Interlude - Devils and Saints [Rewrite]
“Madam, please! For your safety—”
Luitgarde Maryem was closer to 90 than 80.
“Please do not touch the artif—”
Luitgarde Maryem was mortal.
“Please, madam, they're dangerous!”
Luitgarde Maryem let all concerns fall to deaf ears as she continued her vigorous shaking of the glass box in her hands, while eight of Beuzaheim's elite hollow core guards watched in abject horror.
Nothing happened, so she returned it to its pedestal.
‘Deal with it as you may’, that useless prick Baldur had said—and deal with it ‘as she may’, Luitgarde would. This was the fruit of her confrontation with him, and though it may be little compared to the full breadth of his schemes, it was a start.
This vault had been abandoned for who knew how long, completely forgotten by the time her father had taken the position of chief, before Luitgarde had even been born—and it was most certainly not the source of all the expensive items Baldur had been passing around.
On the flip side, this place should have been an incredible discovery, to be shouted from the rooftops, thanks to its historical value alone.
Had Baldur cared, that was.
The idiot had denied her request for experts to be sent in. If nothing else, they could have weighed in on his claims. Sealed as it had been, the vault was remarkably well preserved—to Luitgarde's untrained eye, at least—so there was potential, nonetheless.
Or there would have been, if anyone whose talents lay beyond innkeeping and freestyle jousting had been allowed to take a look.
No, it was just Luitgarde and far more guards than anyone could possibly need for a stroll through an ancient vault. She would have suspected Baldur sent them in to spy on her—paranoid prick that he was—were it not for the fact that they were simply too inane.
Him hoping something did happen—with the guards too incompetent to do anything—was a likelier scenario. Hollow core guards would be no match for some ancient horror.
But if they had anything other than inflated <Body> attributes to their name, they might have noticed the place was so manaless it almost hurt to be in, and Luitgarde was not even a mage!
She took a step forward, examining another pedestal. Each seemed to contain a different trinket from some time in the past, though she could not read the remnants of the text some bore. Its script was unrecognizable.
The display that made her opinion on the place flip was the one she found next. It was larger than her bed and caked in dust. Luitgarde almost summoned a cloth from her inventory to clean it, before she remembered there were people here she could annoy—if they wanted to avoid that, they should not have been Baldur’s men.
“Clean this for me, please.”
The guard who had stepped forward and started to wipe the dust off screamed, jumping back.
Naturally, Luitgarde took that as her hint to see what the fuss was all about. If it scared a guard, it was probably interesting.
And interesting it was… just not good.
It was a corpse. An honest-to-the-Devils corpse.
That was around the point where she started considering just setting this place on fire. Baldur certainly would not care—though he might still use that as an excuse to complain, actually.
Luitgarde wrinkled her nose. “I need a moment. Ensure I remain unbothered.”
One of the guards was glancing at the others, almost one by one, then tried to meet her gaze as he spoke. “Madam, Heinrich and I will go secure the entrance while the rest continue protecting you. We will make sure no undesirables get anywhere near this vault.”
Little did they know Luitgarde would not have lost a wink of sleep if robbers dismantled the place after she was done with it.
Baldur deserved it.
The vault probably deserved it too.
Luitgarde scrunched her nose up in disgust again. Mere feet to the left, a partially mummified, partially skeletonized body lay in that pedestal behind glass.
She had read enough books by otherworlders to understand what a mummy was, but it was not something that should exist here. Everything about it reeked of unnatural events.
And many other pedestals were of that same size.
What sort of freak has a hoard like this? Wave take this glass-obsessed maniac!
And why was everything in glass boxes anyway? She could see the contents of most of them after a simple cleaning, so it did nothing for secrecy! And while her initial hope that ripping the glass from the pedestal would help had been squashed by the glass being a full cube, the fact remained that it took little effort to yank it free from the pedestal.
Unless some additional function had been lost alongside the vault's mana, this all did nothing to deter would-be thieves. The glass could not possibly be making the objects that much heavier, either.
A tracker of sorts? Lost to time, perhaps.
Luitgarde reached for the glass of another pedestal—one far too small to contain a body, just to be safe. As with the others, she shook it, and to her surprise, the bottom snapped open, allowing a crystalline sphere to fall from it.
She put the glass back in its place and knelt to grab the object. Its center mimicked the shape of a smaller, red circle, with orange and yellow streaks coursing through a blue expanse that bordered on purple. It was an uneven gradient, clouded in some spots, but undoubtedly stunning.
| The Devil of {Sunset} |