“Well,” Noah said as Moxie stared at him over the top of her book, “at least you don’t need to try to figure out what Wizen was after anymore.”

She let out a mixture between a long-suffering sigh and a laugh. Shaking her head, Moxie closed the book and tossed it onto her bed. “How do you do this? Are you cursed? Do you just have a nose for trouble and a burning desire to follow after it?”

“I wanted to see where Tim went.”

“And so logically your first thought was to break into restricted Arbitage property.” Moxie burst into laughter. “I suppose that tracks. It sounds like it’s a good thing you did. Nobody was seriously injured other than Barb and the healer that got fried?”

“Yeah. Brayden and Tim are both okay. It didn’t look like Barb was trying to kill Tim and Brayden had some nasty cuts but nothing too significant. He basically shrugged all of them off when we walked out of the tower. They weren’t anything a healing potion won’t handle.”

Moxie rose from her chair and ran a hand through her hair. “And the artifact that Wizen was after… a key to the Damned Plains?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what he wants with it. There’s no way he’s after the same thing that Father was with when he tried to summon Azel and got me instead, right?”

“If he was, this would be the absolute worst way to go about it. There are much easier methods to summon demons,” Moxie said. “Such as the one that Father had Vermil try. Vermil only barely screwed up. If he’d been more competent or actually knew anything about demons, there’s a decent chance he might have pulled it off.”

“I was thinking something along the same lines. It doesn’t really make sense to get a whole ass key straight to the depths of hell just to go knocking on the door of a random demon to ask them to come help out,” Noah said. He hesitated for a moment as a disturbing thought struck him. “Unless Wizen is after a demon that’s too powerful to summon normally?”

“That could be a possibility. I don’t know why he’d even bother with something like that, though. It seems like an enormous amount of overkill. If he needs the key to speak to the demon in the first place, chances are the demon will be stronger than him – and all Wizen will get for his efforts is killed.”

They were both silent for several seconds. Then Noah clapped his hands against his knees and cleared his throat as he rose to his feet.

“Whelp. At least we know one thing.”

“And that is?”

“He probably doesn’t care about you anymore.”

Moxie burst into laughter. “You really do have a one-track mind on certain issues, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you not even slightly concerned about the greater effects of this? If Wizen is completely insane, he could be planning to just release all the demons in the Damned Plains into the mortal realm or something like that. I mean, that seems ridiculous, but who knows. He could want anything.”

“I don’t feel like that’s his goal. Who knows. I could be wrong – but Wizen strikes me as someone with a plan. I don’t think he’s just trying to destroy things for the sake of it. Barb was… fairly decent, actually.”

Moxie’s brow furrowed and she tilted her head to the side. “Decent? What’s that mean?”

“She didn’t seem insane. Or evil, for that matter. She was just determined. I mean, she never tried to hurt Tim even though she could have probably used it against us. The only time she did anything that could have hurt him was when she basically blew the entire room up to buy herself time to get away.”

“You’re saying you don’t think she’d be working with Wizen if he was a madman? You haven’t forgotten the part with the mind control runes, have you?”

“No, of course not,” Noah said. He rubbed his chin. “But you remember how Alexandra was, don’t you? She was forced to be there. It was clear she didn’t have a choice. Barb was completely in control. It was voluntary.”

“Interesting,” Moxie said. She rocked back in her chair and drummed her fingers against her knee. “That isn’t really complete proof that Wizen isn’t insane, but I see where you’re going with it. It doesn’t change the fact that Wizen now has an immensely powerful artifact that could do a lot of damage.”

“Oh, definitely not,” Noah agreed. “But it does mean he’s probably not going to bother us in the near future. We’ll probably have to work on getting rid of him once the Enforcers actually find something marginally useful to work with, but at least we won’t be getting jumped by puppets in the middle of the night – or whatever else it is that Wizen would have done to get the information he wanted from you.”

“That’s true.” Moxie let a small smile cross her lips. “All we had to do was let him make off with an important artifact. Though, to be fair, Arbitage were the idiots keeping it sitting around almost completely undefended. What were they thinking?”If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Probably that the best defense was being forgotten, and that being in the middle of campus would be enough to ward off people,” Noah said. “Did you find any information about a key while you were looking through artifacts?”

“No. Granted I wasn’t looking for anything along those lines, but it certainly wasn’t somewhere easy to find.”

“Brayden only found it shortly before Barb showed up, and I suspect he didn’t do it entirely as legally as he made it sound. It sounds like Arbitage went through a lot of steps to try and make sure it was forgotten,” Noah theorized.

Moxie was nodding before he finished speaking. “I was thinking about that, actually. The more I started digging around, the more scrubbed out information I found. Arbitage has a lot of artifacts. The weird thing was I think they’re all from different families, and so many are missing from records that it’s impossible to know the extent of their collection.”

