Sylver Seeker

Edna had been here for over 4 months.

She was vague as to what originally brought her to Finland, and Sylver didn’t force the question, but after she was done with her thing, she got an extremely good deal on a room at an inn and has been living in it since then.

In terms of work, Edna mainly worked as a translator for the locals, and now and then left the safety of the city to hunt monsters. Her abilities as a druid meant she could maintain a good distance from her targets, which meant there were very few monsters that could harm her.

Some of them were able to “spit” poison, or launch a projectile at her, but by the time they reached her, there wasn’t anywhere near enough strength in the attack to do any real damage.

On top of that, most of the monsters mainly relied on ambushes, but as long as you had a way to find them before they found you and could summon a shark to fight in your place, you were golden.

The source of the blinding level of light turned out to be hundreds, upon thousands, of advertisements, all drawn in a glowing and gelatinous ink. The light diffused in the seawater, bounced off the various reflective glass buildings, and ended up mixing into a painful concoction of bright colors.

What made it all the worse was that it was also uncomfortably quiet.

Sylver could vaguely see the paper-thin barriers separating the water below the buildings, from the water around the buildings, not dissimilar from how the Ki bubble barriers functioned in the Schlagen mountains. Except these barriers were completely see-through, and only blocked sound from passing through them.

It was only when Sylver entered the building, did he realize that he and Gregory had been wordlessly following a monologing Edna. The inside looked familiar, but then again, just about everything in this city looked familiar.

The architecture was identical, from what Sylver saw at least, but the main difference was that the locals either couldn’t alter the metal structures or went out of their way to maintain their original shape.

To be more accurate, they went out of their way not to remove any metal. The doors, windows, and anything that wasn’t a wall, floor, ceiling, or roof, had been removed, and replaced with the glass-like material the tunnel and cage was made from.

The doors were made of that glass, the windows, the kennels for the small creatures Edna said some people kept as pets, and on more than one occasion, two houses were connected by the glass-like material, transforming the two into one large house.

Sylver was fairly certain the bar they were standing inside, had also been a bar in the other realm.

Half of the customers were sitting upside down on the ceiling, which was the floor in the other realm. The other half used the tables bolted to the slanted floor to keep them from floating up.

Edna handed Sylver a menu, and underneath the loopy text that Sylver had to guess was Finnish, there was a barely legible translation into Eirish. Barely legible, because just like the loopy text, the Eirish text was also glowing far too brightly for Sylver’s human-based eyes to read.

Thankfully he wasn’t hungry, and even if he was the drawings representing the food didn’t look appealing. Slimy salad seemed to be the staple of this bar, and possibly this region.

“He’s asking how long you plan to stay here,” Edna said.

Sylver turned to look at Gregory, who was sitting opposite Sylver, next to Edna.

“Not too long. I just need to have a conversation with a nobleman, or the Finnish equivalent, and we can leave after that,” Sylver explained.

Edna and Gregory proceeded to have a conversation that lasted 30 minutes, during which Sylver simply sat/floated at the table and stared off into space as he tried to get his thoughts in order.

On the one hand, he was extremely curious as to how, or more importantly, why there was an upside-down, underwater city, in the middle of the Sinis sea, that bore an uncanny resemblance to a city in a completely separate realm.

Now, to an extent, this wasn’t that weird.

Realms bled into one another all the time, that happens, Sylver had seen it happen more than enough times for him not to lose his mind over it.

Except, something like an identical city isn’t the sort of thing that can “bleed” from one realm to another, a name might bleed, even a general architectural style, possibly a location, that would be within the scope of possibility, but a whole city doesn’t just replica an inverted copy of itself in rock that’s deep underwater.

It meant that the city was put here, by someone or something, hopefully for a reason other than to fuck with Sylver.

Or it was the other way round, and the city in the ice realm was put there, by whoever initially created this city.

The whole thing was so weird that Sylver was debating whether it was a good idea to involve himself with this place. He didn’t have any good alternatives, but as he went through the various scenarios he could see happening with this place, he was beginning to consider the whole thing to be a bad, possibly terrible, idea.

With the ships’ navigation being affected by the moon changing, it was that Sylver was putting in all this time and effort for nothing. For all he knew, the Sinis Sea was going to be empty of sailing vessels from this point on.

It wasn’t as if sailors were famously insane and completely devoid of any sense of danger or self-preservation…

They wouldn’t blindly sail around with nothing more than hope that they would stumble onto something good…

“Do you know a nobleman I could speak to?” Sylver asked, with enough urgency in his voice that Edna began to stand up from her seat as she was speaking.

She started to say something but changed her mind, and looked at Sylver with a thoughtful expression on her face.

“I might know just the man,” Edna said, as Gregory worked on getting himself out of his seat.

***

On a certain level, the fact that Sylver could tell this was a rich man’s house relaxed him.

