“Well, the both of you are pitiless to an old man,” Ludwig finally said after chewing on his pipe for a long time. He brought his sprites closer, as if to give himself a theatrical spotlight, sipped his foul tea and sighed. “You make it so hard to address a subject, like walking on egg shells for fear of dismissing your hard-earned attention.”


    Tallah failed to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. She waved him to go on.


    “Like with all great issues, we must first look at the root of things. If you do not understand the context of my plight you will not see why it is of such importance to me.”


    Christina and Bianca failed to stifle a mental groan.


    It took just one moment, one look at the old man steepling his hands and leaning back in his chair with half-closed eyes, and they were all back in Hoarfrost, suffering another interminable lecture that added nothing more to their lives aside from a single nugget or two of new knowledge. Even the smell of dust and old, waxed paper was the same in his home as it had been in his cramped office, a century back. Even the stench of that foul thing he regarded as tea was the same.


    I can’t do this.


    Tallah got up and wandered away to peruse the shelves. She took his candle tray and got the wicks burning again with some difficulty. Sil gave her a suffering glare.


    “This happened before my tenure at Hoarfrost by a good few decades. Five, I think, or maybe even seven. Time becomes harder to manage and keep straight the more it flows you by. I was a different man then.” He ignored her departure and kept talking. “I don’t say this to justify my actions. I don’t expect you would take kindly to something as blatant as that. I merely wish to offer you a complete account of what happened back then that derailed my life.”


    Tallah dragged a leather-bound book off a too-high shelf and the remaining stack collapsed in an avalanche of dust and loose pages. He hadn’t touched those old tomes in years, maybe decades. Paper flaked away even under her gentle touch.


    Old, obsessed bastard…


    “This was sometime on the tail end of the first Unification War led by Empress Catharina, blessed may she be always. Injury in battle robbed me of a chance to serve the Empire further than the conquests of Drack and Ria so I turned to other pursuits where my experience would be of value. I became, like many retired soldiers in those days, an explorer of the Old World, of the ruins on which we were building a bastion for our species.”


    Tallah threw a glance at the other two captives. Vergil actually listened with rapt attention, eyes fixed on the old man. Sil picked through Ludwig’s alchemical implements strewn across a devastated work bench that hadn’t seen proper use in years.


    She couldn’t help but chuckle. Soldier turned explorer was a pretty way of saying soldier turned tomb robber.


    Let him have this, Tallah. There is no gain to be had from calling the truth from him, Bianca whispered as if she were still a student in class passing on a message.


    “Queen Catharina the First, soon to be Empress, supported and blessed my endeavours. Aztroa funded my work. Valen offered me the men I needed. Those were my halcyon days, Tallah, when I built something that truly mattered.” He fell into a long silence, smiling wistfully.


    “Isn’t the Empire… ancient? I mean, it’s called the Eternal Enlightened Empire. How old are you?”


    Sil was right to call him a puppy. If Vergil had a tail, it would be wagging in excitement.


    “My boy,” Ludwig replied in the tone of the patient professor, “I don’t rightly know anymore. I’ve lived through at least two hundred Summers, if not more.”


    “His memory’s not as good as it used to be,” Tallah said with mischievous delight. “I’m surprised he still recalls his own name going by the crap he’s trying to feed us.”


    “Tallah…”


    She sighed and waved Sil’s exasperation away. “I’ll be nice. I promise. Go on, old man.” She gestured with the opened book towards Vergil. “This one is dying to know more of your illustrious life as a sanctioned tomb robber.”


    “I am not and have never been a tomb robber, you blighted ash-eater,” Ludwig shot back, nearly pushing himself out of the chair. “I brought back knowledge lost to the ages, knowledge too valuable to even express into words. I helped start the Adventurer’s Guild in those days. Show a morsel of respect.”


    “You helped found an enclave of thieves with sanction from a conquering queen hungry for power. What you brought her were new paths through which to march her armies so she could catch her enemies unaware. Best to call a duck a duck.” She turned her attention to Vergil. “Believe maybe a word in three if it comes from him. There’s not much left or preserved of his discoveries, not after being trampled to dust by armies coming and going.”


    She squinted at another book and tried to drag it off its shelf. By candlelight and without her glasses, she could barely make out what was written on its spine. Could have been a cookbook and it still would have been preferable to the old man’s sweetened account.


    “Regardless,” Ludwig said at length, “I don’t intend to defend myself. Just listen, please.”


    “Agreed. Please go on, Master Angledeer, before morning creeps up on us.” Sil sent a sprite to Tallah’s aid, and a glare to warn off further interruptions.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    “My travels ultimately led me to the gateway to a civilisation so ancient that barely any legend of them still survives. But their power, in those rare myths that have survived decay, was believed beyond comprehension. They had unlocked the stars, ladies. Can you imagine that even? Finding a way into their inner Sanctums, into the heart of their sealed city, would have changed the face of Edana. Not even the aelir have a claim on history as old as this.


    “This wasn’t a path to march through. This was pure knowledge, pure history that wanted; no, that needed to be uncovered. Empress Catharina gladly gave me all I asked for in this pursuit. Men, warriors and thinkers, weapons, money, resources. This was to be my life’s greatest achievement, my claim on the immortal soul of the Empire.”


    “And, yet, here you are. Vergil, come here and hold this for me. It’s filthy and I like this dress.”


