Kaelith's room was neat and organized. Everything had a proper place. The bed was on the left side and his desk on the right. On his desk were all kinds of books stacked on top of each other, some books were about swords, others about magic sigils.
Grabbing one of the books about swords, he flipped through it. A yellow sticky note fell down.
Corvus picked it up from the ground. He expected some secret message but it was only a reminder to his weirdness.
"Corvus has a really weird way of moving his eyes and blinking."
He chuckled as he put it back where it belonged. A rare laugh seeing his friend was going to die tomorrow.
"A black chest," he said out loud.
The desk wasn't the only furniture in the room. There was a bookshelf that looked like it was made from oak.
Trying to find the chest, he rummaged through the shelf, making sure to put everything back where it belonged.
"Nothing," he sighed, "How big is this chest even?"
A king sized bed had plenty of room to hide secrets under it. Kaelith's room had slippers, a pair of shoes, two books and a chest.
"Found it."
He pulled out the chest. A brown chest.
"This isn't black."
He tilted his head as he inspected the wooden piece of furniture.
"Unless it's a black chest hidden inside a brown chest," he chuckled again.
The chest wasn't locked. He opened it and was disappointed; there was only a single item.
A thin strand of web was covering a journal, acting like a sort of makeshift lock.
Corvus untied it and picked up the journal.
He opened it up like he was reading a book with two hands. Flipping through the pages, he found an interesting entry.
"Grehm is a real pain in the ass."
He raised his eyebrow. Grehm? The idea that Kaelith spent a lot of time at the brothel wasn't surprising to him. What did surprise him was that he was interacting with the owner. Then he remember that Kaelith said he tried to buy one of the women.
"He wants instant result but won't even concede on letting me use them for the experiments."
Experiments? A sinking feeling in his stomach arose. He sat down on the bed.
"Cassius is a pain too. He thinks it's simple to overthrow a matriarch."
His jaw dropped. They were trying to overthrow Lyssandra? His mind was racing. Cassius was Aurelia's father and an ambassador from Noxian. Noxian and Aracnia were allies for almost a decade now.
"I'm not involving Corvus in this mess. I'm not even certain I want anything to do with it. But Cassius offered to shelter me in Noxian, it was an actual chance to escape my own fate."
His eyes darted to the date on the entry.
It was a week before he visited the brothel with Kaelith. He flipped to the last page. It was written yesterday.
"I made up my mind. I'm leaving behind all my notes for Corvus. I wonder what he'll make of it."
The last sentence had the code: 9-8-1-5.
"Well..."
He was squinting hard. On the one hand he could understand Kaelith's frustration. He was going to be eaten by Elana. However he felt conflicted on his idea to overthrow his mother. Corvus wanted to live but would he sacrifice them? He wasn't sure.
Corvus went to put the brown chest back under the bed and found the black chest. It was smaller than he expected.
There were a bunch of papers with sketches of sigils on it. They had the corpus of poison magic: a spider.
Each paper had a number. Each paper had a different spider, drawn in unique ways. Each paper had a name on it.
"Number 55, Jumping spider hybrid, Hubert Halt."
Underneath the drawing, the word 'Failure' was written in big letters and circled in red.
Hundreds of experiments and hundreds of victims. A sinking feeling in Corvus' guts made him nauseous. He managed to find one that didn't end in failure.
"Number 561, Brown Widow/Black Widow hybrid, Kaelith."
The sketch of a spider was different from the others. It only had half its legs.
His eyes widened. He had to read the name again. There was no way he'd experiment on himself.
Underneath the sigil was a small entry.
"I haven't been able to see out of my visage for three days now. I can't cast magic. This spell should make the matriarch weak enough to be killed but I can't test it out. I can't cast it anymore so I leave it for you, Corvus."
His hands trembled as he held the paper.
"Use it to overthrow the matriarch yourself, trade it to Cassius for safe passage or perhaps you could just leave it in this chest forever. The choice is yours."
Corvus folded the paper into a square and stuffed it in his pocket. He had to loosen up his collar. It felt suffocating. Talking to Kaelith about his plans would've been nice but he's under strict supervision by the guards. Light headedness came over him.
"I need some fresh air."
He was unsteady on his feet as he made his way out of Kaelith's room and into the palace garden.
The sun was hiding behind the clouds, rays of sunshine peeking out. There was no one outside.
A way out was staring him in the face. But he didn't have poison magic yet. He barely had mind magic.
His visage moved to his shoulder.
"Aurelia," he whispered.
He needed to bond with her for poison magic but also figure out what her father's plan was. Letting Lyssandra get killed didn't sit right with him.
A brown leaf fell on Corvus from one of the branches above him. Then another and another.
"The hell?"
He looked up to see a beautiful woman perched on one of the branches. Blue eyes and white hair; an oleander.
She giggled before she used a vine as a rope to descend.
"Hello Corvus."
"Aurelia? Why are you in the tree?"
Her dress was all dirty yet she looked cute, especially with her small blue flower on her head.
"I saw you coming so I hid."
Corvus tilted his head, "What? Why?"
Putting her hands on her waist, narrowing her eyes, she said, "Because you've been avoiding me."