Lina's eye twitched. The palace guard to whom she had been talking to started sweating. "I'm telling you the truth! Princess Amelia isn't here! Ask the Crown Prince!"
     "Okay," Lina said with a sweet smile that only made the guard more nervous, "Where is Phil?"
     "He's in his study!" The guard quickly moved to the side and pointed in the general direction of Prince Phil's study. "Don't hurt me!" he added.
     Lina grinned and started walking towards the study, Gourry on her heels; she hadn't needed the rough direction the guard had provided, as she remembered the way to the study from the last time she had been there.

     Lina and Gourry stood at the doors to Prince Philionel's study. As they stood there, wondering what had caused the muffled yell only a few minutes ago, the door swung open and a harassed-looking messenger quickly left. Lina looked at Gourry, shrugged, and they went in, Gourry swinging shut the door left open by the departing messenger.
     Prince Phil was sitting behind his desk, his head in his hands. Lina cleared her throat, sensing that this was a time not to be loud and cheerful. "Phil? Where's Amelia? We asked the guards about her, but they didn't say much..."
     He said, simply, "My daughter's vanished."
     "What?" Lina said, disbelieving. This was just too surreal for her.
     Prince Philionel took a deep breath. "Amelia, my daughter, has vanished." He looked at Lina, trying to read her face. "She and Zelgadiss-san vanished last week from Rose Castle."
     Lina blinked. Castle? What castle...oh, she thought, he must mean the castle in that legend Amelia told us about before she and Zel left. "So, they did investigate that castle."
     "Zelgadiss-san asked permission to investigate the abandoned castle near the village of Rose. Amelia went to represent the Saillune royal family." Prince Phil lifted his head from his hands. "The messenger who just left was from Rose. A week ago, one of the people from Clearwater Farm went there to deliver supplies and found the place deserted..."
     "Oh no..." Lina could only guess how this was affecting the prince. Lina herself found this hard to believe. She had known Zel and Amelia. They had been good -- not as good as her own self, of course, but good enough that they wouldn't just vanish. Whatever -- whomever -- had caused their disappearance was powerful.
     But now...
     Lina stood up. "Gourry and I will investigate." The prince looked at her, surprised. "And don't even think of offering to pay us (besides covering our basic expenses, of course). Zel and Amelia were friends. This is personal." Besides, Lina thought, there's bound to be treasure involved -- why else would something powerful enough to make those two just vanish be hanging around there? It didn't hurt, of course, that she remember Amelia having said something about the castle and its lands having been clearly declared a century ago to be the rightful reward for whomever solved the mystery.

     Lina and Gourry set out early the next morning. The messenger, a young mercenary named Miles Forrest, was on a fresh horse from the royal stables, riding with them. Prince Philionel had requested that Miles guide Lina and Gourry to Clearwater Farm, and provide directions on to Rose Castle itself.
     Prince Philionel watched as the three rode off, hoping that Lina and Gourry would find his daughter alive...

     Lina and Gourry looked at the castle. It was a tall foreboding building. It reeked of forebodings. It made a distinct effort to set the record on exuding forebodings.
     Aside from its problem with forebodings, it had incredible stonework and, even outside of the castle proper, the glass windows were incredibly beautiful; this was not a castle that was designed to be a drafty old fortress. This castle had been constructed to be a beautiful yet functional work of art and comfortable place to live. If it hadn't the air of general unniceness, this would be the waking world's example of the palace of her fondest fantasies.