Some cultures rejected material wealth, and instead focused on something intangible.

Honor, pride, “goodness,” or something that made even less sense, how much “love” they showed their god, how many descendants they have, how much time they spent in worship, and so forth.

You can’t trust those kinds of people.

There’s no telling how they will perceive your words and actions, how they will twist them to fit whatever narrative they have going on in their heads.

People who value material wealth are much easier to understand.

They want something, and more often than not, they are willing to offer something in exchange for the thing they want. Sometimes it’s an item, sometimes it's currency, sometimes it’s a service.

They’ll never ask you to perform a near-impossible task and then tell you that they’ll pray for your dammed soul in exchange for completing it. Sylver learned the hard way to always be clear about his expectations when performing a service for someone.

And unlike most lessons, he learned that one on his first try.

Even now, hundreds of lifetimes later, Sylver could still see that bald fucker’s peaceful face as if he was standing right in front of him.

The mansion Sylver had been escorted to by Edna was made from glass that was slightly darker than all the other buildings Sylver had seen until now.

Aside from that, there was very little of the original structure visible from the outside. The other buildings were simple extensions, if that, of the original structures, but this one was built on top of and around the metal building inside.

The creatures at the door had a humanoid upper half, and two frog-like legs folded up against themselves, and from a distance it made them look like armored humans. They wielded a polearm with a hooked blade on the top end and a flattened sphere on the other.

Their clothing consisted of the same blue cloth-like material the guards at the checkpoint wore, with different markings on their shoulders and chest, presumably to signify their employment to the man Sylver was about to meet.

The guards floated around the house in a half-sphere formation and stared at Sylver and Edna, but didn’t do anything else.

The door opened as they approached it, and a figure posing as a human floated out. The creature looked a lot like a dark balloon animal someone had expertly twisted into a pretty solid representation of a human man. Each one of its tentacles was the width of a pencil, and even its “face,” was merely a gathering of tentacles.

Edna whistled at the creature, for roughly 40 seconds, and as she did this, Sylver realized how much he missed having Ria around. She would have said something about tuning into their frequency, and after a few minutes of listening in on people’s conversations, would be able to translate 90% of what everyone was saying.

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Once they were inside, Sylver felt a force exerted on him. It prickled his skin as it pulled him upwards, and threatened to smash his head into the ceiling if he didn’t flip himself over. But surprisingly enough, once Sylver touched the ceiling, gravity shifted, and he found himself standing on the house’s “floor.”

He looked up and saw that Edna was flailing her arms around widely, summoning water currents to prevent her from “falling,” to where Sylver was. When she saw Sylver standing on the “ceiling” with a confused look on his face, she stopped fighting the force and allowed herself to fall.

They followed the creature, and eventually, they were passed onto a different creature, a smaller one, while the one that greeted them disappeared into a hole in the wall.

As they walked, Sylver noticed two things.

The first was that the water pressure was increasing with every step that he took. It wasn’t big enough to kill him, but if the increase didn’t stop sometime soon, Sylver would have to turn back.

Which was easier said than done, given that the second thing that he noticed was the massive amount of spacial distortion happening around him. If Sylver was outside it would have taken him less than a minute to walk from one end of it to the other.

And yet he and Edna had been “walking” for at least 6 minutes, not in a straight line, but if the mental map Sylver had drawn was to be trusted, they were 8 house lengths away from the doors they had entered through.

Certain places could afford to enchant their homes in such a manner, but those places either had an inexhaustible supply of mana feeding them, or the space inside naturally stretched out.

Sylver’s home, for example, was a good example of the latter. Misha and Masha didn’t intend to make the inside of their home bigger than the outside, but because of the volume of magic they channeled through the walls on a daily basis, the walls stretched themselves past their physical limitations.

But this house was doing neither.

The space was undeniably stretched out, and yet there wasn’t so much as a drop of mana leaking out of the walls to indicate an enchantment, and there was nowhere near enough ambient mana in the water, the area as a whole, for the inside of a house to expand to such an extent.

It wasn’t any sort of wild magic either, Sylver would have felt it, something outside the bounds of normal was going on in this city.

Although, for an abnormal city to have abnormal things happening inside of it, made a lot more sense than if normal things were happening inside an abnormal city. Things being abnormal in the abnormal city, was in fact normal for an abnormal city.

The creature did as the one before it did and disappeared into a small hole in the wall.

Sylver and Edna were left standing in front of a circular door, and after a moment of hesitation, Sylver walked over to the door and tried to push it open. It resisted his attempt, and as he adjusted his grip, he realized it was meant to slide to the slide.

It opened effortlessly once he stopped pushing against it.

Inside the room, there was a man who looked remarkably similar to a large dwarf, mostly because of the thick mane of hair of his dark beard that connected to his dark hair.

