Page 30 of Spirit Storm

He pegs me with a look, and I nod. “Got it. Thanks so much for helping him today.”

He nods. “I’ll leave you to it. And… good luck, kids.”

Asher drops into the chair beside me and sets down two turkey sandwiches. Next, he opens a bag of salt and vinegar chips and adds them to each plate. "Okay, you nearly keeled over. The house and I voted, and you need to eat something while we hit the database."

There's no sense in arguing. Asher was a mother hen before we moved to Emberwood. Now that he's my destined guardian angel, he's more determined than ever to take care of me.

Besides, with him and the house in agreement, I'm outvoted two to one.

I pick up half of the sandwich and take a bite. The Order database is already open. And after finding no folders or notations specifically about lockstones, I've entered it into the search bar and am waiting for it to return what hits.

"What the hell is a lockstone?" I chew my sandwich and reach for a chip.

The search loads and the results begin to populate.

"Okay, we have something." I click the first entry and scan over the information on the screen. Asher leans sideways, dripping chip crumbs on the table. I shift the laptop slightly so he can see without dripping more bits over my keyboard.

"What the hell language is that?"

I frown. The first entry is dense. It's written in an old language, with formal phrasing, and the kind of academic tone that makes the Order feel like a Victorian gentleman's club pretending to be a government agency.

"It's English, goofball. Just listen… Lockstone," I read aloud. "A magical practice documented in the early pre-Order records, involving the warding and empowering of a number of very specific stones, placed in key locations, to amplify their collective binding power."

"Like wardstones?" He points to my sandwich. "Keep eating."

I take another bite. "Sounds more like magical padlocks." I scroll further down and keep reading. "Once activated, a lockstone array creates a warded containment field capable of repelling or binding powerful supernatural entities. The binding grows stronger with each stone added, each stone drawing power from its placement relative to one another. Disruption of even one stone in the array weakens the whole."

Asher stops chewing. "Weakens the whole?”

"Yeah." My sandwich sits heavy in my stomach as I keep scrolling.

The second entry is shorter. A record fragment, partially restored, with gaps where the text has degraded. I lean closer to the screen.

"It says the earliest lockstone arrays were constructed in remote cave systems, deep underground. The decision to place them subterranean was made as a deliberate attempt to keep them hidden from discovery."

Asher finishes his sandwich and grabs a chip off my plate. "What else does it say?"

"Mostly that they are literal locks. Incredibly powerful. And the more stones in the array, the more powerful the binding."

Outside the kitchen window, a cardinal lands on the ledge and looks in at us. Then, a gust of winter unholy blasts against its feathers, and the poor guy takes off. I don't blame him.

Asher pulls the laptop toward himself and scrolls, scanning the information while I finish half my sandwich. "That's it? Does the Order have a list of where these lockstone arrays might be or what's being contained within them?"

"Doesn't seem so."

"So… a very long time ago, someone or a group of someones went to the trouble of building an array of very powerful warded lockstones, hiding them in secret underground caves, so that some big baddie could be either contained or repelled. And now that Tharuzel has finally achieved a physical form, he's spending all his time and energy finding and breaking them."

"Seems like it."

"And he's already broken two."

"That we know of."

"And whatever is locked away is bad enough that the people building the locks hid all mention of them on record."

I nod.

Asher taps the table twice. "So, we're basically fucked."