The Most Hopeful of Dirges (II)

There might have been some yips and wet-nosed nudges pushed at him for a while, before they grew rarer and fainter. As well as some actual words. From an actual living person even, eventually, rather than one of the ghosts prowling the Candlekeep grounds. Or undergrounds in this case. However, he only registered them – not that he noticed he was registering them while they were happening – due to his perfect memory. And even then he paid them no mind. The book he was reading was just so interesting-

The tome was abruptly yanked out of his hands and his mind suddenly remembered that there was more to existence than sitting on the floor and reading from… a manual on better use and build-up of the physical body. Or what had been a manual on effective physical exercise but had at some point turned into a magically-exhorting text about anything and everything that could expand on whatever someone already was… or was supposed to be…

That train of thought seemed to be proceeding in rather vague directions.

"By the Nine Hells, boy!" A familiar voice echoed against the walls of Alaundo's tomb. Somehow. Despite there not being enough distance for echoes. "Here I am ruining what little goodwill I still have with Candlekeep's higher echelons by disappearing during my 'supervised leisure time while investigations are underway' and I find you like… like… what are you even doing!?"

"Eh?" Cyrus blinked owlishly up at the livid face of one Khelben Blackstaff Arunsun. "I'm sorry, what was the matter?" He hadn't quite caught that. He seemed to be feeling a bit light-headed.

"Oh Mystra give me strength," Khelben pled while pinching his nosebridge. Then he gave the tome he'd snatched an irritated look, which he switched back to the dwarf almost immediately. "Are you telling me that while I've been all but put on trial for your murder, the one I've supposedly murdered has merely been hiding out in the keep's catacombs reading some book!?" The way the man was waving that massive tome around heavily implied that the only reason he hadn't hurled it against the wall was knowing what Candlekeep's punishments for book misuse were. "You didn't even have the decency to set me up for murder intentionally!?"

That snapped some coherence to the boy's mind. "Why would I set someone up for murder?" He was genuinely confused. "Why would I frame someone for anything?"

"Oh, Mystra give me wisdom and patience," the Archmage sighed gustily.

"Wait, my murder?" Cyrus blinked slowly. He tried to get up but his body seemed rather stiff for some reason. "Am I dead?" Was that why he was feeling so stiff?

Arunsun's soul-shade seemed to stall as if he'd been about to say or yell something but stopped himself. "You actually mean that seriously, don't you?"

Cyrus wasn't sure what happened next, only that the next he knew his head was being held straight by one hand and the old wizard was on one knee in front of where he was resting his back against the foot of Alaundo's coffin. Had he blacked out? "Boy," the man enunciated slowly and clearly. "Do you have any idea how long you've been down here?"

His body felt loose and heavy even though his head seemed like it was about to drift off at any moment. "… No." Which had never happened before. And come to think of it, hunger and thirst had seldom risen in him for long either. Father had always been very careful and considerate like that. "I'm starving," he noted aloud with some surprise, looking vaguely at Khelben's face but not really at it. "And I'm close to dying of thirst…" What an odd way to go. He looked around for the wolf pup he belatedly remembered having tentatively adopted and found him in a bad way next to him as well, tired, starving and dehydrated enough to lack the initiative to even attempt to crawl over now that he was aware of his surroundings again. How strange, weren't dogs capable of lasting for weeks on no food or water? Had he gone sick at some point?

What an objectively poor showing for a caretaker, compared to Gorion's upbringing of him.

That old and tepid murk seemed to surface in Khelben Arunsun's self-shade and even stayed this time, intermittently fading and resurging as he studied the young dwarf in front of him. He conjured a flask of water and basically fed it to him, though Cyrus soon found he at least had strength enough to hold it up himself while the man briefly saw to his new animal companion, before returning his attention to him. The old man was surprisingly careful too, Cyrus noted. Khelben Arunsun actually forwent further interrogation and spent the next ten minutes slowly feeding him conjured food so he'd recover at least a little bit of energy. How odd, given that he was still in that crossroad between wanting and not wanting to end Cyrus for whatever reason.

The young dwarf didn't immediately realize he'd said that aloud.

