The dagger vanished. He turned his head to me. “Most of this is mundane,” he gestured at a full backpack that had appeared at his side, “But there are a few things that might interest you. And moreover, it’s a good way to keep a whole bunch of non-magical supplies without having to worry about the weight.”
Another thing I hadn’t considered. “What’s the maximum capacity?”
“Not sure, exactly. It’ll just stop storing when it gets there, though, so you don’t have to worry about it too much.”
Keras patted a hand on the ground next to him. “Come help me organize this when you’re done eating, and we’ll see what we can find.”
It wasn’t long before all of us, even Derek, were sitting on the floor and shifting around mysterious items with legitimate excitement.
Sera, who had already brought paper downstairs to aid in her communication, started working on a catalogue of everything we found in the box and the words we were using to store them. It would be a useful reference, because Wrynn had stored a lot of stuff.
I dug through piles of equipment, searching for anything that interested me. There were coins, flasks, potion bottles… even a few entire bars of metal.
She also had a surprising number of flowers. Either she was the sentimental type or an alchemist. Possibly both. Based on the fact that most of them were either bound in bundles or inside labeled vials, I was guessing the latter.
Perhaps more interesting, the labels on those vials were in a foreign language. It looked almost like one of the two lettering systems they used in Dalenos, but not quite. I showed a vial to Keras. “Can you read his?”
He lifted it. “Hm? Oh, sure. It’s in Liadran. Just says ‘aldenleaf, five units’.”
“Huh.” I put the vial down. I hadn’t heard of that language. Maybe I could ask him more about it later, but I had a higher priority for the moment.
I shifted on my attunement, searching through the piles for anything that glowed with magic. I found a handful of items that glowed, but it was hard to tell how powerful they were. Much like Keras, many of them had auras that didn’t seem to fit into the standard color framework.
A hand-mirror glowed purple. A necklace had a turquoise glow that rippled like waves.
I considered the possibility that purple was simply higher on the color scale than even Sapphire. While that was possible, I suspected these items simply had auras that didn’t work the same way. It wasn’t impossible; Keras was one precedent for it, and I’d also seen elemental auras that glowed with the color of the element, rather than a representation of the item’s power.
Maybe that was what was going on here?
A couple rings and what looked like a hairpin had more conventional yellow auras, but I still couldn’t be sure they were Citrine items. They had some runes etched into them, but I wasn’t familiar with any of the ones that I saw.
There were three more daggers that had magical glows — apparently, Wrynn Jaden liked daggers. One had a lime green aura, the second was crimson, and the third one glowed black. I didn’t even want to touch that one. I didn’t know what a black aura meant, but it didn’t sound good.
I warned the others, of course.
The last glowing item I found was an earring that glowed with a soft white hue, almost transparent. Keras gasped aloud when he saw it.
“Let me see that.” He gestured, and I handed the earring over. Keras turned it over in his fingers reverently. “I should have asked you to open the box sooner.”
I tilted my head to the side. “I take it that thing is powerful?”
“No. Probably the weakest item in the bunch in terms of raw power. But it’s the most important, at least to me.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Sentimental value?”
“No, practical. Did you see a second one?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Good. This is part of a matched set. They’re designed to allow communication with each other.” He raised it to an eye, then hovered it next to his ear. “But I don’t think it’s active.”
Marissa leaned over. “Yer lady friend leave that for you, then?”
He nodded. “Not for me, necessarily, but I’d be one of the ones to know how to use it. I thought it was unusual that Wrynn left the box behind. It’s useful, as I’m sure you can see, and she rarely parts with it. This might help explain what she was up to.”
I frowned at that. “Seems too circuitous. How’d she know you, or whoever she wanted to get the box, would end up with it?”
“Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I don’t think she abandoned the box so that someone would find the earring. That wouldn’t work.”
Keras paused, seemingly considering how to explain. “I think she left the box for some other reason, and if I can get this to work, it might help tell me why. It uses sound magic. Maybe she kept the other earring, or maybe she even stored a message inside. Problem is, one of our other friends made this, not me. And she made lots of them — with different passwords.”
“As interesting as that is,” Derek cut in, “Is it useful to us right now? We have a short time to come up with a gift for Deni, and I’m seeing some prime candidates here, assuming any of it is useful.”
Keras closed his hand around the earring. “This is personally valuable to me, but it would have no use as a gift. There are plenty of communication items in your magic shops. As for the other items, none of them belong to you. They belong to Wrynn.”
Derek shrugged. “Provided she’s still alive. Death would be the simplest explanation for why she doesn’t have the box, yes?”
Keras gave Derek a sharp look. “Simplest, but not the most likely. When last we met, Wrynn was about my equal in a fight, and vastly more flexible. I’d give her better than even odds against one of your visages. It would take a great many enemies to threaten her.”
“Or the rigors of age.” Derek started to lean down toward one of the daggers. Marissa smacked his hand away.
“Yer bein’ a jerk, m’lord.”
I tensed for a moment — I didn’t know if Derek was going to take being insulted in his own home well — but fortunately, he just laughed.
“Oh, Keras knows I’m just teasing.”
Keras continued to glare.
Derek made a forced smile. “Well, regardless of Wrynn Jaden’s status, I think a bit of pragmatism might be appropriate here. She abandoned this years ago. Clearly she couldn’t need the contents that badly.”
I turned my head to Keras. “Derek has a point. We probably need these items a great deal more than she does right now. Not even necessarily for gifts. If we’re going to the tower and these might be useful…”
Keras closed his eyes, then shook his head a moment later. “Very well. I recognize most of these, and I can tell you what those do. For the ones I don’t recognize, we’ll need someone to identify them.”
“I can arrange for a Diviner to visit,” Derek chimed in happily.
“Once we’ve determined the functions, I will loan some of these items out, with the understanding that they all belong to Wrynn. If we end up trading something as a gift to this Sheridan to heal Sera,” he turned his head toward Sera. “Sera will owe me something comparable to pay Wrynn back.”
Sera gave a curt nod.
“Good.” He turned to Derek. “Similarly, if any loaned items are broken or go missing, I’ll expect them to be replaced.”
“That’s quite acceptable. And, for what it’s worth, I have quite a trove of items myself from my climbing days. They’re not all here, of course, but I have a few things lying about that might interest you. Perhaps we can arrange for some trades?”