Luna slowly stretched herself into a crawling position, then leaned out, reaching past the side table for the bell.
Not close enough.
She lay down on her stomach, settling in place for a moment and breathing.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
Now try again.
She pushed herself forward, inching closer until she felt that she might fall off the bed.
Almost... Almost...
There it was.
Luna pushed on the side of the bell, not bothering to try to push or pull on the cord hanging down like a normal person would under normal circumstances, and then she heaved herself back onto her bed with as much strength as she could muster.
It was barely enough to move herself. Each one of her muscles was drained. This was not a normal exhaustion.
The bell rang out with a clanging sound.
Too much for a normal bell.
Luna frowned.
Why was it so... enthusiastic?
Luna had never used a word like that for an inanimate object before. It was strange how it gave the impression of being alive.
Then she realized what it must be.
Right before the world around her went dark.
A relic. An object imbued with magic to the point of being conscious, and often having its own form that looked like whatever race had created or manifested it.
Manifestation was one of the only reasons that the monsters in the North were such a problem. That and their numbers.
The non-sentient beings that were hostile, widely known as monsters, had an inbred ability to create and fuse with relics by their sheer will. That was why known nests and breeding areas had to be crushed so quickly, because if they weren't, and the monsters found out that they were discovered, then the stress on them would quickly increase the chance of them manifesting relics, and the nest would soon grow too strong.
This was also why killing them was so valuable, and likely where Lukas got his fortune from, because many monsters would physically form the relic inside their actual body after they died, though while they lived it would be fused to their being and inseparable from them by any nonmagical or known magical means. Of course, that didn't mean there wasn't a way to do it. Just that no one knew how.
She had discovered this through her reading, not her tutoring. Her tutors were far too ignorant for her liking, so eventually, despite the childlike trust of authority figures she had had when she had been younger, which was the same as most young children had, she had turned to reading.
Luckily, that point had been before she had been properly introduced to noble society, so she had had plenty of time for it, except for when she had been forced to go to gatherings of noble daughters, where her father didn't allow her to take books.
Unfortunately, not a single one of those books told her what she was supposed to do when she accidentally touched a relic, and it turned out to be an artifact, and she was subsequently pulled into its Interior.
Artifacts were a particular form of relics, strong enough with a certain kind of magic to possess a strength that warped not just space, but also time.
This particular form of magic was considered Elven magic, although she had read conflicting reports about Elven magic. Some claimed that it was something different entirely, which was strange enough to have piqued her curiosity. Unfortunately, she hadn't been able to discover anything more about it, due to her father's decreased toleration for her foreign literature requests as she grew older and eventually entered the court.
The point was, she was now standing, or rather, sitting, in an entirely black plane that stretched on for a theoretically infinite distance, and before her was a ghostly manifestation with a humanoid form, which appeared to be in the shape of a snakekin Beastfolk, that had enough power to obliterate her on a whim.
Lukas Warwick, you bastard. Don't just leave something like that in the room with someone who's exhausted to the point of being unable to stand! In fact, don't leave something like that in the room with anyone at all, ever!
She didn't really mean it, of course. She shouldn't have been able to reach it, by all rights. And besides, it wasn't like he regularly left other people in there, at least as far as she knew. Plus, he was distracted by her and whatever she had done last night.
"Well, hello, there," the apparition said. "You like like a perfectly delicious little snack!"
Lukas Warwick, you bastard!