Aexilica wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to get attacked by when she entered the tower, but…it definitely wasn't giant blobs of ink. That was a new one.

Fortunately, they didn't seem that tough. Or rather…Not in the conventional sense. The ink moved faster and with more force than most men, but then so did wild animals. If nothing else Aexilica was pleased to find the entities lacking any of the monstrous physical prowess the guralkans had boasted. The only issue, really, was that she didn't know how to kill them.

Aexilica cut, and her sword carved clean through the inky bodies. But they were ink. Liquid, protean masses of fluid that reformed and continued attacking after each hit. The panic started as soon as Aexilica's arms grew tired, because that was when she realised that losing to these things was on the table. They didn't need to overpower her, they could just wait. Let her grow tired, feeble. Would they smother her, or simply nick her to death? They seemed able to solidify in part, when needed, and she'd already felt her skin broken by one slash from a set of claws that cut truly, if not deeply.

She risked glancing around her, and found that there was doubt in the face of her temporary comrades too. The Storm-Eye crew, even those without any great talent for combat or innate magical prowess to aid them, were all well trained and skilled fighters. Enough so that each of them was able to fend off a single of the ink creations by themselves, if barely.

But that was nothing, Aexilica could've fended off three at once—indeed, she'd briefly managed four in the chaos of this fight—but that didn't mean she had any higher odds of surviving forever. Eventually time would win, and the ink-things fought as if they knew it.

Maybe they did, Aexilica really couldn't say how smart they were. There was a lot she didn't know about these things.

The fight continued, and as she'd predicted it continued going worse. The enemy was too numerous, and too untiring. Aexilica's side started giving ground, and then giving blood. But then their saving grace came.

Someone got lucky.

It was pure chance, a spear-thrust gone wide and smacking into an old section of wall. Apparently this chamber wasn't nearly so magical as the stonework outside, and so dust fell from the point of impact. It rained down onto the ink-thing and…congealed it.

Ink soaked into dust, clung to it, became clotted by it. Aexilica saw as chunks of the ink-thing's body fell away and did not reform. She took all of a quarter-second to draw the obvious conclusion, forced her own enemies back and called out what she'd learned as she sent her sword-tip scraping along the stone floor.

"The dust!" Aexilica roared, watching the very substance she was screaming about shoot up to spray into each one of the ink-things still fighting her. "Use the dust! It stops them from reforming!"

Fortunately, she didn't need to give more of a hint than that. In moments the flow of everything changed again as people realised what they needed to do and, more importantly, that there was something they could do at all. Hope entered the fight, and new vitality soon followed it.

It wasn't easy to defend oneself while simultaneously attacking walls and ceilings to fill the air with debris, but luckily Aexilica didn't have to. Asgrim took care of that for the most part. He moved like a viper, despite carrying a great club seemingly made of iron, but altogether too bright and sturdy to be of any iron Aexilica had ever seen. It did a fine job of breaking apart stony surfaces and leaving their constituents to rain down. Fine enough that soon every ink-thing present was having its body clotted by dust.

Then, Aexilica was on the attack. It was one of the most cathartic things she'd experienced lately. Every swing broke the ink-things apart, and every pause between they'd rebuilt their bodies was longer than the last. Before too much time had passed, and too much strength drained from the party's limbs, one of the entities just fell apart and failed to rise again entirely.

After that, more followed shortly. They ended up moving farther into the tower as they fought, gaining back all the ground they'd ceded and then some. By the time the last enemy had been fully destroyed they were easily two or three hundred yards deeper into the structure's guts than they'd been upon first getting attacked.

It was there that they found the first room. The first of many, Aexilica suspected. And it made an impression fit for the Gods themselves.

"Holy fuck." Asgrim breathed, practically stumbling in on all fours and throwing himself at the chamber's contents. Aexilica actually couldn't blame him this time. As far as old rooms went, it was perhaps the most lucrative she'd ever seen. Goods littered the place; coins, jewellery. There was the occasional weapon or piece of armour, too, but mostly it was just currency metal. Silver, not gold, but a fortune nonetheless. Asgrim was already stuffing fistfuls of the stuff into a great sack before Aexilica had even registered the place's contents.

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It seemed his mind was quick in all things, but never nearly so much as when money was on display before it. Again, she could hardly begrudge him that much.

Despite the volume of goods, it didn't take too long to empty the room of its most valuable treasures and they were soon heading on. More enthusiastic, not less, despite the fighting. It seemed whatever fear had been allowed to take root before was now thoroughly banished by greed.

More ink-things awaited them farther down, greater in number, yes, but also greater in power. The fights grew harder, more lethal. Two more of the crew fell before they triumphed, but grief was washed away once more by the lust for wealth that came over everyone as more rooms were found beyond the defeated foes.

