NOVEL NEXT Chapter 12: Eldritch Scholar
Carmen made her way to Kali’s room and knocked on the door.
“Yes?” Kali asked, opening the door. “Wait, you’re…not Lilith.” She said, carefully looking Carmen over. “The alternate personality, then?”
“Got it in one.” Carmen said. “I’m going to be using that Avatar thing for the foreseeable future, so both of us are going to be out at once.”
A complicated expression briefly crossed Kali’s face, but it vanished as quickly as it arrived. “So, what do you need me for? I’m assuming it’s not just a social visit, right?”
Carmen smiled. “I want your help.” She said. “I’m going to ask Tunem for some…probably forbidden books, and I want you to back me up when I say I don’t have any ill intentions.”
Kali raised an eyebrow. “I’m a member of the Council too. What makes you think I’m going to be any more amenable to this?”
“Because you’re not like them.” Carmen replied calmly. “I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, or even why I feel this way, but something about you is different. You don’t want the same things they want, and you certainly don’t want the same things Tunem wants. He clearly doesn’t trust anything he can’t foresee, and he’s already said that he can’t foresee the eldritch.”
“Well, color me impressed, you’ve figured him out with only a couple of interactions.” Kali responded. “Tunem’s a bit of a stick in the mud when it comes to stuff like this, he’d probably say no without even considering it. But your other claim is a bit…bold, wouldn’t you say? What do I want, if I don’t want what everyone else wants?”
Carmen carefully looked over Kali’s face. Something about it was telling her that the way she responded to this was important, so she considered her words carefully before speaking. “I don’t know. I think it has to do with Lilith in particular, though. You don’t look at her like you look at everyone else, you look…conflicted, like you’re not exactly sure what to say or do.”
And now that she was carefully studying Kali, there was…something else that she could sense from her, something that set off that strange nostalgia she had been feeling earlier. She had…actually felt that nostalgia before, right? It was a similar feeling to the one she had gotten from the ball that held her Domains.
She decided to poke at that a little, hoping that it hit the mark. “And you definitely have something that the other Council members don’t have. Again, I don’t know what, but I can feel it, deep in my bones. So, again, let me ask for your cooperation. You help me out here, and I help you get closer to Lilith, so long as I determine you aren’t out to harm her.”
Kali grinned. “I’d call that a deal. What exactly are you after?”
“The Necronomicon, as well as any other eldritch texts.” Carmen said. “If this is power that only I can access right now, I want it. It’ll be something that other people don’t know how to counter. Then, once I’m done with those, I want any other forbidden tomes I can get my hands on, and then any and all high-level spellbooks around.”
Kali laughed. “Ambitious, aren’t we? I can help you with at least some of that, but there are a few forbidden tomes where I’m going to have to put my foot down. That’s mostly stuff that has to do with magic involving the sacrifice of sapient beings, and I think we can both agree that’s a bridge too far.”
Carmen shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t particularly care. If it means that it makes Lilith safer, then so be it.”
Kali flinched at that. “That’s…understandable, I suppose, but I’m still going to have to say no. That’s really nasty stuff and, to be honest, wouldn’t even be efficient at helping protect you. It’s completely unnecessary for your purposes.”
“Fine, I won’t argue the point further, then. Lilith would probably get on my case about it too, so no big loss. Anyway, I intend to go ask Tunem about this now, will you come?”
Kali nodded. “Just give me a second to get some shoes.” She retreated back into her room and came back out a moment later, wearing a pair of shoes. “Alright, give me a moment to read your mind and I’ll look over the results on our way.”
After Carmen gave permission, she touched a finger to Carmen’s forehead, and the two left for Tunem’s house. After a five or so minute walk they made it there, and Carmen rang the doorbell. There was some shuffling around inside, and then Tunem answered. “Lilith, Kali, what brings you here?”
“It’s Carmen.” Carmen said. “Lilith decided to use her Avatar ability to keep me out so we could both learn things at the same time and double our efficiency. So, I’ve come to request study materials.”
Tunem raised an eyebrow. “Come in to the foyer, we’ll talk there.” He led them to the foyer and took a seat in a chair, motioning for Carmen and Kali to sit down opposite him. “So, what do you want?”
“First, I want to say that my motives are pure; I just want to get Lilith strong enough to protect herself. And Kali here can vouch for me, too, she knows what I want and knows that I don’t have any malicious intentions for this.”
Kali nodded. “Yup. She’s vetted this with me first, and I gave her a look over. She’s clean.”
