After sending the happy customers on their way, Ullie turned to other matters.


    "What a day,” he mumbled as he marched among the shelves, scratching his neck and curiously peering into the jars and chests that weren’t there before. The shop had a way of keeping itself tidy, and even if a snowstorm were to blow through, it would find a way to re-arrange itself within minutes. It did what it wanted, and Ullie had long given up on trying to reason with its whims.


    “Where did you put them?” He squinted at the dark statue as it towered above him, remaining perfectly still, looking at him with a mischievous smirk in the corner of its mouth. Instead of a sword it now held a birdcage in its arms, a beautiful thing made of gold and black leaves wound around the bars.


    “Damn it Zaggari, we talked about this,” Ullie hissed, hearing a soft chirping sound coming from the cage. Four little songbirds covered together on the very edge, fearing for their lives. “Let go,” he cried as he tried to pluck the cage from the statue’s grip. “Let go!”


    “Aaaaaaaaa,” the bird screeched in deep manly voices the moment the cage was released. “Turn us back you imbecile.”


    “No,” Ullie returned, quite grumpily. “Not until you’ll tell me who you work for.”


    "We ain''t telling you nothing!"


    “I won’t be the judge of that,” Ullie returned and began to hum a tuneless song on his way to the backroom.


    ***


    Under the light of a lantern, he observed the mysterious sphere.


    The lantern itself was a relic he treasured greatly, and despite its humble and grubby appearance, it was the only one of its kind in existence. Behind the colored glass, it held thousands of crystals, which would light up like embers if touched by magic.


    Basking in purple, Ullie had almost forgotten what it felt like to be excited over an unfamiliar thing, especially the one that in his hands felt like the missing piece of the greatest puzzle in the universe.


    He kept the sphere suspended in between two upright rods, made of some unusual metal, full of runes and glowing veins. They were another unique tool in his possession, once used by the masters of arcane arts to create tiny pockets in space, and thus a controlled environment they could influence with energy.


    It was not a secret some of those old masters conspired in the pursuit of a different kind of magic, which they believed was the ultimate answer to everything, the very fabric that held the worlds together.


    At a certain point, their pursuit became a forbidden art, as too many people had lost their lives to the errors made and things that came out of the rifts it created. Since that time, no one dared to follow in their footsteps, and whatever knowledge they gathered, was lost to the ages, leaving only a set of warding laws and rules to remember it by. The instruments that survived, had been locked away from the world in secret places and private collections, whose owners could only guess at their true potential.


    Luckily, Ullie had spent a few centuries in the very same pursuit.


    "Could this be it?" he whispered as he let a small spark of light glide over the artifact back and forward. He watched as the layers revealed themselves one underneath the other, so intricately made, that it would have taken decades to put it all together. It did not look like a mechanism based on logic. It was not a clock and it did not move to the passing of time.


    He tried giving it small shocks of electricity at first.


    Most things imbued by magic give some of that energy back to the world, be it a small shock or a radiant glow. Even the simplest of beings can sense this to some degree, and some are even able to feed off this energy and live in symbiosis. Nature recognizes magic as its integral part, but the thing Ullie was trying to study did not speak that language.


    “I can feel it Juniper,” he said to the orange fur ball that lay curdled up on the sofa, purring and shaking its paw in its sleep.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    With every twitch of its whiskers, the caged birds faltered, nearly fainting. They were as silent as the dead.


    “This is proof. This could change everything,” Ullie whispered as he tried to hold back the excitement and keep his hand from shaking.


    Once again he attempted to coax a reaction from the artifact with simple electricity, a charge only strong enough to ruffle feathers and make hairs stand on end.


    Nothing happened.


    Slowly he focused more power on an already-formed field just to see if he was missing something. Time and time again he had to remind himself that it was persistence and preservance that solved problems, not impatience.


    The energy bounced around the pillars and through the endless layers of the artifact, only to end up dispersing into nothing like it was pulled to another level of existence. No matter what he did afterward, and no matter how much power he used, it always led to the same result.


