Chapter 239 (1/2)
Randidly looked around the street, suffused with predawn light. It all struck him as a little surreal. All week she had been coming to speak to Shal, and now suddenly she was willing to speak to him? He supposed it did make sense if she was worried about her safety after she lost, but this almost seemed like a tacit admittance that she would lose to him in the next match. After all this training, was victory really going to be this easy?
But… that sort of feeling wasn’t in the air. Dian didn’t feel as though she had given up, just that… she was nervous about something. There was a great anxiousness to her, even now, as she waited for his response.
“...I assume you won’t just talk here?” Randidly asked, somewhat lamely.
Dian’s lip curled. “No. Follow me.”
Curious, and feeling like there was truly something worth learning from this woman, Randidly gave the inn behind him one final glance and then followed her. She led him through the winding streets of Deardun, crisscrossing between alleys and thoroughfares. Very quickly they had traversed the city, and ended up in one of the more poverty stricken areas.
Only after they had dropped down into underground tunnels did Dian stop, and then only for a moment to listen. Then, satisfied, she continued.
The whole underground tunnels vibe was interesting in a way, but in another way, it made Randidly doubt very much that he had made the right decision by following Dian to talk. Perhaps he should have insisted on a location. But finally, she stopped in front of a dark opening, and gestured to Randidly to walk through.
He gave her a very skeptical look. She sighed dramatically. “You come all this way, and you don’t trust me?”
Randidly didn’t bother to reply, but instead his gaze turned from skeptical to withering. To her credit, Dian laughed and waved a hand, then pressed her palm against the wall. Threads of light emerged, tracing strange runes around the doorway, and illuminated the inner room, which was simply that: a small room.
“These are runes to hide us from the tournament officials’ attention. You are familiar with some Engraving are you not? Feel free to check them.” She gestured, as if checking strange runes was some perfectly easy activity, that anyone could do on a whim based on a small familiarity with Engraving.
Which, Randidly supposed, it might very well be. But based on most of the reading that he had done, it was NOT that simple. Perhaps if he could sample the energy from the runes themselves, but he wasn’t sure how to do that without shorting the whole thing out. In addition, the books seemed to imply that the meaning of the same rune could be very different between two different individuals. But there was apparently a lot of controversy over the issue.
Perhaps the explanation was something to do with Aether, and how the runes in a place drew their meaning from somewhere. Theoretically, the same runes could mean different things, but they never could find two different sources of meaning in one location, likely due to the System’s influence…
Either way, Randidly had no way to check the runes. So either she was bluffing, or completely unsure of how runes worked, or…. or something.
Randidly scratched his head and walked through the door. It had really been a long 2 days of training, and he wanted to get some more… calming relaxation done before his own match. This was not exactly stress free.
Besides, Dian had been very convincing that she genuinely needed to talk to Shal. For whatever reason, he was inclined to believe her, and decided to take this one on faith.
Luckily, nothing happened when Randidly entered into the room. Dian simply pressed a few more things on the wall and followed him in. The runes glowed brighter, perhaps now active.
However, when Randidly turned around, Dian’s expression was serene and solemn, very different from the prideful and direct Dian he had encountered in the past. In fact, her gaze on him seemed almost sad, as she studied him for several seconds. Then she shook her head.