, in places. She saw one that looked like an upright pentagram, but with the star missing the lower right point.
Unrefined markings, but still active, apparently. She couldn't tell if it was a weird natural magical location, the work of a mage, or the latter coming in to work from the starting point of the former.
"Eh, figure if this was some mage's cool stuff stash, it's already been cracked open and raided," Allison replied, "No treasure chests. Orrr it's just a Money Hole some mage would toss money into for, like, fun?"
"Mm..." Melody mmed. God, she sounded so-
She took a breath in, steeled herself. A monster she'd beaten had led them to a hole full of gold, and she was in a shitty mood?
Just because of-
"We should take some pictures! For Claire," Melody pushed out, "um, after you."
Allison smiled, and that was that. She pulled her satchel open and pulled out a plastic-wrapped protein bar, opened it, and then threw it in the hole.
"Uh??"
"Nothin'," Allison stated. Then, "Organic matter, right? No point testing with another coin for the Funny Coin Hole."
"Oh. Oh, good point," Melody said, belatedly. She shook her head, "Sorry, I'm kinda... Not on the ball right now, I guess."
"Just tired out? Or do you wanna talk? Hup-" Allison hopped down into the hole.
Again, nothing happened, the glow steady, the clearing dead silent.
Actually, where'd the birdsong go?
Before she could psych herself out again, Melody descended.
Allison steadied her as she landed, hand remaining, a supportive weight on her shoulder.
"Oh, I don't know," Melody huffed, in the moment they were close, touching, "must be the magic screwing with me, I... Guess?"
Enduring rock walls guarded mercifully from the wind, at least.
"Ah, point," Allison said. She looked around the hole a bit - idly kicked at a coin at her foot. Reached to pull out her phone, "we can make this quick, then."
"I think I'll be okay, honey," Melody said, breaking the embrace-in-part. She went up to one of the circles in the rock.
"Okay, you. What's your story?"
What was on the walls was definitely engraved by a person, now, Melody could see: too scrawled, to be a natural expression of ley lines, some small scratch marks where somebody's hand had slipped with the chisel.
They also didn't look like they should do anything, though, lacking the tight linework Melody was used to in spell circles. A lot of the scrawls looked something like... large, individual symbols.
And yet, they were still active. So maybe the location was magical, right?
Wait, 'still' active? Where am I getting that from?
"Chickenscratchy," Allison summed up, "are we gonna find, like, a button under a rock that lets us into one of Bartholomew's old hideouts? Nah, I bet this is below his standards, even when he was new on the scene."
"They're old," Melody offered, feeling kinda useless once the words were out of her mouth. She'd never gone through any sort of magical curriculum, just learning off of online tutorials and any textbooks Claire still had; She'd never been forced through courses on magical history or the development of styles.
But they were old. She couldn't put more to it than that, but some deeper thing in her... knew.
Allison seemed to take that in stride, "Not modern vandalism, huh? Imagine if this was just Claire's, for some reason, and we spent all this time..."
Her words echoing, thought left unfinished, she walked off to the west end of the chasm. The rock forming a rough crescent, that put her out of sight.
Melody snapped her own pictures of the markings. Still no signal on her phone.
"Hey, there's stuff."
"Stuff?" Melody asked, hurrying over, "Oo, stuff."
It wasn't much: in one rough-hewn corner, a stacked pile of old, weathered red cloth and dull metal. The outer layers of a mage's gear... just left here?
"I'll go through it," Melody said, walking up to it, "you can grab the gold, if you want."
"Alllrighty then!"
Melody bent down and pawed through the pile of stuff. Dusty, old equipment - a holey crimson cloak, tarnished bangles and baubles, and a lotta pins with complicated, weathered engravings on them.
No magical spark to detect when she touched any of it. Any enchantments had faded.
The back of her head was still gnawing on... A question she couldn't name. How long had this been here? It looked looted, but not all the way looted. Did the park ranger know about it?