    Getting a little desperate, he powered through all the elements and simple spells, things that one would use to unlock a door or make a rusty gear move. It wasn’t just the lack of reaction that baffled him, but the way the metal refused to heat up to fire or freeze under the ice.


    The symbols written on the rings were the greatest puzzle. Some part of his mind believed he’d seen them before, somewhere far away and long ago, but at the same time, he could not be certain of it. Tracing the vertical lines around the ring, he tried to recall the memory he wasn’t sure was real.


    Eventually, after tiring himself out and coming too close to incinerating the building, he concluded that whatever the artifact was designed to do, had also made it invulnerable.


    It could have been a million things and served a million purposes, but magic did not appear to be the key to deciphering its secrets.


    Having used the last of his eye drops to ease the exhaustion, he leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. The light of the lantern stayed ever vigilant and kept a promise to warn against curses, even though it failed to recognize the greatest of all, the unbreakable curse Ullie was marked with.


    “This would be so much easier if those archaic rules did not exist,” he said in a faint tone. “If people stopped destroying everything for one day, so much knowledge would be preserved.”


    “You hate them, don’t you?” Juniper said popping one of its eyes open, revealing a piercing red glow. “What a good wizard you are.”


    “Hate? No. No, I’m too old for that. I’m just saying it would be much easier if everyone was a little bit more honest with themselves.”


    “Pity. You could cleanse this pathetic world if you weren’t such a coward.”


    “This world… I’d rather just leave it. Oh… that’s it… he said it was a ship, a ship older than millennia…” he said as speaking to the constellations on the ceiling. “From another place?”


    As Juniper returned to purring, the wizard could not shake the feeling he had, ever since the three strangers walked into his shop. He tilted his chair back and forth tracing the path of stars, shaped like beasts and warriors of old. “From another realm?”


    Jolting forward, he grabbed the sphere and pulled it upwards, trying to make sure he was not as crazy as everyone thought.


    "Orisi?" he whispered as a story started forming at the back of his mind. A thousand things he''d heard, a thousand speculations, and secret conversations could have held some truth after all. If it were real, he wouldn''t have just discovered proof, but a way to conjure the kind of magic that could rewrite history itself.


    Rubbing his eyes and cracking his fingers, he prepared to begin a different kind of game, the kind that required more… books. Turning to the tallest bookshelf in his collection, he started dislodging dusty tomes from their resting places and sending them back to the desk. He stacked one on top of the other with such precision, that it was hard to question their stability even after they were halfway to the ceiling.


    "Now," he said happily dusting off his hands. "We finally get to-"


    Something rang. Something like a telephone, but the wizard was more than certain he never engaged in such modern yet foolish means of communication. There was never a need to call people back in the day, not when he could just summon them.


    “Where is that coming from?”


    “The bird,” said Juniper, flicking its tail. “Shut it up or I will.”


    “The bird? Now that’s a first.”


    “No, don’t!” the boss bird protested as the wizard pulled it out of the cage holding it in his palm like a giant monster. The bird was not the one making the sound, it was something inside it.


    “How does this work?” he started poking the tiny animal, looking for a way to answer the call. “Hello? Anyone there?”


    The ringing stopped and something sounded through the beak.


    “Where are you?” the voice came through, surprisingly clear. “You’re supposed to be at the castle by now?”


    Ullie paused, sorting pieces in his head, realizing the conversation may turn beneficial. “At the shop,” he said, making his voice sound as raspy as he could. He spoke as he held the bird to his ear, actively ignoring the fact of where the microphone might have been placed.


    “The client is here. Don’t mess this up, Vac. Get the artifact and get your ass to the castle. You have 15 minutes.”


    The line broke, and the bird tried to peck his ear off, forcing him to put it back in the cage.


    “The trade-off is tonight? Here? How convenient. I’ll get to kill two birds with one stone today. No pun intended.”


    “Fuck you,” the birds croaked before he put a cloth over them and went on to look for his shoes.