Tunem frowned. “What ‘study material’ do you have in mind? I’m going to have to reserve judgement until I hear what it is.”
Carmen smiled. “First, I want to be exempt from Lilith’s classes. I’m just an avatar, and my presence there isn’t going to help her learn what’s being said faster. Instead, I want to devote my time to studying grimoires, spellbooks, magic formation diagrams, anything and everything that contains written magic. You should have seen my Decipher ability, so you should know that I should be able to commit most of that stuff to memory pretty quickly.”
“Yes, but what exactly are you asking for?” Tunem asked.
“Any and all of your eldritch books, especially the Necronomicon, if you have that.”
Tunem scowled. “You realize you’re asking for incredibly forbidden books, right?”
“I’m well aware.” Carmen said, holding his gaze. “And I’m also aware that you’re desperate. The King in Yellow was almost certainly among the most forbidden of those books, and you let me read it no problem. Furthermore, you were willing to use a djinn you had been keeping for an incredibly long time to get me here.
“So, I don’t see you having much choice in the matter. You need me, and you need me to be as strong as possible as fast as possible. I should be uniquely able to handle all the knowledge contained therein, and I highly doubt it could do any damage to my sanity if The King in Yellow didn’t.”
“Those books aren’t forbidden for quite the same reasons as The King in Yellow.” Tunem protested. “They’re forbidden because the knowledge they hold is too dangerous for the general public to use. Though, admittedly, The King in Yellow’s knowledge would likely fall into that category if we were able to know what it is without going insane.”
“But I’m not the general public. From what I’ve gathered, you intend to use me as a weapon, and you can’t afford having me be weak. If I get captured while I’m weak like this I’ll almost certainly be forced to work for the Society, and I’m sure the Society would have no qualms about forcing forbidden knowledge on me to make me a more effective weapon against you. And again, Kali can vouch for me. I don’t intend to use this to destroy civilization or whatever. I just want to know enough to survive and be free.”
Kali nodded. “She’s right about that. From what I saw she has no ill intentions whatsoever, and that power wouldn’t be able to unnaturally tempt her. But…you know, the reason we even gave Lilith the lamp in the first place was because you said disaster was coming, and the only way we could stop it without unreasonable losses was to give her the lamp.
“So, I think we should try to aid her in whatever way we can. The Society’s becoming bolder, and right now Lilith’s only got potential, no actual strength. She’s a Perfect Chimera, she’ll get power the general public can’t even dream of anyway, so I see no harm in giving her a little more. Unless, of course, this disaster isn’t as pressing as you thought and there were…other reasons you wanted her to have that lamp.”
Kali smiled, looking Tunem directly in the eyes. “I’m sure Elenoa would be quite interested to hear about how, ‘everything you did was for Alex’, wouldn’t you say?”
Tunem grit his teeth. “How do you know about that?”
Kali laughed. “I just asked Vithi, and she told me. Everyone else on the Council suspects it was largely to get her back, but because you’ve brought us a new Perfect Chimera they aren’t looking too closely. So, we’re going to let Carmen read those books, right?”
Tunem looked away. “Fine. I’ll go get the books. Stay here while I fetch them.”
He left, and Carmen looked over to Kali, smiling deviously. “So, would you say I’ve been a good girl? Because I believe you mentioned something about good girls getting a kiss, and I would like to take you up on that.”
Kali blinked in surprise, then smiled. “I think you have. I’ll give you that kiss once we’re finished here, alright?”
“Sounds good. Do you mind if I stick around you while I study? I don’t want to distract Lilith while she’s in class, and I’d like to have someone around if I have any questions.”
“Of course!” Kali replied. “Just so long as you promise not to ask me anything that could potentially ruin my sanity. I wouldn’t know about the eldritch anyway, so it’s not like I would be able to give you a good answer if you did.”
Carmen laughed. “I promise I won’t.”
They made small talk for a few more minutes before Tunem returned, holding a large stack of books. “Here you go.” He said sourly, plopping the books onto an end table. “Don’t make me regret this. Now get out of my house with this stuff, I don’t want it in here for any longer than it has to be.”
Carmen took the books, then gave Kali a nod. “Shall we be on our way, then?”
Kali smiled. “Sure. It’s getting late and you and Lilith have a busy day tomorrow.”
Once they were safely out of Tunem’s house, Carmen asked Kali one of the questions that had been on her mind for the previous ten or so minutes. “Are you sure it’s OK to blackmail Tunem like that?” She said. “This is sort of his demiplane or whatever, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea to make him angry.”
