Hope

They had to deal with seven separate groups of assassins throughout the night. With some reluctance on the part of Elizabeth, they held back from actually killing any of them, merely relying on Desir to physically force them into prolonged slumber. Just to err on the side of caution, he, Irwyn, and Elizabeth had stayed awake.

Not all the way until dawn, though. Waylan and Alice slept for a good chunk of the night, but when it seemed like they had seen the last group of assailants, they woke the two to move on with their plans. Elizabeth set up some magical traps for any latecomers, then they were off underneath a veil of Void magic.

They had put together that the documents they were after would most likely be in a private section of the palace's library. As chance would have it, Waylan had actually stumbled upon it earlier in the day and thus knew the way. For the most part, anyway - they had to do some guessing as to not take the same detour as the sneak had when moving around the whole perimeter.

When they made it to the front door of the palace's archives, they were actually locked. After some debating, they determined that there were no real wards inside the unrestricted section. Alice performed her three-step test of teleportation safety, then brought the entire group inside. From there it took them just a few minutes to stumble upon the heavily enchanted chamber hidden behind one of the bookshelves. All the magic ironically made it easier to find.

Not that breaking in would be easy. Alice quickly determined that breaking in through Time magic would trigger some spells that were likely alarms - and possibly other countermeasures. Elizabeth proposed that with Concepts they could force their way in, but that would also likely alert the whole palace of what was happening. Which would not be untenable, but would bruise their Pride, besides the other possible complications. Which lead to Waylan groaning in the corner as the four mages tried to evaluate how to actually enter.

"How hard can it be to erase the alarm spell from here as it triggers?" Elizabeth suggested after some not very helpful attempts at magical diagnosis. For once it was an area she did not have that much knowledge in - given that few chambers were barred to her in the Federation.

"We have no idea how any hypothetical alarm even works," Desir objected. "There could be several, as well as decoys."

"That is a good point," Irwyn nodded. "How does an alarm get triggered?"

"Something happens that trips it, then a message of some sort gets sent out," Alice explained what she knew. "It could be magical or even mechanical, I suppose?"

"But either way, it would need to come from inside the room, right?"

"So if we can stop that, the alarm cannot go off," Elizabeth realized. "Isolate the room and we can break in, disable all the magic while they cannot announce our presence."

"Or there could be a magical current going through the room that actually triggers the alarm when interrupted," Desir disagreed with the plan. "In fact, that is bare minimum. Second rate gangs in Abonisle could employ that kind of countermeasure."

"Then we should be able to find it," Irwyn decided. "Examine the area and rooms around it. I can look for it."

And that made him ponder that issue. There were walls and other enchantments around the place distracting him, which would make the endeavor difficult with just his usual magical senses. But Irwyn had an idea. His Light was made to be piercing after all. Why not use that to see through walls? Through distraction and diversion.

That required a new spell. His mind surged with inspiration, happy to supply all he needed. The foundation of the new magic would have to be in the eyes. Irwyn wanted to see magic with absolute precision… but why stop at that? He could go further. More than just magic, he could peer through any illusion or even things material, by using his unique advantages.

He fuelled absurd quantities of Light magic into his eyes. So much so anyone else would be left with an exhausted Vessel and two very much ruptured orbs. But just like Fire, Light would not hurt Irwyn. So he funneled more and more magic. Until his very nerves became pronounced in his perception, the power coursing alongside them. So did his sclera, which would no doubt be turning blindingly brilliant. Far further than his Starflesh spell would - To the point it would be impossible to even maintain eye contact once he was done.

To contain that much power, Irwyn naturally invoked his Concept. Anchored the spell in it, then nudged it for the result he wanted. Piercing, just as he had made his Light, but not harmful. He did not wish to destroy all he beheld, merely peer through, into any secrets hidden. And to his pleasant surprise, the Concept happily complied. Unlike his Flame, it did not insist on destruction. Even if the piercing he had in mind when carving was different, the match remained perfect. All that was left was a chant. Irwyn opted for simple.

"With a gleam,
All is seen"

The world became briefly very confusing. A bursting glare of colours, shapes, and motions that had not been there before. Swirling, dizzying chaos that Irwyn's mind could not interpret or take in. He was seeing too much. Irwyn had to close his eyes, struggling not to fall over. Bile tried to rise and was pushed back down, the overwhelming sensation only receding when he remembered to close the eyelids. That ushered unto a mercifully monotone glow taking up his vision.

"Are you alright?" Elizabeth was steadying him on his feet.

"Sorry, I will need to practice with that one," Irwyn nodded, eyes still shut. He needed to filter what would be actually visible. They were looking for coursing magic, so that was exactly what he commanded the spell to show him, and rejected everything else. Or at least tried.

The world was made of vague outlines when his eyes opened again. Irwyn was pretty sure that those were physical objects like walls, made transparent and translucent by the spell twisting his perception. Almost like everything had turned into thin fog. The other visible thing was magic. Not just what he had specified, but mana in general. Elizabeth shone like a beacon to that sense. Desir and Alice did a lot less so, but were still barely visible. Desir actually looked a bit off… but Irwyn put that out of his mind for the moment, returning to his original purpose. The heavily warded room appeared like a sealed cube, luminescent but impossible to glare into - Irwyn did not push lest something triggered.

