Miasmora & Wisric's Grand Meridellian Misadventure

How had he snuck up on them? She'd been so careful.

The Draik, seeming to notice Miasmora's reaching hand, raised his own hands slowly to show they were empty. At the same moment, Wisric's eyes grew wide.

"Caelric," he whispered, reverent.

Miasmora looked between them, Ghost Draik with his hands in the air, Spotted Ixi with his eyes gleaming, and let her hands drop to her sides. "That's a good way to get yourself into trouble," she scolded, "sneaking up on people like that in a place like this."

Caelric lowered his hands too, and stepped through the smashed brickwork into the chamber. "Yes, I see that. You'll have to forgive me. It has been a long time since I was accustomed to-- To company," he said.

"What happened to you?" Wisric blurted out. Then he clamped his hooves over his mouth.

Miasmora laughed. For all the times he'd warned her that Ghost Neopets didn't remember much of what had happened before they were Ghosts, when he came face-to-face with his idol, he blurted out the question that had been haunting him for his whole career. In that moment, she thought, he seemed...normal, and she acknowledged, deep down, that she felt a certain warmth for the Ixi. She might even consider him a friend, now--not that she'd admit that out loud.

The Draik moved through the stacked boxes and crates, running his hands over--no, Miasmora realized, [i]through[/i]--the faded labels and markings still faintly visible on all of them. When he looked back at Miasmora and Wisric, there was a deep sadness in his eyes. "I was betrayed," he said finally.

"By Isoldeia?" Wisric asked.

The Draik rolled his shoulders, as if he were re-balancing an invisible weight on them. "Or perhaps I was the betrayer? Sometimes I wonder if that isn't the right of it. That I owed her the same loyalty I owed..." He trailed off and shook himself. "It's hard to know anything for certain, after so many years. I wonder sometimes how much of my memory is real, and how much I've invented. There was--there is--so much haziness. And sometimes... Sometimes there are details that are too perfect. Details that explain things too neatly, and when you look closely outside yourself, you realize they aren't real. That the truth is... messier than you remember. That the answers you think you have are, too conveniently, the ones you need. So I wonder sometimes--perhaps I betrayed her. Perhaps I am the reason she..." He trailed off again, and turned as if to leave the room.

"The reason she what?" Wisric asked.

Caelric's shoulders slumped, the weight of his guilt written plainly there, and, somehow, in his spectral features too. "Sought the dark."

"What do you mean?" Wisric demanded. "Isoldeia was responsible for the fertility of Meridell's farmlands, she--"

"[i]Was[/i]," the Draik said, shaking his head. He took a deep breath. "I told you, it's so hard to know what's true anymore, but there are clues. Here," he waved his arm over the piles of crates surrounding them, and spectral sparks flew from him, perched in the air, lit the entire space in an eerie glow. "And elsewhere in these chambers. Enough that I can be reasonably certain of...some things. Princess Isoldeia was instrumental in making Meridell what it became. She used her affinity for light and fire magic to temper the weather, to make this the best place in all of Neopia for growing things. Sunlight seemed to cling to her, like she had stepped out of a faerie tale..." Caelric trailed off, shaking himself. "That's how I remember her, when she was younger. Perhaps that is... Perhaps that is not quite right. Facts. You need facts." Another deep breath.

"She had a kind of curiosity that troubled me. This I am certain of, because I wrote of it to her father, and the letter is-- It's around here somewhere, still. When I discovered these chambers beneath the land we'd chosen to build the castle--this is after she began her work on the fields, you understand. There were troubling things down here. Proof this place had been used as a prison, long ago. Spells of binding carved into the walls. Terrible, ancient magic. I never discovered what had been imprisoned down here back then, at least I don't remember having discovered it. Perhaps that is how... Facts. Yes. Things I am certain of.

"Isoldeia's curiosity inspired a need to understand everything we found down here. I begged the king to forbid it, to seal these chambers back up. This spellwork all around us--there is nothing good in it, I am certain. But Isoldeia was not so easily convinced. And she began to study. And... To experiment. The more strongly I urged her against it, the more determined she became. I am certain of that too. But there was something neither of us understood until too late--I think perhaps, once she did, she came to regret what she had done. But, too late."

Caelric shook his head, and studied the two of them. "How well do you understand magic?"

"Not at all," Miasmora said immediately.

Wisric gave her a dumbfounded look. She recalled his admonitions from the day before--[i]Not. A. Word[/i] to the castle staff--and laughed.

Caelric's eyebrows rose. "Power has to come from somewhere. This magic," he waved again, this time pieces of his spectral form settling to illuminate the carved inscriptions around the room, "drew its power from the land. I think whoever built this place believed this part of the world would never be disturbed. That drawing power to reinforce this prison from the land would never cause anyone any trouble at all. And it didn't, for a very long time. But Isodeia learned this kind of magic without understanding it, and the more she used it--"

"The blight," Wisric said, his voice low. "She caused that first great blight? The one that almost ruined Meridell before it had a chance to establish itself?"

