A dungeon heart's standard library pattern included the expected bookshelves, lecterns, and reading tables. However, it also came with test tubes, alembics and similar research equipment. This didn't sit well with Ami, who doubted the wisdom of having experimenting warlocks and flammable books together in the same room. Therefore, she had split her library into a reading area and a separate laboratory built from fireproof stone. It turned out to be a prudent decision.
Thick clouds of grey steam billowed out of the crystal she had taken from Anise, rapidly filling the chamber behind the sturdy observation window.
Ami's eyes widened, and she stopped mid-typing to whip her head around and stare at the bald warlock assisting her. "What did you do, Harold?" she shouted in alarm.
The researcher seemed to shrink under her stare as if trying to hide behind the row of differently sized crystal balls on his workbench. Little beads of sweat appeared on his bald and tattooed scalp, glittering purplish in the light emanating from under her visor. "I w-w-was just c-calibrating the m-magnification, your Majesty, I swear!" he replied, tapping his finger against one of the spheres.
She redirected her gaze to the device that, contrary to her expectation, wasn't showing a close up-image of the circuitry within the gem.
Harold gulped as he realised what it looked like. "It's not off, it's just dark!" he blurted out. "In fact, it's stuck! There has to be some kind of warding on the thing!"
A functional ward against scrying? Normally, Ami would be salivating at the thought of studying it. Unfortunately, saving it from going up in flames took priority. She quickly zoomed in on the smoking gem with her Keeper sight, bypassing the steam and the glass that was fogging up.
So far, the crystal seemed intact, but it was sliding back and forth violently. Keeping the gem on a small dish floating in a water-filled bucket had seemed like a fine idea to keep it from touching her dungeon directly, at least before the water had started boiling inexplicably.
A trio of particularly large rising bubbles struck the floating dish at the same time, causing it to capsize. With a quiet splash, the gem sunk to the bottom.
Its motion reduced the precision of the readings from Ami's visor, which had just started to become interesting. She had detected traces of an invisibility spell coming from inside the crystal, which would certainly explain why she hadn't yet found any sign of the shadow Anise had described.
Did she need to interfere, or should she keep analysing what was going on with her visor? So far, the crystal didn't seem to be taking any damage. The twisted little pathways in its interior seemed to be vibrating at a high frequency, but they weren't generating any heat directly. Infra-red indicated that the water was heating up fairly uniformly, which indicated-
It was hard to think. Huh, why she was on the floor? Had she been taking a nap? She felt like she could drift off back to sleep any moment.
Her visor flashed lines in an irritating red colour at her.
She blinked. Red was bad, wasn't it? Scrunching up her forehead, she tried to make sense of the symbols before her. That one over there was a seven, she was pretty sure. Wait, why was she having trouble with this?
The sudden spike of alarm cleared some of the haze from her mind. Her desire for wakefulness clashed with a pressure trying to lull her back to sleep, its concealment broken by directly opposing her will.
There was an intruder in her head! Startled, she started paying close attention to her thoughts, trying to separate her own mental processes from foreign ones.
The spell numbing her thoughts was now dealing with a target too agitated to go to sleep even if she wanted to, expended the last of its power, and faded away. In response, the foreign presence in her mind gave up on subtlety. An impression of cold fury, screaming skulls, and a burning crown radiated outwards from it.
Ami froze in horror. How could Crowned Death be here?
The giant skull composed of black fire and more skulls barrelled towards her like a tsunami, howling with bloodlust.
Impossible. While Ami wasn't completely certain that the dark god couldn't get into her head somehow, she knew that he wouldn't need to bother with petty tricks like trying to get her to fall asleep. She was dealing with one of his underlings trying to possess her.
The corners of her lips quirked upwards. In a battle of pure magical power, she was confident that she could outlast her attacker.
Her perspective shifted. The wall of fire and skulls that had been about to fill her entire mindscape retreated and shrunk as her own mental representation grew. The distance between her and the intruder expanded at the same rate as her own size increased, and she decided that there should be gravity, and a floor.
