Realm: Americia

Year: 2633 of the Augustian Calendar

How long has it been… since I last set foot upon my home soil?

I mused silently to myself, observing the vast changes to the world around me. I was coming back home. But… it looked nothing like I remembered it.

It shouldn’t be surprising… all that miasma clogging the skies and blocking the sun.

What were once lush hillsides and fields from long, long ago had been reduced to festering pools and rotting trees. Clouds of miasma billowed from every conceivable nook, cranny and corner. It was all fed by an endless drizzle of black fluid raining from the clouds above.

True Sight. Demon’s Sight. Darkvision. Amplify. Magnify. Farsight. Scan. Detect life.

I took no risks. Knowing things had changed so much… I had to be sure. Not to mention, I had popped myself a little far. Opening a gate is a precise business, and I hadn’t opened one from my old home to anywhere else that I had networked to. So, I just calculated my best guess on how far it was from my wasteland castle, added a little height just to be sure I wouldn’t jump into a hillside, and voila!

I suppose that’s one more thing to do while I am there… I should connect a gate to my home so I don’t have to deal with this again.

First, I spied the silhouette of the sun hidden behind the Miasma-filled sky. My lips twitched in annoyance, as I had simultaneously pinned the proper source of the black fluid that rained from above. A new batch of demons had just started to form and tear each other apart. It was an ocean of demons constantly forming and slaughtering each other.

I see.

Their blood and chunks of viscous flesh rained down, and filling in to the rotten pools. Then the miasma would vent upward again, recycling the process.

Considering how important my will is for forming Demons at the time the miasma is used… then they must have been infused with my desire to end everything. Seems that even includes each other.

On the ground, there were no signs of life anywhere around me for the next 100 miles. Then… the “Towers of God”. Even after 10,000 years, those mountains stretched proudly far into the sky, coated in clouds of miasma.

Comparing the angle of the sun to the mountains, I was able to confirm that I had, at the very least, arrived on the correct side of the mountains. Considering I could probably only manage a good half a day of free time, I would have had to come up with an alternative plan if I wound up on the other side.

Although….

My vision honed in on a number of distinctive shapes cruising between the spires and valleys of the mountains, diving into the miasma clouds and picking off newly formed demons like a flock of seagulls diving for fish. Wyverns. Much larger than they used to be, although still incomparable to dragons. Their scales had also changed, much less surprisingly, to a jet black. Their long tales whipped around, occasionally using their spade-like tips to spear into other prey and drag it out of the clouds.

Seems they have adapted to the miasma… have they been changed by it like that Goblin? How much else has survived? Just another thing I will have to deal with later… shitty Demon God.

And lastly… in the direction I guessed for my house a couple hundred miles off, I spied something particularly frustrating. Especially considering how devoid of life everywhere else was, it was absolutely impossible for me to mistake it.

Why, of all places, does there seem to be a concentration of creatures at MY house?! Let’s see…

Detect Energy.

Ah… that’s still functioning? Even after all this time?

Tacking on Detect Energy let me properly see a bubble of pure, holy energy surrounding my house. A relic from my late wife, as a Saintess who didn’t commit to the Gods but rather to her own ideals of purity and love. A blessed barrier she used to keep all unwanted demons from our home, and she granted exceptions only to myself, little Almas, and Belladonna.

And… I foolishly hadn’t planned for any of my family to conspire with the humans. Dishonorable bastards, the whole lot of them!

I took a deep breath, and refocused. It has been so long, and that age old grievance still bothers me. My only regret was not learning how to strip out someone’s soul until later. Then, I could have sentenced them to an eternity of suffering as penance.

Anyways, I have seen enough.

Time for the real test, and my final set of precautions. Leaving the gate open to the inn, even if it is just to the side I split from the main dimension, would likely still be too risky. I don’t know how much the Wyverns have evolved, or if something else could come wandering by while I am distracted. And, now that I know precisely where I am, opening a proper gate back is more than easy enough. And with closing the gate…

I stopped hiding the contract seal on my hand, and studied it carefully.

Once I close the gate, it won’t be like stepping into a connected parallel dimension. I will truly be separated off by whatever the real distance is to Diane’s world… to Genoisia. However, none of this violates the terms of our agreement, but still…

I took another deep breath.

“Close gate.” I muttered, more for myself than anything. As the doorway faded away into nothingness, I felt… nothing. No. A barely perceptible, slight pull. Almost as if a small piece of me was stretching and reaching across an inconceivable distance, through the sky and into the stars beyond.

