Avarein: Vant

Chapter 11: Justice

Foc slowly made her way down the spiralling staircase, carefully navigating her feet to the spots of moss-less stone, Cantec following behind her somewhat annoyed by their slow progress. He held up his right hand which sat snugly in a particularly strange looking, burning with an unnaturally hot flame which lit the path before them. Foc kept a distance away from the glove as well; she had seen how powerful it was and she didn't feel like risking any accidents with it.

"Can you tell me what's down here? We've been walking for like, ten minutes already."

"If I knew, I would have told you already. All I know is that this place constantly had two guards standing in front of it and nobody was allowed inside. Well, except Pridon."

Cantec took a moment to contemplate, before coming to the conclusion that he was also intrigued. He gently placed his left hand onto Foc's shoulder and nudged her aside, almost immediately charging ahead of her and flying down the stairs at extraordinary speed. Foc groaned internally; if the new leader of Defician was going to be this much of an impatient child, maybe staging the coup wasn't worth it after all. Both him and the glow that surrounded him almost immediately disappeared, leaving Foc in the complete darkness. A moment later, a ball of fire formed over her head; although she wasn't exactly fond of the new leader, she was glad that she could give herself her own light source now. The sounds of his steps were heavy and echoed throughout the staircase until...

Foc's turned around, 180 degrees, her focus now entirely on the sound of his heavy footsteps. Before long, she spotted the glow of a flame coming down from higher in the staircase behind her.

"Cantec, stop!"

She ducked down and yelled at the technologist as he came barrelling down the staircase at a speed fast enough that it was almost impossible for him to simply slow down immediately. The ball of fire didn't help either; in retrospect, Foc realised that her magic had prevented him from simply jumping over her. Cantec, seeing the mage before him jumped towards the outer wall and landed upon it, slowing himself down as he ran along the stone at a 90 degree angle, barely navigating himself through the gap between Foc and the flame. Once she realised what had happened from the feeling of passing overhead and the laughing coming from behind her, she jumped back up and turned around, looking somewhat displeased to see Cantec alive and kicking.

"I just want you to know that what you did was very dangerous."

Cantec grinned, one filled to the brim with obnoxious amounts of confidence and ego.

"With these little toys, nothing seems dangerous to me."

Foc sighed once more and made her way up the staircase, not caring about keeping her sandals moss free and instead more focused on the magical trap they had encountered. Soon enough they had made their way back up to the surface, emerging in the east wing of the keep with Pridon's quarters before them and a staircase to a lower floor on their left. She took a moment to inspect the frame around the rectangular opening that led to the spiral staircase, carefully checking the runes inscribed into it.

"I'm sure there's a certain procedure we need to do to get it to stop looping us. Give me a day or two to translate it."

Foc gave Cantec enough of a gap to pass through and squatted down to start at the left side of the frame, tilting her head towards the left to try and make reading a little easier. Cantec quickly made his way into Pridon's quarters, a room he now claimed as his own, returning with a massive flat greatsword he carried under one of his arms. The length of the blade was about one metre and it's width was around twenty centimetres, with the edges spotted with rust alongside having a strangely out of place cross-guard disconnected from the blade, its length mirroring the width of the blade.