    “And, yet, here I am, yes,” Ludwig echoed her words as Vergil reluctantly shuffled over to her. The old man smoked more pensively, the fire seeming to leave him. “I did find the city. I found the door to it. I found that it was open but there was no safe passage through. Death lurked beyond it, death unseen and unheard. Something beyond resisted us… and we succumbed. The cost in lives was…”


    He pressed a gnarled hand to his eyes and looked away, into the shadowed nooks of his home.


    “Riveting. If you want to try again, I’m not interested.” Tallah handed the heavy tome to Vergil and moved him around so the sprite’s light would serve better. “I don’t care to become another casualty of your ambitions.”


    “I didn’t fail. That’s the core of it. In the end, I succeeded.” He drew in a deep breath and held it for some time. When he spoke, it was low enough that Tallah had to strain to hear him. “I needed a cipher to go through. I sought audience with the Empress herself, and was granted it. I prostrated myself to her and made a plea. I needed a cipher breaker, someone that could see what both was and wasn’t there. I needed an Egia.”


    Sil let out a slow laugh.


    “And you didn’t ask for one of the Moons too? Egia were even rarer back then than they are now.”


    “I was young, foolish, and too confident in my abilities. The Empress nearly had me thrown to the dogs. But, in her wisdom, she thought on my request for a long time. I had the determination and my past successes. I knew she would see the value in my efforts; so I waited, right there, on my knees for two whole days.


    “I was thrown out after the Court got tired of tripping over me. Days later, an aide sought me out and brought me to the first Gate. It activated and through it stepped… Erisa.” He whispered the name, like trying to shift a heavy stone off his heart. “She was barely ten Summers, still flowering, a dark-eyed girl that regarded me with curiosity and eager wanderlust. I was told she had been born to the School of Healing and had never seen anything but its walls and gardens. She held the Empress’s hand but was not afraid.


    “‘I entrust her to you, Angledeer, as she was entrusted to me by the School. If any harm should come to her, I will have you flogged within a hair’s breadth of your life,’ she told me. I barely heard the threat. My mind was filled with the triumphant song of destiny made manifest at long last.


    “And I was a fool.”


    “So… what happened?” Vergil asked as Ludwig lapsed into silence.


    Tallah, despite herself, was intrigued.


    He was on to something if the Empress actually granted him an Egia, Christina mused. If this is going where it appears to be then I think Professor Angledeer might have made a grave mistake.


    “Of course, I wasn’t entrusted alone with her safety. The Empress chose minders from her veterans to accompany us on the journey, some of the first of the newly established Storm Guard. Her enemies were rallying then, on the Summer of Bastra’s Humbling. We set out on our journey into the Crags while she marched down into the South, on a beautiful early-Summer day.


    “Erisa was everything I had hoped she would be and so much more. Where I’d lost over forty people on my previous attempt, I now only lost five to carelessness and mischance. She guided us through the danger, fast and true, straight into the embrace of history. Beyond the passage, our prize awaited.”


    Vergil trembled with excitement like a child listening to bed time stories of faer folk and dragon kings. That, despite her shrivelling patience, got a smile out of Tallah. The coming ending to the remembrance, like for all good faer stories, would be tragic. For his sake she held her tongue.


    Ludwig sighed, reached for his cup and took another sip of tea.


    “It all went wrong once we reached the city. Creatures such as I have never encountered before assailed us the moment we emerged out of the passage, before we could bask in the glory of our success. Our first clash was vicious and bloody but we endured and pushed back the tide.


    “After that we began to die one by one. They hunted us down, grabbed us in the night, from our sleep, from making our water. Our strength lessened by the passing hour.”


    “Wh-what was killing you? What were they?” Vergil asked with shaking voice.


    “I hesitate to call them spiders, but that is as close as I can describe those nightmarish apparitions. Something as mundane as that grown by some cursed means to the size of a man, even larger, with razor claws and envenomed fangs. We were powerless against their tide.


    “The evil in there, for there is no other word that serves for it, jealously guarded its secrets. We barely made it beyond the threshold and we had lost half of our strength. Half, Tallah. Good men and women of valour that had laid down their lives for our mission. Their dying cries haunt me.”


    Tallah yawned. Ludwig kept going.


    “Whatever controlled the creatures sent an envoy on our third day there. We were weary and tired, bloodied and desperate. Bone-white monsters came up to us and, without words, I knew what they wanted.” He sighed deeply, sipped his tea, and held the cup in both hands on his lap. “They wanted the girl. They wanted Erisa. I do not know why or what for.”


    His sprites dimmed out until only Sil’s was left. The long shadow of a bookshelf settled over him as he finished his tale, face lit by the embers of his pipe.


    “I accepted. To my eternal shame, I accepted. What choice did I have? I gave them the girl and they, in turn, showed us safe passage out. It was easy for them. We lost people that couldn’t keep up the pace.


    “Fifty and five people left Aztroa with me. Eight got back.”


    “I don’t expect the Empress enjoyed the news you brought back,” Sil said from where she sat on the edge of the work desk.


    Ludwig chuckled grimly.


    “She had me flogged, then imprisoned in the darkest, smallest cell she could find in Aztroa. After weeks of agony and filth she had me flogged again, then thrown out of the city with nothing but the bloodied rags on my back. I was promised the headsman’s axe if I ever set foot again within a league of the capital. I’ve never dared check if the edict still stands.”