Also - and she only thought about this when she'd already searched through most of the pile - if they kept turning stuff over in this cave, shouldn't there have been at least, like, a bug underneath something, somewhere? Hell - if this place was emanating magic... Shouldn't there have been monsters congregated around? Maybe not many, but... They'd only followed the one bird here, and that seemed maybe accidental.
She would have expected something. She would have expected anything.
"Don't like this, don't like this, don't like this," she found herself murmuring.
"Everything okay, babe?" Allison called.
"I'm good!"
She shook her head and looked over the now spread-out pile again. There was a crack in the wall - she'd revealed it from behind the pile. On inspection, she spotted one last object lodged inside. Dark, rectangular - she nudged things out of the way with her boot and went to get on her tummy.
"Oh, hey," Allison's voice echoed, in a pensive tone, "are you blood?"
Melody whipped her head around - "Uuuhhh?"
Allison didn't respond to her uhhing; she was over at the east end of the crevasse. Melody debated hotly in her head for a second - and just rushed to get her phone out, shining a light into the slot in the rock-wall she was examining.
No critters waiting for her hand in there, no little magical mechanism she could see to punish anyone who got curious. Just the...
She pulled out the old book, hopped onto her feet best she could, and jogged over to Allison.
The bunny-woman was prodding at rocks with her sword idly, turning them over. And on the wall Allison stood beside, a big vertical slash of faded red, sitting at a height around Allison's torso. There was one beast folk handprint in it, and small drips of red seemed splattered around.
"What's over here?"
"Can't see anything. Just..." Allison gestured with the Jolt Sword at the faded paint on the wall."Is that blood?" Melody took a closer look, "I would've just assumed it was painted here with the engravings, maybe."
"Nah, look at the curve," Allison framed what she was pointing out with her hands. The bottom half of the streak did curve away, "I figure they started bleeding here- probably jumped down here, made the wound worse. Then they slumped down - see?"
She motioned over the curve, "Back, shoulders. They got back up, though, I think! Walked around after drinking a potion or something, you can see where there's less on the ground.""Well, that's comforting, at least," Melody said. She tried to put something flirty into her tired voice, "Hey, when'd you get all detective-y on me?"
"Well, it's not super complex, and I've watched enough shows, hey? Me and Jodie would watch a bunch of these different old murder mystery shows, back before everything went down," Allison said, "Huh. That's the first time I've thought about that in a hot minute, actually. I should hit her up about doing those again sometime."
They... stood in silence for a bit after that, neither really sure what to say next.
"No, uh, other signs of life?"
"Nah," Allison said. She looked at the wall behind her, the nearest symbol, "weird vibes, huh?"
Just that statement summed up a lot of what was on Melody's mind.
"Yeah, I... Oh! By the way, I found this."
"What's up- ooh."
She held up the book. The blank dark-red leather cover didnt identify itself; it slumped, some, integrity lost to time or rough handling.
"Ooooh. Is it a Spellbook?"
"Iii was a little more worried about, like, cursed," Melody said, "but I don't think it's either? Just a book. I don't feel..."
Melody went quiet, and listened.
She didn't actually have practice with identifying artifacts. Some intuitive stuff came, being a Paladin, but she wasn't sure if there was, like, a mental process she was supposed to be using, to get more clarity than she got.
But... There was a buzzing. A humming. Giving her a bit of a headache.
There had been for a while.
"Okay, there's something," she admitted, "and I can feel it on the book. But I think it's, just, like, this place, and maybe it's seeped into the stuff here."
"General bad vibes?"
"Kinda?"
Curious, now, she cracked open the book.
It was pretty pristine, still, in comparison to what she'd expected. The pages were a little yellowed, the text a little faded, but it held up in her hands, and didn't seem to be water damaged at all.
At first, she was surprised - the entire book seemed to be written in the Reverian mage script she patently hadn't observed anywhere else in the cave.
Which she wasn't fluent in. She'd picked up more lately, though, researching and hanging out with Claire, so she went to pick out what she could...
