"...Wait, I know this place."

"This is Dr Cyte's hut," trilled Wyatt. He was already half a leg through the window before the other two had even approached the door. "I bet the door's locked. Don't worry, guys. I think I can get inside and open the door from-"

Crack!

The sound of wood splintering and rusted hinges giving way cut Wyatt off. Neither of the two said anything, making eye contact through what was now an empty, jagged door frame.

Nobody wanted to verbally address the swift dip in Nova's demeanour, so they didn't. Her usual, warm, smiling radiance gave way to a nauseating, tense presence aura that clung to her like a smell that wouldn't fade, and Volta and Wyatt could only hold their metaphorical breath.

Her eyes were wide open. The eyes on her face even more so. She looked around like she was expecting a dead body or horrifying experiments at every corner.

Knowing Phago, she was probably right. Dust and soot and chalk and bones... she carefully sifted through them all. At some point, Volta could have sworn the eyes on her back glow a little redder than their usual soft pink, but they dimmed back down as she visibly relaxed while mumbling something along the lines of "It's not them."

Volta, too unnerved to ask what she just did, turned his attention to looking for signs of his own missing person.

Wyatt proved to have less self-restraint... and evidently preservation, for he hopped towards her immediately and reached to wave a little hand in front of one of her feathered pupils, to which Volta practically tripped over himself to pull him away and back to investigate the rest of the room.

This was one of the stops Phago used while travelling. Volta caught that acrid scent of sulphur and menthol and grimaced at the thought of those "detoxifying cleansers" Phago had been hellbent on working on selling to, well, he hesitated to call them naive, but the kind of people who thought detoxifying wasn't already what anyone with a functioning liver could do just fine.

As far as he was concerned, Phago had done little more than create edible gunpowder-or, perhaps more impressively, invent a new

way to make mint taste worse than it already did.

Personally, Volta turned his nose up at the prospect of peddling things that people didn't need to people who didn't know, but, unfortunately for him, everything was up to code. At least, their local town council thought so.

Luckily (something that Volta thought in private) Wyatt and his pyromaniacal proclivities had... fumbled a bag of some of his casting stones and dropped his flint stone on the sulphur components.

"Hey, the stuff I blew up is still here! Looks like he made more."

"Recently, too." Volta determined from fresh-looking tracks of hand prints and water stains that something alchemical in nature had been performed here. "I'm trying to see what he's working on, but whatever it is, I've never seen the likes of it." Marks at the corners of the counter, lining the counter, and even on the parts of the door frame that Nova hadn't turned to sawdust.

Wyatt came hopping over. "What's that?"

"Looks to me like a bottle of ink?"

"Neat! Now what's that?"

"Sage."

"And this?"

"Animal bones."

"Which animal?"

"I'm going to say... rat."

"In the mountains?"

"Fine. Squirrel."

"What about that?"

Volta didn't know. What Wyatt was pointing to were some sort of carving or markings with symbols and glyph etched into the ground with charcoal or ink, but he didn't know what they meant at all. He followed the trail of symbols with his eyes past the dirt on the ground and some of the grass by the entrance and up the frame of the door on the outside.

He looked over to Wyatt, who was putting a finger to his chin and leaning forward to squint intensely at the markings as if perhaps his eyesight was the reason why they couldn't understand the mysterious ancient-looking symbols in the abandoned ritual circle.

... He supposed taking a look wouldn't hurt. He spoke and read Elven while learning Common as a second language. How hard could a third be?

He could try picking out some universal symbols. One of them looked sort of like the sun. Or, with the dot in the middle, maybe an eyeball? The sun is the eyeball? Oh, he hated symbols. Maybe it was a metaphor-

"Miss Leon, what is this?"

Fine. Or they could give up immediately and ask for help.

Now, the sun is an eyeball, little "x" with little circles on the ends, swirl that goes three-quarters of the way through-

"It's a warding sigil."

"Wait, what?" Volta nearly choked on his own spit. "Where? How? You just looked at it! You just got here!"

"It's a protection ward." Nova pointed at the words and traced along the door frame.

"'Bound is this contract by our holy blood, walled is this home by our eternal bones..." she hovered hesitantly over a large, gaping hole in the door frame that she had broken through. "...something something mortal flesh... Ward us from the great evil..." she hovered her finger over an empty slot. "They never finished the ritual."

Turning back to the door frame, she gestured to a bottle of red ink she found while conducting her own investigation. "This is a ritual I've hardly used myself, but I've seen it performed at holy gatherings before. Let me give it a go." She uncorked the bottle and began smearing it with her hand onto the words on the door.

...

"Why'd you stop? The words keep going." Wyatt picked up the bottle that she had set down but promptly put it down again when Volta shot him a warning look. "You said it wasn't completed?"

"I, uh," she scratched her head sheepishly while looking at the gaping hole of the door frame. "Forgot I broke it. Can you give me that piece of wood? I'll make something up."

Volta silently handed the miraculously still-intact fragment of the broken frame to her and also a small pocket knife.

She spent a few minutes carving in similar-looking symbols while quietly mumbling what must have been sacred, maybe even ancient incantations.

"We offer our mortal flesh... Something something... how do you spell Exigent? Ex-ee-junt... Exijo- Ex- We offer our mortal flesh to make this plea. That works, right? ...in exchange for this... What other word is there? Request? In exchange..."

Was she... doodling smiley faces around the scripture?

