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Lucien’s study would surely hold answers, or at least some kind of hint.
Essek used a combination of graviturgy and courage to balance on the windowsill, his hands wrapped around the cold bricks. He didn’t dare look below, where the ground was likely hundreds of feet away and promised a grisly (and embarrassing) death.
He hadn’t personally snuck out of his room/cell before, but he’d traded Sending spells with a few clerics who were also in the building and had somewhat of an idea of what to do. And where to go.
The spell was cast. Essek could float down off of his window, down a few stories, and land on another windowsill.
Hypothetically.
Assuming that the window he had his eye on was actually Lucien’s study. There was no way he could actually know. He was going off of a few rumors and a logical understanding of architecture, which didn’t mean much at the moment.
The fortress where all of Wildemount’s arcanists were being held didn’t really follow the rules of physics or construction. Once again, Essek hadn’t traveled out of his own room very much, but he’d received warnings from other people that the hallways and passages were unreliable. Portraits would change, door knobs would lock and unlock without rhyme or reason, and sometimes whole rooms would just disappear.
Essek had his own theories on what the deal was with the fortress, but most of them were too disturbing to seriously consider. Teeth, eyes, bones….it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the walls were listening here.
With that reassuring thought, Essek concentrated on the spell again and released his grip on the bricks and leaned off of the windowsill.
As he’d hoped, he began to delicately float off of the windowsill and away from it with almost no trouble at all. It felt like he was merely drifting underwater, not dangling hundreds of feet off of the ground.
He kicked off of the side of a balcony to aim himself better, then slid down the stone above the windowsill, perching on it.
A glance inside revealed a large, round room filled with bookshelves and a large desk. It was hard to see with the moonlight reflecting off of the glass, but Essek would take his chances. Even if it wasn’t Lucien’s study, it had books.
Spellbooks.
If Essek could get his hands back on his spellbook, he’d have a chance of escaping.
He fumbled along the edge of the window, feeling for a latch or a hinge of some kind to open it. There didn’t seem to be one.
Essek sighed. He didn’t really want to do this, but these were desperate times. Hopefully everybody else in the fortress was asleep.
Grabbing onto the top of the window’s frame, he leaned backwards as far as possible, and then tucked his knees into his chest and swung himself into the glass, trying to shatter it with a kick.
Nothing happened, except for a rather loud thunk.
Embarrassing. Well, brute force alone clearly wasn’t going to cut it.
Essek leaned in and pressed his whole right hand against the glass, holding a Ray of Frost right against the window.
This was going to be both loud and noticeable. But it would be worth it, if he succeeded.
Ice crept across the glass, frosting it over and turning it brittle. Once Essek was satisfied with the coverage, he leaned back and tried to kick the window in again.
CRASH!
This time, the window shattered under his weight, sending Essek tumbling into the room and landing on the pile of broken glass.
What a mess. If anybody from the Lucid Bastion had seen this, Essek would have seriously considered fleeing the state.
He stood up, brushing broken glass from his clothes and frowning at his hands, which were now cut up and beginning to gently drip blood.
So long as Essek got his spellbook back, all would be well.
He looked around the room.
It did indeed look like a study. The bookshelves were neatly organized, except they had their spine facing in, as to make it harder to see what the book was. The desk had a few stray papers and ink pots on it, but for the most part looked rather unused. A plush loveseat and a few comfortable-looking chairs were strode around the rest of the room, and two mirrors were hung in the corner next to a grandfather clock.
Wow. Lucien was vain enough to have two mirrors. What a freak.
Essek immediately began searching the desk. He flung open drawers and scattered quills across the desk, not really caring about making a mess (for once). Most of the drawers were fairly empty, except for a battered, ugly old book in the bottom of the largest drawer. He placed it on the desk to take with him later and resumed searching, unearthing a few gold pieces that he dropped into his pocket for the hell of it.
He then approached the bookshelves, reaching out to grab the nearest one, but his hand was abruptly shocked backwards with a painful jolt.
Shit. Some kind of ward protecting the spellbooks. He should’ve known.
Part of him was surprised that he’d even found the spellbooks at all. He’d thought there was a good chance that Lucien had burned them or buried them in a hole or dumped them into the Lucidian Ocean. But they were here, which meant that Lucien wanted to read them or use them…which meant that there had to be some way to access them.
Essek began frantically combing the room in search of a rune or a switch or a key to disable the ward. He looked under the chairs, rapped on the side of the grandfather clock in search of hidden compartments, and then approached the mirrors to try and lift them off the wall.
They were very creepy mirrors, with detailed stone frames. Both of them had three red eyes on either side of the frame, two on the bottom part of the frame, and one dead-center up at the top that was closed.
However, as Essek approached it, the eye on top suddenly snapped open, glowing red and staring right at him.
