The Fractured Tower Book 2, Chapter 69

There were two objects on the agenda. First, and most importantly, ca the identification of the loot. For Sorin, that ant finally getting a good look at that slate and hoping that it wouldn’t require another trip through the Antechamber to use it. Probably will, though. I’m not that lucky, and the tower isn’t that nice.

The second task was to survey the ruin. With the destruction of its guardian and heart, it was entirely possible, even likely, that the behavior of the monsters would change. Until such a ti as the tower reset everything, the beetles might have forgotten their newfound hatred of Sorin. If that was the case, they had a highly productive day of harvesting anima ahead of them.

They started with the big pieces, if only because the seven-foot-tall armoire was the current center of attention. Sorin pulled out the mirror and started trying to decipher the magic in it, which was complicated by the fact that it seed to have a thin cloud of anima hanging off it. That slowly dissipated, and eventually he figured out what he was looking at.

“A mirror of reflection,” he announced. “I didn’t na it. I realize it’s a stupid na. All mirrors are mirrors of reflection.”

“What’s it do?” Nemari asked patiently while Rue rolled her eyes.

“It lets you see into your soulspace without actually entering it.”

“Oh, that could actually be useful for practicing soulprint rging!”

“No,” Yoru said before Sorin could correct her. “It’s only for seeing into your soulspace. You can’t actually do anything unless you enter like normal.”

“Then what’s the point?” Odric asked, his brow furrowed.

“To look at your collection and be vain about it, I guess,” Sorin told him with a shrug. “Sobody would happily buy this, but even if it was useful to us, I can’t imagine carrying it around.”

While the others debated the mirror’s strange properties and tried to find so reason they might want to keep it, Sorin moved on to the breastplate. He already knew no one was going to want it, if for no other reason than they already had better. That was the problem with being sponsored and having access to powerful crafters. Tower-forged loot was appropriate for the location it was found in. That didn’t make it better than sothing made by a rank 15 blacksmith.

“Diving Breastplate,” he said finally, frowning. This piece had so anima clinging to it, as well, though not as much as the mirror had. “Pulls you down to the bottom of whatever water you’re in, provides enough air to breathe as long as you can pump anima into the sapphire. It’ll help with the pressure, but I wouldn’t go too far down with just this, certainly not ocean-floor deep.”

“More useful than the mirror, but situational enough to put it in storage rather than wear it regularly,” Yoru said.

Both the sword and the spear were surprisingly mundane. They were magical, but with the sa basic enchantnts any apprentice enchanter could put on them. “Sharpness, durability, and bloodletting,” he explained. “Good weapons for climbers on Floor 2. Not great for us.”

The two soulprints were set aside once Sorin told everyone what they were. Odric expressed so interest in Tremor Sense to go with his Earth Shaping, but without the accompanying ability to rge the soulprints, it was a lot of overlap in capabilities and wasted space.

While Sorin was examining the trio of dice—all of which were one linked item, magically speaking—Yoru peered at the armoire. It was sitting open, its drawers and cabinet empty now. “Where did you get this thing?” he asked.

“From the cache, of course,” Sorin said distractedly.

“This is tower-forged?”

“Yeah. Probably just cleans whatever clothes are put inside it. Might nd them, too. It’s neat, but not especially valuable.”

“Oh,” Yoru said, disappointnt plain in his voice. Then, after a mont, he added, “When you say ‘probably,’ do you an because you looked at it and that’s what you think it can do, or because you haven’t examined it closely and that’s your first guess?”

“The second one,” Sorin said. He looked up from the dice. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you’ve been complaining about the anima sticking to everything for the last ten minutes,” Yoru said. “And one thing they all have in common is that they were inside this. And it’s definitely magical.”

Sorin’s breath caught. In a flash, he was on his feet and standing next to Yoru. “You don’t think…”

“It could be.”

“Could be what?” Rue asked. They had everyone’s attention now.

“Let’s not get excited,” Sorin cautioned. “It’s probably sothing to do with dragging it all through the gateway or sothing. The odds…”

“But it could be,” Yoru argued.

“I honestly have never seen one,” Sorin said. “If it is, I couldn’t identify it.”

“If it is what?” Rue interrupted.

Both n turned to look at her, surprised by the outburst. “An enchanter’s cabinet,” Yoru told her. “Probably not very powerful since this is only Floor 5, but still, it would likely be the most valuable find anyone’s made this year.”

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“Holy crap,” Nemari said, her eyes going wide as she regarded the armoire in a new light.

“I don’t know what that ans,” Rue snapped. “How about a simple explanation?”

“An enchanter’s cabinet is one of the rarest tower-forged items in existence,” Sorin told her. “It doesn’t have to be an armoire, either. Any sort of cupboard could be one. Technically, even an empty box or bag might qualify. If this really is one—which I doubt both because it’s Floor 5 and because it’s huge—it would go for at least ten thousand danirs.”

“More like fifty,” Yoru said.

“What it does is very simple, but also very important. Enchanting is a very ti-consuming process made all the more tedious by the fact that it has to be done all at once. An enchanter must saturate the object of their attention in anima, which ans pushing a steady channel of their own reserves in without variance in flow and without stopping.”

“Which ans they’re limited by how fast they can recover anima,” Rue said as she started adding the pieces together.

