30: Uncanny

Lilith stepped into the cramped room that should’ve been a bathroom, a box of stone no wider than a coffin lid.

Tight walls pressed in like an unkind embrace; Morris had space to spare, but scarce materials meant the house had shaved the bathroom down to a sliver.

The air hit her first—orange air freshener, sharp as peel oil squeezed under a noon sun—she winced, a thorn of scent pricking her brow.

It wasn’t just strong; it was cloying, a syrup-thick fruit note that stuck like varnish. Maybe it wasn’t even an air freshener at all—maybe some misfired charm.

She looked down at the vast pale-violet array etched into the floor, a muted moon drawn in chalk. No pulse, no ripple. Even her touch didn’t wake it.

That clashed with what she’d pried from Eliza—her intel said it should hum. Doubt bit at her heel: was she wrong, or was the intel rotten?

Dragons and Vampires are built different, bone and blood tuned to other songs; and Star Energy isn’t mana, not really. She leaned toward mismatch, not malfunction.

So forcing the array to flare just to see what it did—no go. Frustration pricked, then cooled; she let it pass like a cloud over water.

She’d never expected a quick fix anyway; to stumble and scrape felt truer to the rhythm she knew.

One path blocked, she turned to the other odd thing in the room.

Beyond the floor-wide sigil, the strangest anchor was the stinging citrus haze, a fake summer shoved into stone.

She could track the source, sure, but another question tugged harder.

Why use air freshener here at all?

She didn’t grasp Morris’s arc all that well. This world was a knot of magic gods, stray species, and powers that didn’t read like any textbook. The Little White Dragon’s past-life knowledge of “civilization” kept slipping like sand.

Every culture ran on tools with unknown roots—magic and tech without manuals—yet nations of wildly uneven strength still managed to share borders without bleeding.

Maybe because everyone fights the same enemy: disasters stamped into the land by gods passing through.

While living under Morris’s stone ribs, she’d watched its growth. Spuiset might defy common sense, but Morris outpaced the fringe cities by a head and a half.

They had sanitation that mostly held, and lights that rarely died. Annie swore they burned kerosene, but curiosity had Lilith crack open a lamp—clean mana cores, textbook builds. Almost like what she’d read in the books from the Dragon Territory.

Dragon-castoffs from centuries ago, left like molted scales. Still, for isolated Morris—and all of Spuiset—their lighting was a bright step ahead.

In other parts of daily life, though, they lagged in a way that felt bleak. If her old human kingdom sat around a 14th-century feudal hearth, Morris’s citywork was like the first shiver of the Middle Ages—patched, provisional, held together with twine.

An air-freshener, the kind of nicety you buy for comfort, wasn’t something Morris’s Vampires would bother to make.

Yet Morris had all kinds of beverages stacked on shelves, and the city didn’t look like it could grow a weed, let alone wheat.

Magic, maybe. A tap on an unseen spring.

So the freshener probably wasn’t made here at all; it was smuggled in by the Void Sect from outside.

But why haul air freshener into Morris?

Any route in crossed a death desert big as a dried ocean, dunes like ribs under a black sky. Even if the Void Sect could shield against Black Sun Devouring, freight would still grind you down.

All that weight… for scent?

Because the bathroom stench was unbearable?

Likely. Morris had pipes, sure, but an underground city without rain collects smells like moss in shade—don’t expect spring air.

Lilith had marched through worse on the road and learned to breathe past it. Void Sect faithful might not have that callus.

But if they couldn’t stand it, why choose the bathroom to draw their sigils?

Maybe their creed demanded bathroom arrays—she snorted; that felt silly. More likely, they were riding Morris’s sewer veins.

So this array’s a trigger—a switch. Inject mana, and it links to a matching node under the floor.

As for what it does—communication fits. That would explain why the Void Sect drew these circles and left them to dust.

Any other use would need maintenance; damage or a mis-touch would drag trouble up like a net full of stones.

With comms, discovery’s a shrug. They’d have ciphers. A stray activation wouldn’t shake the pillars.

The more she thought, the more the pieces nested. She almost admired herself, a spark of pride flickering like a firefly in a jar.

Still, she refused to crown the guess as truth. So far, it was smoke without flame—no proof.

To test it, she’d have to slip into Morris’s sewers and see what clawed back at her from the dark.

But this house’s bathroom was now an array, a lid of runes. To enter, she’d have to pry the circle up—or find another mouth into the pipes.

Lilith pinched her chin, sinking into thought, quiet as a pond under moon.

If only she knew Alohomora.