“It isn’t going to eat anything else, is it?” Lee asked, edging away from the grimoire. “I don’t want to share.”

“I get the feeling it probably only wants books and Runes, but I don’t think I’d bet on it,” Noah said. He was still half-waiting for a beam of light or an alarm to erupt, but it was silent. Whatever the artifact had done, the Records of the Deceased was gone.

“The real question should be if the Imbuements remained behind,” Moxie said. “I suppose they couldn’t be there in their normal state. Is your grimoire going to set off an alarm if you touch it and then let go?”

“No clue. Care to give an answer that one?” Noah asked, turning to match the book’s eye. That was an odd notion in its own. He’d never thought that a book would be reading him.

Unfortunately, his efforts were not rewarded. His new grimoire blinked, then closed its eye. The leather rippled as its features faded away, turning into a drawing rather than a three-dimensional body part.

While that did make the book a little less creepy, it didn’t help answer any questions. Noah glared and nudged it with his shoe. The book’s cover rippled and the eye reformed, looking up at him.

“You can sleep after you give me some answers,” Noah said. “After all the stuff I just fed you, I’d say I deserve them. Do you still have the Imbuements of the book you ate?”

“Evidently not. You just touched it,” Lee pointed out.

Ah, crud.

“Okay, scratch that. Do you have them in your possession? Or are they just gone?”

The book flipped open and Noah was forced to jump back to avoid getting smacked by its large cover. Pages flipped past before landing on a completely blank one. Then it slammed shut once more.

“I think that’s a no,” Lee said helpfully.

“You don’t say,” Noah said dryly. “I guess they got snacked on. So it only keeps writing and actual Runes, not Imbuements.”

“Still quite useful, though that does depend on it not eating anything you’ve left in its pages,” Moxie said. Noah couldn’t help but notice that she was keeping a good bit of distance between herself and the artifact. “I guess the only way we’ll find out is by testing it. If this is the kind of thing the Linwicks had in their catacombs, it makes me wonder what else there was.”

“That’s probably in the book somewhere,” Noah said. “The Records of the Damned had information about some of the artifacts. We can always poke our noses around later. I do have a question, though.”

“I don’t think we’re the right crowd to answer anything about the Linwicks.”

“It’s not about the Linwicks. Not directly, at least. I was just thinking – Father is a Rank 6, and he’s not even part of the main branch. That means the Family Head of the Linwicks is also a Rank 6, unless there’s some weird political stuff going on. And, if Father couldn’t get into the Main Branch, then there have to be other Rank 6s in the Linwick family that outrank him.”

Moxie nodded slowly. “All logical, yes.”

“Then what was up with the Torrins? The other branch leaders were Rank 5s, not Rank 6. How in the world was Father relegated to a side branch when he’s strong enough to butt heads with Evergreen, the head of the Torrin family? I thought the Linwicks and Torrins were meant to be pretty evenly matched.”

Moxie blew a breath out through pursed lips. “That’s a rough question. Part of it is the number of Runes. It gets really damn hard to combine and fill Runes at higher levels. A Rank 6 with a single Rune is magnitudes weaker than one with two – and so on. I’d imagine that, despite all Father’s machinations, he probably only has a single Rune.”

“Then what about the other Linwicks?” Lee asked, her interest piqued. “Does that mean they just have way more Rank 6 mages than the Torrins?”

“They definitely have more,” Moxie said. “But I think a lot of them were like Dayton. Bad combinations and overly reliant on aid. A Rank 5 with perfect Runes is still far stronger than a Rank 6 with bad ones. That wouldn’t hold true between a Rank 3 and 4, though. The Gap is too significant. I suppose the same would go for a Rank 6 and 7.”

“I get that, but this seems like a bigger difference than just that,” Noah said slowly. “I mean, if the Linwicks have enough Rank 6 mages that Father isn’t even main branch, shouldn’t they be considerably more powerful than the Torrins? Even if their quality of mage is worse, just sheer numbers should have tipped the scales.”

Moxie was silent for several moments. She chewed on her lower lip, clearly debating on something internally before shaking her head and giving in. “At this point, with no Rune Oaths, I think I can say more. The Linwicks and the Torrins don’t work the same way. We don’t choose our family heads on strength.”

As soon as Moxie said it, Noah wanted to slap himself in the forehead. He’d gotten so used to power ruling above all that he’d completely disregarded basic logic. Just because someone was good at killing people didn’t make them a good political leader.The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You’re telling me that the Torrins have their strongest members as–”

“The soldiers. Our guards – generally, people whose names aren’t even known,” Moxie confirmed. “Evergreen was an exception. She was the face of the family, and a strong one at that. But the Torrins have no shortage of powerful warriors. The Linwicks just flaunt theirs around far more.”

Well, that certainly clears a lot of things up. It explains why they were so willing to let Evergreen’s death go. She wasn’t the sole protector of their family. She was just their rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth pitbull. Strong, dangerous, and replacable.

“Okay. I’m bored,” Lee said. “We got the book. Can we go kill things now? I want to find that Great Monster that was near Dawnforge. You promised we could hunt it.”

Noah burst into laughter. It didn’t matter what kind of big revelation they had when Lee was around – anything that wasn’t directly related to fun or food quickly lost her interest. It was pretty refreshing.