The man was large, round, and Sylver would go as far as to describe his general appearance as “jolly,” if not for the somber expression on his face.

Next to him was a woman that was wasting away, the skin on her face was pulled tightly against her skull, and even from here, Sylver could count the number of teeth she had. She was laying in a bed that was closer to an adult crib than a normal bed people used.

As Sylver approached the man, he saw that he wasn’t a large dwarf, but he was a fat elf. His ears were pointy, unlike humans or dwarves whose ears were round. And the same was true for the woman in the crib-like bed, the proportions weren’t entirely correct, but if someone assumed these two were elves, Sylver wouldn’t think they were stupid for making that assumption.

The fat man said something, but when Edna responded to him, Sylver saw her throat move differently than when she normally spoke to the people here. As if she was speaking slower and made her vowels longer.

“He’s asking what you want in exchange for curing his daughter,” Edna said.

Sylver tried to take a step closer towards the woman, daughter, in question but found that there was a gentle, but firm, force keeping him away. Similar to the one that had pulled him toward the ceiling.

“I can’t cure diseases, I’m not a-”

“It’s a curse,” Edna said.

Sylver waited a moment and then made sure he hadn’t heard her wrong.

“A curse?” he asked.

“She’s been cursed, and-” Edna opened her mouth, but no sound came out, “-is asking what you want in exchange for curing her curse. Treating her curse?” Edna asked.

Sylver was quiet for a while.

“Just to be clear… He wants me to help his daughter with her curse,” Sylver asked.

“Yes.”

“And he is willing to do what I ask, in exchange for me removing his daughter’s curse?” Sylver asked.

“He wants to know what you want,” Edna said.

“He…” Sylver was about to repeat himself, but he managed to stop before he said it.

After a moment of minor silent celebration, he composed himself and spoke with a clear voice.

“I need a section of the Sinis Sea to be isolated. About 400 kilometers off the coast of Laketula, there’s a small island, and I need nobody to see it, touch it, or in any way interact with it,” Sylver explained, as the large man lifted his hand and produced a map out of seemingly nowhere.

The man said something at Sylver, as he gave Sylver the map.

“He’s asking if the area you’re talking about is that little half-floating island,” Edna translated, as Sylver tried to read the map.

It took him far too long to understand what he was looking at because the thing was littered with tiny symbols that meant nothing to him, along with seemingly random highlighted sections of the sea. It didn’t help that it was glowing bright enough that he had to squint to tolerate looking at it.

“Half floating?” Sylver asked as he tried to figure out where Tuli would be on this map.

Edna repeated Sylver’s question and the man gave a long response.

“He’s saying 6 pillars are holding it up,” Edna said.

While Sylver digested this information, Edna spoke to the man and ended up lightly arguing with him, if her soul and body language was to be believed.

6 pillars… 2 front legs, 2 back legs, her head, and her tail?

Is she standing on her own, or are they dangling because her shell inflated like a balloon?

They were buried 5 years ago, and now…

Sylver waited for Spring to provide the information he was looking for, but the shade shook his head at him.

Alright, that’s on me for not giving enough attention to the fact that her shell was above water…

Sylver was snapped out of his thoughts as Edna suddenly scrunched her hands into fists and held them up against her chest, and looked like she was about to squeal with joy. Thankfully she remembered that they were standing in a room with a dying woman, and merely grinned at no one in particular.

“He said he can have it sectioned off within half a day of you removing the curse!” Edna said, with a childlike glee in her voice. Way too gleeful for this room.

“It sounded like he said a lot more than that,” Sylver said.

“We were discussing my finders fee,” Edna said, in a tone that suggested that she didn’t want to get any more specific than that.

Under different circumstances, Sylver would have been livid that someone negotiated around something he was doing without his knowledge or permission.

But today, he was just happy he was doing something within his area of expertise.

***

It took a bit of convincing for the man to leave Sylver and Edna alone with the unconscious woman, but somehow Edna managed to do it.

She offered to also leave, to stand outside with the man, but Sylver could tell she wanted to stay, and on top of that, he needed her healing magic, in the event something unexpected happened.

Sylver removed the sheet covering the woman and undid the belt that was keeping her from floating out of her bed.

He allowed her to float upward, so he wouldn’t have to crouch to examine her and started the search by placing one hand on the small of her back and placed the other on her stomach.

Sylver immediately felt the curse sitting inside her.

He took note of the strength and direction of it and started examining her insides. Initially, Sylver was only interested in the curse, but when he reached for her kidney and missed, he tried to get a better grip on her stomach and got dangerously close to squashing her.

Her organs were very close to a human’s except her liver was larger than it needed to be for a woman of this size, but most worrying of all was the missing kidney on the right side of her torso. Instead of a kidney, this woman had a deflated balloon of an organ squished between her colon and her enlarged liver.

The organ, the human-looking “high-elves” called a cut-gland.