But the sharp look Khelben Blackstaff gave him made it clear that he had. And he was also talking now. "Boy, why… what have you done to yourself?" He demanded, still supporting his head. "What have you been up to? How did you even get down here? How did you even find whatever passage got you here, let alone make it all the way to…!" Arunsun looked around in something like barely supressed incredulity and Cyrus Anwar realized the man had never been down there before. In Alaundo's final resting place that so many people had craved to see but never been allowed to even contemplate. "There are walls and traps and locked passages. There are undead and other guardians prowling these catacombs! I had to get creative when teleporting to you!"

Cyrus looked past Kheben Arunsun's face again at the spectral visage of one of many spirits that he had come across while exploring the many tunnels, halls and crypts beneath the library fortress. He knew from one of them that they generally preferred to go unseen and could even shield themselves from many types of magical detection thanks to the benefits conferred from their willing pact with the Keep and the benefits of an ever-maintained magical territory.

Naturally, Cyrus could see them anyway. As he could see all dead things. And death in general.

"The dead never did anything to me," the boy said simply. "They were rather helpful actually." Like they were even now, watching over him for whatever reason. They apparently felt uncertain whether Khelben was friend or foe. Cyrus frowned at the one that had been with him since shortly after he passed the worst of the traps. He supposed the man wasn't an enemy right now and the ghosts wouldn't be able to do anything to him anyway even if he were. The gap in might was too large and the certainties clear.

The ghost behind Khelben Arunsun stared at him silently, then nodded and faded back through the wall. Set to look, Cyrus expected, for whatever other spirits were in the area and tell them not to consider the Archmage a hostile element. For now.

But still be on their guard, because might or no, Chosen of Mystra or no, Khelben Arunsun definitely was an intruder in those catacombs.

The Archmage himself didn't notice the exchange, though he seemed to sigh anyway, and some tension simply bled out of him, then the man glared at Cyrus in exasperation. "No wonder Gorion is so defensive of you. You're hopeless on your own."

Cyrus rather objected to that assessment. He was fine until… until how long ago again? "The people topside have already noticed me missing?"

"Already?" The man echoed in disbelief. "Boy… you've been gone for four days!" Wait, really? "You just up and vanished one afternoon and was never seen again! I cannot begin to describe the trouble that has caused me so you had better have a good explanation or so help me-!" The Archmage forcefully stopped himself and, after a few minutes of fighting with his temper, slowly sighed again. "Boy. Tell me everything that happened since you vanished from the sight of your Watchers."

Well alright, it wasn't like he'd ever intended to keep it a secret. The only reason he even snuck out of the keep was so that he could experience that small bit of the outside before Khelben Arunsun decided on or against finishing him for whatever reason. He hadn't even had a plan for after he was out, which was why he spent most of that first afternoon sea-gazing and then didn't mind technically returning to Candlekeep when he decided to explore the wolf cave. He'd had to trace the death lines on the face of that disguised exit in order to open the path to the catacombs – it had been designed to only open from the inside – but after that it had been fairly straightforward. The traps and wards were so effective that stepping on or through them or even approaching the magics was almost guaranteed to end him. But that made it trivial to know and avoid the trick steps and stones. As for the wards that couldn't be bypassed, well, he knew better than tearing or killing the Weave now but that still left one option. All he'd had to do was impose on the parts of the Weave coming into contact with him the same still death he'd imposed on Imoen and he could pass through them without any problem, after which magic returned to its natural state. He supposed it was a consequence of how the moment of death could result in both death and recovery, and the natural state of the wards was just that: natural.

Figuratively speaking.

The ghosts were even easier to handle since they seemed hesitant to actually engage him in any way. It only took laying eyes on one or two of them to realize why he'd never personally seen any evidence of the legends and traditions that Candlekeep's avowed and acolytes held to, stories of spirits wandering the grounds and occasionally speaking through one of the living. They'd all avoided him and his line of sight for his whole life, fearful of being forced to pass on in defiance of their decision to stay and guard Candlekeep in their own way. He politely told them that he was fairly certain he lacked the power for that, the skill, the knowledge or all three, so they shouldn't think they need to avoid their usual haunts because of him. That had confused the floating spirits, and because he hadn't actually tripped any wards that would have compelled them to embody the many skeletons and other armed corpses filling those halls and tunnels, they decided not to bother doing it of their own initiative. Whatever else Cyrus was or could do, he was of Candlekeep and also literally under the active protection of the Watchers, the body recognized as the chief security force of the fortress with authority over the living and dead alike. He'd been allowed to wander as he willed and even converse with whichever spirit he wished as long as he didn't try anything on them that they didn't want.