Of course, the moving magic he had specifically sought was also distinct. Just as Desir had predicted, there were hairline streams of it entering into the sealed room and leaving from the other end - so thin they were hard to see even with his newly empowered vision. Two such networks actually. Irwyn followed each with his eyes to their destinations, quickly spotting all four nodes where that magic coalesced in intricate formations.

Those were not quite as well defended though. Irwyn managed to help Alice pinpoint their physical locations - they were all buried deep inside the walls - and examine them better. After some back and forth, the group was confident that those were not overly trapped and could therefore be disabled with reasonable ease if they were careful. Irwyn did not participate in that, merely observing as Elizaeth carefully sabotaged parts of the enchantment's symbols. A surgical procedure he did not have the expertise to interpret as it involved neither Light nor Flame. After admiring the scalpel precision for a while, her returned to thinking about his new spell.

It would lose potency with distance, due to Finity, but the raw quantity of magic more than made up for that in the intended range. If he wanted something like farseing, that would require a different spell. But it was still very potent, surprisingly so, even. He was not sure about the limits of what he had seen when the spell had run unrestricted but it was clearly more than just things mundane and magical. There was an unexpected depth that would need exploring.

Not immediately though, because the alarms had been disabled, and they needed his help opening the room. Elizabeth erected a field of complete isolation around the whole inner library, then bid Irwyn to force the lock. He briefly tried lock picking by filling the mechanism with physical Flame, but even a cursory inspection revealed that the engineering behind it was hellishly complex. Therefore Irwyn melted all of it to slug. The enchantments helped it little.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He was prepared for a lethal traps to spring. Or even for a failsafe, setting everything in the room on fire in an attempt to destroy knowledge rather than let it get stolen. There was none of that, thought. Only a whole lot of paperwork occupied the room. Too much, actually. One filing cabinet after another, wall to wall, taking all the space besides a moderate work table placed to the opposite wall from the entrance. A quick glance into one of them immediately told Irwyn that those cabinets seemed mostly full of files and individual documents.

"There has to be a system to this," Elizabeth guessed.

"I am half-sure these are time periods," Desir commented, looking at the numbers written on the cabinets. "From several months to a full year apart. At least from what I am seeing."

"We would be looking for things about 40 years back then," Irwyn nodded

"Johnson was here for decades longer," Elizabeth shook her head. "We need to go further back."

"I should be the most familiar with his writing, so I will take it from the front," Desir suggested. "The rest of you can look to the decades before that to look for anything interesting."

"Sounds well enough," Irwyn nodded. Desir briefly introduced them to the local calendar - which Irwyn was quite sure he would forget by the end of the week, if not sooner - and how to navigate the private archive. Then Irwyn got to work, looking at documents about 50 years old.

The first thing he randomly picked out was a tax reform… He briefly wondered why that needed to be in the private part of archive but skimming did not provide an answer. Deciding that the mystery was indeed not that interesting he quickly moved on. It turned out that the secret library of a decently old family full of schemers was surprisingly boring. Irwyn genuinely couldn't tell why most of the documents passing through his hands had to be hidden behind so many wards. From the outlining of districts, outdated plans for the sewer system, to water supply chain, most were dreadfully pointless.

The two highlights he ran into were the documentation of a scheme of how to collapse the knight order being fostered by a neighboring family. It was apparently a 60 year plan with very exhaustive notes of how it should be executed in case the writer - presumably the still living patriarch - perished. Irwyn didn't read most of it, it just seemed much more curious than his other discoveries.

The second was a post-mortem report about the death of a certain noble lady of house Sammer. What Irwyn found the most interesting about it was a different mention though, one denoting a relationship. The mother of Avys. Irwyn naturally called Elizabeth. She seemed very much interested but chose to stash it away for the moment so that they could continue looking.

"This organization scheme is dumb," Waylan complained. "How many tax reforms do you need in a year?"

"Maybe that's the point," Alice suggested. "Make things needlessly hard to find so that if someone tries to steal them, they can't locate anything quickly. Imagine breaking into here while triggering the alarm, having only a minute or two to grab the most important stack of paper."

"It wouldn't be even easy to destroy this quantity," Elizabeth noted. "The paper is surprisingly high quality and damage resistant - natural flame wouldn't even burn it, I suspect. Yet it's still a rather dubious reason to store this much junk in a private library.

"Dubious reasons seem to be somewhat common around here," Irwyn pointed out. "How many assassins did we have to deal with so far?"

"Good point, paranoia is probably a virtue here," Elizabeth nodded.

"I have something!" Desir interrupted them, showing off several bundles of documents. "And it's the good stuff as well."

What Desir had found, as it turned out, was actually a guide to both magic and honing, divided into separate scripts, they talked about all the nine elements and a variety of non-magical methods. Rather than a precise step by step, it was more a guideline interwoven with principles and a few secrets or laws. Finity was a prominent mention in those Irwyn got to skim.

