Am I reading it right? A conflicting system? He stared at the letters, trying to make it look like he wasn't staring at the letters.

Is the Eidralith saying that this knight is a . . . System user? So there are other systems.

That made sense. There were more than one legendary artifacts, so it wasn't impossible for there to be more than one of this 'System'.

Nonetheless, it wasn't time to ponder over this revelation. Anabeth and the knight were already on the move, and he lurched forward into motion and skipped after the pair. The grass muffled his footfalls but did nothing for the flailing of his coat, which insisted on getting caught on his elbows every few meters.

Anabeth and the knight moved with smooth, synchronized certainty. It took them another ten minutes to reach the outer ridge of the valley. The campus lights had long vanished behind the rise, replaced by the vast, blue-black sprawl of the valley below. Anabeth moved her finger like jerking an invisible puppet on a string, and conjured a sphere of fire. It wasn't the kind of textbook torch-light spell Fabrisse had seen a hundred students butcher in practice halls; it was cleaner, almost playful, a self-sustaining flame that hovered just above her palm like a trained bird. It brightened the trail without burning the grass, and every few seconds it pulsed in a repeated rhythm, painting her face in flashes of gold. Fabrisse had to admit, her control was impressive.

"Keep up, Kestovar! The cave's just ahead!" she called, her voice bouncing off the valley walls.

"I know . . ."

They reached the cave mouth, a familiar crescent of stone framed by hanging roots and the constant whisper of wind. Anabeth strode in. The light peeled back the dark, revealing the same rough walls and the same slick mineral ridges.

Fabrisse slowed as they entered, his eyes scanning everything. He'd been here dozens of times for resonance measurements and mineral sampling. Every twist, every fork in the tunnel was etched in his memory. There shouldn't have been anything unusual. Yet Anabeth moved with such surety, he thought she was tracing a map no one else could see.

The surety continued as she veered off the main path, toward what looked like a dead end. A sloped wall of stone met them, veined with old quartz growth, dull and clouded by sediment.

"There's nothing here," he said automatically.

Anabeth gave him a conspiratorial smile. "That's what he said."

"Who?"

"Sir Henry."

"He hasn't said anything."

Anabeth crouched anyway, brushing aside a patch of moss with her fingers then paused, as if deciding something. With a small, knowing glance up at him, she pressed her palm flat to the stone. Then she murmured something, and the sky-blue sparks of joy emanated from her fingertips.

The light from her fingers flowed in symphonic concord with the stone's buried veins. The dull quartz under her hand liquefied to light, tracing elegant whorls in geometric spirals. Then the rocks moved.

Fabrisse staggered back as the wall's surface folded in on itself. When it stopped, a narrow, unnaturally smooth corridor had opened before his eyes, slanting down into the dark.

"What—what is that spell?" He stabilized himself.

Anabeth's blue light painted her face in elegant chiaroscuro as she turned to him over her shoulder. Her lips curved into a smile both coy and impossibly assured. "Oh, this?" she said lightly, her tone tipping into a teasing hauteur. "You'll understand once you've signed the family contract." Then she winked and stepped into the passage like a debutante descending a ballroom stair.

The knight promptly followed. Fabrisse had to jog after them before he was left in the dark.

As Fabrisse stepped into the newly revealed corridor, the air became almost crystalline itself. Every plane of stone seemed a peculiar kind of exact, carved by a geometry that nature could only have achieved through an obsession with patience. The crystals embedded along the surface had facets cut by pressure and epoch and layers of translucent white packed so tightly they split light into subtle halos of interference.

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These are rare, he thought, rare enough to poke holes at his shaky crystal knowledge. Some formed clusters shaped like branching lattices, each node meeting another at precise ninety-degree intervals. Others resembled frozen ripples, capturing the record of an ancient quake or aether surge. He recognized none of these mineral types from his coursework. Whatever had made them had done so with a patience bordering on devotion. Thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, compressed into every fracture line.

"How do you even know about this tunnel?" Fabrisse asked, still distracted by a column that looked like a calcified bolt of lightning.

