Roots

After that, another few months passed. At first, I had no clue where to start, but thankfully, Louise had some connections, and through these connections came rumors. We started to search suspicious looking locations from those rumors for any hints of the sort, but that yielded no results, naturally.

As the years went by, The New Masked Order kept strengthening itself, we recruited more people to our cause, and trained them even more. Eventually, I even ended up recruiting several more members into roots.

One day, while Louise and I were exploring some abandoned ruins that she had heard were connected to some strange events, we just happened to stumble upon a creature that resembled Henry’s wolf-like form, but he was long dead, and that creature was simply a shadowspawn created by the world’s imbalance.

I told Louise to handle it in order to test her, and that I’d jump in if she was in critical danger, but she ended up not needing my help after all, easily dismantling the creature while taking minimal damage.

I gave her a thumbs up and we went back to exploring these ruins. There was a huge stone that was suspiciously placed in the middle of the ruins, so I pushed it aside, assuming it was hiding a secret passage, but there was nothing. I double checked by attempting to dispel any cloaking spells, but there were none, and there was nothing to be veiled.

“What now?” Louise asked. “There’s nothing here.”

“Wait, there’s something off about that stone.” I muttered while lost in thought.

“But didn’t you just push it aside and see that there wasn’t anything under it?”

“That’s not it.”

I walked over and placed my hand on the stone, and slid it all over until I felt a hollow area and pressed it in. As soon as I did that, the floor opened up to reveal a staircase that lead underground.

“I knew it!” I said.

I walked down the stairway, with Louise right behind me. Unlike the stairway at the meeting place which was pretty cramped, this one was huge, and would probably fit ten people walking down side by side.

I slowly walked into the darkness, being cautious of a trap, but not sensing anything. Eventually we reached a small cavern lit up by glowing crystals surrounded by speleothems. At the very edge of the cavern, was a small pool of water, and in the center resided a cabin.

“This looks ominous.” Louise commented.

“Don’t worry.” I said, while beginning to approach the cabin.

I knocked on the door, but no answer came, so I tried to open it, but it was locked.

“Move back.” I told Louise, as I then proceeded to kick the entire door down.

“That was pretty unnecessary.” She said as we entered the cabin. “You could have just used a spell or something.”

I was too busy looking at the huge amount of books that laid before us to come up with a witty remark.

Shelves upon shelves of books in this tiny room, taking up so much space that there was almost nowhere to walk.

“What the hell is all this?” Louise asked.

I picked up a random book, the cover was completely blank so I had no clue what it was about. I briefly skimmed it’s contents, scanning for something interesting.

“This….This is a book about magic!” I exclaimed, handing the book over to Louise. “Look! Detailed explanations of spells, how to cast them, and the dangers that come with them! It’s incredible!”

As Louise flipped through the book I’d just handed to her, I walked across the room over to another shelf and picked a random book, once again flipping through it to find anything interesting.

“This is….a history of magic! Every well known and documented event! They even describe all sorts of magical creatures, including the shadowspawn that we’ve been facing!”

“This is amazing.” Louise agreed. “What’s all this been doing here?”

“I don’t know.” I put the book back and started looking for another one. “Surely there has to be a book about rituals amongst them, right? We have to find it!”

“But all of these books have the same cover, we won’t know which one it is until we start looking through it’s contents! Are we really going to have to search through all of these? There’s probably hundreds, if not thousands!”

“What other choice do we have?” I said, while flipping through another book, which inevitably wasn’t the one I was looking for. “Wait, hold on, we need to distinguish the books we’ve checked out, or else we run the risk of checking the same one twice.”

“Yeah, how do we do that?” She asked.

“It’s simple.” I threw the book I was holding out of the nearest window. “Throw em out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. Also, this is probably gonna take a really long time, so we should probably call some others for backup.”

“Right, it’ll be quicker that way. Which one of us is going back?”

“You do. I’ll stay here and start checking them out.”

Louise nodded and headed out while I looked through every book individually, looking for clues to the ritual. After some time, she returned with a few other root members, including her brother, Christopher.

I lost track of time, but perhaps hours had passed, until I finally came across something.

“This is it!” I yelled, drawing their attention. “A book describing various rituals! Surely the symbol we’re looking for has to be in here!”

They immediately dropped everything and rushed to my side to take a look.

I flipped through the pages and eventually made it to the end of the book.

“Shit! It’s not here!”

“Wait, hold on.” Louise took the book from me. “I think, earlier, I saw…”

She flipped back to around the middle of the book and pointed something out to me.

“Look, it’s torn page! That had to have been it, right?”

“Damn it…Looks like it wasn’t that easy after all, huh?”

“What do we do now?” Louise asked.

“Wait, hold up.” One of the others said. “I think I saw a torn page in a book earlier.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” Christopher scolded him.

We went outside and started looking through the books we’d thrown out, until we finally found it.

“So, we finally have it, huh…” I said while holding the torn page that depicted a familiar looking symbol and a couple of paragraphs under it. “We have the ritual, at last.”