Ch277-Deep Mystery

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 11 (277) – Deep Mystery

There weren’t a lot of creatures around for Sylver to absorb health from to heal himself up on the mountain.

He got some foxes, a pair of hares, and Aleri almost managed to bring down a fur covered flying thing, but it whipped Aleri with its tail and by the time Sylver brought the flying shade back, the creature was gone.

He used the wriggling thread Mora provided to sow his torso closed, he didn’t have anywhere near enough flesh or bones to actually fix the damage, but at the very least nothing was going to fall out of him if he stood up too fast.

Without the muscles and bones the entire front of his torso was soft, like a folded up blanket, or a seat cushion, and the “skin” Mora managed to help him make was so thin that there was a serious concern about getting caught on a branch and tearing the entire thing off as if it were a shirt.

Klara fell asleep shortly after Mora stopped messing around on the ice, and went back to very smoothly sliding along her threads.

Sylver hadn’t sensed any damage inside Klara, at least to her soul. As for the physical damage, broken ribs, cracks on her arms and shoulder blade, various effects of long term starvation, oddly enough she seemed sufficiently hydrated, but as far as he could tell there was nothing that a mediocre healer couldn’t fix in a few months, or in a few hours if Edmund had a crack at it .

The mining town of Velrod would very likely have at least a pair of healers, as for paying them for their services… Sylver had taken inventory of what he had left in his [Bound Bones] and to no-one’s surprise, one of the bones that had been sliced open contained all of his local and foreign currency.

He had brought more than enough spending money with him from the “allowance” Lola/Chrys had provided him and the rabbits, but he had kept all of it in a single bone deep within his chest, barely an inch away from his needle. His reasoning was that if something managed to hit him that deeply he’d have much bigger problems than not having any money.

He wasn’t going to sell his daggers, he’d spent too much time and effort saturating them with mana, he had a couple of diamonds he wasn’t going to cry about selling off, and if it came down to it, the pirate shades had quite a few decent weapons and pieces of armour that wouldn’t be difficult to replace later on.

As far as Lostal was concerned…

Realistically, there wasn’t any reason not to let him write his report and send it to someone.

Sylver had been counting on Novva to clean up Lostal’s official report before he sent it off to anyone else, but given what he saw inside the hollow-vault having someone actually deal with it before it managed to spiral into something unmanageable was worth whatever consequences might come with Sylver being mentioned by name in a report that may or may not end up on the desk of the High King.

He mostly didn’t like the idea of people digging into him, into the people around, especially while Chrys was doing what she was doing, and it goes without saying he didn’t want anybody to know about Tuli, the dark elves, let alone what he had done in Tuli.

But now that Edmund was here, the potential consequences for Sylver and everyone around him were significantly fewer, but it would still be an unimaginable shitshow if Edmund had to ever seriously throw his weight around enough to deter the people Sylver was concerned about.

He wasn’t ready to go to war with a real army, country, kingdom, he almost lost to mishmashes of mere human beings melded into a single “creature” in a piece of Babel affected hollow-vault.

The smart thing to do would be to have Lostal write his report, make certain Sylver’s presence wasn’t mentioned, and then make Lostal disappear so nobody could ever read his mind or ask him for any details.

Then again, the man was so deeply loyal to his people that he was seriously thinking of murdering “children” to keep his country safe. If Novva told him directly never to speak about what he saw Sylver do in the hollow-vault, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Lostal would take the secret to his grave.

Instead of mulling the various possibilities over in his head, Sylver had Ulvic run close to Mora, and asked the man directly. He put a spell around Klara’s head so she didn’t wake up from them talking.

The crystal in his throat he used to speak had been nicked, so Sylver used [Mirage] to create his voice.

“I need you not to mention Nels or myself in your reports. Can you do that?” Sylver asked.

Lostal didn’t answer straight away, he looked at Sylver, looked at the back of Mora’s head, and looked up towards the sky for a bit before he turned back towards Sylver.

“I don’t have the authority to make that decision,” Lostal said honestly.

Part of the blame was on Sylver for freely handing out his name, but since a piece of Babel was involved, the right thing to do was to get the information to someone with enough firepower to deal with it as soon as possible.

He wanted to say a few days wouldn’t make a difference, but he knew from multiple first and secondhand experiences that in cases like these a few hours could mean the difference between sending a couple of adventurers, and having to march an army.

“I respect your honesty. Can you leave Nels’ and my names blank in that case? Or come up with different names?” Sylver asked.

“I can do that. But if it’s as a big of a deal as it appears to me, they’ll want to talk to you…” Lostal said.

“What if I write down everything they would need to know? How safely to enter and exit it, how to prevent people from getting infected by the curse? ” Sylver asked.

“I don’t know. This entire thing is several rungs above my head. I don’t have the authority to make any sort of decision on it,” Lostal explained.