He sucked in a breath, not daring to move as he stared at it. The other stone eyes around the frames of the mirrors lit up as well, bathing his reflection in an unnerving red light. Only the eyes on the tops of the frames followed him, however.
It was obviously magical. It was obviously dangerous.
But Essek had no choice.
He approached the mirror on the right, watching the red eye on top as it followed him. It didn’t blink, which wasn’t really reassuring.
He glanced at his reflection again, which for some reason was oddly warped now that he was close to it. The red light made him look like a villain from the Age of Arcanum or something.
Essek reached out his hands to try and lift the mirror off of the wall, but he stopped before he could touch it.
His reflection hadn’t moved.
He swallowed, leaning to one side, then the other.
His reflection didn’t move. It just ominously stared at him.
“Hello?” Essek asked, staring back.
His reflection blinked once, then started rippling like it was the surface of a lake. It almost made him dizzy, so he looked away.
“Wow. You are totally not supposed to be in here.”
Now Essek shrieked, spinning around behind him.
But the door was closed. Nobody else was in the room.
“Over here, silly!”
Essek gulped, and rotated back to look at his reflection in the mirror.
It was no longer his reflection. Staring back at him was a blue tiefling with horns curling out of their blue hair. They were wearing a green dress (Essek guessed it was a dress - he was only seeing them from the waist up, but it looked like a dress) with a pink backpack slung over their shoulders.
“Wait a second!” they cried. “I know you!”
“SHHH!” Essek hissed. “Keep your voice down!”
“Essek!” they cried. “It’s me, Jester! From the Mighty Nein, remember? You gave us a house!”
The Mighty Nein. As soon as the tiefling said that, everything slid into place. That ragtag band of mercenaries who’d gifted the Beacon back to the Bright Queen months and months ago.
“Jester Lavorre.” Essek repeated back. “How…why are you in a mirror? ”
A magic mirror. Two magic mirrors, probably. Essek had only heard legends of such things, and none of them were pleasant.
Jester huffed, blowing some stray hairs out of her forehead in a distinctly frustrated move (was her hair longer? How long had it been?). “Lucien hates me and Caleb specifically. Or maybe not hates , actually. He wanted to keep us around. So he trapped us in mirrors.”
“Caleb? Widogast?” Essek said.
“Yup. You totally remember him, right? You taught him a few spells.”
Right. The Zemnian wizard with the cat. Essek remembered him fairly enough. He’d been intriguing, but a lot of things had happened since then. Essek hadn’t thought of Caleb Widogast or the Mighty Nein since they’d last asked him to teleport gods-know-where.
“How in the hells do you know Lucien? Why did he decide to trap you guys?”
Jester’s expression faltered. Essek’s memory was of an exuberant, overexcited cleric, so seeing her hesitate suddenly felt like a big deal.
“It’s…a long, shitty story.” she eventually said. “We couldn’t stop him from…doing all this.”
She gestured around.
Essek wasn’t sure if this meant he could reasonably blame the Mighty Nein for the entire affair, but decided not to dwell on that for the moment.
“I have to ask you something.” Essek said, getting back down to business. “I’m trying to get into the bookshelves, but they’re being protected with a spell of sorts. I’m looking for a way to disable it.”
Jester raised an eyebrow. “Can’t you just dispel magic?”
Essek resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “I can’t dispel the ward itself, I have to find the rune.”
“Hm.” Jester said. “I don’t know anything about that, so you should definitely ask Caleb.” She tilted her thumb over her left shoulder in the direction of the other mirror, which was still reflecting Essek and the rest of the room normally.
“I will do that,” he said. “Thank you, Jester.”
She grinned. “Anytime, Essek. Hey, if you find a way to get us out of here, you totally should.”
“I will consider it.”
Essek stepped to the side, out of the mirror’s range, and Jester’s image warped and reflected and vanished, returning the mirror to its normal reflective state. The left mirror began to ripple and shift and twist, and Caleb appeared in it. He was still wearing his purple coat, though his hair and beard were definitely longer.
“Ah. Nice to see you again, Shadowhand.” he said, not looking very happy. “I understand you need my help.”
“You can hear, then.” Essek interpreted.
“Indeed. We can hear through here, but someone has to be in range for us to be able to respond.”
“Unfortunate.” Essek sighed. “Well? Have you seen where the wards are?”
“I have.” Caleb said simply.
Essek waited a beat for him to describe them, but he didn’t. “Are they in this room?”
“They are.”
If Caleb had physically been in the room with him, Essek would’ve had a hard time not slapping him.
All of this sitting around without action had seriously harmed his ability to stay calm.
