Maria quickly swung the front door open, followed by Kedra and Lionel. She stepped into the residence with a decisive stride. As they reached the main hall, they discovered Lucie lying on the floor next to a spilled crate of various old items and worn books.
"Oh my, Lucie, are you alright?" Maria went to the fallen servant's side, gently helping her up.
"I'm fine; I'm just tired of moving all these boxes around. That room you asked me to clear out was full to the brim!" Lucie's clothes were frayed and wrinkled, her face was soaking with sweat, and her hands were shaking from fatigue. She had clearly been working hard.
Unable to contain her curiosity, Kedra walked over to the crate, inspecting its contents. She mostly found old tax records or various rusty tools that were no longer in working condition; however, at the very bottom of the wooden box, she saw a lone piece of blank paper.
Flipping the sheet around revealed an advanced blueprint for an engraved circuit; there were at the very least seven overlapping circles within it, each with a different purpose.
The sight of such a complex structure completely blew Kedra's mind. So far, her understanding of magic engraving was limited to the one book she had stumbled upon, and yet here were dozens of symbols that completely evaded her comprehension.
"Where did you say you found these Lucie?"
"Oh, I don't really know. Maria just told me to clear out a room and handed me the key."
"Allow me to explain, my lady." Maria interjected. "The room I had Lucie clear out was what I believed to be the head maid's private storeroom. I often spotted her sneaking things in and out of there after all, and since I now have her keyring, I made the decision to reclaim her property."
Kedra sighed in frustration.
"Ugh, again with the head maid! Just who was she that she had access to such complex magic?!"
"I am unsure, my lady; all I know is that she was placed here personally by the patriarch, and judging by the sum of money we recovered from her, she was exceptionally well paid to boot. I can only assume that she had contacts with some magic institute or that she was a mage herself."
"I see, but if she was a mage, how come she didn't defend herself when I, uh, you know?" Kedra slid her thumb over her neck; she wasn't quite comfortable talking about the murder she committed after all.
"Well, she didn't usually carry a wand or staff with her, and I doubt she had any engraved circuits carved onto her body, so when you 'confronted' her, she would've been on the same level as any other old woman, unable to cast any form of magic."
"And let me say, my lady, you 'confronted' her pretty brutally; I doubt she would've kept calm enough to do anything about it." Lucie spoke with a sarcastic tone, a small proof of her lingering defiance, though the more time she spent serving Kedra, the more such feelings began to eclipse themselves.
"Well, either way, I need to see the rest of the crates from that storage room; where have you put them?"
"I moved them to your old room; we weren't using it for anything after all."
"Very well, Mona, could you show Lionel a room he can use? Maria and Lucie, you should go get started on lunch; we haven't eaten anything today after all."
"Yes, my lady!" The three servants all spoke in unison, some with more enthusiasm than others.
Marching over to the most desolate part of the residence, Kedra reached the shabby wooden door that marked her old room. It was foreign yet painfully familiar. She had not spent more than a day in this room, and yet she vividly remembered the ten painstaking years of suffering that the previous Kedra had endured behind that door.
With a deep breath, she pushed the door open. Once inside, her jaw dropped, she saw that every last inch of the room's floor had been taken up by a crate; only the doorway had been spared.
'Well, this is gonna take a while.'
Kedra spent hours on end sifting through the head maid's belongings, finding jewelry, expensive clothing, novels, family photos, old vases, and mountains of documents, among other things. Stopping only to eat lunch and dinner, she was determined to make it through the entire pile before going to bed.
Eventually, as night began to fall, beneath a crate full of flower seeds, Kedra stumbled upon a metallic lockbox about twenty centimeters in height, forty in width, and sixty in length.
Not wanting to waste her time searching for a key, she stuck one of her engraved circuits onto the lock and activated it. The sudden burst of frost damaging the locking mechanism just enough for it to be simply pulled open with force.
Inside the box were three tomes, the first of which was a sort of compendium of many different symbols and materials used in magic engraving. The second appeared to be a notebook of sorts, with many different hand-written lines of text and hand-drawn pictures lining its pages.
The third book was the most confusing of all; it bore no title to speak of yet resembled the previous two books on magic engraving closely, opening up the book. Kedra was faced with impossibly complex formulas and symbols, at the sigh of which she felt overwhelmed, as if she were attempting to attain knowledge that was forbidden to her.
Quickly shutting the book, Kedra placed it back into the box before sighing heavily.
"I think I'll leave that one alone for now."
The girl quickly grabbed the other two books and headed up towards her room, stashing them in her cupboards while giggling in excitement over the new knowledge she was bound to acquire. Though she first needed a long night's rest after spending half of her day searching a dusty room.