The enemy's advance turned into a lunge that fell way short of its target. The intruder flopped to the ground with a wet smack, sending skulls and flames bouncing in every direction. A prone spectral figure in black robes decorated with chains remained behind.
Ami crouched down and reached for the surprised spectre before it could recover.
Pinned between her thumb and index finger, the thing squirmed like a caterpillar, unable to move either digit even a little. Neither was it able to ignore physics and obstacles as it did in the real world.
Ami frowned. Without a doubt, this was the spectre who had once controlled many aquatic undead and who had gotten loose when she got trapped in the adamantine box. Why was it here now, and what did it have to do with the crystal she had been investigating? Speaking of which, she really should check what was going on with that, too.
"-Majesty? Are you all right, your Majesty?" Harold's voice came from his corner of the room. The warlock was at the side of his workbench, looking undecided on whether he should rush to her aid or flee the room.
"I'll be fine," she commented, focusing on her visor. The crystal was no longer producing heat, but there, in red, she saw the outline of a root-like underground tendril connecting the six-sided gem with her left foot.
Apparently, the spectre had sprung an ambush from within the gem, phasing through the solid matter underneath the floor to sneak up on her.
Well, that neatly explained what exactly Anise had seen inside the crystal. Still, Ami wasn't satisfied. The spectre shouldn't have been sapient, let alone smart enough to use tricks and deception. She wanted answers, and she could extract some from the creature currently trapped by her will if she dared to seize them.
A part of her balked at the idea. Sifting through Keeper Malleus' memories had been bad enough. Diving into the mind of a creature that may or may not be a tiny fragment of a dark god had the potential to be much, much worse.
Thinking on the issue for a bit, she decided that she should be fine if she took precautions. She would start with its most recent memories and slowly go backwards in time. The being hadn't been able to commit any atrocities while stuck in her dungeon, after all.
She checked up on the state of her prisoner once more. The spectre was trapped in the same condition as it had intended for her to end up in, unable to think under the pressure she was exerting on its mind and effectively comatose. Safe enough, but she wasn't going to take any risks. One imagined rubber band wrapped around her fingers later, the spectre would get squished the moment she lost concentration.
Satisfied with her precautions, she forced her way into the being's memories.
A strange, distorted view of squished-together shapes and odd colours appeared before her. The spectre didn't see like living things did, but relied on magical senses that were closer to Keeper sight.
Disoriented, Ami hesitated for a moment as she learned to make sense of what she was seeing. It didn't take her long to figure out the colours didn't match the visual spectrum and that the spectre had 360-degree vision, which was annoying, but not incomprehensible. At least it was perceiving the world through something like magical radar or echolocation and not something that the next Incarnation of Extinction she ran into could use to kill everything around it.
Her prisoner's intentions, on the other hand, were straightforward and easy to interpret. This attack had been a premature assassination attempt. Fearing discovery, the spectre had been forced to act before its preparations were complete. The plan was to knock Ami out, take enough control to make her drop her possession spell, and then inflict a fatal wound on her body. Its success chances had been minimal from the start, given the power disparity, but minimal was still better than non-existent from not acting at all.
The spectre's original plan had been both simpler and more dangerous at once. It was going to gather enough magical power to force a possession without bothering with fighting for control, and then explode once within her true body.
Ami grimaced at the thought. That kind of attack could have worked on her if it caught her by surprise, as it targeted her, rather than the body she was possessing. Now she knew why the creature had tricked Anise into collecting dark magic crystals, too. It could drain power from them, though it took some time digesting it. Why did it pick the fairy, anyway?
Ami jumped a little farther through the spectre's memories, catching short glimpses each time. Most of it was the simple drudgery of lying below a pile of black shards and slowly extracting magical power from them. The treasury's occupants changed with each glimpse. Occasionally, the gem housing the spectre got picked up by Anise to establish control over yet another underling.