Sorin shook his head. “You’re still thinking too small. They’re limited by that, and by factors like how long they can maintain their focus or, for the more powerful enchantnts, how long they can stay conscious. Achieving the equivalent of a C-rank soulprint as an enchantnt would probably take about a week of nonstop work just to imbue enough anima into whatever I’m trying to enchant.”

“Don’t forget that the enchanter then needs to be in a good enough state to actually perform the enchantnt,” Yoru pointed out. “It’s not enough to be awake for a week straight. You have to do fine, detailed precision work at the end of it.”

“Exactly. I’m not an enchanter, so you’re not getting anything like that out of . I only know the basic concepts,” Sorin explained. “This is all relevant because the enchanter’s cabinet does the first part automatically for you. All you have to do is feed it a large enough reservoir of anima at your leisure, whenever you feel like adding a bit more to it, and then place whatever you want to enchant inside. It does everything else, leaving the enchanter to live their life while it works and enabling them to approach the delicate work at the end with a fresh mind.”

“Better, stronger enchantnts,” Nemari said.

“In theory only. We don’t know that this is an enchanter’s cabinet. It might be. It might be sothing else.”

“It’s worth taking it back ho to test it,” Yoru said. “Especially since you can do that and be back in a few minutes.”

“After we finish going over everything else,” Sorin agreed, but he could tell everyone was too enthralled with the idea of the armoire being an enchanter’s cabinet. In all his years climbing, he’d never seen one in person.

There were rumors, of course. Every famous enchanter was suspected of having access to one, and every single one of them denied it. Sorin had always wondered if the cabinets even existed, or if it was just a rumor soone had started that had gotten out of hand. He supposed, if the armoire did turn out to be one, that he’d finally have his answer.

He left the rest of the team to speculate and returned to examining the remaining pieces of loot. Without the haze of anima shrouding them—another point in favor of the enchanter’s cabinet theory—it was much easier to divine their purpose.

The dice were strange items, and not ones he wanted on him. Each was a single use item, but as they were linked together, they couldn’t be divided up. Using whatever arcane thods the tower had imbued into them, they could alter so random elent of an encounter up to three tis. One die would make things worse. One would make things better. The final one would just change the situation, not necessarily for better or worse, but decidedly different.

If the owner had any control over when a die might decide to exert its influence, he would have considered keeping them so that he could burn up the bad luck in a stable situation. Lacking that, the dice could be thought of as cursed more than enchanted. Sorin wasn’t even sure he’d be willing to sell them, but he supposed for a non-climber, they probably wouldn’t result in a fatal outco when the bad luck die decided to interfere.

Fortunately, the rest of the loot was less ambiguous. The fire-gold necklace did exactly what Sorin expected it to, which was to say it enhanced fire magic. Nemari claid it imdiately, even though Sorin had doubts about enabling her dependency on that set of soulprints.

The bracelet bestowed sothing like Iron Body on the wearer, though far stronger and only for a single hit. Then it had to recharge for at least a day before it could be used again. The only thing that made it worth keeping was that the wearer could decide when to trigger it, which made it a potential life-saving tool if one of them saw a heavy attack coming that they couldn’t handle on their own.

The puzzle ball was actually a container with a soulprint in it. Ironically, once they solved it, it was a tiny little machine that rolled in circles on a track—Train of Thought, which they’d all just already acquired a few days ago. Yoru just laughed and said they could replace one of the ones they’d taken from the armory.

The dagger and statue were the most interesting pieces. In Sorin’s opinion, with the possible exception of the armoire itself, they were the only two items that were actually worth keeping. The statue was a summoning stone, earth-attuned, and capable of calling forth a miniature copy of the ruin guardian it was carved to look like.

Miniature was a relative asure, however. The real guardian had been twenty feet long. The replica was perhaps six, which still made it bigger than the average human. The only downside was that it was an anima-hungry piece of work. It would have to be deployed strategically, if at all. Still, the option to have a disposable minion was valuable.

The dagger displayed no discernable magical properties that Sorin could see. Yoru, who was versed in object identification as well, agreed with the assessnt. They even had Rue check it to see if it displayed any sort of aura, but it ca back blank.

“Well, it can’t be nothing if it ca from a tower cache,” Nemari said. “I guess we need an expert to look at it.”

“Maybe… but… I think it’s ant for ,” Sorin said. He drew his own sword and displayed the blue hue on the blade, which was a near perfect match for the sheath of the dagger. “I’m not sure what its purpose is yet, but I think if I hang onto it, I’ll find a use for it.”

Finally, they reached the bottom of the bag. Only the slate that he expected he’d need to hang onto until the next Antechamber was left. The symbol was strange, similar in so ways to the one he was familiar with, but decidedly different. It contained the sa circle, but instead of seven lines going through it, there were only two. Another one connected them, making a sort of sideways ‘H.’

On the inside edge of the circle were seven different dots. None of them were colored, but Sorin had no doubt they were ant to represent the seven towers. A thinner line connected the dots to each other in a circle, but not to the design in the middle.

He was so caught up in the symbol that it took him a minute to realize sothing more important. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no. You have got to be kidding .”

“What’s wrong?” Rue asked.

The slot in the center of his second mosaic piece was an oval, just like the black stone on the cross guard of his sword. Sorin held up the slate for everyone to see, showing that it was clearly and perfectly round.

“It doesn’t fit.”