Memoirs of Your Local Small-time Villainess-Chapter 347 - Layered meanings

Scarlett examined their surroundings in silence — the walls, the floor beneath their feet, even the intricately designed ceiling that stretched overhead. She scrutinised it all, taking in the endless glyphs and channels of magical circuitry woven seamlessly into the architecture of Beld Thylelion. Illuminated by the ethereal flames she had conjured to float gently around the party, the patterns seemed impossibly precise, as if the entire structure were a single, colossal enchantment.

It felt less like a ruin and more like a vast, living mechanism — an arcane engine whose true purpose hovered just beyond perception. Even with her grasp of Zuverian script and their fundamental arcanology, Scarlett found it hard to decipher more than a few fragments at a time. Trying to piece together the full significance of this place from these scattered impressions was like attempting to understand a book by glimpsing only a few of its torn pages.

In the game, all of this had served as little more than set dressing. Beld Thylelion’s main function was to house and protect the Tribute of Dominion. Beyond that, it was just another dungeon for players to explore. But here—in this reality—it was clearly more than just a backdrop. The place itself carried weight. It felt far greater than simply acting as the Tribute’s vault.

Scarlett was trying to understand exactly why.

The complex web of arrays and inscriptions wasn’t decorative. They had purpose and intent that hadn’t been obvious in the game. So what was it? Why had Thainnith constructed something of such scale and intricacy just to house the Tribute? Why was the grandiosity so necessary?

She knew at least part of the answer, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy her.

A faint crease touched her brow as she considered the possibilities, her boots tapping softly against the stone floor. The party moved steadily down the corridor in a practised formation — Fynn took the lead at the front, with Shin bringing up the rear. Scarlett walked a few paces ahead of Allyssa and the others, who murmured half-hushed conversation, alert but at ease. Everyone was watching for signs of trouble.

Arnaud was the only one still new to expeditions like this with them. Kat was already mostly familiar with Scarlett’s methods from their previous collaborations, and Arnaud, as a seasoned Shielder, had adapted quickly to the group’s rhythm.

As Scarlett caught fragments of Allyssa and Shin recounting experiences from the Hall of Echoes, Rosa quietly stepped up beside her.

Scarlett glanced at her, then returned her gaze to the glyphwork along the stone. “Was there something you wished to say?” she asked.

“Can’t a girl check in on how her favourite noblewoman is holding up?” Rosa replied, a teasing lilt in her voice. “You were staring so intently at the walls, I thought maybe you were trying to look busy just to avoid seeming lonely.”

“Hardly.”

“No? Must’ve misread you, then. Happens to the best.”

“Of that, I have no doubt.”

Rosa chuckled. “All business today, are we?”

“This is neither the time nor the place for jests and diversions,” Scarlett replied evenly.

“I respectfully disagree. But I’ll honour your sense of propriety.”

“Good.”

They walked in silence for a moment, Rosa matching her pace. Scarlett tried to focus on the etchings, but finally released a quiet breath and turned her head. “What is it, Rosa?”

The bard grinned, almost triumphant. “Can’t ignore me even if you try, huh? Not that I blame you.” She tossed a lock of curled hair over her shoulder with practised flair, batting her eyes. “Even I get caught in front of mirrors sometimes when I forget to look away quickly enough.”

Scarlett simply stared at her, wholly unmoved.

Rosa met her gaze with the same smile — until it slowly faded, replaced by something more serious. Her voice dropped. “Can you feel it too? That there’s something different about this place?”

Scarlett arched a single brow. “I believe we have already discussed this.”

Rosa shook her head. “Beyond just the general atmosphere that Allyssa was talking about. I mean something else.” She gestured vaguely around them. “Do you feel it?”

Scarlett studied her, then her gaze drifted towards Rosa’s chest, where the Heartstone lay hidden beneath her clothes. Rosa’s mouth twitched into a knowing smile—no doubt considering some quip about her ‘eyes being up here’—but thankfully, the woman seemed to possess enough restraint to hold it in.

