The ebony box rested on the cracked wooden table in my inn room. It did nothing. It didn't glow, didn't vibrate, didn't whisper. It just… existed. And that silent existence was more disturbing than any noisy monster. It was a void that screamed.
"So basically, we're now the official delivery crew for the Demon King's cursed items?" I asked, rubbing my eyes. The night had been short and restless.
"Think of it as a promotion," Liriel retorted, examining her nails with an air of boredom. "From 'Strippers' to 'Bearers of the Apocalypse.' Has a certain charm."
"I liked it better when we were just strippers," Vespera complained, throwing a knife at the wall. She missed the target she'd drawn, and the blade stuck into the table leg. "At least that was funny. This is just… creepy."
Elara said nothing. She was sitting on the bed, staring at the box, her fingers tracing nervous patterns on the blanket. "He knew," she finally whispered. "The hermit. He knew that Corvus would come. He used us."
"Welcome to the club," I said bitterly. "Everyone uses us. The Guild uses us for the jobs no one wants, the gods use us as scapegoats, and now hermits use us as a courier service for forbidden items."
The question was: what to do with the damned box? Returning it to the hermit was impossible—he'd probably moved away. Giving it to the Guild was begging to be accused of possessing a demonic artifact. Throwing it into a river seemed poetic, until Liriel mentioned it would probably contaminate the groundwater and create zombie fish.
"We need to hide it," Elara proposed, raising her eyes. "Somewhere no one would think to look. A place without magic, without importance."
"Torin's basement?" Vespera suggested.
"Torin's basement smells like rotten cheese and despair. Any sensitive mage would feel the amulet's energy from a mile away," Liriel countered.
That was when I remembered Kael, the blacksmith. Not Kael from our plaster debt, but his grandfather—the other Kael. The one with a workshop on the southern edge of the city, which looked more like a graveyard of mining tools and failed inventions. A place where the only magical energy was static from friction.
"Old Kael," I announced. "His workshop is a black hole of uselessness. Even the fairies avoid it."
Liriel arched an eyebrow. "A mortal who managed to repel fae curiosity? Intriguing. Let's go."
Old Kael's workshop was exactly as I remembered: a crooked wooden building surrounded by piles of rusted metal, broken gears, and one or two disassembled automatons that looked like they'd had an existential crisis. The air smelled of burnt oil and defeat.
Old Kael himself sat on a stool, trying to hammer a piece of metal into something that vaguely resembled a kettle. He was the more wrinkled and skeptical version of his grandson.
"What?" he grunted, without looking up.
"Mr. Kael," I began, choosing my words carefully. "We need a favor. We need you to keep… this." I placed the ebony box on a pile of scrap nearby.
He stopped hammering and looked at the box. Then he looked at me. His eyes were small and piercing.
"Looks expensive," he said simply.
"It's not. It's… troublesome."
"Everything troublesome ends up here eventually," he spat on the floor. "Fifty silver coins. Up front."
It was absurd. But it was also a solution. I paid him, feeling a weight lift from my shoulders and another, lighter but more persistent, settle in my pocket.
"What is it?" he asked, picking up the box and examining it without ceremony.
"It's better if you don't know," Liriel replied, with unusual seriousness.
He shrugged. "Fair. I've kept worse." He tossed the box into a chest full of old tools and slammed the lid shut with a thud. "Now get out. I'm busy."
We left the workshop, and for the first time in days, I felt like I could finally take a deep breath. We had gotten rid of the amulet.
Of course, that peace lasted only until the next morning.
We were at the tavern, trying to enjoy a breakfast that didn't taste like defeat, when Old Kael walked in, dragging his feet. His expression was that of a man who had seen the gears of the universe — and hadn't liked what he saw.
"Take your junk back," he said, throwing the ebony box onto our table, making the mugs rattle.
"What happened?" I asked, my heart sinking.
"Things," he replied vaguely. "Metals twisting on their own. Shadows moving in the corner of my eye. My kettle tried to tell me the secrets of the cosmos. I don't like things that think." He pointed a bony finger at me. "And give me my money back."
With a deep sigh, I returned his fifty coins. He took them, nodded, and left, mumbling about the good old days when metallurgy was simple.
The box was back. Now what?
"He said the kettle spoke to him," Elara murmured, pale. "The amulet isn't just protecting itself. It's… expressing itself."
"Great," Vespera said, chewing a piece of bacon. "Now we have a chatty amulet."
Liriel picked up the box, holding it with a strange reverence. "It's not chatty. It's testing its limits. Looking for a breach in its prison." She looked at me. "We can't leave it with an ordinary mortal. It's only a matter of time before it corrupts something… or someone."
"So what do we do?" I asked, frustration bubbling inside me. "We can't destroy it, we can't hide it, we can't sell it…"
Liriel was silent for a long moment, her eyes lost in the smooth surface of the ebony. "There is… a place," she finally said. "A place forgotten even by the gods. The Temple of Eternal Forgetting. It's a sanctuary for relics the world needs to forget."
It sounded like a legend. It sounded like a terrible quest.
"And where is this place?" I asked, almost not wanting to know the answer.
Liriel smiled — a tired, dangerous smile. "Where else? In the middle of the one place no sane person ever wants to visit. The Forest of Whispering Stones."
The name sounded like a sentence. I looked at the box, then at Elara and Vespera's resigned faces, and finally at Liriel's determined eyes. The relief had lasted less than a day. The box needed a new resting place, and we were its unlucky bearers. The cycle of disasters continued — only the scenery had changed.