“I knew the one you put in looked different…” Zef squinted, to which Makhus nodded.

“Aye, I uh…” he began, looking off to the side as he built an explanation in his head. “Look, I asked the Krishorn heiress if she knew someone who could do glyph tattoos on the down-low and she just out-and-out asked if I’d gotten my hands on an Iron Rider belt. Gave me this thing-” he pulled the cartridge out of the belt and gestured with it, ”-and told me the originals wouldn’t work for a new user until the belt had decided I deserved to use ‘em. It also turns out she knows how to do glyph tattoos, but that’s besides the point. Anyway, you need anything?”

He seemed altogether rather eager to move on from the matter of his dealings with the heiress, and Zel frankly didn’t feel like overtly prodding at the man. Retrieving the elder’s letter and note from storage, she showed them to him and asked: “Can you translate?”

A raised brow as he squinted at the note, looking back and forth between it and Zel, questioning: “That’s it? Yeah, sure. I think I’ve got a book about it somewhere around here, in case you ever need or want to do it yourself. Now, let’s take a look here...”

First came the note, whose contents made Zel chuckle at her own lack of caution.

Beyond this door lay,

the passageway,

to the Eternal Vault.

I plead with you again,

do not place overmuch faith,

in the herein held ancient arts.

Beware, ye who would pass,

the seventh floor panel,

conceals an alkahest pit trap.

The letter itself began in a similar manner, pleading with a theoretical future elder to not just dredge up the arts detailed in the contents of the Vault and his personal library, to actually innovate upon old arts and create something truly practical, before it moved into actual new information.

“...know that I was not betrayed. I chose to do this, knowing that such a tale of inner conflict was the only thing that could keep the other branches from meddling. In my personal library, I sequestered the common texts which I believed to be detrimental to innovation, for I saw my students and peers both placing nearly religious belief in the words of these texts.”

“I may have fallen to the same tendencies, had I not been there when some of them were written, had I not known the people who wrote them and the reasonings for why these texts were written as they were. What once was a perfectly straightforward analogy meant to intuitively and clearly convey information, through a millennium of history and cultural drift, became a mystical riddle to be vaguely interpreted and ruminated upon rather than understood.”

“It is because of these shortcomings that, in preparation, I had sought out texts whose methods of teaching I believed to be inured against such perversion, securing them safely within the Eternal Vault.”

“And yet, I must again beg of you to not rely upon them. These scrolls, too, were products of their time and place, and they may be ill suited to your era. In order to ensure my wishes are fulfilled at least partially, I have applied a cursed seal to the portal into the Eternal Vault. When unsealed, the frame will tarnish and fall apart within a timespan only barely sufficient to retrieve one scroll from the vault, lest you risk becoming stuck in the subterranean chamber.”

“If or when you have obtained the knowledge and means to repair the portal, so will you have obtained my blessing to use the Vault to its full extent.”

“Once more, however, I plead - learn from the works of the past and built upon them, do not merely co-opt them in place of innovation.”

“The task of a sect elder is to keep the flame alive and foster its growth, to remove that which is useless and add onto the pyre that which will best fuel it - it is not to worship ash and cinders.”

After he finished quickly and rather eagerly writing out the translation, Makhus handed it to Zel and with a grin asked, “Already getting into sect secrets, eh?”

“Uh-huh…” Zel replied, reading the translation. “Unsealed the elder’s quarters, met the chef. It seems that he and the custodian had been locked up inside the sect for… However long it was sealed.”

“I’m sorry, did you say the chef?” Makhus asked.

Zef replied this time, “He certainly looked and acted the part, and welcomed us with pumpkin cheesecake. I took what was left of it in storage, if you want.”

By the time she’d finished, Zel had already pulled out her Tablet and handed it over, her mind fully focused on the translated letter.

Makhus, however, didn’t seem to care, instead disbelievingly continuing to rant: “Don’t you realize? Someone capable enough to become the dedicated chef of a sect like the Black Horses would be one of the most knowledgeable and skilled individuals in that sect. They would be among the first to work with newly acquired ingredients, short of only the sect’s elder and highest-ranking alchemists. What… What’d he look like?”

“Ponytail, long ears, apron,” Zel said. “Don’t you worry, I’ll do whatever I can to get you a space in the sect building. Worst comes to worst, we’ll just repurpose one of the outdoor grow houses until we get something more permanent set up.”

“I’d certainly hope so,” responded the alchemist with feigned entitlement, once again reaching for the cream with a pained grimace. It seemed to be forming into a waxy, protective layer as it dried. “If that’s all you needed, I uh… I’ve still got work to do after lunch break. I’ll probably come by around three, four in the afternoon.”

“What, you don’t want a look at the scroll I sacrificed my leg-plates for?” Zel grinned, holding out her hand towards Zef as the blonde was pulling two slices of absolutely immaculate cheesecake out of a vortex, placing them down on a tin plate that she had retrieved a moment earlier. Without skipping a beat she retrieved the scroll, handing it to Zel and slipping the Tablet into her back holster.