“Are you sensing something specific?” Scarlett asked, nodding slightly towards the concealed artifact.

Rosa’s smirk dimmed. She looked at Scarlett for a few seconds, then faced forward. Scarlett caught a flicker of blackness in Rosa’s eyes as her aura shifted slightly.

“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly,” the bard said. “Ever since we got here, there’s been this kind of suffocating pressure. Like something sitting on my chest.” She touched the spot gently, fingertips brushing fabric. “Not painful or anything. Just…opposed. Like I shouldn’t be here. Like I’m icky.”

Scarlett watched her profile. That hint of uncertainty was rare in Rosa’s usually upbeat expression.

Not once since Scarlett had embedded the Heartstone in her had Rosa voiced a complaint. Not about the demonic power it came with, nor about the toll it might take. She’d never even suggested she felt any regret, never placed blame, though she had every reason to.

If anything, she’d embraced it.

But Scarlett wondered if maybe a part of Rosa was weighed down by it after all. Concealed beneath her ever-present gaiety. This was Rosa they were talking about, in the end. The woman had made an art of smiling through the worst.

Scarlett looked ahead. “…You are not icky,” she simply said.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rosa turn to her. A quiet shift passed over the bard’s face. “Huh. Never really thought someone would need to say that to me. Or that it’d mean so much.”

“You are welcome. Do not expect a repeat performance.”

Rosa chuckled again. “I’ll treasure it until my dying breath.”

“See that you do.”

Scarlett wasn’t entirely sure why she’d added that last part. Why she felt the need to patch over that moment of sincerity with stiff formality. But not saying it at all felt wrong.

As silence settled again, her thoughts drifted back to Rosa’s words — about sensing something else in this place.

Since arriving in this world, she’d grown accustomed to detecting a variety of supernatural phenomena. Forces and presences that would have completely eluded her when she first got here. Perhaps the most prominent in Beld Thylelion was the sheer density of magical energy embedded in the stone itself, saturating the entire structure like arcane residue. It was likely this phenomenon Allyssa had sensed earlier. The atmosphere was so charged that even those without classical magical training could feel it — like standing beside a spell held just on the verge of release.

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Beyond that, through the power of Thainnith’s legacy and its tenuous connection to the fragment of the Anomalous One’s power—still sealed from interacting with the Material Realm—Scarlett also sensed something else. Like a second weight layered over the first, quieter but no less present. Ethereal, cold, and strange. She couldn’t really describe it in plain words, but it tugged faintly at the edge of her awareness, and intuitively, she felt it had something to do with Fate.

And beneath even that, there was a third sensation. One that, as Rosa said, Scarlett couldn’t quite pinpoint. It wasn’t suffocating or hostile, though. Not to her, at least. It was almost…airy, for lack of a better term. Diffused, or half-formed. She’d even wondered if she was imagining it. Was this the same sensation troubling Rosa?

After some contemplation, she held out her hand and, with a flicker of will, summoned the [Eternal Flameweaver’s Athane]. The dagger shimmered into existence, the hilt’s sanguine scales catching the firelight as if slick with oil. Scarlett turned it slowly in her grip, examining the blade’s edge. A pale, bluish-white flame flickered to life along the base, ghosting up the blade in smooth curls, strangely cool against her skin.

Since returning from the Rising Isle, she’d always felt something faint—barely perceptible—tethered to the Flameweaver. Just a subtle presence reminding her of its existence and the divine connection it represented. But it had never been much more than that.

That still hadn’t changed. But…

Her brow tightened slightly.

It wasn’t just in her mind. That third, ambient sensation floating through Beld Thylelion… It reminded her of that tether. Not necessarily in strength or function. Just…in texture. In shape. Like two unrelated melodies sharing a single note.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Rosa asked, nodding towards the pale fire dancing along the dagger.

