“Ok. What’s the deal with you?” Sage Yeltz asked, clearly annoyed by the whole situation.

  “As much as I hate work, I still have things to do and submit. And clearly this is a waste of my time. Explain yourself.” She said, conjuring a glass of water onto her hands.

  “Err… Could we try to take a look at the contract binding me first?” Aurelius asked carefully.

  For a magical contract, a copy was left within the signatory that could be viewed through a notary like a receipt.

  And since Aurelius was not sure about the nature of the secrecy clause that was binding him, he had come up with a plan that would keep things the safest for him.

  It might drive him insane if he had to stay in that void another time without a proper meal after all…

  Sage Yeltz squinted at the squirming Aurelius, getting more irritated by the minute.

  “Ok. Sure. Do you know what the name of this notary is?” She finally asked, taking a sip of her drink violently.

  “No ma’am. But I believe that it was a pen gilded with gold that Mr. Unclass used to make me sign this particular contract.” Aurelius said plainly, blinking innocently at Sage Yeltz.

  This seemed to make Sage Yeltz squint even harder, creating wrinkles around her eyes in a display of intense suspicion.

  “Do you know what you’re asking me to show you?” Sage Yeltz growled, taking another violent swig of water.

  Aurelius continued to stare innocently at the sage, shaking his head with a forced smile plastered on his face in an attempt to appear as harmless as possible.

  While he had his suspicions, he did not know what exactly that damn pen was for certain…

  “Who do you work for?” Sage Yeltz asked, snapping her finger to teleport some more water to top off her glass.

  “Why, I’m glad you asked that.” Aurelius responded, smiling innocently at the increasingly irritable sage across him.

  “I’ve been told that I’m a loyal dog to the Commission.” Aurelius answered without a single hint of sarcasm in his words.

  Sage Yeltz did a double take at his response, her face running through a marathon of expressions. And much to Aurelius’s shock, she settled on the one most unexpected expression that he had ever seen on the woman’s face.

  “...AHAHAHA!” The sage laughed heartily, and slapped her knees in a horrifying display of amusement. This naturally caused Aurelius to flinch reflexively.

  Had she gone mad?

  “Haha… Ah… You know what, I’ll humour you for today Mr. Dog.” Sage Yeltz said, smiling in amusement at a petrified Aurelius.

  Snapping her fingers, she sent away her glass of water into the line of geometric shapes. Then, the sage reached into her pockets, and pulled out a wooden stick.

  Snapping it into two, she snapped her fingers once more, causing the world to swirl in colour and changing the scenery into white walls lit up eerily.

  Four Commission guards immediately stood up in horror at their sudden appearance, hurriedly hiding evidence of their interrupted card game.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Sage Yeltz waved at them dismissively, unclipping a badge from her hips.

  “I’m here to see the vault. I’ll turn a blind eye to whatever you were doing to slack off on your duty, so don’t ask questions.” She said coolly.

  “Yes ma’am.” The embarrassed guards said reflexively, giving their boss a salute with cards still fluttering behind their backs.

  The corridor that they had appeared in definitely was carved and inlaid with ignivite.

  Aurelius could feel the lack of mana within the space up ahead, as well as the presence of several high level warding spells.

  He could not even hope to fathom the cost of maintaining such a complex web of wards in such a tight space.

  Sage Yeltz, turning over to Aurelius now, used her chin to point down the corridor.

  At the very end of the long, intricately carved corridor, Aurelius could vaguely make out a rectangular vault door.

  Sage Yeltz gestured at Aurelius to follow along, stepping into the strange corridor casually.

  “As high as I am on the totem pole, I cannot directly summon an item as valuable as that pen directly for the sake of whoever the hell you are.” She explained, leading Aurelius down the corridor without much concern.

  As Aurelius stepped into the corridor, he felt a strange change immediately at the back of his brain.

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was… but he felt… an itch in a hidden corner of his mind like some sort of tiny ant had burrowed its way into it.

  “I’m not sure how you became aware that we keep that particular item in The Tower, but I suppose it saves us a trip over to some other foreign vaults.” Sage Yeltz commented dismissively, sauntering down the corridor casually.

  Aurelius nodded at Sage Yeltz’s comment as he took more steps down the corridor, staring at the red carvings of the brightly lit corridor. As Aurelius walked, he tried to make sense of some of these geometric shapes as a mind exercise.

  “The magic that was invested into these vaults probably exceed those from the Churches.” She continued, seemingly rather talkative today.

  …Wait. Didn’t he pass by that exact pattern just now?

  Aurelius looked back at where he had just come from in confusion.

  To his absolute shock, he saw an infinite expanse of the same corridor.

  An illusion?!

  Aurelius snapped back around, and found that the corridor had twisted itself into several different passageways, with Sage Yeltz standing confidently at its junctions.

  He took another step towards the sage and the corridor bent once more without warning, folding into itself at an impossible angle. When he glanced back, the distance he had just crossed had vanished entirely, replaced by a solid wall only a few steps behind him.

  A maze!

  “Err… What’s going on?” Aurelius asked in horror.

  “Just the security systems kicking in.” Sage Yeltz replied casually.

  The walls and the patterns etched on their surfaces twisted and curved at her comment.

  The floor that Aurelius had been standing on folded into itself, creating a horrifying wave of solid under his feet, threatening to knock himself off of the safety of the ground.

  And all over the walls, horrifying figures and grotesque geometric shapes started to take shape, threatening to burst forth from its solid surface in a defiance of the laws of nature.

  “AHHH” Aurelius screamed as white… things that looked like human faces popped up into the walls right beside him to paint a horrifying picture of hell in Aurelius’s retinas.

  Sage Yeltz stood calmly in the ocean of strange eldritch horrors that painted the horizons, and instead simply held out her badge into empty air.

  Then, with a magical click, everything around Aurelius immediately collapsed into a strange, vast white void.

  And the familiar corridor restored itself all around him in a single instant, taking with it that horrible itch that had invaded his brain moments prior, leaving Aurelius out of breath and sweating in horror.

  They had arrived at the vault.

  With an amused smile at the panting Aurelius, Sage Yeltz pushed open the vault doors, unfolding a strange room in front of Aurelius’s poor eyes.

  The room was of a similar makeup as the corridor that led up to it, with white walls engraved with red ignivite patterns.

  Arranged neatly around the room were around two dozen labeled boxes, each with its own pedestal.

  What was strange, however, was the atmosphere that leaked from the room itself.

  Aurelius stared into the room, then out back behind himself.

  …Yes, he could swear that he could feel the literal heat sucked from his skin the moment that he stared into the room.

  Very creepy indeed.

  Sage Yeltz looked unbothered as she stepped into the room and unlatched a box carefully.

  And as she carefully pulled out the familiar pen, Sage Yeltz smiled kindly at Aurelius.

  “Here you go.” She said.

  “Here’s Pultris.”

  “The Djinn.”