It seemed to only have anything to say up to the end of imbuement, but Irwyn was sure he could extract a few insights from it with a thorough reading. He didn't have any use for the part that spoke about Light based healing, but some of the uses of Light and Flame would be worth investigating and testing out.

For example, had he ever tried to accelerate the speed of Light? Natural light was already unfathomably fast, but the primer suggested it could be pushed even a bit further. While that in itself would not be useful or even perceptible, it was supposedly a good exercise for making actual Light magic move faster too.

Elizabeth would gain nothing from a primer on Void magic and didn't even take it. Alice and Desir though definitely had much to learn. Alice still had gaps in her magical education due to it being cut-off halfway, and Desir had both Life and Void to tamper with. Despite his mysterious background, it didn't seem like he often had great fonts of knowledge to draw from. For the moment, he also took custody of all of the guides with a promise to search for something Johnson might have hidden between the lines.

Waylan would possibly benefit the most, if the sneak managed to actually read through everything. Beforehand he had almost no frame of reference to honing, but these documents could help with that. Warn him about pitfalls and inform about how he was actually doing in comparison to others. There would be a lot of paper to chew through though as they outlined several different directions honing could take.

Meanwhile, Desir held on to the rest, claiming he had some mild interest. And if they never found any use of them, he was in the best position to sell them to Bhaak for something the whole group could use. Given the lack of any real use for what remained, it was not a hard sell anyway. They returned to looking for clues.

"Found some more, probably," Desir exclaimed again a few minutes later, waving a letter of some kind around before getting to it. "Give me a moment."

"He seems to have all the luck," Waylan exclaimed in frustration.

"Or maybe he is actually going through a good number of documents," Irwyn's smiled, pointing at Waylan's very meager progress.

"You know, maybe if I find something, it will just happen to get lost."

"At that pace? Not much of a risk."

They bickered for a bit longer before returning to the mind-numbing boredom of the paperwork. Still frustratingly deprived of anything they were looking for. Alice was the only one who seemingly found something - but it turned out to be an ancient, possibly fake, treasure map rather than anything useful. Irwyn hoped they would not take large detours for that. Even if anything was still left in those spots, it would more likely than not be mostly worthless.

"And how is your progress?" Irwyn eventually turned back to Desir.

"The letter is definitely Johnson's handwriting, but the envelope has just a bunch of numbers and the inside looks like gibberish, probably a cypher," the shape changer said dejectedly. He had been staring at it for a good while already, so he ended up passing the notes instead.

"I recognize this," Elizabeth was first, eyes snapping to the strange symbols.

"Really?" Irwyn also took a look. The symbols looked like squiggles to him.

"This is a simplistic code language specifically made to pass information between powerful mages of the Federation," she nodded. "It seems like it hasn't change in centuries - or Johnson got wind of an update.

"Wouldn't that be counterproductive against the undead?" Irwyn questioned. If it had been used for a while it would have undoubtedly been cracked at as more point. After which it could be actively detrimental to trust in such a cypher.

"For once, this is not a measure against the Rot," Elizabeth shook her head. "There is another, far more secretive, method that only the Dukes themselves use for that, but that is besides the point. This code is almost closer to a mark of status rather than being actually useful. A 'for us' language that you can be sure only people with influence will know. Rarely practical… but I suppose one of the good uses is to leave behind messages only someone from the Federation could read."

"Johnson could have left that in the Republic," Irwyn shook his head in disbelief. "Would have made accessing that hideout easier."

"There is a good chance he actually had," Desir spoke up. "When I was looking into the statues, I found out that there used to be some more esoteric sculptures with unknown symbols scribbled on them. The records of what they were ended up unfortunately destroyed, so they were eventually removed to free up space. If those were left behind by their glorious 'founder'… I think there could be some funny reactions if we told them what their predecessors threw out."

"I think I have the gist of this," Elizabeth interrupted with a frown. "It… speaks a lot about my mother and other things. I don't think I can share most of it without violating some of my bindings concerning strategic secrets… I will have to erase it after memorization, actually. Most of it, anyway. One notable thing I found is that Johnson refers to the 'Hydra' method as 'multi-headed' method. But I don't know if that is actual insight or just because the code language doesn't have an actual word for a hydra so he used the next closest thing."

"It probably means he named it that because of the headcount rather than regeneration," Desir noted. "Doesn't it say more about what it is?"

"Just as vague as before," Elizabeth shook her head. "Doesn't even explicitly mention what the patriarch told us about improving talents."

They talked about it for a little longer, but Elizabeth insisted that she really couldn't say anything more and that it wasn't particularly relevant to what they were doing. Eventually they returned to sorting through documents. After failing to find anything of note in a whole other hour and going through a big chunk of the time windows they had looked into, the quintet decided to call it quits. Someone would notice the paralyzed assassins in their room eventually, and then spread word they had left said lodgings. Best to be gone by then, if only to avoid more fruitless assassination attempts. Not, of course, before there was one more suggestion voiced.

"If they love their pointless documents so much," a mischievous glint passed through Alice's eyes. "How about we do a bit of shuffling."