Naya had been working on getting the glassware as clean as she could. This was easier said than done because the glass was very delicate. If she wiped dust off a piece in the wrong way, she could have broken it, and then there would have only been two places it could have gone, scrap sellers or in the trash. Gone would have been a lot of the money she wished to gain.
She used a light cloth to remove the layers of dust which had come with the glass. She poured the sealed vials of brown liquid into the grass, knowing it was just rot. The smell of long-since rotted away plant extracts emanated out as each cap was pulled off with a sudden pop of escaping gases. She was glad that her house wasn’t that close to anyone else. Like most people, she had moved with her family out to the countryside. It would take her about half an hour to walk to her closest neighbour, an older man named Jathon who owned a small farm.
From what she could tell, Jathon was of the Agris Crest which meant that his family had been working the land to grow food since possibly before the founding of the Readon a few centuries before, long before the kingdom was spread from north to south to capture as many forms of magic within its borders as possible. She could tell by the mark he had above his front door. She rarely talked to him aside from when she had just moved in a decade ago. It was clear that he didn’t approve of a lot of what she did.
Naya was an unmarried woman who had lived through the crisis and was now working a job which often brought her to dangerous places and into contact with toxic materials like whatever she had just dumped into the grass. The grass could take it, and if it didn’t, she would just have a bare spot in her lawn for a while. She, however, wouldn’t come back from inhaling too much of the gas that came out of the vials. She had also heard of device collectors who had gotten fluids from devices on their skin and watched as they ate through their skin. Other fluids were highly flammable and could cling to clothes and skin for days. These fluids would go up in flames if someone merely sat outside in the sun on a very hot day. There was no telling what types of materials one would find while on a job, and if she wasn’t careful, it could lead to her getting very sick, injured, or even dead.
This wasn’t the only reason to not approve of her being a device collector, of course. The places that she went weren’t always completely legal to enter. Sure, some landowners and businesses allowed device collectors into their old buildings to see what they could find. Usually, when people hire a collector, they want a cut of the money that was made off the devices sold. However, most people who owned these old buildings wanted no one to disturb them. They didn’t want to think of the past. For many of them, the crisis and the years following were traumatic. They were confused by all of the people trying to cling to something that was never coming back, that being magic.
As she polished the first of the vials until it was clean and shiny in the light, she thought about how maybe it was okay to cling to at least a small part of the past. Magic was important to the kingdom since before its founding. Just because it no longer worked didn’t mean it was suddenly not important. Just a few decades ago people were living in a world full of all kinds of magic and she thought that while most magic was taken for granted, people did appreciate at least some of it. What little she remembered from when she was a child was beautiful. The fluids that her father mixed together to make potions were beautiful. Even this fragile glass that had been made using a magical tool which she was now cleaning up to see was beautiful. She hoped that whoever she was able to sell it to would be able to appreciate how impressive these tools were, how the glass sparkled in the light and felt as light as eggshell while being tough enough not to shatter every time she held it.
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Once she was done, she brought the glassware into her house and sat it on the small table in her back room to dry. When it was dry she would need to give the glass a quick polish to make sure it was perfect when she was walking around the city and showing the items off to potential sellers. For now she could lock it up in the small ventilated room she had set up to keep her finds away from Blade.
As she closed the door she realized that she hadn’t seen the cat since before she left to collect from that old cellar.
“Blade!” she called, hoping that she would get a reply in the form of either a loud meow or him running up to her and rubbing his feathers against her leg. Instead she got nothing. She did a quick search of the house and he was nowhere to be found. She did feel a little worried that she couldn’t find him, but it was an old house and he had found many hiding spots within it. All she could do was wait for him to come out and hope that he didn’t get stuck or lost. Ever since her father had to stay at the mundanis hospital and her mother went to stay with some relatives in the next kingdom over he was the only companion she had.
She went to make herself a bite of something to eat while she waited for the glass to dry and for Blade to come out. She smeared some strawberry preserve over a piece of bread. It had been a week since she had last bought groceries and the bread was starting to feel its age. It was fine as long as it wasn’t moldy yet, but she always preferred it fresh. She sometimes considered learning how to bake her own bread, but if it had nothing to do with magic she found she had no interest in it.
About two hours later she heard the sound. It sounded as though someone was rubbing two rocks together in her basement. She stood up and rushed down the stairs to find the source of the noise. Oftentimes with these very old houses that were made with the help of magic, cracks could form in the foundation. They were built to be infused and supported by magic. Without that magic they quickly show their flaws which get worse over time until they can cause the entire house to collapse onto the head of the residents. That was how she was able to get this house for so cheap despite it being in a prime living area. She was glad that she would live in a place so old, but she had to worry about the potential dangers.
The basement was dark. She lit a candle and looked around. There was only a cellar down here. Some bottles of wine had been set into racks to make use of the cooler temperatures down here. There wasn’t anything other than that. She didn’t have a very big cellar. “Hello?” she called out. “Blade? Is that you? Did you do something?”
At the call of his name Blade came running out from beneath the wine rack. His black and purple feathers were covered in dust. With a soft chirrup, he rubbed up against her leg.
She quickly stepped away, shaking her head at the cat. “No, Blade. You need to go and clean yourself up. Don’t go tracking all that dust around the house.”
She went up the stairs with the cat and looked back to see if she could spot whatever had been making that noise. It was silent now. There were no changes that she could see. She went back into the living room and sat back down. It wasn’t long until a clean version of Blade came up to sit beside her. That noise was nothing but the house settling. She hadn’t heard her house make that noise before, however that was the only explanation she could think of.
She didn’t consider that maybe, just maybe, something had been laying in wait in her basement or that now there was a gap in the wall forming which was meant to be there. Things like that didn’t happen without magic and there was no magic. It just wasn’t something she would have ever considered. Even if that was exactly what was going on.