Kali snorted. “It’s fine. This is only ‘his’ demiplane the same way a city is ‘the mayor’s’ city. He just has jurisdiction here, no actual power over the physical nature of the plane. I have just as much authority as he does, so he can’t touch me while I’m holding this over him.”
“But won’t it make the future harder, once this blows over? He’s not going to be happy with you.”
Kali shrugged. “Perhaps. Elenoa, that angel woman, she practically runs the Council and she hates the Society. If she learned that Tunem did what he did in order to get someone who defected to the Society back, she’d hound him about it forever and it’d make his life really hard. Especially since I doubt you’re looking to become the Council’s attack dog, so he wouldn’t even have much gain to show for it.”
Carmen gave Kali a careful look. “And you’re fine with that?”
Kali grinned. “As you said, I don’t want what the rest of the Council wants. What I want is for you and Lilith to maintain your independence so you can shake things up.”
“In what way?” Carmen said guardedly. “We’re not going to help you perform a coup or anything.”
Kali laughed. “No, nothing like that. You see, I belong to what you might call the progressives, though there are really only two of us, me and another Council member named Yamato. We believe it’s high time we lift the restrictions preventing people from Earth from using magic or interacting with the people from Haven.
“No one on Earth was even alive for the war that caused the restrictions to be put upon them, and still, people like Elenoa, and, to a lesser extent, Tunem, think it’s fair that such a large part of life is kept from them.”
“What is this war, anyway?” Carmen asked. “Alex mentioned it before, but I don’t really know much other than it was humans against like everyone else.”
“That’s…sort of correct.” Kali replied. “But it’s complicated. Humans are more numerous than most sapient races, it’s a tradeoff for eternal youth being much harder to achieve than said other races. And Earth was beginning to run out of space, so a few human kingdoms thought that some races like the angels had kingdoms that were far too big for how many people they had.
“There was some negotiation over land, but it didn’t work out and things turned to war. To tell you the truth, I might even blame the other races more than I blame the humans here, because the humans were right, many kingdoms were way too big. But, well, people don’t want to just give up land, and when the humans attacked, they had to defend themselves somehow.
“It devolved into a world war after that. But it wasn’t like humans were only fighting against the other races, there were humans on this side of things too. The humans living under the Protectorate now are mostly either descendants of those humans or even people who fought for the Protectorate in the war.”
Kali sighed, looking regretfully off into the distance. “And then people discovered Haven. It should have been an end to the conflict, since there’s ample room for everyone there. It’s like…at least five times as big as Earth from our calculations, and that’s a lower bound. But…no, people like Elenoa said the humans would just expand more and we would run into this problem again.
“So, they worked on a way to strip humans of magic and confine them on Earth. At this point, a few high-profile demon kingdoms defected, since they were of the belief that magic is a basic right and stripping huge swathes of people of it was morally wrong. Well, you know how that ended. The humans and those demons lost, but to add insult to injury, Elenoa and her ilk launched a huge smear campaign on Earth to make sure no humans would ever trust a demon again, which is why you’ve heard such bad things about us.”
Kali shook her head. “But that’s in the past now. Yamato and I want to build bridges again, and to do that we need some sort of power. Elenoa has one Perfect Chimera completely under her thumb, and there’s one that’s entirely neutral in all of this, so we hope that if we’re able to sway her to our side and also get your help, we’ll have the bargaining power to make something happen. Will you be willing to help?”
Carmen thought about that for a while. “I’m not going to say no outright, but I’m not going to say yes either.” She said. “It’s not my decision to make. Lilith’s the real person here, not me, so I can’t just speak for her. It seems like a noble cause, but…well, that’s apparently what the Society wants too, and they’re not exactly noble.”
Kali smiled sadly. “Unfortunately, the Society really helps people who want to keep Earth and Haven separate more than they help the cause of getting Earth’s magic back. People like Yamato and I always get compared to them, even though they’re barely even trying to get Earth’s magic back. They just use it as a talking point and an excuse for their power grabs. We’re not anything like them, don’t worry.”
“Lilith and I will think on it.” Carmen said as they reached the dorm. “But we’ll talk more later. The mood’s been completely ruined, so I won’t expect that kiss until later, but I’m going to hold you to it, alright?”
“I won’t let you down.” Kali said, opening the door for Carmen. “Just let me know when, alright?”
And so, Carmen unloaded her books onto the living room table, sat down on the couch, grabbed the Necronomicon, and began to read.
