She cleared her throat, hacking up more husk into it, and she even took a step forward though she shook. “The Sanatorium of Ebony Malicious, uh, wait—the Mal Sanctum, er…Ebon—”
“The Ebon Sanctum Mallor?”
“That’s it!” Amma pointed at him, voice lilting up high as she grinned. “Ugh, everything around here sounds like that, all ominous and creepy, I don’t know how you keep the names straight.” She swallowed back the nervous giggle that bubbled up out of her, crossing her arms tight over her chest.
The man turned back to her fully, tipping his head to one side. Amma’s heart sped up, but she held her ground as he began to close the distance between them with a few long strides. Closer now, she could see the color of his eyes even in the gloam, a striking violet, stark against the shadows in the alley and blackness of his hair, messy and pushed back on one side though it still fell in his face. “What doyou,”—and thatyouwas not complimentary—“want with the Sanctum?”
She squeezed her hands into fists. “That is, uh, none of your business, buddy.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Buddy?”
Amma’s stomach dropped to the bottom of her borrowed-without-asking boots. Still, she didn’t move. “You heard me,” she managed to eke out, then added, “jerk,” for good measure, though she immediately regretted it.
To both her relief and horror, he only smirked, eyes flitting down the length of her. As he raised a hand to a clean-shaven jaw in thought, she saw a slice of red across his palm.
“Oh, no, you’re bleeding.” Amma’s concern overrode her faux bravado, dropping the stance, the voice, the everything when faced with someone else’s problem.
He pulled his hand away from his chin, cocking a brow at the cut. “So, I am.” When he flipped his hand to flex his fingers, she could see the mark better, and it was deep.
“That looks painful.” She dug into her hip pouch and found the handkerchief she had used to tie up dried fruit when she first set out three weeks prior. “Let me help.”
He curled his lip, surveying his palm once more. “It will heal shortly.”
Amma shook her head, scrunching up her nose, and stepped right up to him to wrap the handkerchief over the slice, tying a simple knot at the back of his hand.
His eyes widened at the sudden appearance of the cloth—Amma had always been nimble-fingered and too quick for others to track, let alone stop when she was determined to do something she thought was for someone else’s good. She grinned up at him, recognizing the surprise and taking it as a compliment.
So close, she could see a long scar drawn over his face in raised, silver skin, running down his forehead, over the bridge of a long and pointed nose, just missing his violet eye, and ending mid cheek. There was no bandaging that, it was old and permanent, but it did very little to mar his looks which, now that Amma was really looking, made her own face suddenly go very warm. She made herself take a hefty step back and pulled up her cowl.
“Now.” She lowered her voice again, and his eyes snapped up to hers as if she had some command over him. “I did a favor for you, so repay me. Where is the…sanctum of dark, evil stuff?”
A frigid breeze blew down the alley, picking up his cloak and hair. It swept over Amma, catching her hood and pushing it back. Not quick enough, she fumbled to conceal the messy nest her wheat-colored hair had become, mumbling a minced oath.
The man finally dropped his arm, balling his newly wrapped hand into a fist. “Iwilldo you a favor.”
Amma almost fled at the darkness in his voice, visceral and cutting right to the center of her, but then he went on and gave her very exact directions, complete with landmarks, and much better than those inside any of the Grand Athenaeum’s books. When he was finished, she thanked him sincerely, and with one last, long stare, he whipped around and was gone.
She hummed to herself as she turned for the route he had told her, “I guess he was kind after all.”
Except, the man Amma had met wasnotkind, and after following his directions through Aszath Koth and ending up right back at the city’s entry gates, no Sanctum in sight, Amma very much wanted to tell him just how not-kind she thought he was. Under normal circumstances, she never would. In fact, in all of Amma’s twenty-five years she had almost never told anyone they were “not kind” or any other variation thereupon. But this journey had been grueling, and even Amma’s patience could be taxed to the point she might say something nasty.
But then her mother’s words flitted through her head, as they often did when she felt anger well up in her heart.Blame not one’s failings on cruelty when ignorance is the much more likely cause, or, more simply, most of the time people weren’t mean, they were just dumb. Amma would have settled, then, on telling him she thought he was very,verydumb.
However, as fate and plot would have it, Amma found an elderly woman selling prickly berries on a street corner who looked human enough, though the point to her ears suggested an elven bloodline, and an offer of gold bought her better directions. By the time Amma found the Sanctum, it was late evening, she had finished off the fruit, and despite cutting the inside of her mouth twice and wasting the entire day on the wrong, meandering route, her mood had righted itself. A brighter mood was, after all, a much easier way to exist in the world, whether it was kind back to one or not.
The Ebon Sanctum Mallor was exactly as its name advised, made up of slick, black stones and altogether terrifying. Set away from the city, one had to pass through many twisting, narrow alleys to be let out at its northwestern corner, traverse a desolate and craggy moor, and follow a winding, disused footpath that crossed through once-palatial ruins. There, the Sanctum stood tall and narrow, nestled into a small orchard of gnarled kalsephrus trees that had died long ago but somehow continued to grow. Necrotic energy did that sometimes, and while Amma was not magically inclined herself, she had read quite a lot about arcana in preparation for her trip. No amount of reading could have prepared her, though, to feel it humming through the very air as she approached.
She reached out for one of the trees. Kalsephrus were rare enough that she’d only ever read about them, but that’s what these had to be. Even undead, they had the mottled, flaky bark and twisty branches from the illustrations in her horticultural texts. But as her hand touched the trunk, it pulsed back at her, and her mind was suddenly clouded with a vision of the same tree blooming with sapphire leaves that glittered like glass under the sun centuries earlier.
Amma gasped, pulling back. The books would need to be updated: apparently undead kalsepherus could use latent arcana to send messages. It was by no means the only tree that did so, but she was surprised to meet a second species in her lifetime that could.
She shook her head, pat her dagger, and tightened the strap of her hip pouch. Amma had made it this far, and it had been no easy feat. What she sought was only a little farther inside, but everything she had read about the dark and cruel temple jumbled together in her mind. The place was cursed and built on the remains of a wronged people whose stories were lost to time. That made it perfect for housing evil artifacts, but it also made it perfect for killing those who would take them. But Amma only wanted one, an ancient scroll, and despite her query’s inherent evil, her intentions were good, and that had to count for something.
As the perpetual twilight of the city and its surrounding lands shifted ever so slightly to dimmer twilight, she stepped up to the black void of the Sanctum’s entry. It required an offering, and though the text in the Grand Athenaeum was vague, she felt she knew what it might want.
Grabbing the hilt of her dagger, she looked for the sigil that would allow entry, finding it easily as blood was already smeared across it. It didn’t drip, but in the last of the evening’s light, it gave off a faint shimmer. She shifted her eyes over to the void and carefully stuck her hand through. Swallowed up into darkness, it felt neither hot nor cold, and when she pulled it back, it remained unblemished. So, the door was already opened then—lucky—and Amma stepped through.
The Ebon Sanctum Mallor was quite dissimilar to how it was described on the inside. Sure, the walls dripped a green ooze, the origin of which was undefinable, and disembodied wails swept down corridors that split off and moved around on their own, and there was even a moment when Amma thought she had been run through by a sword that turned out to just be an illusion meant to send her screaming back the way she’d come, but there were absolutely no traps.