And as long as he didn't steal anything.

Which he didn't. Really. He'd had no way to know that tome he'd found on the plinth next to the coffin in the other mausoleum would vanish as soon as he finished reading it. And he hadn't even picked it up, so it couldn't have been theft. By the time he managed to understand why he was being forced to read normally (albeit still very quickly) instead of taking whole pages at a glance as he normally did, he was already near the end. Then the tome vanished, leaving him with a somewhat better understanding of things in general and the nature of that manual in particular (A Tome of Understanding, if he had his lore right) but also a vanished relic and a very displeased spirit glaring at him.

The ghost – an avowed of times long past – refused to let him anywhere unsupervised afterwards, though it did grudgingly allow him to try and appease him by trying to figure out how to prevent books like that from vanishing next time. The tome he found on the open-air but heavily (to him ineffectually) warded reliquary in Alaundo's tomb became his test subject for that. Cyrus suspected the ghosts kept letting him do what he wanted because of how he was apparently permitted to do anything by the wards throughout that whole level of the Candlekeep Underground.

Taking things slowly this time, he'd looked as deeply as he could at the item he was reading until he noticed the enchantment weaved into it. When he realized that the act of reading was literally pouring the magical words into his mind and leaving the words behind empty and unstable, Cyrus realized it was an issue of charge power. The tome was basically a magical item with a single charge. So all he had to do was prevent the charge from depleting, which should be easy enough to do by replacing the drained energy as it went. The Weave didn't seem to want to cooperate no matter how he tried to connect external threads to the item, so eventually he decided to just pour whatever-he-was into the book instead, which seemed to work.

It worked really well actually. Better than he expected. The book didn't vanish when he finished it but the full effects did take hold, making his muscles feel tingly as if they were changing or had been changing for the whole time he'd been reading it. The hovering spirit had seemed beyond surprised as well, and rushed off through the nearest wall, presumably to let others of its ilk know. Upon returning to the beginning to check the magical charge of the words, Cyrus found them changed so he read the tome again, then a third time. Then the content seemed to shift away from physical might and health to general lore, then logic and mnemonics (the latter sadly irrelevant to him), then various koans and sayings with multiple layers of meanings and parables, then back to physical prowess and how it may be achieved through ways other than mere exercise since there was a point beyond which mere workout did not produce any further returns. After that point text started to combine various accounts, hypotheses and lessons on all sorts of things because there was a certain level both physical, intellectual and emotion self-mastery before anyone could hope to have even a slight chance of comprehending the Metatext-

"WHAT?!" Khelben Blackstaff Arunsun burst. He'd even gasped before he regained control of himself. Then he cut off Cyrus's impending response with a cutting wave of the hand and held the Manual of Gainful Exercise (that No Longer Was) away from him, slowly laid it on the floor and withdrew his hands as if they were burned. That done, he took a small ruby set in a small golden loop out of his spell component pouch and cast a spell on himself… Cyrus couldn't comprehend its goal and he didn't feel up for trying to self-rationalize death into it to try and gain insight, but the way the man proceeded to stare at the book after the casting indicated some method of discerning the effects and abilities of enchantments.

Some minutes later, by which point Cyrus felt as if he could try to stand without passing out again, the older man reached up to rub at his temples. "What is with you boy?" He glared at the dwarf then. "You are out of sight for mere moments and the next time someone finds you days have passed and you've somehow created an Artefact of Doom!"

The Archmage regretted what he said almost immediately, for knowing the item's status as death-dealing object essentially allowed Cyrus to comprehend its nature as soon as he next laid eyes on it, which was at precisely that moment.