Scarlett looked at her, then let the flames flicker out. The dagger vanished in the same breath. “It does not.” freewёbnoνel.com

She was still working out exactly what those flames were, but they had never hurt. The Angler Man had called them the fires of Itris, which made sense. She knew they consumed mana rather than anything physical, and from her experiments, they didn’t interact with people at all. But she had noticed that they could sometimes destabilise and unmake certain magical arrays or wards, if they were weakened or exposed.

Her eyes drifted towards Rosa again — specifically, to the woman’s chest. To the hidden Heartstone.

…It was probably best to keep those flames away from the bard, just to be safe.

Rosa followed her gaze and tilted her head, about to say something—

But Fynn stopped abruptly ahead of them.

Scarlett’s attention snapped forward as the rest of the party halted. Everyone shifted, instinctively alert, eyes on the white-haired youth who stood motionless ahead.

Until now, the passage had been straight and unbroken. No side halls, no doors — just a slow journey through ancient stone. Scarlett’s flames lit the way for several dozen metres, and beyond that there was only darkness. Unlike most Zuverian ruins they’d explored, much of Beld Thylelion lacked the usual glow of enchanted crystals on sconces or ambient light glyphs. There was a starkness to it, a quiet that gave the place a stillness and set the nerves ever-so-slightly on edge.

“Why did we stop?” Allyssa asked, pulling her goggles down with one hand, the other gripping a flask on her bandolier.

Fynn didn’t respond at first. He stared ahead, then suddenly thrust an arm forward, as if grabbing something midair.

His hand closed on nothing. He stared at his empty palm, as though confused.

Scarlett frowned.

What was he doing? This definitely wasn’t an idle twitch. Were his ancestors acting up? If so, that could be a serious problem. The last thing they needed was them getting restless now.

“Hey, Fynn, you good?” Rosa asked, her tone light but cautious as she stepped up and rested a hand on his shoulder.

He turned to her, brow drawn and eyes slightly distant. Then he looked back down the corridor.

“…This place is strange,” he said eventually.

“Sure, we’ve established that,” Rosa replied. “You’re the first to start swatting at ghosts, though.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t a ghost.”

“…What was it?” Scarlett asked, eyes narrowing.

Fynn was silent for a few moments longer. He kept staring into the dark, listening to something only he could hear. Then he looked at her. “I don’t know. I just sensed…something. It felt familiar.”

Scarlett studied his face. If he knew more, he would’ve said so. Whether this was tied to Beld Thylelion itself or some quirk of his ancestral bond was hard to say — especially if no one else could feel it.

She glanced back at Arnaud.

The Shielder stood still, arms crossed, calmly observing. He didn’t say anything at first. Then his eyes met hers. “Is there something you have to say, Baroness?”

Scarlett paused. “I merely wondered if you noticed anything as well.”

She still didn’t fully understand the extent of Arnaud’s abilities, but like Fynn, he had a knack for perceiving the unnatural.

The man shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Whatever young Fynn perceived, it’s beyond me.”

“I see…”

She turned back to Fynn, watching him a moment longer. Then she motioned ahead. “Remain alert. If you sense it again, speak up immediately. Until then, we move on.”

Fynn nodded and faced forward once more. The group resumed their march, this time slower and more cautious, every gaze scanning the gloom and glyph-lined walls.

Eventually, the corridor widened into a large chamber. So large, in fact, that its ceiling and farthest edges disappeared into shadow. Scarlett summoned additional flames, and they drifted outward, spreading light across the space.

Grand pillars rose from the floor, carved from veined marble that gleamed like bone under the firelight. The same flawless stone composed the walls and floor, lending the room a cold, almost surgical elegance. As with the rest of Beld Thylelion, glyphs and magical circuitry coated every surface — but here, the patterns were moving. Slowly and deliberately, the symbols and carvings drifted and rearranged, folding over each other in difficult patterns that made no immediate sense.