“I don’t think I’ve got any complaints there. We’ve got all the time up until school starts to test this artifact out.” Noah patted the top of his grimoire. “And now we’re actually free of responsibilities. No reason not to indulge, eh?”

“You just want to get yourself killed again,” Moxie said with a laugh. “Let’s go, then. Besides, it’s probably a good idea to get out of here before anyone from the Linwick family shows up to investigate what you did to their catacombs.”

Noah grimaced and nodded. He slung his grimoire over his shoulder and they all headed out of the guest house. Once they were far away enough from Whiterock, Lee transformed into a crow and took her customary place in Noah’s bag.

They all got onto his flying sword, and then they were off.

***

Wind howled past the Whiterock mountains. Snow sloughed from the sky in sheets as a storm kicked up, intensifying with startling speed. But, in all the chaos at the base of the mountains, there was a sphere of calm.

And, within that sphere, Jalen stood, arms crossed behind his back. His features were sharp, complete with a small, well-cared for goatee and angular eyebrows. He wore fine – but not overly extravagant – clothes of deep purple, hems trimmed with threads of gold. His hair stood perfectly still, and not a single speck of snow or dirt touched him.

The door wasn’t forced open, so the intruders must have been of Linwick descent.

Jalen waved a hand through the air in a casual, bored motion. A rumble passed through the mountain before him as fallen stone shuddered. The entrance to the Linwick Catacombs revealed itself as rubble rose, repairing and sliding back into place as if it had never been damaged.

Marble slabs rose from the darkness, forming into a pathway. Jalen stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind him as he headed into the darkness. The echo of his steps somehow managed to sound out, even through the cacophony surrounding him.

By the time he had made it to the catacomb proper, it was perfectly pristine. All had restored to how it had been just a few hours ago – even as far as the layer of dust that covered everything.

Jalen’s senses brushed across the halls as he strode deeper, briefly checking the status of the artifacts stored within them. It had been some time since the main defenses of the catacomb had gone off, but they had done their job.

There was only so much a mage could do against an entire mountain falling down on their head, after all. They really only had two options – stay and get crushed, or flee with their prize and hope they made it out before they were crushed. Destroying the entire catacomb made it much easier to deal with the incompetent intruders that didn’t deserve to make it out, and it wasn’t like any of the artifacts would get damaged by something as mundane as falling rock.

Quite the elegant solution, if I say so myself. The only problem is cleaning up the pasted idiots.

A few Linwick brats occasionally managed to make away with one of the lesser artifacts that they’d read about in a book, of course. Jalen shook his head as he walked. Nobody ever stopped to wonder why the Linwick family would leave records of their artifacts sitting around for any fool to find them.

A little mouse bit the cheese in the trap. All that remains to be seen is if the mouse that triggered this collapse is lucky, talented, or dead. I wonder if they had good taste in what they took.

Jalen snorted as his senses discovered the artifact that had gone missing. A moody book of Catchpaper with a dour personality and an intense hunger for power – hardly a worthwhile target.

They did manage to remove the book without triggering the alarm, though. I would have been more impressed if they’d been smart enough to leave things at that. Unsurprising. It was a lucky mouse, then. Those eventually get cocky enough to think themselves talented – and then they become dead mice.

Arriving at the final door at the end of the hall, Jalen stepped inside. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d wiped the crushed remains of a Linwick brat from the inside of his catacomb.

Number seven this year, was it? Or is this eight?

It was all the same. The latest generation of his family filled Jalen with a single emotion – disappointment. There was no hunger. There was no drive or determination to become powerful on their own. It was pathetic. A group of coddled children that believed they had earned what their parents had gifted to them.

And, as usual, the lucky mouse ignored the warning and tried to pry for secrets. They set off the book’s alarm once – I suppose they never let go of it, even as they died. Somewhat respectable, if stupid. I wonder which branch raised the latest fool.

Jalen stepped inside, looking to the dais that the Records of the Deceased sat on – and froze. The book was missing. There was no sign of anyone’s pulverized body anywhere in the room, and the rest of the catacombs were empty.

It couldn’t have been a high Rank mage. The catacombs told me they were Rank 4 at most, and they would have been marked if they weren’t a Linwick. The door wasn’t forced open, either. But… the alarm hasn’t gone off again.

Jalen stood there for several seconds. Then, slowly, a grin tugged at the corners of his lips and he started to laugh.

They ran out of the catacomb without letting go of the book. What, did they think this was a library?

“This might actually be interesting,” Jalen mused. He turned and strode out of the catacombs. There weren’t a lot of reasons to steal the Records of the Deceased. Despite what it claimed, the book wasn’t particularly valuable. Most of the other noble families already had a good understanding of everyone within the Linwick family, and the same went in the other direction.

The Records of the Deceased was, more than anything, an open challenge. It didn’t have the strength to kill a rodent, much less a mage. It was just a tracker and a test to see if someone was worth Jalen’s attention. Someone wanted him paying attention to them – and they’d succeeded in catching his eye.

Consider me intrigued, little mouse. How long can you keep that book close to chest? I look forward to meeting you the next time you slip up. Perhaps the latest generation of Linwicks has someone of interest after all.