     The castle's grounds were well-kept. There were archers' targets along one wall, which were in good repair and even had a few arrows sticking in them. Lina glanced at where the arrows were, and hoped that she never had to rely on the archer whom had put them there. Along the opposite wall hung, in a theoretical sort of way, several sword-practice dummies. Against the wall itself was a sizable pile of relatively fresh ex-dummies. Unless Amelia had taken up swordwork... But Zelgadiss wasn't somebody Lina could easily see demolishing practice dummies. The few times Lina saw Zelgadiss attacking practice dummies, he had 'killed' them with a minimum of strokes, all of them graceful, and with a minimum of mess to clean up. A small voice noted, at the back of Lina's mind, that Gourry in action against practice dummies was even more of a treat to watch...
     Aside from that, though, the grounds were unusually neat. It looked rather like one castle Lina had once visited in early in her travels, when she had her first direct encounter with a mazoku. The captain of the castle guards's favorite punishment was to instruct the offending parties to clean up the grounds. It was not something she quite wanted to be reminded of, given how much trouble the entire incident had been.

     Lina Inverse and Gourry Gabriev looked around the great hall of the castle. It was two stories high, and by Lina's estimates it was perhaps slightly larger than the main ballroom of the palace in the capital... The ceiling was vaulted stone, and Lina could barely believe that there could be a floor above it, though she knew that there had to be at least one.
     Heavy curtains had once covered the lower halves of the walls near the doors of the great hall. But the curtains were gone now, and all that remained was the hardware that had held them to the wall. There was, to the left, a door. To the right was an open archway. Each, had the curtains still been there, would have been hidden from public view.
     Lina looked towards the open archway, and then towards the door. The door looked more interesting. It was clear to Lina that it led to much less public rooms, while the section that was accessed by the open archway was merely not made obvious to the public most of the time.
     This, of course, meant that of the two it would be the most interesting to explore. "Gourry, why don't we split up? It'll take less time to search the castle for any clues, and from what Amelia said I doubt the castle's dangerous during the day."
     Gourry, possibly purely out of self preservation, nodded. "Alright, Lina!"
     "I'll take the left!"