Anabeth turned, firelight playing along the edges of her coat. "Oh!" she said. "It was once a natural branch of the cave network, until my grandfather sealed it. Family precaution, you see. The technique for reopening it has only ever been passed down the Von Silberthal line. Unless you intend to pulverize solid bedrock, you wouldn't be able to force it open." She lifted her chin with inherited grandeur. "Our family has ways of preserving what ought not to be disturbed."

Fabrisse stared at her back as the words took a moment to sort themselves into meaning.

This girl could spill a family secret if you so much as asked about the weather.

Meanwhile, the 'knight' probably hadn't even said a word.

Anabeth slowed, crouching low as the tunnel widened into a small hollow. Her tone turned brisk and focused.

"Right," she said. "You know the Stormglass, Kestovar. Which quartz do you think might respond to it?"

He blinked, startled to be consulted at all. "Ah, well, if the Stormglass carries a high aetheric frequency, then we'd need something resonant but not dominant. Possibly a Stratos Quartz, or even a Vein-Frost variety if there's enough purity. Something layered, capable of harmonizing without refracting the channel."

Anabeth clicked her tongue. "We already tried that. Twice. Nothing happened."

"I see." He didn't, not without seeing her method of facilitating a reaction, but it was easier to agree.

Before he could suggest another specimen, she spotted a sliver of stone by her boot. "Oh," she said, crouching again. "This is . . . low-quality, but maybe—" She plucked it up and brushed away the dirt. It was an unimpressive lump of Skalitz quartz, dull grey with a cloudy core. "Worth a try, I suppose."

Anabeth held it up to the knight's gauntlet. Then she whispered a word and drew a narrow line of light between the two crystals. Oh, that's cool. That was a higher-level kindling spell, if he recalled correctly. It was one of the most advanced techniques in Stone Thaumaturgy, possibly Tier III.

Still, he couldn't comment on the methodology. He was more familiar with lab equipment than spells like these.

The flame-thread touched the quartz. For a heartbeat, Fabrisse felt a pulse in the air. Then nothing.

The light winked out. The ordinary quartz remained just as lifeless, dull and unreactive.

Anabeth sighed, rolling the stone between her fingers with faint annoyance. "Well. That was anticlimactic." She turned to the knight, gesturing vaguely toward the deeper dark of the corridor. "Come along, Sir Henry. There's bound to be something more promising further in."

The tunnel widened into a cavern that could've swallowed a lecture hall. The walls glittered faintly in the dim, as if some buried aurora had been frozen into the stone. Anabeth's eyes lit with delight. "Ah, perfect. This must be the resonance chamber my grandfather sealed." She clasped her hands behind her back, surveying the glittering expanse. "Now then, Kestovar—our expertise. Which of these would our Stormglass find . . . agreeable?"

He stared at the thousands of gleaming surfaces. The logical part of his mind wanted to categorize each by fracture line, hue, and opacity. But there were too many, and the interference from Anabeth's flame-light warped every reflection into chaos.

"Uh," he said, blinking at the kaleidoscope. "I can't reliably detect the rare ones. My analysis spell works on common quartz, maybe up to mid-grade crystalline forms. Anything rarer and the reading just . . . returns null."

Anabeth turned to him, one brow arched. "Then don't limit yourself to what the spell says," she said. "If your scan yields nothing, that absence is information. Think like a thaumaturge, not a clerk. A stone too refined for your spell to quantify is, by definition, worth examining."

"Oh. Right," he murmured.

"Splendid," she said, smiling with satisfied grace. "Let us meet up here in fifteen minutes, Kestovar."

Before he could respond, Anabeth was already striding toward the far side of the cavern. Fabrisse lingered where he stood, acutely aware that he was not alone. The knight remained a few paces away, motionless as a statue. The reflected firelight skimmed across his armor in narrow bands, painting it in fractured bronze and cold steel.

He tried to look anywhere else, but he soon found his gaze landed on the knight like a compass needle turning to the North. His limbs immediately felt like overcooked noodles from whatever aura that knight exuded. He promptly turned away.

Best not ever interact with that person.

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