Derp was, well he was a derp.
Admittedly that was mostly my fault, seeing as my talent with sculpting is, well, entirely non-existent. Both his front and back were a mashed up mess that made it nearly impossible to tell which was which.
You might think that it would be easy to tell after all the back has a tail! You'd be wrong, mostly because I got distracted halfway through molding his face and added a horn because why not?
Except said horn looks like a tail, Or maybe it's that said tail looks like a horn? I honestly can't tell which side is which.
However I have to say his weird tumbling walk isn't my fault, I made sure Derp's legs were of equal length. While I am a total failure in giving him a recognizable face I made sure his body was proportioned correctly, so that's all on him.
Well still on me technically because it's drawing on my interpretation of a cat/dog/small creature, as well as my experiences with them.
Either way, Derp was mine and if anything happened to him I would kill everyone in the room and then myself.
I snort at my own thought process as I pick Derp up and set him on his feet correctly. Only for my effort to be entirely in vain as he just keeps doing his weird stumbly diagonal crab walk.
Golems are kind of fascinating, I was learning a lot from just watching Derp walk around on where I'd messed up. For one I don't think I put enough magic into the ritual, Derp was supposed to take on the properties of stone but he's just a tad bit squishy in places.
It also looks like I didn't spread the mana across him properly since there were random spots that were way more dense than he should have been.
'I think I might have a passion for golemancy' I note internally while I scribble down another thing I did wrong making Derp as I notice a sort of chalky substance sticking to my hands after picking him up.
Sunlight drifted down into the Library, warmth shining down on my back as I pushed a lock of hair out of my vision. My hair still annoyingly white as I ran my eyes over my current quarry, A large tome about as thick as my forearm detailing one subject in depth.
Golemancy was a rare form of magic.
Not in the sense that making Golems was rare, If anything it was quite common, but in the sense that it was strange for someone to actually bother learning anything beyond the very basics.
Most who learn the trade do so with the goal of making one or two as guards for a hidden room, or do so with the aim of making cheap mass produced minions (mostly for labor).
Something that is to be perfectly honest, a whole endeavor onto itself. Just getting to the point of making quick, shitty golems who can only do menial tasks could take years of study.
As a result a lot of people didn't bother getting into the more advanced forms that could require more effort. Advanced Golemancy could make legions of near indestructible minions that could do anything from breath fire to straight cause volcanic eruptions.
A true master could literally create new forms of life, such as how Prometheus made his version of Humans, and how Lucifer made the original Pillar Devils.
Yeah it was a bit surprising to find out just how different the first Devils were to Modern Devils, and it wasn't just how we were made. The Original Pillar Devils were made with Golemancy, and Lucifer was still fiddling with the details when the great war really broke out. Which lead to second generation devils that were made by a spell to fill in their already small numbers. There were apparently still a number of issues with our 'design' but I couldn't find any real info on it.
Not that I could blame the writer, it was probably really depressing to list the design errors inherent to your own species.
Even just thinking about it as I shut my current book was more than enough to make me shift uncomfortably in my seat.
Even so I couldn't help but hum happily to myself, I'd come to the library to see if I could find any ways to figure out what was wrong with Derp, and while I'd learned far more about my species than I'd like, I had also found a Diagnostic spell specifically for Golems.
'Sadly' I thought with a wry smile on my face as I rubbed my head, fully aware of the headache I would soon have. 'Translating Human spells into Rituals is always annoying.'
Devil spells were incredibly easy to make into rituals, make a circle with some arbitrary symbols (that don't really matter but look authentic), some words, maybe a weird dance, and a bit of Demonic Power then a bam, ritual done.
Human spells were much more complicated. I had to swap out the several pages worth of calculation with something else in their place. A process that could involve anything from taking a couple leaves off a tree as a substitution, to rhythmically slaughtering animals to the overly meme'd beats of Rick Astley under the moonlight.
I didn't even pull that example out of my ass, that was taken word for word from the book that I learned how to translate human magic into rituals from (which was funny because it was written centuries before Rick Astley was born). Thankfully magic was always subjective, and it was honestly pretty easy to change mass goat murder into something like stomping on grass. It required a bit of extra magic and gaslighting yourself into thinking the things were tangentially related enough to count, but it was still far better than actually doing all that math.
It's still incredibly tedious though.
Regardless, I slid an empty notebook from across the Library table, the metal spiral scraping across the wood. Before flipping it open and clicking my pen, It was time to start working out how to cast the Diagnostic spell in ritual form.
3 hours Two pens, and another spiral notebook, later and I was finally finished.
The resulting ritual was honestly very simple, however it did have requirements. Just looking at the list of things I was going to need, already had me rubbing my head in annoyance.
Thankfully it was a pretty simple list, especially for a ritual translated from human magic.
I was kind of thankful I was both a Devil and a part of an obscenely rich family. Otherwise I would have no hope of finding a jewel (the kind didn't matter) the size of baseball.
I guess it was time to start raiding my ancestors' jewelry drawers.
Sadly I did not find any jewels of the required size, I found literal mountains of jewelry- most of it gold and silver with surprisingly few adorned with gems of any kind.
At least until I hit the jackpot- not that I'd realized it at the time.
One thing I probably haven't emphasized enough, is that this mansion is huge. Like big enough to fit at least two apartment complexes, and even then I think they might have somehow made it bigger on the inside. The Library alone is big enough to take up an apartment complex all on its lonesome.
As a result there are a lot of rooms, a great deal of which I haven't even thought of opening yet. In my search of huge shiny rocks I stumbled upon four wine cellars, several hundred bedrooms, a room full to the brim of gold bars, and one that seemed to have been modified into a garden despite the lack of sunlight.