     Lina turned the knob and carefully pushed the door inwards. It swung open silently, as if it was freshly and regularly oiled.
     The door opened onto a hall. On the long wall directly across from this door were two evenly spaced doors, and also at each end was a single door. Aside from these doors and the lamps, the hall was empty. Lina walked into the hall, and started towards the nearest of the doors. She stopped with her hand on its knob, however, as she noticed something unusual about the lamp fixtures.
     They had been designed to be normally lit by the ball of light created by a light spell, and, though they could hold candles in an emergency, it'd be unwise to frequently use candles in them... The prince for whom this place was built for and his wife must have been sorcerers, Lina realized. There was no other reason for such lamps otherwise...
     Lina felt a chill in her bones; she knew that Amelia and Zelgadiss couldn't have failed to notice that, too.
     Lina had known when she'd decided to investigate that her friends hadn't been the first sorcerers to vanish from there, and it was very unlikely that no sorcerers would have tried to solve the mystery of Rose Castle before Amelia and Zelgadiss. But there was a difference between knowing and knowing something in such a deep-down way that you can't ignore it.
     The door Lina first tried was one of the two doors at the ends of the hallway. It swung towards her, and she found herself looking into a bedroom. She walked around the room, giving it a cursory inspection. It was rounded, a reflection of its location inside the corner tower. The room was around four stories tall, with four rose windows. Each of the windows was positioned carefully to be nearly a quarter of a turn away from the previous one, or at least have that appearance.
     The largest was nearly a story tall, by Lina's rough estimates, and would be located at around the center of the tower's outer wall with its bottom at least a story above the ground. A lone winged figure inhabited it, her gold and black hair filling what sections of the background that her white wings didn't. She was wearing a simple sapphire dress, and in her cupped hands floated a round, clear gem.
     On the other side, just above the center a rail-less cresent-shaped loft that was around the same distance from the floor, there was a smaller rose window filled by a stylized dragon's head in the colors of flames with single light blue piece of cut glass for its eye. It was set into a shallow box, and Lina suspected that there were hidden hinges so a light could be placed behind it.
     The final two windows were across from each other, each one having a stone ledge running beneath them that went up to perhaps a hand's width beneath the window. There was a bed against each stone ledge, and upon them were a few assorted items that Lina guessed had belonged to Amelia and Zelgadiss.
     Lina paused, a slight twinge of conscious reminding her that it would be nosy to go through their things before she gave herself a small token excuse. Lina then went to the less filled one of the shelves. The stained glass window above it depicted a Healer's Rose blossom in full bloom. On one of the deep red-pink petals had been set a piece of clear faceted crystal, looking like a drop of dew. Lina touched the crystal, and a small smile of appreciation twitched over her mouth; whoever had made the window had taken the time to use rock crystal.
     On the ledge beneath the rose-blossom window was a sword-care kit and an ornate medium-sized jewel box. Lina quickly went through the sword-care kit; she knew from experience what to look for in one, especially when it came to assessing the quality of its materials. This one -- Lina knew it had to be Zelgadiss's, as she knew Amelia would never keep one -- was of the highest quality she had seen in a long time... Lina's brow wrinkled with a sudden suspicion, and she looked at the kit a bit closer.
     I thought I knew this style of kit, Lina thought upon locating the seller's mark, one that she had known from childhood. Dad's certainly managed to maintain the quality of his goods.
     As she put the kit back together and back on the shelf, she wondered slightly if Zelgadiss had realized that she was related to those Inverses.
     The jewelry box was quickly looked-through. It contained, mostly, the normal items of jewelry of theirs, such Amelia's earrings and Zelgadiss's brooch. There were also a few mysterious pieces, particularly a matching set of jewelry -- earrings, necklace, and a ring -- of white gold with deep sky-blue topazes and deep blue sapphires, which had been carefully wrapped in pale blue silk and tucked into a black velvet bag.
     The window above the other ledge was split in half by a sword, with a clear cut gem in its pommel. On the left side of the sword was a young man being knighted, and on the right the same man was riding out, presumably to perform good deeds, with the same sword at his side as the one that divided the window. The ledge had on it a writing kit, two books wrapped in protective covers, and Zelgadiss's sword lay at the very back of the ledge.
     Lina opened up the writing kit and discovered that it was nothing interesting. It contained a couple pens and brushes, several carefully labeled packets of dry ink powder, an ink stick & stone, and a well. All of them were of good quality, but rather standard. The most exceptional items were some of the ink powders, and that only because they would not be often carried by anybody but a sorcerer.
     The two books with protective outer covers turned out to be diaries. Well, though Lina was certain that Zel would insist that his solemn-looking one, completely encased in plain high-quality black leather, was a journal, Lina was just as certain that it was a diary. The other one was encased in creamy white leather, and from the feel of the seams Lina guessed that the cover was made up of perhaps two layers of good leather, with a middle layer containing some fabric with protection spells for the book on them. It was clearly something Amelia would carry; it was likely that this would eventually find itself a home in some archive of royal papers of the Saillunese royal house, documenting the youthful adventures of Queen Amelia the First for future generations of the royal house. Locks had been attached to the flaps of both of them, good brass ones which would require effort to break even if they did lack any spells to prevent somebody from opening them without the right key.
     Under the two books were the keys; it was obvious that neither Amelia nor Zelgadiss had been expecting anybody to be coming into there. Lina carefully unlocked the black one and unfolded the outer cover. The journal itself was elegantly cloth-bound with navy blue cloth, and a navy ribbon marked the last entry, nearly two-thirds of the way into the book. Lina carefully opened it to there, and looked curiously at the page. The entry had been written in a strange script that Lina was completely unfamiliar with.
     Lina then unlocked Amelia's diary. Her diary had a leather cover that matched the outer cover, and a cream ribbon near its end. Lina opened it up to the ribbon...and found more of the same script that she had seen in Zel's journal.
     Lina looked at the start of Amelia's dairy: still the same unknown script. She then looked at the first page of Zel's journal, and saw it written in the familiar script that was normally used. There were comments in the margins in a different hand. She leafed through, and to her disappointment discovered that the last page in a script she could read was written while Zelgadiss had been traveling with Amelia, Gourry and herself and trying to find the Clair Bible.
     Lina put them back as they had been and left the room.

