Framework of the Frontier, Sain Artwell [read me a book .TXT] 📗

are moving about the key we need to leave this place.” Orien raised her brow.

Both William and Ember stopped in their tracks. Cold sweat of conflicted morals began to drip down his neck. “We uhh…”

“We did not think about that…” Ember admitted.

Orien pursed her lips together with an apprehensive frown. “That’s better than doing it after thinking about it.”

William and Ember hung their heads in shame. Again he plunged into the pit of confusion. Can I risk six for one. Can I risk six for Rulu? His brain drew blank, teetering on the edge of breakdown. Honestly, yeah, I’d let the six of them die for Rulu. “Fuck, I can’t do this…”

“All of today’s loot.” Ember said to Orien. “You get all of today’s loot if you let us try this.”

“Today’s?” The triton adventuress couldn’t suppress the involuntary peek of a greedy grin. She looked at the mountain of magic items, calculating the price of life in her head. “You little bitch, you’re quite the demon. Alright. Take your gamble.”

Ember opened the chest and put the core in William’s hand. He could not stop staring at the awesome crazy lovable perfection in a gorgeous faun shaped package, until she shouted, “Will, It’s going to shoot you if you don’t try it.”

The pink was turning white, yes. William pointed the eye at the statue’s eyes. Bright burning dot within the core locked onto the statue.

“It’s working!” Ember cheered. “It’s like with the doors, sorta.”

Light reflected in its unblinking adamantite eyes and spread over their surface, until the eyes were alit with a dim whiteness. An impulse of pressure expanded from the statue, followed by a thrumming vibration. Dust rose off the ground and began to fall again.

The red angel stirred to life.

Her wings unfolded into a width of thirteen feet each. Their feathers dwarfed the blade of a zweihander and glistened in dark shades of garnet and gold. Matte red with a metal sheen, her body was a perfect harmony of muscle and rich womanly curves. On her lashes, areola, sex, and pouting lips, the crimson deepened and gained a coat of gold.

She rotated her white gaze to face William with mechanical precision. An eerie resonance in her soft feminine voice shivered William’s spine.

25

Her words were unrecognizable. But, her speech had the same melodic timbre and soft consonants as the bardsong from ancient Iram.

“What in the Gtormörg’s balls did you awaken, Ranger!” Trotto stormed into the core room weapons drawn. Freshly looted bling jingled out of his pockets. “I get it, you’re desperate, but you’ve no right to sign us up on your death wish.”

“I signed us up,” Orien shot back, stopping her furious partner mid-step.

Trotto shook his head, dumbfounded. “What?”

“What, what? I signed us up. I’ve done it a hundred times over, haven’t I? You’ll thank me later, like the last hundred times. Besides, if it was hostile it’d have attacked already, yeah? So sit tight and put your weapons down dummy.”

Trotto tightened his glare on Orien and his grip on the axes. “We finally have the wealth to make it.”

“To make it as minor Spire Lords of Nibir. This here, this’ll make us the future rulers of a realm.” She cracked a grin, curtsying to William and Ember. “Or, good friends of the rulers.”

William chuckled. “As far as I’m concerned, friends who risk becoming red paste together, deserve to be kings together.”

He didn’t dare to avert his face from the red angel’s angular face. Though symmetric and sharp, her features had a feminine softness — loosely opened pouty lips, thin brows, and the resting expression of a perturbed bunny.

The red angel spoke another two word sentence, shifting her unblinking gaze over the adventurers. Returning her attention to William, she said another word, and lifted a finger towards the golem core. Arcane sigils within the pink crystal became wild, rotating like the out of control orbits of a planetary model. Though their outlines were faint, as they were white against white, William could make out a matching structure inside the irises of the red angel.

When she spoke, the melodicity of the Iram’s language was replaced by the brutally evenly pronounced english — or nibir. “Good morning.”

Yes, she’s not hostile.

A surge of relief brought a grin on William’s lips. He swallowed, speaking slow in case whatever language download thingy she had done was incomplete. “Good morning. I’m William Adams, the Ranger of Nastall. It’s a small town close by, really small.”

The Red Angel turned her head towards Ember.

“Me? I… It’s a pleasure to meet you miss— my lady. I never thought I’d speak with something like you, I mean someone like you. Ah-ha-haa… I’m Ember Fireberry. Good morning.”

“I am Orien, leader of the Band of Orien.” She gestured to the five others, giving them an imploring stare.

They introduced themselves, maintaining a wary stance towards the metallic construct.

Her gaze shifted through them one by one. A long silence followed. A silence filled by a palpable awkwardness, to which the red angel seemed immune.

William cleared his throat, gesturing at the spiral hieroglyphs. “So. How does this work?”

She looked at the spiral and at him. Her brows remained in a seemingly permanent furrow of mild confusion. “I do not understand the question.”

“We kind of assumed…” William glanced at Ember, hoping she’d correct him where he went wrong. “…you would grant some form of control to those who come here? The people in the hieroglyphs seemed to raise civilizations after meeting you.”

“Fascinating.” She neither sounded nor looked fascinated, but inspected the hieroglyphs spiraling outward from her.

“You don’t remember? Or this is not you?”

She pursed her lips into a flat line. “It seems, I rearranged my memory archives to accommodate for the echordings of a large amount of operas. Memories with lesser priority may have been lost. Dance of the