The Dragons, they came from these other worlds… just how much did the gods not want us to know? If I had even been the least bit curious in things other than how to just burn everything to the ground, would I have realized this sooner? Do the gods have their own world too? Is this how they feel anytime someone calls upon them for a blessing?

In truth, I felt nothing… but the endless new questions swirling in my mind deeply disturbed me.

“Fuck, let’s just get this over with.” I sighed in unresolved frustration upon frustration.

At least I will take the chance to stretch my legs properly. Stealth boosts, aura reducers, speed and strength amplification, mana obscuration, body reinforcement, image displacement, and some environment control spells… stack all of those together and I should be able to easily make it home entirely unnoticed.

I smiled, for once.

I finally get to go for a nice run! If I push myself a bit, I might even get the pleasure of a nice adrenaline boost!

The closest damn thing I could get to a good time, anyways. Whichever god let us have that much… you’re the only one I won’t make suffer. You better believe that.

It was honestly quite surprising how well kept the place was. I originally built this manor when I was a young Daemon. I picked this spot for several reasons, but mostly because it was in a quiet, sheltered, out-of-the-way spot surrounded by hills and with absolutely nothing of interest around it. The fact you could only really see it when you were practically on top of it sealed the deal. If I had to deal with anyone or anything else, I wanted to do it on my terms. Particularly as it would usually end in violence.

That is almost certainly why it remained relatively unscathed despite the passing millennia. Well, that and all of my wife’s enchantments. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised though, as she was the only person to ever defeat me. Of course her magic would withstand the test of time!

Which is why it is extremely grating that the same leeches that brought her to her death have managed to take shelter around my home!

All things considered though, they are showing my home some proper respect and haven’t sullied its halls. And, if I were to hazard a guess, any other surviving enclaves of people would likely be few and far between. Probably much worse off as well.

Her little spring pouring out from her garden and through the manor’s aqueducts is probably the only source of pure, uncontaminated water left. They are recharging mana crystals themselves to power light crystals to grow some crops and fruit trees, and they are regularly praying and offering mana in Maria’s shrine… It’s almost sickeningly ironic.

If they are so desperate to cling to life, may as well let them be a while longer. Especially since it would keep the nastier undesirables away.

I eyed back up at the fresh mess of demons spawning in the skies above, some of whom seemed to be taking more of an interest here than in slaughtering each other again. Mistakes. Accidents. Trash, the whole lot of them.

Slipping quietly past the elves, humans and other assorted demi humans and fey spirits was easy enough. As long as Maria’s barrier was up, I doubt they would ever have expected a demon to slip through. Add in their organized efforts to target and repel any demons trying to break through, and any potential challenge is gone for someone at my level. Not to mention, any warriors worth their salt almost certainly died assaulting my castle.

A pathetic, despairing existence. And yet they struggle so hard against their despair… their souls may be worth claiming one day. Perhaps I could even get another taste of their dreams, their desires, and their emotions!

Yes, struggle and grow strong! Worthy enough to challenge me!

But I am getting distracted here. I felt a strange nagging in the seal of my contract. I wasted more than enough time here. I just needed to find a good present, and get back. Now was certainly not the time to test long-term effects of too much separation.

I moved as nothing more than a shadow in an endless night, and quietly slipped into the halls of my home.

It truly had been far too long.

Odd pieces of cozy, if not dusty, furniture and paintings dotted the maze of otherwise Spartan halls. The paintings and cushions looked as if they might fall to dust themselves at the slightest touch, while all the wood had practically fossilized in place. They were unnecessary excesses in my opinion, but I still had to keep them all the same. The faint glow of barely functional light crystals gave off the feeling that I was walking through a mausoleum of my past. A feeling that was, in a sense, true.

My treasury, although more aptly described as a trophy hall, remained untouched as well. It was offset to an odd corner of the manor of minimal interest. All the enchantments disguising its grand magisteel doors as just another regular part of the wall remained. Add in that they opened into an early implementation of my anchored dimensions, there wouldn’t have been any hints that anything was amiss even if anyone had ever found my home. Lastly, with a good dose of paranoia, I placed a seal upon them. So even if they were somehow found and opened, unless you activated the seal, they would open to the adjacent hall instead of my trophy hall.

I checked one last time to make completely sure nobody dared tread in the halls of my home, before I firmly spoke the seals command.

“Seal of the undaunted, the unbroken, the champion of despair and bringer of ruin, heed the call of your master and open your doors. My command is your law!”

The aged creak and groan of the door’s opening was the first thing that properly met my expectations today. Following the soft *whoosh* of ancient air blowing from the dark halls of my trophy room, I promptly stepped across the threshold and closed the magisteel doors behind me.