     Lina walked back into the hallway, and noticed a small door on her left, just beside the door that led to the great hall. Curious, she opened the door to find a narrow, tightly spiraling, and dimly lit staircase made out of wrought iron.
     Lina lifted her palm and cast Lighting. Sending the resulting ball of light on ahead of her, she climbed the stairs. Eventually, a small doorway in them opened out to another hallway; the stairs looked like they went up for another floor or two. Lina glanced up quickly, and saw that a skylight had been installed to provide the stairs with light. Like all the windows she had seen so far, it was stained glass.
     She shook her head in disbelief. Why would anybody install a stained glass skylight over a hidden staircase? It wasn't like anybody would get to admire it...
     Lina stepped into the hallway to do a bit of exploring. Between the end of the hallway -- Lina estimated far end of this hallway roughly corresponded with the far end of the near-identical hallway downstairs -- were two rooms. It was a bit shorter the hallway downstairs, though, and peeking through the door at the very end she found that this was how you were supposed to get to the loft in the main bedroom if you couldn't use flight spells.
     A small table with two chairs stood on the loft's floor, dustless but nevertheless still looking unused, sat. Lina ventured further in, and noticed that there were columns of bookshelves to either side of the door, as tight as possible against the wall. They were only broken by the door she had come through and the rose window depicting Ceified, the polished metal lining the inside of the box behind it gleaming through the glass.
     She stepped to the table to take a closer look at the small wooden box on it, and noticed that, inlaid in the table's top was a marble chessboard. Carefully opening the box, she discovered that inside was an exquisitely carved stone chess set. The black pieces, to her experienced judgment, were marble; on some pieces, small red gems, perhaps rubies, had been set into the pieces as eyes. The white set looked to have been carved from alabaster, and set into some of its pieces were small blue gems -- given the quality of the pieces, she guessed they were sapphires. No two pieces looked the same, either; as Lina went through the set, she found that even the pawns were each unique. One of the black bishops caught her eye; she laughed slightly after realizing why. The chess set was a Ceified versus Shabraningdo style set, and from its looks Lina decided that it must have been carved very soon after the War of the Demon's Fall... That meant it was as old as the castle -- and worth the price of a small kingdom.
     Lina put the chess pieces back into the box gently, and closed it. She wondered, idly, if she could teach Gourry chess, and left the room. As she went back to the stairs, she glanced into the two rooms on the floor.
     The one closer to the bedroom had been, once upon a time, a nursery. Its large rectangular window, a stained glass window as always, was a pastel riot of color depicting a white wolf sitting and looking incredibly doggish in a surreal forest with a wreath of flowers around his neck. Beneath the window was a window seat and an old-fashioned cradle, which, if any of its clothes had been on it, would have completely hidden any evidence of there being a baby inside.
     The other room had been set up as a study, with three narrow stained glass windows, all on hinges. The left one, Lina noticed, depicted a large Healer's Rose, and the one to the far right was an abstract version of the Saillune royal house's crest. The center window showed a gold and clear burst of light. Taking up most of the room was a massive desk, with an old-looking chair behind it.
     Lina went back to the stares and up to the next floor, this one closed off from the stairs by a door. This floor, she discovered, was one a long room that was as wide as both the hall and the two rooms off of it on the floor below, and about as long as those two rooms, too. There were several stained glass windows on one of its walls, all of them depicting some heroic act from one or another fairy tale. The room itself was painted blue, and was unfurnished. There was an aura of...waiting. Like the room was still waiting for the young princes for whom it had been intended...
     The next floor was hardly better; it looked almost exactly the same as the one below, except that its walls were pink and its windows depicted, instead of heroic acts, romantic scenes from fairy tales. This room, too, was waiting, this time for princesses who had yet to arrive.
     Lina stepped out and carefully swung the door shut. Glancing up, she looked at the skylight. There were seven rounds of pastel colors surrounding a large piece of clear crystal that had been cut to increase the light coming through the window. From there, at the top of the stairs, it was surprisingly light and airy. She went back down the stairs, intending to finish exploring the hall on the first floor.