I did spot some potatoes growing in it so I'll have to come back to it one of these days.
Anyway even after raiding a good portion of the bedrooms I'd found, I hadn't found anything bedecked in the gaudy jewels I was looking for. Sure there were some with some small sapphires, even a couple of diamonds.
None of them bearing the gaudy, over expensive tastes found commonly among the devil race.
I was honestly kind of annoyed, at some point I'd lost my hair tie -Again- some of the rooms probably hadn't been open in centuries based on the accumulated dust that now covered me. As a result I was sporting what I'm sure would be an intimidating scowl, if I wasn't an adorable little girl with a soft face that refused to look even mildly intimidating.
On the other hand, scouring a mansion for shiny jewels for my hoard was a wonderful exercise in entering a Dragon mindset.
It was also just a little annoying as I found my eyes nearly snapping between shiny silver laden chandeliers and doorknobs whose bronze surface held mechanisms of pure gold. The sheer effort it was taking to rip my eyes away was getting annoying and I'd found myself slipping small bits of silver into my sweater without even realising.
I couldn't bring myself to put any of it back, and I argued with myself that it didn't harm anything. If I didn't take it, they would just languish gathering dust.
"Nope, not an issue, I'm totally not becoming a kleptomaniac." I muttered under my breath as I pushed open the next door. This one was painted over with white paint, delicate patterns of camels crawling over it having been etched with what I'm sure is pure gold.
The door slid open on well oiled hinges, not even a whisper of sound as it swung open to reveal yet another bedroom. The bedroom was dim, rather obvious since it probably hadn't been used in at least a century. Yet it was obviously well taken cared of, incredible size for a bedroom, The walls a soft purple pastel color done up with intricate details, various animals dancing in silver inlay, most of them being camels. Soft carpet spread out over the floor, a four poster bed with the nearly transparent curtains drawn closed resting in the center of the room while each wall held several sets of drawers sans the far wall directly across from me where another door rested.
For some reason all the camels seemed mildly important and I found myself rubbing my chin as I tried to think of why, before disregarding it with a shrug.
Instead I made a b line straight for the many drawers, and in the process of pulling them open I was forced to notice more camels engraved into the wood as my hands ran over the carvings. The wooden drawer slid open with a sound of obvious friction that made me think the wood had warped with age.
Inside of the drawer was a near senseless amount of wealth, countless necklaces, bracelets, and earrings all made of what I was nearly certain was pure gold. It wasn't even ordered, just piled into the drawer in a messy mound.
For a moment I felt the urge to just take the drawer and run, surely no one would notice? One of my hands dipped inside pulling out a handful just to let it slip between my fingers. It was an involuntary action, my hand moving entirely without any thought behind it.
Then I noticed something and any desire for the pile of shinies faded like morning mist.
Every necklace, earring , bracelet, ring, and what was pretty sure what was supposed to be a nipple bar, shared one thing that absolutely killed any interest I had.
Each and every one of them had a camel on them. Whether the object itself was a camel or it had a camel engraved on it, heck one had a spell on it that was making the camel on it do the cha cha before my eyes.
I could feel something bubble in my chest, something like tar seeping out of my heart and I could feel my eyes twitch as I found myself slamming the drawer shut with enough force to cause a small boom from the air forced out of the way.
Really it was honestly kind of surprising the drawer survived the force behind the action. Either way the loud sound faded into silence, just me, myself, and my own heavy breathing. I don't know when I'd started taking deep panting breaths, all I knew was the boiling tar trying to seethe it's way through my body.
"I think I might hate camels?" I said allowed as I sort of let myself plop my ass onto the soft carpet. Not sure myself where the emotion had come from, sure I knew I had been afraid of camels, had been since one of the camels My Mother in this life raised had bit me.
I hadn't thought much of it since I'd been locked in isolation, my lonely little property didn't have a single animal on it. It had a section that was definitely for horses, and probably camels, but if they're had been any here they had been taken away before I had got here.
As a result I hadn't thought much about them, but now recalling the memory of the camel biting my hand.
It made me angry, to an extent I hadn't felt in either life. The urge to run I could remember was completely replaced by rage and I could feel that if one of the camels tried to chase me around like they had since that first meeting, my reaction would be immediate violence.
It was honestly just more than a little confusing, the mental dissonance from knowing I should be afraid, even as my mind pivoted to incandescent anger. It was only when I remembered exactly why I was in this place that what was going on clicked.
"Huh, so that's what everyone was so afraid of." I muttered under my breath. "The sleeping disease really can fuck up your personality."
I forced myself back to my feet, stumbling forward a little before I corrected my balance. Standing straight I started to turn in order to start digging around in another drawer, only to freeze when I noticed something.
My eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness of the room, allowing my superior eyesight to truly shine. Meaning that I could ever so slightly see through the violet curtains drawn around the bed. At first it was only an outline, a figure out of the corner of my eye until I turned properly and saw it fully.
Laying neatly in the center of the bed was a girl, unmoving like a statue in a mimication of sleep. I could feel the shiver creeping down my spine as I took in the details, the blankets were tight around the girl's figure leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination even as her red hair lay over her shoulder.
I nearly sprinted out of the room, my mind trying to bleach just what exactly such an anatomically accurate doll would be doing in one of my family's properties.
Especially one that looked as though it could have been my sister.
"Don't think about,don'tthinkaboutdon'tthinkaboutit- shit I thought about it-uggh I think I'm gonna through up.