Ami paid particularly close attention to that process. According to the being's thoughts, it could have seeded pieces of itself within their bodies, similar to how it controlled and animated corpses. In this case, however, it deemed such an approach more prone to detection and wasteful to boot, as illusions of the Keeper giving orders worked just as well. It could even trick the transformed fairy into casting the spells herself without realising it to preserve more mana.
Ami paused. Trickery, deceit and illusions were not what she would have expected from an undead minion of Crowned Death. Subtlety just didn't seem like his usual modus operandi. Of course, that also gave him the advantage of surprise if he employed it sparingly. Still, she wouldn't have believed the spectre to be able of more than instinctive action after it lost so many of its component undead. Putting such a plan together and executing it should have been completely beyond it. She also hadn't figured out yet why it opted to work through the crystal, or why it was hiding inside in the first place.
One of the memories she checked actually showed her the spectre drawing Anise's attention to the gem crate. The being didn't know who she was, but her magic showed up brighter in its strange vision. This seemed to signify to the monster that she would be compatible with -- yikes. Ami really didn't need to know a spell-boosting method that consumed the caster as fuel. Without delving into its details, she checked back further in time.
The crystal stuck inside of a gem crate. Irrelevant.
Inside of the same shaking crate on a train. Still irrelevant.
Suddenly having a monochrome viewpoint that more resembled normal vision, accompanied by impulses she'd expect from a very murderous instinct-guided animal? That was very interesting, and possibly too far back.
Ami considered the memory. This was back at her now abandoned dungeon, even though it was a bit hard to recognise with the spectre's vision somehow being able to see through walls. Its simplistic thought processes matched what she would have expected from the undead minion more closely. The main difference between its sapient and its animalistic state was the gem, which it had apparently found in her dungeon.
She examined more memories, going slightly forward in time, until she found one that caught her attention.
The spectre moved through her dungeon, unbound, moving towards a glow that stood out strongly to its magical senses and enraged it. Something was calling out, lighting up like a beacon, and the spectre would stop at nothing to destroy this rival.
The ethereal thing ghosted through several walls until it ended up in a sapphire-filled treasure chamber. Among the monochrome field of jewels, one crystal glowed bright blue in the spectre's vision. From each facet, a flailing tendril extended, reaching and grasping blindly.
To Ami, the crystal resembled some strange, injured sea creature. The tendrils looked as if they had been longer originally and something had torn them off.
The spectre reacted like a predator spotting a wounded prey animal and pounced, going right for the frayed end of one of the tendrils. Grasping the appendage with both hands, it started sucking nourishment from the wound.
The gem reacted to the assault by trying to stab its remaining tendrils into its attacker.
From the spectre's memories, Ami could tell that those attacks actually inflicted damage on it, unlike her own futile efforts to hurt it directly. The fight itself was something of a chaotic mess, as the creature didn't really remember the details clearly. It remembered aggression and wills clashing, pain, ripping and tearing, and pitting magical power against each other as both creatures tried to subsume each other.
In the end, the spectre proved itself a little stronger than its opponent and crushed the gem-creature's will, turning it into an empty husk. As the survivor possessed the crystal's inert corpse, its thoughts achieved clarity, rising above mere animal instinct.
The crystal seemed to provide as much mental capacity as an entire horde of animal zombies, which Ami found rather concerning. At least now, she knew why the spectre had been more capable than she expected. There was more, though. She got a first-person perspective of how the undead creature digested its gains. Its memories were back to the odd mode of vision in the first memory she had accessed -- which seemed to be that of the crystal.
In an uncomfortable parallel to what Ami was doing right now, the monster had been looking at the memories of its victim. She got to observe them twice removed, which felt a little odd. Somehow like watching someone's memories of watching a TV show. If said TV was for magical senses humans didn't have. The spectre seemed to be rather bad at using the gem's senses, since the crystal's own memories were clearer and more vivid-looking. Most of them, however, were from the familiar perspective of an imp.