“So?” Essek prompted. “Are they trapped, or hidden, or -”
“Say.” Caleb interrupted, and Essek clenched his fists at his sides, wishing he could bury them in his heavy mantle the way he used to. “We’ve already built up quite the network of favors, ja? What’s one more?”
Essek swallowed. “What…do you propose?”
“I tell you where the wards are. And you free us from these mirrors. Simple.”
“I thought you owed me many favors, not the other way around, Widogast.” Essek responded sharply.
Caleb shrugged, eerily calm the way most people were not in front of the Shadowhand. “It’s not like I can pay off any of those favors here. This is in your own interests. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all. And we’re already friends, so that’s quite simple.”
Friends? Friends felt like a stretch. The Mighty Nein were much more of a nuisance or possibly business partners, though the two were not mutually exclusive whatsoever.
But Caleb raised a decent point. If Lucien was acquainted with the Mighty Nein…it could be worthwhile to arrange some sort of alliance.
“Fine.” Essek said, almost sticking out his hand to shake on instinct. “It’s a deal. I’ll help you escape if you tell me where the wards are.”
Caleb smiled, but it was slightly unsettling. “I knew you would see reason. There are two wards, one for each bookshelf. The first is underneath a panel in the floor beside one of those chairs. One of them is loose, and if you pick it up, it’s on the panel.”
Essek immediately stepped out of range of the mirror, walking towards the chairs. It took several minutes of tapping and jostling the boards to find the right one, but eventually one of them came loose. Not wanting to waste a Dispel Magic on it, Essek simply approached the shattered window and tossed it outside, where it exploded into wooden shards.
The air around one of the bookshelves shimmered before dissipating, its contents free.
Overcome with a sudden greed, Essek rushed over, running his hands across the spines, searching for his spellbook. On a whim, he opened a random one, only to find it written in a language he didn’t understand.
No, no. He needed his spellbook . It was the key to escape.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be on that shelf. Essek begrudgingly walked back across the room to Caleb’s mirror, where he reappeared once Essek walked back into its range.
“Hm. I was half expecting you to just leave.” he mused.
“Where’s the other ward?” Essek demanded.
“There’s a bottle of rocks - or, actually, there was a bottle of rocks.” Caleb gestured over to the shattered window. Now that Essek was looking closer, he could see a pile of random rocks with strange pieces of paper stuck to them all over the floor.
“One of those has the other ward on them. Don’t ask me which.”
Essek stormed out of range again and began going through the pile of rocks, setting the ones that didn’t have any runes on them carefully aside until he found the one with a sigil of some kind scratched right onto it.
Standing up in front of the shattered window, Essek hurled it out, watching it spiral down onto the dark grounds and vanishing from sight.
With a pop, the other ward around the bookshelf vanished, and Essek frantically began searching it for his spellbook, almost throwing them right to the ground in haste. His anxiety only grew as his search didn’t seem to turn anything up. Certain he missed it, Essek tore through the bookshelf a second time, desperate to find it.
It had to be there. He searched a third time.
Nothing.
Essek cursed loudly, tossing the book in his hand to the ground. Where could it possibly be!?
He scowled, storming back towards Caleb’s mirror.
“Is this some kind of trick?”
“No trick. I was certain it was there. I told you where the wards were, did I not?”
Essek sighed. “I suppose that is true.”
“So our deal continues. I’ll help you find your spellbook in any way I can -”
“Which isn’t very much.”
“I don’t see many other allies for you here, Shadowhand.”
“I can speak to the other arcanists trapped here alongside me. Especially if I can return spellbooks to those who own them.”
Caleb laughed without humor. “You don’t think Lucien will notice as soon as he returns? I hate to say it, but you’ve made quite the mess, friend.”
Essek gulped. Usually, he handled his job with so much tact, but this? This was a mess. There was broken glass all over the floor. There was a whole panel of wood missing. The spellbook shelves were in tatters.
“I was planning on dispelling you two and getting the hell out of here.” Essek said.
“Well, that plan is out.” Caleb responded. “But there’s hope for you yet.”
“Indeed there is.” Essek responded, turning to step out of the mirror’s range. “I’ll be on my way, now, thank you -”
Caleb sighed. “The rest of the Mighty Nein are here too. You could seek them out. Tell them Jester and I sent you. If you free us once you recover your spellbook, we’ll defeat Lucien and end this hell.”
“I don’t see what I have to do with that.”
Caleb shrugged simply. “Alright. It’s not like we’re going anywhere. Find the rest of the Mighty Nein.”
Essek stepped out of the mirror’s range and stormed towards the windowsill. He hesitated for a moment, then grabbed the battered book that he’d left on the desk.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As much as Essek hated this, this was his best - and only - step towards escaping.
But it still begged the question - what the hell did the Mighty Nein do to Lucien to get trapped in mirrors?