System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 198
Creak.
The door was pushed open slowly, with a scrape sharp enough to set teeth on edge and a rush of dust in their faces. The two Witchers had to rein in their movements and ease the door shut behind them with care.
“Jennifer Verrieres, founder of the Verrieres line...” Roy let his eyes travel around the room. It felt like some neglected antique, age showing everywhere. The plaster on the mottled walls had cracked and split, the old floorboards were eaten through in places, leaving black scars, and the bed, wardrobe, and other furniture all lay under a thick layer of dust.
Plainly, no one had looked after the place for a very long time, yet shallow, messy footprints could still be seen across the dust on the floor. Someone had been in here before.
“Ignatius can’t even be bothered to keep his ancestors’ rooms in order ... then again, I suppose the only one he ever truly cared about was Lady Mary.” Roy’s gaze shifted to the middle of the left-hand wall. As in the earlier rooms, a half-length portrait of the room’s owner hung there. He stepped over and gently brushed the dust from its surface, and at once a strikingly beautiful woman came into view.
Perhaps it was in the blood. The women of Ignatius’s branch had all been beauties, one finer than the next. Jennifer Verrieres was no exception, graceful, vivid, impossible to overlook.
“Kid, another second and your eyes will be bulging out. Go inspect the bookcase. Lady Jennifer may have left some record of the one who laid the curse.” Letho said this while rummaging through the room himself. He did not bother checking the hidden space above the ceiling. As the first ancestor of Ignatius’s line, Jennifer and Leon Verrieres had no specially built attic chamber above their bedroom, so there could be no strange Wraith Dust there.
Roy moved to the bookcase. Dawn was just beginning beyond the window, a pale yellow arc rising like an egg yolk at the horizon. He narrowed his eyes, and in the corner of his vision the shelf came into focus. There were perhaps a dozen books there, all buried in dust and outwardly unremarkable.
“The Poetry of the Moon...” He took one down, dusted it off, and flipped it open at random. “When moonlight is full, passion blooms in turn ... Hm. So the founder of House Verrieres had a taste for poetry.”
Roy could not say he loved poetry, but neither did he dislike it. What young man had never entertained some dream of becoming a dashing bard? To turn into Dandelion, armed with a handsome face, a gift for verse, and a sharp tongue, charming his way across the whole world, perhaps even daring to clap a cap on the head of a Toussaint duke.
“I ought to read more poetry, find a few pieces suited to Coral’s lovely voice. Then, someday...”
He shook the pleasant fantasy from his mind and quickly turned pages, searching for any note or mark left by human hands. Unfortunately, Lady Jennifer seemed not to have been the sort to annotate what she read. There was no trace of ink anywhere in the book.
“Let’s see...” He reached for the next. “The Winter Tundra, The North Wind of Temeria, In Praise of Love ... twelve books, all poetry. Which one should I pick?” Roy’s gaze slid to the last volume. “What’s this? Something odd seems to have crept in. The Eternal Goddess? Isn’t that a religious text?”
He pulled it down. It was a heavy volume bound in solemn black boards. He recalled seeing it once in the library at the Temple of Melitele.
“A book on the faith of the goddess Melitele.”
“One religious work hidden among all this poetry ... that’s odd.” Roy opened it and soon found something unexpected, a yellowed, brittle slip of paper with a line of blurred, elegant handwriting.
“Merciful goddess, if you truly exist in this world, take pity on your faithful devotee. Heal her aging body.”
The line was written in Common Speech and easy enough to grasp.
In plain terms, it was an aging, faded woman pouring out her desire to the goddess. But the desire itself was wholly unrealistic. Priests of Melitele would offer aid to the poor and heal the gravely sick or wounded, but they would neither interfere with nor reverse the natural aging of a mortal body.
“Was this written by Jennifer? Could she not face reality? But to heal age itself, how could that ever be easy?” Roy kept turning pages and frowned. A large section of the book had been torn out by force, the edges rough and uneven.
He could almost feel the rage of the one who had ripped them away.
Not far beyond that, he found another slip of paper. The contents, however, were far stranger.
“Blood of the Sun!!! Blood of the Sun!!! Blood of the Sun!!!”
The handwriting had been pressed so hard it nearly cut through the page, carrying all the fevered excitement of the writer.
Roy fell into thought. “Were both of these left by Jennifer Verrieres? And what exactly does Blood of the Sun mean?”
“Roy.” Letho suddenly shouted, jolting him out of it.
Roy had no choice but to put the slips aside and hurry over. “You found something?”
“I’ve searched the whole room. No hidden compartments, no mechanisms. But there is one strange thing. Look closely...”
Roy followed the direction of Letho’s finger, his gaze passing over the bed, the drawers, the clothes stand, the wardrobe...
“What’s strange?”
“It seems Lytta Neyd still hasn’t taught you much about women...” Letho folded his arms and shook his head. “Here’s a hint. Jennifer Verrieres wasn’t just a woman, she was by all appearances a remarkable beauty. Yet her room is missing something.”
“You mean...” Roy rested his chin on his hand for a few moments, then it struck him. “A mirror.”
“Exactly. Every room we’ve checked so far, including Ignatius’s, had a standing mirror somewhere. Yet in the chamber of a beauty like Jennifer, there isn’t one. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Letho said with conviction. “And take it from a man with experience, any normal woman, pretty or plain, needs a mirror. Unless...”
“Unless she no longer wanted to see her own face in one.” Roy held up the two slips for Letho to see.
“If Jennifer wrote these, then she must already have been very old by then, old enough that she could no longer bear to look at her own face. Yet she couldn’t accept the loss of youth and beauty, and so she prayed to Melitele. Of course, all of that was empty air. No goddess is going to interfere in the ordinary aging of a mortal.”