Ami was running into a little trouble finding what she wanted, as the spectre hadn't accessed the crystal's knowledge in chronological order. Between self-satisfied gloating to itself about beating a minion of the hated Unraveller -- Ami took note of the gem's origin -- and a hunger for more, it had mostly been interested in locating more victims.
She did catch some useful glimpses, not that the spectre agreed. There were foreign imps in her gem furnace room, each one with a crystal just like the one she was investigating embedded in the forehead. A network of straight lines connected each of these gems with each other, visible as a transparent overlay to the imp's vision.
The picture of said workers disassembling one of her gem furnaces in a coordinated effort worried her, but when she saw that they spent as much time and effort on the useless distractions as on the real mechanisms, she relaxed. It was clear that they didn't understand enough to know what was important.
She was more interested in their leader, the clearly Keeper-possessed dark mistress. Unfortunately, the spectre hadn't been, so it didn't pay much attention to her. Ami got a few glimpses of the intruder walking off towards her treasury, and that was it.
The spectre had been much more interested in hungrily eyeing the imps swarming over her equipment, wondering if it could catch up to them.
Ami, in contrast, was fascinated by the eerie coordination of the imps as they took apart the gem furnace bit by bit, handing each other pieces and tools without ever communicating or even looking at each other. Was that how the Unraveller of Mysteries got her name? It certainly looked as if the minions managed to take everything without inflicting damage, and she doubted they would have trouble piecing it back together again.
They didn't have an instruction manual, she reassured herself. Without knowing the right temperature range, the furnace wouldn't produce sapphires.
She skimmed through more memories, trying to get a better look at the dark mistress so she could identify the intruding Keeper.
Working imps, more working imps, more hungry gazing at forehead gems...
She paused as the imp the crystal was personally controlling licked the ashes in the growth cavity. According to the crystal's memories, it was analysing its composition. To Ami's alarm, it got surprisingly accurate results. She briefly wondered about imps being forced to eat all kinds of weird and harmful things just so the gem could recognise the taste. Did the intruders have similar ways to determine temperature and duration?
Questions for later. Where did the thieves come from? There were no memories to find before their arrival at Ami's dungeon. Apparently, the imps had been created on-site by the Keeper, using the possessed dark mistress as a piece of claimed ground. The crystal's earliest memory was a literal headache from being stabbed into an imp's head without any kind of anaesthetics. A dead end for her investigation.
Also, her speculation about the imps ingesting harmful substances in the name of chemistry had apparently been wrong. Fortunately, the gem furnaces had already cooled down from their operating temperature before the imps got here. At this point, she wouldn't be surprised if the crystals could get an accurate read on temperature by the painful burns they inflicted too. That sounded like a technique the dark gods would enjoy.
For a moment, she considered what kind of burns an imp would suffer from touching an active gem furnace before dismissing the unproductive thought. She still didn't know who had broken into her dungeon, aside from the fact that they had the Unraveller's support.
Her search continued. She saw a few scenes of the ice golem fighting the imps -- the spectre found it amusing to watch something that looked like Keeper Mercury fail against the weakest kind of dungeon denizen that existed. She also saw the imp in which the captured gem was embedded die. The perspective shift from imp vision to crystal vision was rather jarring. It dropped into a deep, bent gap between two pieces of machines, sliding too far for the short arms of its allies to retrieve it. They could have managed to get it out eventually if they hadn't been retreating in a hurry, or if they had paid less attention to salvaging machinery.
Ami felt a renewed surge of worry. Was it possible they had retrieved enough of the furnace to figure out its operation? Normally, she would not think so, but with the Unraveller involved... Which phases would give a reverse engineer the most trouble? As she started mentally going through the steps, she hesitated.
Why did her mind keep circling back to the details of her gem furnace's inner workings when she was interested in tracking down the intruders? It wasn't relevant to her investigation at all.
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Was she being manipulated?
Of course not. There was obviously no subtle way to make her divulge that the correct temperature for the crystal forming process was-
Stop it!
