I Am The Game's Villain

”Your eye,” she breathed.

”Open yours,” he said.

She understood what he meant before the sentence finished. Her hand came up almost instinctively and she opened her left eye slowly revealing a silver hue.

She could see.

She stood there blinking, adjusting, and then blinking again because adjusting did not seem like the right word for what was happening. She could see more than she had expected. More than she remembered. More, even, than her right eye gave her on its clearest day. The world through that eye was vivid and sharp and layered in ways she did not have language for yet.

She looked at Amael and her throat tightened.

”W—Why,” she said her voice trembling.

She didn’t understand what exactly he did but she knew he just gave up something priceless to her.

Amael just looked at her with a gentle smile then turned his gaze toward Sylvia.

”Get cleaned up,” he said. ”Both of you. I need to show you something.” And without waiting for a response he turned and walked off into the dark, leaving the two of them standing there.

Half an hour later, scrubbed clean of dirt and dried sweat, they followed Amael back into the cavern. But he did not stop where he usually did. He walked past the familiar stretches of stone and firelight and came to a halt at the far end, in front of what had always looked like nothing more than a dead end wall of solid rock.

Lisandra and Sylvia exchanged a glance.

”What is that?” Sylvia asked, her eyes catching the object Amael had just produced. It was a key, golden and oddly shaped, its bow formed in the perfect cross of two intersecting lines.

”This,” Amael said, ”is the key to that.” And without waiting he pressed it into the stone.

Golden light erupted from the point of contact and spread outward in every direction at once, racing across the surface of the rock in bright, branching lines. Ancient symbols and runes bloomed in its wake, nothing like the random cracks and textures of natural stone. They moved and shifted and connected until they had traced the outline of a shape, a tetragonal circle, perfectly symmetrical, burning against the dark.

Then the rock moved. A deep, resonant rumble passed through the ground beneath their feet and the wall simply parted, folding back on itself.

Both Lisandra and Sylvia drew in sharp breaths, shocked.

Beyond the opening, torches ignited on their own one after another, the flames catching fast and burning a deep, steady orange that pushed the darkness back and revealed what lay inside. A chamber, large enough to swallow the cavern they slept in twice over, lined from floor to ceiling with the accumulated weight of what looked like an entire lifetime of collecting. Shelves crowded with books whose spines were marked in scripts Lisandra could not immediately identify. Chests of various sizes, some open, some sealed tight with mechanisms she did not recognize. Artifacts of every conceivable shape arranged with the care of someone who understood exactly what each one was worth. Gold, yes, but not the kind that mattered most here. The room had the feeling of a library more than a treasury.

They had slept thirty feet from this for six years and had never once felt a trace of it.

”What is this place?” Lisandra asked stuttering.

”Does it belong to you?” Sylvia added.

Amael shook his head. ”It belonged to Enigma.”

Lisandra turned to look at him. ”Enigma?”

”Everything in this room is hers,” he said, his gaze moving slowly across the shelves and chests. ”Every artifact, every piece of writing, every object. She gathered all of it and sealed it away in here. I have read everything worth reading and come away with more questions than I started with, which is its own kind of answer I suppose.” A brief, quiet laugh. ”But there are things in this room that the Gods themselves would not want people like you or even people like me to know about. Secrets that were buried purposefully. Forbidden things.” His hand came to rest on a structure near the wall, long and sealed, shaped like a coffin. He let it rest there a moment before continuing. ”Everything here carries weight and importance. My own father would burn a great deal to get his hands on certain pieces of this collection, and he is not a man who wants for much.”

Sylvia frowned slightly. ”I don’t understand that. Gods don’t have limits on what they can obtain, do they?”