Okay, on the bright side, funneling all your panic into an attempt to bend the bars seems to have burned the panic down to a manageable level. On a less-bright side, it also seems to have done nothing to the bars, which remain as unbent as ever.
You turn your attention back to escaping. Not to panic, but between the cloak’s blindness curse and the looming possibility of Sigrid waking up and finding you, you’re on more than one time limit right now. It’s basically a race at this point to see what will fuck you over first.
As best you can tell, there isn’t any sort of chain or rope attached to the top of the cage. The whole thing must have either been hidden in a ceiling compartment hundreds of feet above, or floating directly above the pillar while invisible.
Given that you’re in a Mages Guild, the convoluted “it was magic” solution somehow seems more likely than the feat of engineering the alternative would take.
Like you suspected, it’s a soul gem and some burnt-out rune-type things. You know what magic enchantments are enough to understand that the gem was keeping a spell maintained, but not enough to know how it actually works, if the spell can be restored, or even if there’s any energy left in the gem.
Heck, you’re not sure if restoring the spell would even lift the cage back up. It might be designed to levitate the cage, or it might be designed to hold something in place twenty feet above you. Even interpreting something like this is way over your level, let alone getting it to actually function.
Without any other real options, you take a look at the crates by the wall. You swear, next time you’re gonna look at all the insignificant background details before touching the clearly-important thing.
Although the crates themselves are too heavy to draw to the cage, you have no problem opening them and looking inside. Some of this stuff looks rather expensive; you find dozens of little glass alchemy-mixing things, dozens of identical robes… someone could equip and train entire classrooms full of mages with this stuff, were it not packed away down in this oubliette.
Oh, hey, daggers!
Alright, they’re silver daggers. That little nuance of magic is never going to stop pissing you off.
It’s not a bag, it’s a rolled up pelt. As for what’s inside, it looks like it contains… the rest of the pelt, all rolled up. The leather straps around it look rather sturdy, however; you might be able to bend the cage bars if you wrap them around a pair and twist.
Or at least, you could see that working for bars that aren’t an inch thick and made of solid steel.
The remaining two chests seem to be locked, and are too heavy to pull. This box, though, contains a set of paints.
Or she might come down while the cloak’s recharging, which would leave you blind, completely visible, and at her mercy with no chance of escape or fighting back. As long as you can get these bars apart and escape before the cloak runs dry, you’ll be fine. Or heck, even if you only manage to get out of the cage, you can hide in a barrel or behind that wall while it recharges.
If you were going to try to recharge the cloak, you really should’ve started it as soon as you were trapped. The way you see it, the chances of Sigrid coming down and checking the trap get higher with every second, so losing a big chunk of time while blind is not going to be your advantage if you want to get out of here before-
You hear a latch click echo through the cavern.
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Kayit Ol