Vanysa set the heavy tome on her desk, it was easily the largest single book she'd seen outside of the Library of Ashurbanipal. She swallowed a lump in her throat as she looked the flowing script over. 'Old Baruthian?' A deep frown settled on the face of the demoness and she struggled to hold back a groan of anguish as her fingertips grazed the yellowed page and the ink which marked it. While the script wasn't that hard to read, it was hard to read for different reasons. 'The ancients had horrible literary taste.' She reflected.
She put her hand out vertical to her chest and bowed her head, "Praise be to the souls of writers who left us their gifts. May their tortures in eternal hell for the crime of enduring their obsessive love of metaphor, be light as a feather for a moment as brief as an arrow's flight… before you really fuck them up for what I'm about to read." Vanysa's prayer was accompanied by a shudder.
"It was a dark and stormy night…" She mouthed the first words on the page. As much as she enjoyed reading, and revered those who crafted long, epic stories, the bad was so painful that she refused to inflict it on her victims and considered it a mercy to pluck out their eyes instead. But now there was no choice, 'And apparently nobody ever told the Old Baruthians anything about 'subtlety' in their epic histories.' She cursed as she continued reading.
Interestingly, the hand of the writer clearly changed, and it didn't take long for it to do so. It was similar, but distinctly different, with tiny points where the hand had clearly lifted away and broken the flow of the script.
'A younger writer I suppose.' Vanysa guessed, and then the language of the script changed. 'Old Draconian?' She recognized the language shift. All written languages had some sort of persistent flow, but Draconian was at least a little more familiar.
Unlike Baruthian, Draconian script flowed back and forth, left to right at the first line, right to left on the second, and then back again at the third. To her mind it was quite practical and a twinge of pride in her country for its excellent writing practices rose up in her breast.
But the demoness focused on the matter at hand a half a moment later and watched the story unfold.
Most of it was nonsense. At least as near as she could tell. Legends from a time so far back that it was ancient even to the eyes of a writer who was ancient to her.
Powerful river gods who played at games of creation before vanishing into the beyond. Fables, mere silly fables. 'Still, maybe I should bring that up to Demi?' She asked herself and made a mental note to do so when she moved on with the story.
And to her surprise, she found herself looking at a picture. A portrait of a noble. She ran her hand over the face, while Inta wasn't known to her personally, she'd seen him at least once years before. 'An ancestor of his?' She wondered and glanced at the picture she'd sketched of him based on how others said he looked. It wasn't particularly good, but as she lay the picture on her piece of paper to the one in the book? 'That could be him?'
She asked the question and was half convinced of it before the question even fully formed.
The name wasn't his, that was sure. "Barintacha." She pronounced the name, it was very 'Draconic'. It was also a close resemblance to the name of the region where she herself was from. 'It looks like I'm going to be making a little trip home again… I have been a smidge curious about whether or not any of my old friends survived. And if any of the ruling family there, did.' It seemed unlikely. 'Master really murdered his way through that area. Murdered them right to death he did he did.' She gave a satisfied nod and recalled her promise. 'Right, I promised to exterminate the bearmen, all of them… but then, I can't do that anymore. Not since the survivors are master's people…' She let out a regretful sigh at the thought of her lost chance for vengeance, and then perked up.
'Oh well, at least I get to see some old sights again, I thought it'd be decades before I got to do that.' She told herself what she needed to in order to cheer up her spirits and began to jot notes down from the book.
'Barintacha. Red waters. Mocking stone.' A few more words stood out, a few of which at least, were hauntingly familiar, born of local legends around her own village. 'It's not much to go on, but it's a place to get started. On the other hand, perhaps I should go back to where he last used to live, this whole thing might be a wild vampire chase.' That brought the demoness up short.
The simple and practical thing to do was to go back to where he was last known to live and talk to the other villages around it to find out what he'd been up to before the Sorcerer King's amnesty.
But she felt the fingers of fate tugging on the strings of mental curiosity. Her fingers twitched as she ran her hands along the words of unfolding stories given academic flare which sadly robbed them of their peasant passions.
'Something is here. I can feel it. I can feel it, and if I wait, the chance might slip past… like when I started running in the first place. What was it that got me out?' She wondered when she thought back to her final days in the Draconic Kingdom village.
She closed her eyes as the unthought of memory was slowly brought to the surface again. 'Yes… yes that was it. A handful of missing hunters. Knowing what I know now, it had to have been scouts of the beastmen taking them. But then?' Vanysa put a hand to her head 'Yeah, yeah I just knew something was wrong. One hunter might go missing, but a trio or more in familiar ground? I might never have been caught at all if I hadn't let myself be second guessed for as long as I did. Fine, I've talked myself into it. I'll go back there.' She told herself and scribbled the last of her notes.
The decision made, she closed the book and left her office to request a gate spell to take her to a place she hadn't thought of in years, the place where the peasant lived, and the greater part of her, died.