     Meanwhile, Gourry wandered through the maze of the servant's quarters and guest rooms that lay beyond the archway. He very quickly quit trying to figure out the building's layout; it had been designed so that one would need a guide if they were not used to traveling the halls. Instead, he was simply looking for a single normal window. The closest he had come, so far, was one badly done piece of stained glass.
     He also looked for one sign of dirt or ill repair. Aside from the aura of disuse and lack of habitation, though, each room looked amazingly clean, lacking even any furniture aside from the occasional piece made of a material more durable than wood, leather, or cloth.

     The first room on the first floor was depressingly plain. It was, like almost every single other room Lina had explored, incredibly clean and very empty. The window was the most interesting thing in the room. It was a long, rectangular window mostly made of pale blue rippled glass, with a pale pink lotus in the lower left corner and a light green leaf beside it with a bit of cut glass or rock crystal for a droplet of water. Lina supposed it had been intended to be eventually turned into a parlor, or a spare bedroom.
     The next room was a very plain sitting room and library. There were two cushions on the floor, clearly brought to the castle recently, in front of a fireplace on the right-hand wall. This room, like the loft, had bookshelves along almost all of the wall, except for the fireplace & hearth and a pair of French doors directly across from the hallway's door.
     Lina looked at the double French doors. It was a small work of art; the panels of stained glass in it -- Lina wondered if there was a single pane of normal glass in the entire building -- showing a tangle of pink-red roses. She recognized the kind of rose, too, as Healer's Roses. Lina thought this was appropriate for a castle that had been built for a prince of Saillune.
     She opened the door -- noticing as she did so that the doors' knobs had been cast in the shape of a bloom from a Healer's Rose -- and looked into what was beyond them. She gasped. Amelia and Zelgadiss must have been busy, for the garden in the walled courtyard that the doors opened up on showed few signs of having ever lost its gardeners.
     Well, with the exception of the water garden, which was badly overgrown. Lina smiled to herself. She wouldn't have expected that the chimera would be so devoted a gardener as to almost completely restore a formal garden.
     Lina wandered among the plantings. She occasionally stopped to admire an usually rare specimen; the garden was planted completely with plants used in magic, and only a few of the plants were particularly common. A few were even ones that she'd never seen before, even in the gardens kept by magicians' guilds. This garden, Lina knew, was the kind that people sometimes fought over now -- she doubted that some of the plants inside it could be easily found elsewhere.
     This wasn't as comforting a thought as it would have been elsewhere. Elsewhere, Lina would have been free to gloat over her luck and think about how she was going to get her new plants to market.
     Here, though, she had to wonder why nobody else had dared take rootings from these plants.
     Lina settled on a stone bench hidden inside a dense group of thick rosebushes -- whomever had originally planted this garden must have been very fond of roses, she thought idly -- and let her mind drift.

     Gourry looked around the small stone sitting room. Straight across from him were a pair of French doors, standing wide open and leading to a garden. Behind him was the door to the hallway, and to his left was a wooden door that, from his previous investigations, he knew led to the kitchen. He paused, and decided that Lina was most likely to be in the garden.
     Once in the garden, he stopped every so often to sniff at a flower or plant. Lina, looking out through a gap in the roses, watched as Gourry came closer. She grinned, and waited until Gourry was walking past her hiding place.
     Gourry stiffened when he felt Lina's arms wrap around his waist. "Lina!" he yelled as she giggled, somewhat insanely. "Don't do that!"
     Lina just looked up at him, her grin wide enough that her eyes were closed. He sighed, and ruffled her hair.
     "I found the kitchen, Lina. Want to search it for some lunch?"

The Slayers & the characters from it were created by & are copyright Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi. This story is the property of Ryo Hoshi & is not being written for profit.