cascade | kotlc

35. The Dusk Sun Sets

honestly vespera's not scary enough. hopefully this chapter changes that.

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tw: pain, threats of death

"This is totally fine," Faye whispered, not even bothering checking out the barricaded door. She could blast her way out of it anyways. Sure, the entire Nightfall labyrinth might collapse on top of her, but that was nothing a few strikes of lightning couldn't fix.

Anyway, the Archetype was her major concern. She fumbled to unstrap Dex's deciphering mechanism and pulled the four pieces of the key from inside her tunic, quickly piecing them together into the cube, like they had done in Havenfield.

"Come on, come on, come on," she muttered when the key refused to fit in the custom designed lock. Lady Gisela's welding skills certainly weren't optimal -- uneven metal ran down the sides of the bolt and the fastener was slightly too small for the right edge of the key.

After jostling the cube around for a few minutes the lock finally gave in. Faye shoved the key in and twisted, the silver and gold pieces detaching and clattering to the ground.

The securing device creaked as the central plate rotated, allowing Faye to unbuckle the thick volume.

She let out a breath she didn't even know she was holding when the pages did indeed contain runes. And there were so many runes, sprawled all over the pages, some neatly organized and in legible rows, others crammed into margins and corners and highlighted with all sorts of colors of ink. Some texts were massive, emphasized with the bold outlining of sharpies, and footnotes filled the bottom lines of every page. Some parts were written in landscape, some copied down in portrait, and others were strewn in separate blocks angling in every direction. In other words, the book was complete gibberish.

Faye couldn't make out any of the runes anyway. The ends were curly and expansive, littered with fancy calligraphy. Some runes were scribbled so compact she could barely tell one line apart from another. Words overlapped, runes intersected, and she was seriously doubting Dex's gadget's capabilities.

"Worth a try in any case," Faye decided, unraveling the cable and propping up the x-ray camera sensor. She slipped the test tube of silver isotope secretion from her pocket and cautiously removed the cap before she poured the liquid-gas compound into the pages.

The silver seeped through the yellow, worn-down pages, illuminating the words with a ghostly pale silver glow. The letters shone like the fading moonlight of yesteryear as the night fell and encompassed the hanging arc moon.

"Work," Faye commanded, plugging in the camera attachment and activating the device. The camera beeped as its lens slid open before it shimmered, pulsing slowly and projecting a blurry curtain of x-ray incandescence over the cover. The runes that read Architype glittered especially ethereal under the rays of light.

"Please work," Faye begged, stroking the gadget like it was a pet. The device merely beeped again as the camera swapped between different eyepieces, each marginally adjusting the distribution and density of the falling light. Words occasionally fluttered from the processor, incoherent and nonsensical, before they dissipated into shadowy mist.

"It will not," a soft female voice spoke, from nowhere and everywhere at once. Instantly Faye leapt to her feet, unsheathing her sword and Ace of Spades, thunder booming as she swiveled around, searching for the source of the voice.

"I am not here," the voice said, drawing out her vowels. "I suppose you wish to know my identity. Everyone does."

Faye had a guess already. "Vespera," she whispered, her voice deathly, and she instinctively bit down on her lip. The voice merely laughed, soft claps echoing in mock applause.