058 - Matter Over Mind

[JasonPaul]

As soon as Anwyn heard the door slamming it vanished completely. He glanced up the stairs at the spectral blacksmith, and unsurprisingly, he was no longer there. Angrily he walked to the table where the grimoires lay and kicked it over as he cursed loudly. "Shit!"

"Wh-where's Bluzie?" Red asked. She was now the only other occupant of the house besides Anwyn.

"She walked right into a trap," Anwyn said. "I told them not to panic."

"You knew that guy wasn't real?"

"No," Anwyn said, calming down a little, "but I did know that panicking is exactly the reaction that Tyne wanted us to make. Now we're split up again." Anwyn tried kicking the wall where the door was, but it was no good. The wall was quite strong. He tried looking for the front entrance to the house, but it too was nowhere to be found.

"Well, let's see what's upstairs anyway," Anwyn said. "It's not like we can go anywhere else."

Red nodded quietly as the two climbed the stairs. Unlike the last time, there were no phantoms to assail them on their way up. Anwyn took the lead, with Red nervously following behind. Anwyn noted the felinefolk's hesitation. "What's wrong?"

"Is...is Bluzie going to be okay?" Red asked with all the plaintive whimpering of a child. Anwyn almost laughed at this, and likely would have had the atmosphere not warranted a great deal of worry in the first place.

"I'm sure she'll be fine," he said. "And Glenn's with her. Don't worry so much."

Red nodded a bit, but her apprehensions refused to give in. "Will we ever get out of here?"

"Spells of astral binding," Anwyn began, "like the one we're in now, always have an exit. The hard part is finding it. I've never actually had to find one from the inside before, but there's a first time for everything." He shrugged his shoulders, his response doing very little to ease Red's worries, and the woman simply kept her thoughts to herself as they reached the upper floor of the house. The two of them searched what looked like a study, as bookcases filled with tomes lined the walls. Anwyn checked the books but saw nothing pertinent among them. At the end of the room was a desk with a lit oil lamp illuminating it. There was an open tome and an inkwell on the desk looking eerily similar to the sight found on the previous floor. Written on the tome was a single phrase.

[center:t2q6v74k]"The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate
And the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter"[/center:t2q6v74k]

"What does it mean?" Red asked.

"That's open to interpretation," Anwyn answered. "One way to look at it is, 'the world is only the way you see it as'. As far as its relevance to this place, though, I have no idea."

"Maybe it's a clue?" Red said, half to herself.

"I doubt it," Anwyn said. "It's probably just Tyne taunting us. I mean, it's not like I can simply think of a way out and it would..."

The Mystic was interrupted by the sound of a bookcase sliding. He quickly turned to the source and saw an entrance to a dark forest where there was once only a bookcase. Anwyn turned to Red, who looked at him in confusion, then back to the entrance.

"Bet you think that's funny, huh Tyne?" Anwyn muttered quietly as the two walked through the passageway.