“I respect your honesty,” Sylver repeated, and had Ulvic create some distance between them.

Nels turned her head around in the makeshift holder Sylver had made out of [Black Mass] lined with warm red mushrooms.

“What will happen if he tells his commander about you?” Nels asked.

She didn’t bother speaking in a foreign language since Lostal had a perk that likely would be able to translate it, and instead she just covered Sylver and herself in a sound isolating spell.

It wasn’t the time or place, but her neat and straight lined sphere made the “bubble” Sylver had covered Klara’s head in look like a scribble on a napkin compared to high quality calligraphy on gold lined parchment. Just looking at it was honestly the second best thing he’d seen today.

“Probably nothing. Between the Cats and Lola’s connections it’s unlikely it will ever reach anyone who might cause problems,” Sylver explained. The keyword in what he said was “probably.”

“You have cats and an elf working for you?” Nels asked.

“Cats with a capital C. They only look like cats, it’s a long story. And a high-elf. Lola Aeyri is a high-elf, at least physically. I found her soul on an island with a curse, and I made her a new body but I couldn’t make her a proper high-elf core,” Sylver explained.

He caught a reaction in Nels’ eyes when he said Lola’s full name, and while that in itself wasn’t concerning, the fact that she tried to hide her reaction in the first place, was.

“Layla’s daughter,” Nels half said, half asked.

“Layla’s daughter,” Sylver confirmed.

“White hair, big eyes… Always tries to sit down on something?” Nels asked.

The last part sounded right even if Sylver never really noticed it, but now that Nels had said it, Lola did always try to find somewhere to sit down whenever they spoke.

“Ed said that he remembers that she died when she was born. And that Layla had made a burial gierth for her. White sand, with a piece of dried bark,” Sylver explained.

He saw the same reaction in Nels’ eyes, and saw her try to hide it again.

“Don’t do that,” Sylver said, and maybe warned, but he wasn’t sure if that was what he meant.

What Nels did to her body to survive was her business, but if she knew something that involved Lola, which by extension, involved him, then she knew better than most not to keep it from him.

But even with that in mind, Nels waited far too long before she spoke.

“You have to trust me on this. If it’s what I think it is, then I cannot be wrong about it. I need to speak to Edmund before I can talk about it to either of you with any degree of certainty,” Nels said.

Sylver just looked at her, and a piece of him wanted to pick her up and physically shake answers out of her. Obviously he didn’t do that, and wouldn’t do that. He just stared at her, and tried to see if the silence would be enough to pressure her.

It wasn’t, she knew him too well to believe there could be anything more than the staring.

“Anyway,” Sylver said, “I found Tuli. Her shell is damaged, but Ed and I have a plan to kickstart the healing process. Might be a good time to mention the Sun Demon is said to make a gigantic hole in Eira in the next real summer solstice. Ed also killed the Moon Demon that was being summoned inside Tuli. What else…” Sylver said.

He knew what he was doing, Nels knew what he was doing, and as shocked as she was, it wasn’t enough to jostle the information out of her. In fact, she didn’t even look all that shocked, just tired, in a way that was more than mere physical tiredness.

“If you know about the Sun Demon, that means Sonso is still around…” Nels said.

His face shouldn’t have shown anything, but Nels must have seen the reaction in his mana, but regardless of how she saw it, she saw it.

“I don’t know if he’s around, but his book almost made me not get Ed,” Sylver said.

As he said that, for some reason it clicked in his head that Edmund was in a mountain, and Nels had also been in a mountain.

There were a limited number of mountains in Eira, it would take years to check all of them, but it wouldn’t take a lifetime.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Nels sighed.

“About the clairvoyant with the two siblings, when did you last see him?” Nels asked.

It felt like being splashed in the face with cold water and having snow fall down the back of his robe.

“All three of mine were women. And the last time I saw all three was a few months ago. I got sent to a different realm, and two of them remained in that realm, the third one came back here with me, and left a few weeks ago,” Sylver said.

Nels closed her eyes and shook her head.

“Did they look like the son-or I mean daughter, mother, and grandmother of each other? Near identical apart from the age?” Nels asked.

“Yes,” Sylver said.

Three long creases formed on her forehead as she scowled for a few moments, but they faded away as her face returned to its usual neutral position.

“Did you find them, or did they find you?” Nels asked.

“One of them was waiting for me in the city. I ended up “waking up in” so to speak. She said she knew I’d be there, but didn’t know when. I came back to the village on the day I knew she’d be there, and that was the first time we met in person… But I met her sister before that but I didn’t know she was her sister. The sister had hired this dipshit dimensional mage to kidnap the pregnant wife of the original owner of the body I ended up taking,” Sylver explained.

The thing about her non-reaction he didn’t like more than anything was that he didn’t get the sense what he was saying was new information for her.