“What kind of other stuff do they have?”

“The answer is too broad,” Moxie said. “But the key is useful. A lot of the other stuff I read about was either useless, censored, or too dangerous.”

Noah wet his lips. “Not that I’m saying that was the best way to store something that powerful, but it gives me a slightly different thought. Maybe we’re thinking about things the wrong way. What if it isn’t that Arbitage is keeping its best artifacts just sitting around relatively undefended, but…”

“That wasn’t their best artifact at all,” Moxie agreed. She ran a hand through her hair and blew a puff of air out from her lips. “Not even close.”

“That’s the only thing that comes to mind. The censored stuff… Maybe things that were made before the – what was the event where the super strong Great Monsters showed up and caused the Bastions to be made?”

“The Long Night.”

“Yeah. What if they’ve got a bunch of stuff from before the Long Night stored away in Arbitage?”

“It could be a form of treaty,” Moxie said, her eyes widening slightly with the thought. “It used to be said all the noble families had powerful weapons that were used during the Long Night, but I can’t imagine any of them giving them up for no reason. I didn’t see anything like that in the records of course, but with the number of censored things… it’s possible.”

“If that’s true, then Arbitage wasn’t originally a school at all. It’s a bloody armory. The kids just got tacked on at some point for some reason. Maybe as a way to keep normal people from realizing what Arbirage is? I mean, it wasn’t that hard for you to do it. Relatively speaking, of course.”

Moxie shook her head and her cheeks reddened. “It wasn’t easy. I went through a lot of books, and some of them were in areas I wasn’t supposed to be in.”

“You broke into the library?”

“I didn’t break in anywhere. I just… asked Lee to slide in behind a librarian and grab a few things in sections where people aren’t allowed to go.”

Noah let out a burst of laughter. “Okay. That explains a lot. I think the part I’m still stuck on is why there are students here at all. Was a school really the best way to cover up a horde of artifacts?”

It was several seconds before Moxie answered.

“Having noble families send their students here would be a good way to make sure none of them tried to make a move on everything,” Moxie mused, her face losing a shade of color. “The kids aren’t here for training. They’re collateral.”

And just like that, something clicked. The overall incompetence of both the average students and their instructors. Arbitage lack of interest in students and how even the nobles that were here didn’t seem that competent. There was no way a family stayed in power if their members were all complete idiots.

They send the people they don’t care about here.

“How is it that I dislike this place more the more I learn about it?” Noah asked.

“We don’t know for sure that we read it right,” Moxie said, starting to pace around the room. “We could just be making things up. We’re drawing quite a bit from just a single piece of information.”

“I don’t think hunting around to find more would be very wise. It seems like a good way to get on Arbitage’s shit list.”

“Wizen would probably know. If he found out about the key, then I bet he’d know if there was more.”

Noah shot Moxie a sharp look. “You’re spending too much time with me if you’re starting to think we should approach him and ask for advice.”

“I wasn’t thinking that. But when we inevitably do run into him again while trying to take the key back, it can’t hurt to ask. Wasn’t he pretty talkative in the fight against Silvertide?”

“That’s a good point,” Noah allowed, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. “Yeah, he was. And speaking of which, Silvertide might know something as well. He strikes me as someone who has a good grasp of things behind the scenes.”

“You can ask him before the meeting with the enforcers, maybe?”

“It got pushed off until day after tomorrow, but yeah – I’ll ask him then.”

Moxie’s pacing finally came to a stop beside her bed. She picked up the book she’d tossed onto it and moved it back to her desk.

“That works. Honestly I don’t even know what I’d do with the information if we had it. I’ve just been starting to wonder what Arbitage actually offers. I’m hoping the advanced track will start providing more value than trying to attack us randomly.”

“I reckon we’ll find out tomorrow night with the next meeting, but I’m in agreement. It feels like the only thing Arbitage has provided is housing and exams that we could do ourselves. It’s not like they’re even giving us resources – though the advanced track has mentioned that’s on the table. We should focus on making sure everyone is ready to handle that first exam coming up so they perform well against the other advanced track students.”

A grin passed over Moxie’s face and she held back a laugh. “Can you imagine the looks on their faces if our students completely walk all over the kids that have been in the advanced track for a while longer?”

“I’d much prefer to see it in person than imagine,” Noah replied. “We’ll have to scope out what we’re up against tomorrow night – but that’s a problem for tomorrow night.”

“Which implies there’s something more important that we have to deal with first?” Moxie tilted her head to the side. “I don’t really need any more groundbreaking revelations today, but now you’ve got my curiosity. What is it?”

“We have a date tomorrow, and I haven’t figured out where you wanted to eat.”