"Umm, Miss Leon?" Wyatt, itchy fingers as always, reached for the bottle again. Volta shot him a sharp look, and he pulled back.

"Hm?"

"Why does Mr Phago know how to perform obscure Stratosian holy rituals?"

"Because it wasn't him who performed it." Nova held the splintered plank up to the window to check her Palaiós Stratosían handwriting. "Unless he was there to see one being performed one hundred and seventy-four years ago in Ground Cirro, Stratos, this ward was one made by an old colleague of mine."

"They're here?!"

"Were. They must have been interrupted while setting it up. Whatever they were hiding from, it found them."

A horrified silence fell on the two brothers. Volta lowered his head. "My condolences."

"Oh, they're not dead, I'm sure," she simply replied, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the piece of wood. "They've proven to be especially elusive. In fact, they even escaped me! Hah..."

It wouldn't have been so... sad to hear if her voice hadn't dwindled into nothing before she could even commit to a fake laugh.

Volta opened his mouth to say something, change the topic or at the very least not linger in this terribly concealed... he didn't even know what it was called that she was doing, he just knew it felt bad to watch.

Nothing came to mind. The three could only shift uncomfortably before Nova took the hint to talk about something else.

She cleared her throat. "They're still out there, I mean. Just not here specifically."

"Oh, okay!" Volta could almost hear Wyatt's blood pressure returning to normal levels. He wasn't sure if the kid would pass out from holding his breath like that. "They're not dead! Isn't that amazing?"

Volta remembered his musings about her from before, the one pondering about what horrors she must have seen in her line of work and made the wise decision to not prod her further. He held out his hand

"Either way, I'm glad the knife was enough to carve such small letters. I would have used it on the cloak I made, but I figured the blood and fat would have been hells to clean afterwards. Not to mention it is also just an expensive tool."

"Oh, the knife was an excellent idea, Mr Joule. I was just planning to use this-" she pulled out Orion's Blade and tapped it against the brittle wood. Of course, the giant sword promptly split the glorified bundle of spindles and fibre perfectly down the middle, and cut through all of her hard work. "...And that was probably why your idea was better."

"Oh no! It's too small now," said Wyatt, picking up the pieces and handing it over to Volta. "Fix it?"

Volta shrugged and traced his thumb over the bisection. All three watched as the splinters began to weave into each other and re-seal the breakage like it was never cut at all.

"You can do that?" Nova gaped, bewildered, as she pried the thing from his hands and tapped it with her finger to see if it would come apart again. "I don't think I've ever seen you do magic, nor was I aware it was a common occurrence in the terrestrial plane."

"I know. It's incredible." Volta crossed his arms. "When I first found out I could do that, I was so upset. I spent months working on a new kind of invisible adhesive solution, only to find that I could just oogie-boogie magic things back together. Apparently, it's not a very hard move to learn. My work friends just thought I had some sort of superiority complex over using magic."

"Do you?"

"A little."

She hoisted him up and they sealed the piece of wood back into its original position. The words lined up slightly awkwardly, but Nova traced the ink over them and closed the lines together to form what Volta could only extrapolate was some sort of circuit.

Eventually,with the lines were drawn and the sigils connected by a crude mixture of "blood", leaves and bone fragments, Judgement's voice mumbled in a near-forgotten language, with every syllable, if any, rang with an indescribable hum that resonated like wind chimes in a breeze.

She stopped suddenly, hand hovering over the unfinished slot where a name was to be fed. She looked briefly over to the two of them, shook her head and looked back.

The reaction was almost immediate. Several glowing snakes erupted from the ground and lashed at them. The brothers leapt back just in time to dodge the white-hot whip of what seemed to be sentient chains, but it did not seem to be aiming for them.

A cry ripped from Nova's lungs. One so anguished the strain of vocal muscles was like nothing compared to the grip those things had on her arms, her legs, even around her neck. She resisted them for as long as she could, screaming in agony the whole way, but eventually, her legs gave way and she sank a knee into the ground. The chains did not relent. In fact, they seemed to constrict all the more intensely as her screams died off into silent convulsing.

"Miss Leon!"

Wyatt's scream shook Volta out of his state of shock. By the time his eyes flickered over to his brother, he was already dashing towards her. Obviously, that wasn't going to help because Wyatt was only a boy and this was the work of something quite literally beyond their realm of influence, but he still had to try.

Volta, however, had different plans. He grabbed his pocket knife and, with both hands, drove the blade into the runes. A grating clang of metal and stone revealed not even a scratch had managed to perforate its surface. He tried again. And again. And again. All while Wyatt's desperate cries of help and Judgement's agonised screaming began to fade quieter and quieter in his haze of concentration.

A slash of something cold sank into his arm as the knife's blade broke off its hilt. One fragment of it clattered lamely to the floor while the other lodged itself deep into his arm.

He was out of options.

He reached for Orion's Blade.

---A note from the author---

You know as much as Wyatt is usually the "chaotic gremlin" character of the trio, Volta and Nova make their fair share of stupid and dangerous decisions on their own.

Yeah, they're driven by the sense to protect or the adrenaline of an emergency but there has got to be some thought between step 1 find death trap with name slot and step 2 put your own name in death trap name slot. Come on now.

Anyway, I'm changing the upload schedule from Mondays to Wednesdays now! A fun treat of two uploads in a single week for the readers keeping up. This chapter and also book goes out to my therapist!! If you're seeing this doc I love you ~( ; w ; )~