Page 15 of Bright Blinding Ruin

Fred emerges from the back of the hut carrying a small metal shovel, and he marches right past us to go outside.

What the…

I follow him, and Frederick is right behind me, though he tucks the old journal between his trousers’ waistband and his tucked-in shirt before coming along. Fred leads us around the hut, to its back side, where he then closes a single eye and lifts up his shovel-free hand to do some measuring in the air.

Okay, I thought the man wasn’t so out of his mind today, but it looks like he’s still off his rocker.

“Uh,” I start, glancing at Frederick, “what’s he doing?”

Frederick shakes his head the same moment his dad lowers his measuring tool—cough, cough, his hand—and breaks ground with the shovel. “I have no idea. Maybe he buried something here before he left? If he did, I don’t remember what it was or why he’d need it now.” He runs a hand through his hair, perplexed.

I feel that. I’m pretty much hopeless at this point. It’s silly to place any hope on a man who was kept alive by magic and imprisoned for years. Empress Morimento wanted me to go to the undercrofts in all of the castles? Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

And, say, if I am miraculously able to travel to each of the castles on foot, with no magic to speed up the process, and I can find the undercrofts… what good will it do? Do the castles hold some kind of secret that nobody except the empresses were in the know about?

Oh, yeah, and who can forget about the golden bastard who wants to kill me? I doubt he’ll let me roam the countryside in search of a way to kill him when he can squash me like a bug at any time.

“It’s here,” Fred says, digging deeper with a shovel that has clearly seen better days. The rust on the metal has pretty muchturned the entire thing an ugly brown. “I know it’s here.” He digs about twelve inches down before the shovel hits something hard, and when that thud reverberates through the air, Frederick and I glance at each other before moving to help him retrieve whatever it is.

It takes all three of us, but we manage to lift the heavy object out of the hole and onto the undisturbed grass. A metal box, a foot wide and half that deep, no lock that I can see.

“Thank the empresses,” Fred exclaims as he throws open the lid. “It’s still here.” The lid swings open to reveal…mud? No wonder the damn thing was so heavy; it’s full of dirt that’s been so waterlogged it’s basically turned to clay.

Frederick speaks carefully, “Is there supposed to be something inside it?”

Fred spares only a glance to his son, his brows creased. “What are you talking about? There is something inside it. Don’t you see?” He gestures to the thick, wet dirt inside the small chest.

“I see a lot of dirt,” Frederick says. “I don’t see anything else.”

The way Fred sighs tells me he’s had it up to here with his son, even though, you know, his son is one hundred percent right in this case. “I thought I taught you before I left that sometimes what’s on the surface is not as important as what’s underneath.” He cracks his neck and then his knuckles like he’s about to do something incredibly strenuous, and then, without another word, he starts to dig through the chest.

He digs and digs, his fingers searching for something in the chest, and then—big shocker—he digs some more. The seconds turn into a minute, then two. It’s enough time for me to stand back and think:Man, Laconia’s doomed.

“Ah-ha!” Fred suddenly exclaims as he pulls his mud-covered hands out of the box. He’s holding onto something, all right,something small… on a chain? It’s hard to tell what it is, thanks to the dirt.

Without sparing Frederick or I a glance, he abandons the chest and leaves us to rinse off the object in the nearby pond. By the time Frederick and I catch up to him, he’s lifting his hands out of the water and chuckling like he just discovered a long-lost treasure chest and all the loot inside is his.

“I knew it’d still be here. I knew it.” Fred kisses the object. With his back to us, it’s still impossible to tell what it is.

“What is it?” Frederick voices the question we’re both wondering.

Turning around, Fred holds up the small item. Now clean of dirt and mud, I can see it’s a necklace with a single vial-shaped pendant. The chain is thick silver, and the pendant is about half the size of my pinky finger, made of glass. I notice it has liquid inside it.

Even after all this time… that’s something, although I don’t know what it is.

“Come,” Fred says. “Let’s talk somewhere it won’t hear us.” As he says that, he glances all around, as if he’s anxious Invictis will pop up out of nowhere, a concern I feel in my heart, too.

Through the city we walk until we’re back in the upper district. Our destination is the library beneath the conclave, and Fred kicks everyone out. No one wants to go; but he’s got a look in his eyes that tells everyone he won’t take no for an answer.

Only when we’re alone in the dimly lit library does Fred move to the bookcase on the furthest wall. “This one. Help me move it.”

He’s a man on a mission, and Frederick and I are just along for the ride. It’s full of books, so it’s heavy as fuck, but the three of us together manage to scoot it aside. The wooden legs of the bookcase drag along the stone floor, an ugly sound, but it’s made easier to swallow thanks to the progress we make by moving it.

The bookcase is almost as tall as the ceiling; some of the old books on it fall off it as we move it. Inch by inch, we struggle until Fred tells us, “That’s enough.” Both Frederick and I move around the bookcase to see what it was blocking, and I don’t think either of us expects what we see.

It should be nothing more than the wall, the end of the library’s rows and rows of books, but it’s not. It’s more.

Chiseled into the wall, hidden perfectly behind the bookcase we just moved, is a door.

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