A low whistle escaped both Rosa and Kat in unison, and the rest of the party took in the sight.

“This place looks important,” Allyssa murmured, crouching beside a glyph etched into the floor. It glided toward the entrance, then abruptly veered toward the wall.

“It may appear so,” Scarlett replied, her eyes fixed on a particularly dense spiral of runes near them, “but this is only a convergence chamber. A kind of processing node for the arrays that run through Beld Thylelion. They are not uncommon in Zuverian ruins.”

She stepped closer, studying the shifting glyphs. “Typically, chambers like these serve as command relays of sorts for complex defensive arrays — monitoring threats, calculating probabilities, and activating layered responses. You may think of them as arcane predictive engines, optimised to read magical input and prepare spells before a threat fully manifests.”

She paused, brow furrowing as the cluster of symbols folded rapidly into a new configuration. “However…they are rarely exposed like this. Normally, such systems are sealed deep within the structure and not placed in accessible areas.”

Trying to read the patterns was hard. It felt like trying to understand an operating system by watching lines of raw code flicker past the screen. Thainnith’s legacy told her these chambers weren’t unusual, and she had encountered them here in Beld Thylelion in the game, but…

Something about actually seeing one in person unsettled part of her. A tickle at the back of her mind.

She was pretty sure that the Rising Isle and other Zuverian ruins did have something similar. The chamber itself wasn’t the issue. The level of arcane sophistication used here was leagues beyond anything modern magic could replicate, but that was expected.

So what was it that nagged at her?

Her brow tightened even further.

Was it the behaviour of the glyphs here? The way they shifted in response to something she couldn’t quite see or feel? Or maybe it was tied to the arrays’ predictive function. Did it have something to do with Fate, perhaps? Thainnith, as a divinarch, had possessed deep insight into Fate, surpassing even that of gods if his fragment was to be believed. It stood to reason that a civilisation like the ancient Zuver might have embedded principles of Fate into their magic.

“What’s that?” Kat asked, pointing towards the centre of the room.

There, like an island amid the sea of flowing glyphs, stood a solitary alabaster-white structure. It was smooth and rectangular—almost like a casket—and unmistakably deliberate in its placement.

Scarlett observed it. She had noticed it upon entering but hadn’t focused on it. She didn’t need to. She already knew what it was.

“That is a warden,” she said. “Do you recall what I told you about them?”

Kat blinked. “That’s a warden?”

“The Zuver had a flair for unconventional and varying design.”

“I guess…”

Fynn looked at Scarlett for confirmation. She nodded once, and he moved forward. As he did, pale green energy flared to life above his knuckles, forming translucent claws, and the air stirred faintly in response.

Allyssa and Shin readied their weapons. Rosa tightened her grip on her klert. Kat shifted her stance, adjusting the tall claymore on her shoulder — the one Scarlett had given her. Arnaud simply placed a hand lightly on his sword’s hilt, eyes locked on the structure.

Fynn had taken no more than six steps when the thing moved.

With a slow, grinding sound, the top of the structure rose. Beneath it, crouched low, was a figure carved of pale stone. Four limbs braced against the floor. A hunched torso. A broad, triangular head like a collapsed tower. The upper casing remained fused to its back, like a carapace.

The construct had no face — only etched patterns and sharp angles. Two hollow hourglass-shaped cores glowed in its chest and abdomen, each filled with sand suspended in midair, unmoving.

As it stirred, the light around it began to warp. Scarlett’s flames stopped reaching it, their glow absorbed into the air. In their place, golden threads drifted outward from the creature, gliding like echoes tracing invisible footsteps.

Arnaud stepped forward, but Scarlett raised a hand. She met his eyes. “You may leave this one to us.”

Then she turned to the others, gaze sweeping over them before finally settling on the warden.

“I trust all of you,” she said. “It is time to demonstrate what we are capable of.”