If I felt like I was in a mausoleum before, now it felt a thousand times more accurate.

Row after row of mirrors lined the absurdly long and massive hall. Adjacent to each mirror were various sets of mannequins donned with an incredible variety of different armors, and each of those sets was accompanied by a weapon stand. Hammers, cleavers, longswords, bows, rings, plate mail, leathers and anything else that could be imagined for as far as the human eye can see.

Although to me, the real treasures were what was in the mirrors.

I couldn’t help but stop to appreciate a couple of my favorites, such as a massive mirror towering 100 meters tall.

Gormak the conqueror… greatest warrior of the giants, who lived solely for the joy of combat.

Touching his mirror, I watched longingly at the world shown within it, as he repeated endlessly the greatest moments of his life, which also just so happened to be his last. His soul fought doggedly against an apparition of myself, and each time he died, the world reset and he was forced to fight it again and again and again. I could almost taste it, his “joy”. A feeling so close, yet out of reach… forever just out of reach… and my own memories pouring back in to me….

A sharp sting in my hand brought me back. What I wanted was at the end. I would come back again at some point, I had to. There was much I needed to remember. There was more to why I wanted to bring an end to everything. I could feel it… something I wanted at any cost. What was it?

My head started hurting again, my memories growing fuzzy once more.

I hurried down the hall, stopping only momentarily to pick up the cursed ring of the Mad Wraith. Its cruel gleam and promise of power caught my eye, and you know what? It would make a great test case to use on a certain asshole father. I promised revenge, did I not? And I am always a Daemon of my word.

I quickly reached the end, greeted by a large stone antechamber housing a single titanic, lightless mirror. What I wanted was just before the chamber, the only set of gear without an associated mirror, but… shouldn’t it have been the end of the hall?

Was that always there? I don’t… I don….

I dropped to one knee, grimacing horribly. My mind burned as I tried to remember, as if a wall blocked my every….

“GAHHH!” I bellowed in pain, and left it be for the moment. To tie it all together, my contract seal was acting up a lot more, and it was pulling a steady drain on my mana. That could only mean one thing.

I needed to get back, and get back fast. Something was happening. I was resolved though, I absolutely will be coming back here.

I glanced over at the solid blue set of full plate mail, and spoke as respectfully as I could manage, as it was not something I did often.

“Courdelain Gloris, your sword shall return to the world once more. It shall be re-forged to match the glory it once knew.” With a nod, I took the broken sections of blade and hilt from a weapon case adjacent to the armor, and placed it into a box full of materials at the base of the stand.

My first greatest challenge, one of the few people who I had ever respected, and the great-great-great grandfather of Maria.

I passed a pained glance at the last part of his set, a small stand with my family picture. Diane really does look like my little Almas… and didn’t I just see…?

Searing pain broke my thoughts once more, striking through my seal and mind nearly simultaneously.

“GATE!” I bellowed, scooping the box as I rushed back through. Something had gone clearly wrong. Why did it have to be today of all days?!

Shortly after the last vestiges of the gate had faded from the room, something began to move from the mirror in the Antechamber.

A great red eye opened, with a golden-red, predatory iris. It focused in on the gate’s last location, and then turned to face the mirror wall. The mirror-wall rippled as a massive, scaled snout pushed out through it. The creatures maw was filled with rows of steaming, glistening, and sharp white fangs, each one the length of a full-sized pike.

A colossal clawed foot followed, a single step shaking the walls and foundations of the trophy hall, as the rest of the lizard-like head emerged, focused on the gate’s former location.

A thunderous whisper echoed throughout the halls.

“It’s long past due for him to start re-awakening. Our ward seems to still be holding, and…”

A powerful, blue magical aura danced around the dragon’s eyes, and with it all mana signatures throughout the hall were brought into sharp relief.

A massive smile, or at least as much as one could imagine a dragon to smile, grew across its face, while a thunderous laugh reverberated through steel and stone, and danced with crimson flames through its imposing maw.

“SO HE CHOSE TO REVOLT AND ACTUALLY BROKE FREE, DID HE?! SUCH A TURN OF EVENTS… BAHAMUT WOULD LOVE TO KNOW!”

The dragon back-stepped into the mirror world again, and unfurled its grand wings. It launched itself into the air like a hurricane, blasting the dirt from his resting place like a sandstorm and violently swaying the endless fields of grass. Deep into the mirror-world, grand mountains rose into blue, cloud-studded skies filled with the roar and songs of thousands of dragons. As the ripples faded, the mirror grew black once more.