Caelric nodded. "I think that might have been enough to turn her from her path, if she'd understood sooner. She loved Meridell. Still does, I imagine, more than I have ever loved anything. Except she had spent so much time down here that the darkness of this place had gotten its claws into her. The things she wanted later on were not the same things she'd wanted in the beginning, and she became... ruthless in pursuit of them. A faerie-tale villain." He shuddered. "It was me. I'm the one who trapped her down here. But I didn't understand much of what was happening either, and binding her down here only made her stronger. Her reach was limited, but her power blossomed."

The wreckage, Miasmora realized.

"If I hadn't tried to trap her in the first place, maybe she could have been saved. I don't know. But when I realized I had failed, I wrote to my apprentice, and I came back down here to keep vigil over her prison. To make sure she could not escape. To hold the wards that kept her power limited to this place."

"But it's not," Wisric said. "Her Ghost is--"

"That's her," the Draik said. "It's a shade. A sliver of her, leaking out through the walls this place shares with the castle above. It took her many years to figure out how to do that. By then I was..." He raised his hands again, inspecting them himself. "I was this." He laughed, a cold, miserable laugh. "I imagine sometimes she must have taken inspiration for that form from me."

"The walls," Miasmora breathed.

"What about them?" Wisric asked.

"Last night, when I felt like we were being watched. It was her, wasn't it? From within the walls?"

Caelric seemed to consider for a moment. "Possibly."

"She left documents on my desk in the library. Years ago now. They tell a very different story--that the king sealed her away down here for some imagined crime."

"A ploy," Caelric said. "Forged. Probably very convincingly--she's had a long time to make convincing forgeries down here. All this Old Paper, ancient inks, access to all of Meridell's earliest recorded history. Plenty of time to wait for a Neopet whose curiosity would get the better of them. Who would come looking for her."

Miasmora bristled. He was [i]not[/i] saying something like that about Wisric! She opened her maw to tell the old Draik off, but Wisric spoke first.

"But why do that and then let your map and your note to Tavira come to light?"

[i]Iiiii thiiinkkkk Iiiii haaveeee seeeeeen thiisssss befooooreeee. Aaaa veeeerrryyyy loooongggg timmmeee agooo. Theeee laassst tiiiimeeee Iiiii waaaaas asssskeeeeed for heeeelppp.[/i] Miasmora remembered the Ghost Moehog's words all too well.

"It wasn't her," the Grarrl said, pieces clicking into place. "It was you, Caelric. Only it took much longer than you intended, didn't it? That map, the letter--they were meant for Tavira, but by that time no one was coming and going from here much anymore, and you couldn't leave without risking Isoldeia breaking free. So you had to give the note to someone else to take to her. But something must have gone wrong, and it never made it to her. This place was never bricked back up like you wanted, it was just forgotten." She turned to Wisric. "What would you have done if we hadn't found this yesterday?"

"Come looking down here myself, eventually. Probably," the Ixi said. "I thought I might find something in the papers the castle cleaners always throw out, but it had been years, and I was already thinking about how to get back in."

He had been running out of Neopoints. Only a few hundred left in his belt pouch, before the Mortog-Kissing...escapade. And that explained his quickness to jump to visiting the castle when they found the map.

Maybe that had been lucky after all. Incredibly lucky to find Caelric's note and map when they did, before--

Before Isoldeia broke her bonds entirely?

Caelric hadn't told them that could happen. Hadn't even hinted at it. But deep in her bones, Miasmora knew.

She didn't know anything about the kind of magic written on the walls around her, or about Meridellian princesses, or about ancient history. But she knew stories, and in stories, ancient evil sorceresses couldn't plant forged documents outside the confines of their prison unless they were [i]very[/i] close to being able to shirk those bonds. If she'd tried to lure Wisric down here, then the thing she needed to get free was help of some kind, and--

Misamora's middle roiled.

Her middle never roiled. She was a Swamp Gas Skeith, capable of digesting anything, even--especially--bad news and terrible realizations, but [i]this[/i] made her middle roil.

"We should not have come down here," she said. The words were almost a whisper.

Wisric and Caelric, who had continued on a tangent about ancient history while she'd been lost in thought, abruptly stopped talking.

"Uhh, Miasmora?" Wisric said. "You're...a little green. Like. Pale green? Very pale green."

"We already did it," Maismora said.

"Did what?" the Ixi prompted. "You remember how you were annoyed that I wouldn't tell you what I was thinking? You're doing the same thing, and I'm--"

Miasmora dug into her pockets for the key she'd found in the library. It settled in the palm of her hand, and the crest on it morphed under the glow of the spectral lights Caelric had cast around the room. Morphed into an inverted, darkened, blighted crest.

They'd carried it straight to her door.

She held the key out for Wisric and Caelric to inspect. "I thought we'd have to use this to get in here. But we--" The word stuck in Miasmora's throat. "It's not that kind of key, is it Caelric, and we--" Miamora forced the last words out. "We already opened her prison."