Sylver moved up her torso and discovered that the curse was sitting in her lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, and oddly enough, her eyes, and ears. Her gills were unaffected, for some reason, even though they were directly connected to her lungs, and they should have been infected the second the lungs were.

Sylver pulled the woman’s body back down to the bed and redid the belt keeping her in place. He leaned over her and very carefully opened her eyelids to look down at her eyeballs. Her eyes were clear, and a pleasant blue color, but her pupils didn’t respond to Sylver flashing a light in front of them.

He tried to open her mouth, and felt the curse tense the muscles in her jaws and lips. His attempt to open it with magic had a similar reaction, and while Sylver was certain he could force her mouth open, he could tell he would break her jaw in the process.

Edna had explained that the woman had been feeling unwell for the last month or so, and when she didn’t wake up after going to sleep 9 days ago, her father sent out a country-wide search for healers, doctors, and anyone even remotely capable of helping her.

Within the first 12 hours of his search, he depleted Finland’s reserve of healers, shamans, priests, and mages and scraped the bottom of the barrel by getting sorcerers involved.

The abilities the locals had were “unique,” in Edna’s words, and given her description sounded to be closer to wild magic, than any kind of proper standardized mage craft. Which meant their healing abilities were heavily limited and were useless against a proper curse.

Sylver rested his hand on the woman’s neck as if he was about to strangle her.

“It would be best if I checked if anyone else in the house is cursed,” Sylver said.

Edna walked up to stand behind him and looked down at the unconscious woman.

“You think it might have spread? To her, or from her?” Edna asked.

“It… Huh…” Sylver said as he pressed with his magic on what he felt to be a weak point in the curse.

Where Sylver’s ring finger was touching the woman’s neck, a giant white vein appeared on her skin. It traveled up her neck, up her chin, and slid between her lips, into her mouth.

The woman’s whole body curled up, her knees pulled up to her chest, and her arms wrapped around them, and only Sylver’s hand on her neck stopped her head from leaning forward.

As he tried to figure out how to stop her tensed-up muscles from tearing, he saw white foam passing through the sheet covering her body. She made a sound, as much as a person can make a sound without opening their mouth, and then returned to being limp and unconscious.

Sylver adjusted her limbs, so she was comfortable, and aside from a massive bruise on her neck, she seemed to be fine. The liquid that had escaped from her, came from her gills, and when Sylver gathered it into a tight ball to inspect, he discovered that it was sea foam, with a few droplets of blood mixed into it.

But the longer Sylver watched the ball of foam, the less blood remained, and the more foam appeared.

Sylver moved the ball of foam out of the way and pressed his hand up against the woman’s torso.

“Her insides are turning to sea foam… But the good news is, we have a month before she dies. Assuming we’re able to give her nutrients through blood transfusions,” Sylver explained, as he took his hand away, and closed his eyes for a few seconds while he tried to find what he was looking for in his [Bound Bones].

“Great,” Edna said with a tired tone.

“The bad news is that I can’t do anything to this curse,” Sylver said.

This made Edna pause because she was expecting a joke of some sort, not actual bad news.

“Can’t as in you don’t have enough time, or can’t as in you don’t have the skills?” Edna asked cautiously.

“Can’t as in she willingly accepted this curse, and the only way to remove it is to have the person who cursed her remove it,” Sylver said, as he pulled a single sheet of vellum paper out of his robe and waited for it to adapt to the wet and high-pressured environment.

“Why would she willingly accept a curse? And why wouldn’t she tell anyone about it?” Edna asked.

“We’re about to find out,” Sylver said.

He carefully placed the piece of vellum paper onto the woman’s bed and laid her hand on top of the page. He made a small incision on her knuckle and pressed the bleeding cut against the vellum page.

The blood leaked into the seawater and created a cloud of pink mist. Sylver ran his finger down her arm, to push more blood into the open wound, and after the cloud was big enough that it had stained half of the sheets covering her red, Sylver applied pressure onto the wound and lifted the hand away from the goat skin page.

For a few seconds, nothing happened.

The blood floated aimlessly in a loose cloud, and eventually didn’t leave any trace, save for the giant stain on the sheet, and the bedsheets.

Also the pillows.

And the ceiling.

“Heal this closed please,” Sylver said, as he moved the woman’s arm over to Edna. While Edna worked her magic, Sylver lifted the vellum off the bed and narrowed his eyes as he tried to read it.

The barely visible light pink characters were hard to see against the brown vellum, but there was enough for Sylver.

He read the letters written in blood, and initially couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was only when he applied his more recently applied knowledge that he was able to understand the text.

“You found something?” Edna asked with a hopeful tone.

“Yeah… Can you ask if he knows a man named Tristen? And if he’s ever heard of someone named Medusa?” Sylver asked, as he slowly rolled up the page, and hid it away in his robe.