A crystal-clear mental pulse that conveyed the message "It was worth a try" along with the equivalent of a shrug and a feeling of amused mockery answered her.
An instant later, the spectre radiated a feeling of mortal terror before abruptly disappearing from her mind.
Darn it! Ami suspected that the moment of animalistic fear had been her only genuine glimpse into the creature's mind, rather than at the carefully constructed façade that its puppet master had shown her. Expecting a renewed mental attack, she took an instant too long to focus her attention outward.
The crystal was slurping the elongated form of the spectre up like a noodle. According to Ami's visor, the ghostly being was now plain dead, rather than undead. The spiking energy levels in the gem also suggested that the process was fuelling a spell.
Without a flash or any other overt magical effects, a small sphere of matter just large enough to contain the gem disappeared. The surrounding water rushed in to fill the void and then spilled out through the circular hole in the bucket's bottom to fill the semi-spherical depression gouged out of the floor.
Ami doubted that the gem creature had simply committed an elaborate form of suicide. Typing frantically on her palmtop computer, she first checked if she wasn't dealing with some new form of trickery or illusion, and then confirmed traces of teleportation magic. She stomped her foot in frustration.
In the back, Harold silently tried to make himself smaller and less visible, trembling faintly. He froze when her gaze snapped onto him.
"Try to track that crystal, quickly," she ordered. There was a chance the thing hadn't gotten far with the power it had available. Its teleportation spell wasn't an innate ability, judging by its effects on the gem's environment, so it should be rather expensive to cast so quickly.
"At once, your Majesty!" The warlock almost toppled his crystal ball in his haste to touch it. "Seeking, seeking, I'm getting something, nearly -- got it!" he shouted excitedly.
In an instant, Ami was right next to him and stared into the scrying device.
The gem was lying on the broken tip of a chalk-white stalagmite. It glittered in the single ray of sunlight that shone like a spotlight through a tiny gap in the cave's roof.
Ami didn't believe for an instant that the crystal had landed in the only illuminated spot by sheer good fortune. This was either an attempt to mislead her, outright mockery, or possibly both.
An imp stepped into the small circle of light and grabbed the gem.
On second thought, it might also have been a deliberate arrangement to make itself more visible to allies. Ami still wasn't willing to rule out the other possibilities, though, and grabbed a crystal ball of her own. "Keep a view of that location, they might be working with illusions," she instructed.
Meanwhile, the imp was bringing the pointy end of the gem up to his forehead with trembling arms.
Ami scried on the crystal herself and got a view of the same location as Harold. Unlike the warlock, she brought her perspective closer and closer to the gem, which earned her an unfortunate close-up view of the minion's face contorting in pain as he shoved the crystal slowly into his own forehead. Fighting through her revulsion, she zoomed in on the inside of the gem.
Her crystal ball went dark, which matched Harold's results earlier and confirmed she was looking at the real thing.
She discarded the temporary useless scrying device for another.
There was a flash of green from Harold's crystal ball, and the warlock bit back a curse. "It teleported!" he reported.
"Maintain view of the cave," Ami ordered. The place where the gem had first landed might be important, and once the crystal ball's point of view changed, it couldn't simply flip back to a previous one. With another scrying device in hand, she searched for the vanished gem herself.
The resulting image was an assault on the senses. A dizzying network of black and white lines completely covered the walls, forming patterns that seemed to wiggle in the corner of her eyes.
Ami blinked once and tore her gaze away from the strangely hypnotic sight, focusing entirely on the imp instead. Her face fell when she realised that he was standing at the edge of a rectangular basin where strange rainbow patterns played across the dark waters.
The imp stopped tapping his foot, looked up, and grinned in her direction. The gem set in his bloody forehead was blazing a bright white, growing in intensity when the imp waved at her.
With a loud clinking noise, cracks spread over Ami's crystal ball as if something heavy had struck its smooth surface.
Startled, she let go of the sphere, which shattered into pieces a moment later. She hurriedly picked up a replacement, but it refused to show anything but darkness.