Eventually, Aexilica found herself wondering how much longer the Storm-Eyes would even be able to continue filling their sacks. There was surely some limit to the volume of transportation space they had brought, and if not that then a limit to the amount of weight they could move across the island. If they were nearing it, though, none of them gave her so much as a hint. Deeper they went, deeper. Pilfering more silver, and finding, soon, that even the occasional piece of gold popped up among the treasures.

The excitement in the air became palpable. So much so in fact that it clouded their senses. Aexilica suspected she alone heard the scraping of gears and twisting ropes as pressure came down on one of the corridor floors, and though she called out her warning it was all too slow.

A grate fell down at their backs, made from dark iron and easily a half-inch thick. They could have smashed through with time. They did not have time. The floor shifted, leaning open as an entire stretch of it became a great, yawning trap-door that left the legs falling out from under them and toppled them forwards.

Aexilica maintained her balance for all of a second before it fell away and left her to plummet with the rest.

***

The tower was useless, it turned out.

"What was this place an offering site too, the god of hobos?" Emma growled, glaring at Vari as they made their way through. "There's nothing here!"

He got defensive at that, for some reason.

"Maybe it's been looted already." He cut back. "Maybe you're not the first heathen to find out there was treasure here."

Emma paused, then started looking around as they walked. She had to admit, it did seem like there'd been a struggle. Scrapes in the walls, cracks too. Forget a fight, as far as she could tell some fucking pitched battle had been fought in the confines of the corridors. Complete with siege engines.

But that did not change the fundamental, crucial fact that there wasn't any fucking money left for her.

"This is a waste of my time." She sighed. "We should've never bothered coming." It wasn't such a big tower, Emma thought, and their progress deeper into its depths came quickly enough that she was passing several rooms even while conversing with Vari. Vari took his time before responding to her, and that left Emma with nothing to think about except her surroundings.

As it happened, that was what saved them both.

Emma saw the scrapes along the walls, and realised how regular they were. How inconsistent with anything but the edges of one surface grinding against another. She stopped, Vari carried on moving forwards. The moment his weight reached a sufficient distance into the trap, it began to move. Gears ground, pulleys went taut. Emma was already extending her magic by then.

She couldn't conjure material or create energy constructs beyond her line of sight, so simply clogging the mechanisms with something solid to jam them was beyond her. What she could do, however, was wrap something around Vari the Idiot, so she did. A bubble of hardened energy, connected to a length of yet more of it, connected again to a big trough at the end. Emma conjured sand and water into this trough until its weight was enough that Vari was left suspended in the air when the floor fell out from under him. Emma left him there, waited for the mechanism to reset. It took a good minute or two before the floor finally swung back into place.

Then she banished her energy constructs, and sent a new one extending outwards to just shove Vari over the gap. Emma's own transit was something similar, applying a Force effect of as close to equal-to-gravity intensity as she could manage, hopping and letting herself slowly drift over the abyss.

Actually, she misjudged things somewhat and was falling upwards slightly, but reached the other side and released the effect before her relationship with the ceiling could grow uncomfortably intimate. Vari was staring at her as she came down, Emma just grinned.

"What?" She asked, not bothering to hide her smugness. "You thought a trap-door could stop the most powerful wizard in the world? Ha!"

It wasn't all bravado, either. Emma hadn't even thought about what she'd done there, it had just…Happened. Not entirely instinctive, she'd needed some measure of intellect to figure out how best to stop the idiot from falling, but the actual doing of it all had come naturally as breathing. Wizard indeed.

"So you can't learn that kind of power?" Vari asked abruptly. Emma rolled her eyes.

"No, haven't you already been handed enough power anyway? You couldn't even make a good Jarl, and now you want to alter reality."

He flinched at that, as if she'd struck him. Swallowed, glared but…without heat.

"I just wanted to make father proud." Vari said at last, keeping his eyes ahead, angled somewhat away from Emma. Perhaps he was trying to hide how wet they'd suddenly become, but she saw it anyway. "And now…He's gone."

Emma felt something repulsive at that, a twisting, coiling wash of guilt deep in her gut. It curled her lip and sent a shiver down her spine. Guilt. She hated guilt, hated how often she felt it and hated that other people, for some reason, considered even that too infrequently enough.

Nothing would ruin a task, day or affair like a sudden sense of guilt. Emma could do nothing about it—not short of bringing the idiot's stupid dad back—so she just did her best to ignore it and kept on walking down into the tower's depths.

Of course, that distraction was nothing close to enough. It kept on gnawing at her as they went, growing along with the darkness, and the cold, and the sense of danger washing the walls around them.

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