They stood in front of Nemuri no Shiro while Ketty Pordis prepared the teleportation circle. Damarys had never given the castle much thought before now. It was just another part of the city that she’d never explored before, much like the Toshokans and the Sages tower. Now, she and Kasyn were preparing to enter the unknown. Judging from the injuries Tomodachi had sustained, it wasn’t going to be an easy task.

“Are you ready?” Ketty asked, pulling Damarys out of her thoughts.

Kasyn was already standing in the circle which was glowing with a faint light.

“Yes, I’m ready,” Damarys hurried into the circle as well.

“You’ll need to find your own way back out,” Ketty warned. “So either find Akumu and fix whatever’s wrong in there, or Kasyn will need to figure it out for you.” Ketty hesitated a moment and then added, “good luck.”

The magic circle flared and Damarys was blind for a few seconds. When the room around her came into focus, Damarys found herself in a round room with a low ceiling. A solitary door led the way out of the room. Everything was made out of worked stone besides the door, and the light here didn’t seem to have any specific source that she could see. Everything was simply illuminated in a flat, even light that cast no shadows.

“Do you feel that?” Kasyn asked.

“Feel what?”

“I don’t know, like pressure in your ears?”

Damarys had experienced pressure changes while hiking up and down steep mountains but she didn’t feel anything like that right now and she told him so.

“You could try yawning to equalize the pressure if it’s bothering you,” she said, hoping that would help.

He tried it a few times but eventually gave up, shaking his head.

“I guess this is the way out,” he said, stepping over to the door and cracking it open just wide enough to peek out. “It’s a spiral staircase,” he said, opening the door the rest of the way.

Sure enough, the spiral stairs led up and down with no markings to say what either direction would lead to.

“I don’t hear anything,” Damarys remarked as she joined Kasyn in the doorway.

“Me neither.”

“Down first?” Damarys suggested after a moment.

“Sure,” Kasyn agreed, “I don’t sense any runes above us.”

The stairs soon opened up into another landing and a closed door before the stairs continued further down.

“We should check each floor, I guess,” Kasyn said and pulled the new door open just enough for them to peek through.

A ruined ballroom met their gaze. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere. Where once had hung floor to ceiling mirrors were now bare walls with shattered glass at their base. Chandeliers lay on the ground where they’d fallen, twisted and broken into thousands of pieces. The only sound was that of flies buzzing around the room. It was a wonder and a relief to Damarys that it didn’t stink.

“I think there’s a rune one more floor down,” Kasyn said, shutting the door and looking pale.

“Sounds good,” Damarys nodded and was grateful the awful scene in the ballroom was out of sight.

They made their way down to the next floor and just like before they found a shut door with the stairs going onward. Behind the door they found a kitchen and larder. There were food stuffs being prepared by unseen hands and a few golums were carrying the finished dishes away through another doorway.

“There’s definitely a broken rune in here,” Kasyn muttered.

“Do you think whatever’s in there will ignore us if we go in?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Kasyn walked forward, his steps slow and deliberate as if he were ready to spring backwards at the first sign of trouble. The work of cooking slowed, and then stopped, as the golums turned to face Kasyn. Damarys braced for an attack, knocking an arrow and wondering where she ought to aim on a golum.

“We’ll be with you shortly,” one of the golums said in a surprisingly formal voice. “Please wait in the ballroom for your server to arrive.”

The golums then turned back to their task of delivering the food they carried.

“I guess that answers that question,” Kasyn sighed.

Damarys joined him and both began to look around for the rune.

“It’s here somewhere,” Kasyn grunted as he tried to look behind shelves of ingredients. “I just can’t tell exactly where. In the city it was a lot easier because there weren’t that many places to hide them, and they were generally pretty obvious.”

Damarys found another door, one that the golums weren’t using, and pulled it open. Cold air flowed out and she was greeted by racks of frozen meat.

“What about this?” she called over to Kasyn as she eyed the back wall.

Kasyn joined her and brightened at once.

“That’s it,” he said and withdrew the chain.

At the back of the room was a collection of ice crystals that looked significantly similar to the other runes, though large sections of it had been shattered by brute force. Kasyn swung the black chain into it and the ice began to regrow right before their eyes. When it finished, Kasyn let out a long, slow breath.

“What is it?” Damarys asked.

“That one…didn’t feel like the others.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the others I could feel the connection to the city grow stronger, but with this one, I felt…I don’t know how to describe it, like a bunch of eyes just turned to face me and won’t look away.”

There was movement behind them and Damarys glanced over her shoulder to see what it was. What she saw almost made her jump as four large golums stood in the doorway, two of them holding platters of food.

“Could it be these ones looking at you?” she asked as Kasyn turned to see what she was looking at.

“What do you want?” Kasyn asked after a tense moment of neither side moving or saying anything.

“We are awaiting orders,” the golums said in unison.

“Who’ve you been taking that food to?” Damarys asked as a sudden insight struck her.

“Soldiers from the tower of light,” the golums replied.

“How many are there?”

“Two hundred that we know of.”

That was far more than the two of them could handle, but perhaps there was a way to deal with them that didn’t require fighting.

“Are there any poisons available here?” She asked.

An hour later, Damarys and Kasyn strode into the room the golums had been delivering food to. Dozens of bodies lay on the ground, their faces contorted in pain, many of them still hunched over and gripping their stomachs. She would have preferred to use a quicker poison, but if they’d used one of those then the soldiers could have figured out what was going on sooner and stopped eating the food. Although, it wasn’t the food they’d poisoned since many of the soldiers would have already eaten. It was the water and the wine the golums carried out last that bore the poison.

“I don’t think I can be proud of this victory,” Kasyn murmured as they searched the soldiers for anything that might prove useful.

“I don’t like it either but it worked,” Damarys said.

“It’s different when it’s fiends or undead,” Kasyn observed after a few minutes. “You know? It’s hard to feel bad about killing something that’s either evil incarnate or mindless, but when it’s actual people…”

“These soldiers invaded the city, tried to overthrow Akumu, nearly got all of us killed, and had no plan for what to do afterwards,” Damarys replied bitterly. “I’m not enjoying this moment, but I don’t regret it either.”

In the end they found a map of the castle, or at least the parts the soldiers were interested in, including where the soldiers were currently stationed leading to Akumu’s throne room.

“This will be handy,” Kasyn said as he examined the map, then, closing his eyes he began turn his head this way and that as if listening to a faint sound that only he could hear. After a moment, he opened his eyes and added a mark to the map. He repeated the process several more times before he lay the map down on a cleared table and pointed triumphantly at it. “Here’s where the rest of the runes are,” he proclaimed.

“Easy,” Damarys said with sarcasm. “They’re all where the Tower of Light are. I’m sure they’ll be just as easy to deal with as these ones here were.”

“It’s something, at least.”

Kasyn shrugged and his head drooped.

“Hey, I was joking. Just trying to lighten the mood,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Maybe it’d be more effective if we weren’t in a room full of dead bodies.”

“Right,” Damarys grimaced. “Let’s get out of here.”

They stowed the map and made their way back to the stair. They needed to go down a few flights until they came to a bridge. The castle apparently had four such spiral staircases and they were linked by these bridges. It didn’t match what the outside of Nemuri no Shiro looked like but Damarys wasn’t going to question that oddity right now.