Over several millennia, the demon kings of the day, now considered failures to the race and prophecy, had left behind their presence in the hundreds of fortresses and castles dotting the vast landscape. The source of magical and physical experimentation that had bolstered the military efforts of the day, left behind upon the death of him to whom their loyalty was bound at the hands of humanity's champion, emanated unto the surrounding area and the nation as a whole as if a plague, the last curse of the failed demon kings, their final failures. From these so-called dungeons came forth monsters of all kinds, and within lay the gathered fortunes and artifacts of the strongest beings in existence, whether ancient or contemporary.
The name of this castle's former owner was lost to time as were many, given the concerted efforts of their betrayed peoples to erase their names from everything from documentation, to their bloodline, to the very namesakes of important objects as a death beyond death. The job of historian, disrespected, was made for masochists, but Kaffe's one-time master had drawn attention to the importance of documentation in the way of the old mages who wisely discarded demonic pique where it served no purpose. The man himself could only be remembered bitterly, but his lessons were branded in pain on her mind, and he'd been a proper master at least in that way.
What did it matter that the Grut, lord of the grey marsh had named the Manic Skiff after himself? It had taken more than a year to find the hermetic signatures woven within its propulsion circuits to learn just where it had originated, and those days were wasted on a vehicle which couldn't be returned to service after all. Worse and worse were the chests found within dungeons fully detached from their origins by years or ages and never investigated!
But here, this was where the last chest had originated. Kaffe soared on leathery wings, following the tiny movements of a pendulum, visible only due to a new technique developed within her own laboratory. She'd have been proud of the micromagics if she hadn't essentially wrenched the runes out of a power regulation circuit in an otherwise unremarkable magic sword. She'd come to a ravine deep in feral territory, hidden by the very angle of the surrounding landscape, and set down on its rim to check the pendulum.
It was swinging wildly as soon as she'd let the string tense. Energies resonating from the sample had absolutely originated under her very feet. She stowed the device in one of her hanging bags and left them there at the edge as she descended, flaring her wings and loosing a flake of magic light into the hole before stepping off the edge. Even if it was a plundered, empty place, plunderers rarely knew how to take the most actually valuable things; she could only hope that scrolls and codices weren't used for their campfires.
Kaffe floated down within an expansive space, walls and ceiling glistening as though she were within a geode, a fantastical structure formed at the advent of all things. Before demonkind or any other living creature, Heaven had been in the process of refining this crystalline space deep within the world, swaddled in liquid rock. It was comparatively recent that the structure only now coming into view had been constructed; Kaffe's flake of light fell hundreds of feet before landing upon a landscape cut from the whole cloth of the surface, illuminating not only a fortress the like of which she'd only heard of in the fearful mutterings of madmen, but grazing lands and the placid waters of an artificial lake.
It shouldn't have been green. This space couldn't have gotten more than a couple hours of light on a given day, but the grasses were as lush and healthy as she'd seen in the human lands, complete with wild trees, dots of vivid color revealed to be a cornucopia of fruits. Kaffe circled downward, tilting her wings to keep herself level as possible without flapping, and spread magical light all around to illuminate the entirety of the space, not only to take in its majesty, but to search for risks. She'd seen the kinds of horrors which stalked beautiful spaces for herself.
But by the time her bare feet touched the cool grass, she'd seen nothing that concerned her. She cast one final light to hover over her shoulder, the beginnings of another spell held offhandedly in reserve as she stepped through the strangely manicured grasses to the bridge across the fortress' moat, left open after the death of the occupant had reduced its defenses to meaninglessness.
The walls inside were actually plastered and painted, or had been at one time. Age had stolen the color and rot had eaten the plaster beneath, dotting it with black holes rimmed by fungus. Given the fact that most demon-kin didn't bother with those niceties atop bare stone and wood, whoever had occupied this castle was a cut above average. How it survived the millennia in a state even this preserved was perplexing.
It wasn't a utilitarian space, too large, too tall, and with too much worn marble that Kaffe soon began coming across. This felt so much less like a demonic structure and so much more like those that she had been involved in plundering with her master during the war, off in the human lands, meant for their
gods
. Their abundance had been apparent at every turn with paintings and sculpture, great colorful banners accentuating the high ceilings of their halls, whereas the current high lord of demons slept in a room scarcely wider than thrice his arm span like a pauper.
It being his choice scarcely made it more acceptable.
Up near the ceiling, Kaffe saw as she walked the twinkling of the metal rings which would have held that same sort of banner. Incredible luxury, using metal which wouldn't patina or rust to nothing within however many millennia it lay undisturbed; she planned to take as many as she could carry back home, with or without what she'd come to find. Perhaps a bit of jewelry would settle her lord's temper... or inflame it, considering his... her current predicament.
The stone was cold beneath her bare feet, marble in such great slabs that the radius of her light could not find a seam. One would think that a place such as this would never fall out of memory, that it would remain the oft-spoken jewel of the race no matter how many rational men must be expended to reclaim it from the monsters.
Kaffe kept her head on a swivel, squinting into the darkness while directing the points of her ears to pinpoint any small noise.
It was too quiet. If the monsters once here had starved she would have expected remains, or had it really been long enough that scavengers had taken every scrap of flesh and bone, long enough that their own leavings had been rendered dirt? No, in fact it looked like there had been servants sweeping the floors, dusting the giant marble pillars and the ceiling, cutting the grass outside in the darkness of the surrounding estate, but they were nowhere to be seen.
There were spells which could affect that, but even the best enchantments had some trace of their existence. Kaffe's refined spiritual senses picked up not a whiff. Magics so delicate as that had been denied to demonkind for eons.
By the time she'd crossed the entry hall to the marble steps, Kaffe had dismissed the offensive spell held in her hand for a stronger variant. Were there an ancient monster waiting for her behind some door or another, she much preferred to reduce it to atoms then and there even if she could have learned something from its corpse.
The rooms in the East wing were at least closer to a reasonable scale, though the fittings and fixtures were all of incredible quality, proven just by their continued existence. Kaffe went to searching, knowing full well that the most apparently valuable treasures were always deeper inside, but true treasures were often crammed into worm-eaten corners. The doors had all long since rotted away, leaving their hinges to flap uselessly, and any room that had once held a wooden storage chest now held its shadow in the form of a standing metal skeleton. Gold pieces here and there, flat disks with no minting, unhelpful yet picked up all the same, but Kaffe couldn't have hoped for a diary or a grimoire to have survived in the common form.
Old master historian Del had bemoaned how common an item paper was in the common age, compared to his childhood. There was once a time that anything written down could be assumed to be important, no matter how silly an ancient mage's code made it seem. Some of the most valuable contributions to magic had been found in cookbooks! If this castle were so old as it seemed, Kaffe could only imagine the wealth of knowledge lost forever to rot.
Kaffe rummaged through a pile through the open skeleton of a locked chest. One piece of rubbish there looked like a slate, with a character scraped into its surface... So this place was
