The changes seemed without pattern
as I had watched it for hours, trying to decide if it was an attempt at
communication. If it was, I couldn’t decipher the code. The crystals didn’t
hum, didn’t glow, didn’t do anything other than change shape and strained to
reach past some invisible field within the box. Even with the lid open, the
crystal couldn’t push past the top of the box. In fact, it didn’t even touch
the box in any way. It sort of hovered in place, equidistant from all edges.
I hadn’t been brave enough to try
touching the crystal. I know better than
to try something like that. Max’s notes on the object held his trademarked
terseness in the logbook: “Shapechanging crystal. Beats me.”
While I was at a loss for the
crystal, I did know the box held containment glyphs and geograms. I knew
because I had used one to contain a demon inside a man. It wasn’t exactly the
same, but there were enough similarities that I reasoned it to be the case.
“The question is, what is being
imprisoned?”
Generally imprisonment was done for a good reason, such as to segregate criminals and dangerous folk away from
everyone else. But when it came to magic, imprisonment was often done for power
or other purposes.
So
this is either something really bad that will get loose and run rampant, or a
being wrongfully imprisoned. And I have no way of knowing which.
I closed the lid of the box, then
pushed it back on the shelf. I made a few notes in the new logbook of things to
try to discover what it was, and moved on to the next item.