"You know, I missed weird books," Allison noodled, "I mean I don't want it to kill us but I did miss weird little freaky ol' books."
"I never thought of that as a perk of the job??"
Melody's eyes scanned down the pages. It looked similar to the alphabet she was more used to - characters constructed from blocky segments, so that they could coherently bind a spell circle - but the glyphs weren't exactly the same. She tried making a few best guesses, but that didn't make any of it readable at all.
There were inset inscriptions of what she thought were the phases of the moons, breaking up the text occasionally. That might've been...
"Dates?" she said aloud, "could be a journal?"
"Lets go~o! Mage secrets! Mage Embarrassment! I mean, this all looks old enough to be history, which means we can snoop, right?"
"Something like that, except I can't read this," Melody pouted, "Allison, you fixated on ciphers back in high school for a bit, right?"
"Okay, it actually genuinely means a lot when you remember random things like that," Allison said. She leaned over the open book, "Hmm. Hmmmmmm. But no yeah I definitely don't have the ability to do that thing anymore."
"But it's not anything obvious? I don't know if there's, like, a code mages use for their stuff."
"Mmm, not one single one," Allison put a finger on her bottom lip like she was trying to recall, "doesn't look like anything I've seen though, nah."
"Because then it's a cipher in magical runes, or just..." Melody breathed out, and carefully closed the slumped book, "Really old runes."
Another beat where neither of them picked up the conversation. Things were darker, now, casting them and their deliberating expressions in more of the chasm's saturated magenta glow.
"Hey, Mel," Allison said, sheathing her sword again, eyes downcast, "these coins are all, uh, mostly ones and twos. It's- you're the leader, but I'm kinda feeling like-"
"No, yeah, sweetie," Melody murmured, "I don't really wanna be here, anymore."
"Cool!" Allison said, compelling lightness into her voice, "Wanna bell us out before Cathy closes up, then?"
"Oh, uh," Melody blurted. She knew they were losing light, but...
"I said that the magic that was around seeped into the book, right?"
Melody stretched her body out, yawned, (tried to force some of the tension out). The pieces had put themselves together in her head on their own time.
"There's - these are all wards to cause, like, weakness, I think," she said, gesturing all around, "And I think we're just too high level to really notice it. But maybe if a bunch of monsters got attracted here, fell down, they wouldn't be able to get out..."
Allison's eyes lighted up as she got it.
"The coins are all monster drops!!" Allison bent over and picked up one of the coins to make the point. She flipped it once, just for fun, "Damn, Mel. You know, I have a really smart girlfriend. See! You can do detective, too!"
"Ha ha. Anyway, I guess... sorta, the monsters all decomposed into mana, and that created a cycle. So that's kind of what's in the book, and, I'm just worried if we go into the Astral Plane, the mana will attract... The locals? And it's just the two of us, so..."
That sounded right.
Allison blinked, "you wanna bring the book?"
Melody felt knocked a step back. She pulled her wand hand across her body to pick at her satchel's buttons, subconsciously.
"Uh, my phone doesn't have signal, even I was still a bit away from here, so I don't know if we'll exactly be able to find our way back here," Melody hedged, "and the book isn't, um, evil. I'm not even sure it's any sort of magical?
"It's just a book in a cipher or that's been around a lot of... Bad vibes. We can take it up to Zinnia's tomorrow, get more takes on it."
"If you're su~ure it's not cursed, hon," Allison said. Her voice was chipper, but turned softer at the edges, "I'm pretty sure I can navigate us back from here. It might be a long walk home, but we'll do whatever you feel safest with, okay?"
Melody took one last glance at the markings all around them. Rough, scratched into the walls...
Maybe whoever had drawn them had been like her - in a very general sort of way, anyway. An amateur spellcaster, just going off of whatever they could learn.
She patted her satchel.
"Yeah," Melody said, her voice a little thing, like hallowing, "let's go home."