Huh. By pushing his inner whatever-he-was into the tome he'd turned a Manual of Gainful Exercise into a tome of ever-changing content cursed to ensorcel the reader into thinking of doing nothing but reading it while it leeched the life from readers even as the magic worked its wonders on their mind and body. It was just the latest failure in a series of attempts to productively channel his inner whatever-it-was for the sake of feeling some sort of peace. Just the latest, stunning failure.

It was a minor consolation that it hadn't gotten around to actually draining Cyrus' own life. His weakness and fainting spell had been entirely owed to hunger and thirst accumulated over the course of days. A fair bit of Cyrus' whatever-he-was had been drained instead, making that the third time in his life when he experienced any sort of peace or even the ability to feel emotions on his own instead of reflecting off someone else. Faint feelings but his all the same. He could feel it slowly replenishing, the bleak/dark/nothing, but as he stared at his palms and saw the flickers of aura, the faint glimpses of colour here and there even as they were being slowly drowned out again, he felt for the first time like there might be a reason to hope that he wasn't entirely dead within.

Khelben Arunsun huffed and carefully used a conjured silk cloth to wrap the Cursed Tome of Everything before storing it in his pocket of holding. Then he stood and, after giving Cyrus one long, hard stare, finally spoke again with his usual, sternly cold mien. "Alright. Since I have already used up whatever goodwill I still had with the Candlekeep overseeing echelons by essentially escaping arrest, however unofficial, I am loathe to make things worse by teleporting back with or without you. So you're going to lead me back the way you used to get in here and then we'll use the normal way to return to the keep."

Cyrus nodded, picked up his still baby wolf and, when motioned to go ahead, led the way as ordered, indicating trap triggers where needed and leaving it to the man himself to deal with magical wards unless told otherwise. It soon became clear that the Archmage did not even need to bother with the magics since they appeared to slide over him harmlessly. A function of his status as Chosen of Mystra no doubt, the same as the wards on the Inner Rooms where the most precious texts were stored.

They traversed a series of tunnels, then a massive column-dotted hall as large as the inner Candlekeep courtyard, then another tunnel before they were near the exit. It was at that point that Khelben Blackstaff interrupted the boy's near-constant commentary on the various mechanical deathtraps they'd had to carefully skirt around that far. Ah, the man had seen the two phase spiders. Or their corpses anyhow. "Those aren't part of any defences I know or would ever have used."

Cyrus returned the man's contemplative gaze with a level one of his own. "They weren't. They tried to snatch me." And take him back to the Ethereal Plane to prepare and eat him. "I threw myself right on top of a pressure plate just as the first one phased in to sting me. It died to a hail of arrows from the corner alcoves." He indicated the appropriate spots. "The other phased in just after that so I stabbed it in the head." Khelben gave him a look of pure incredulity. "The ghosts helped. They make for excellent distractions on short notice."

The wizard sighed – he seemed to be doing that a lot lately, like Gorion – and muttered something that sounded a lot like "Too precocious by far" but didn't say anything more until they were back in the wolf cave. Once there, he made him wait until he cast a Greater Spell to Make Whole on the hidden door to remove all signs of Cyrus' and his passage. Cyrus nodded at his ghostly guide in farewell just as the final stone crumbs and chips lifted and fused back into place.

Then there was just him and the Archmage who wanted him dead inside a cave that was most definitely not part of Candlekeep or subject to its various rules and wards. An Archmage that was looking down at him, showing nothing openly but being a total chaos of murky hues and shadows inside. But for all that the man was clearly at war with himself somehow, the chances of him deciding on actually killing him were the lowest they'd ever gone since Cyrus had killed his table.

How strange.

He told him so.

To which the man reacted by allowing his shoulders to slightly sag and his eyes to soften from frigid condemnation to frustrated suspicion. "How on Toril can diviners not be screaming incoherently all around the world because of you? How did all seers miss you?"

The dwarf blinked up at the wizard. "That's an odd thing to say. Alaundo seemed to have predicted me just fine."

Khelben Blackstaff had been about to make for the exit but went rigid and turned back to face the boy with a look that was beyond piercing. "What did you just say?"