All right, that's enough, thought Efrain.

He’d been at the task of attempting to calculate a prospective solution to his castle’s drained finances for some hours now. Endless series of rows and columns swam before his empty eye sockets, yet he could not find a way to patch any of the holes. The various repair work, the camps of people he would have to finance, the price of materials transported all the way from outside the Vale. As soon as he would come up with a solution, he’d double back, check the numbers, and find that it was insolvent.

He did his equivalent to a sigh as he set down the heavy book, the librarian standing behind him in attentive silence. His frustration had only grown linearly with the total of failed solutions. The room, which had received little sunlight to begin with, had become completely in the shrouded in shadow as the sun hid behind the southern mountains. The darkness was not a problem to Efrain, rather his source of frustration was its admission of just how much time had passed.

Drawing back the heavy curtains, he looked out past the yard and over the western gate. Some ways beyond, he could see the snow glittering, and the pink clouds above it. His gaze wandered to the northern wall, as a orange-brown cat wandered across the stones. Though he could see little beyond it but the misty cliffs some leagues away, he knew that far below lay the old growths of the Vale. That was the territory of the spirits that had inhabited the area for centuries, if not millennia.

He wondered if they would be affable to a visitor.

A glance, a wave, and the librarian retrieved the volumes in its eerie silence. Efrain rose from the chair after it had shuffled to disappear around a book shelf. In any case, he needed to check on the situation in the main hall and whether the repairs was suitable for contractors.

The logistics of such a journey began to drum through his mind as his slippers softly thumped the stone underfoot. It would be a hour or two to the edge of the forest by horse, then perhaps three or four more to get to Innie’s grove beyond. The wisdom of building a castle so close to a wisp mother’s den was lost on Efrain, but there must of been a reason, either spiritual or practical. Either way, his last horses had died some time ago, so either he would have to go on foot or…

The multi-limbed form of Carnes’s ‘present’ flashed through his mind, causing him to pause for just a moment. That might be an interesting work-around for travel time, although Innie’s distaste for Carnes’s creations was well known to him. The tranquillity of her clearing might very well be worth the earful he would surely get. He began to list some of the books on his extensive list he still had to read: there was of course the remaining volumes of Abstract Poetics, then the biographies of the pre-Akdaj Hebeenian dynasties, and then after that…

Efrain shook his head as he tossed the fancy to the wind. He needed to focus on patching the hole in his finances and his ceiling, creating a plan for procurement of labour and materials. Afterall, the grove would still be waiting for him after he’d finished cleaning up the mess, no matter how many months or years it took.

As he wandered into the main hall once more, he groaned to see that the slinking forms sniffing at the few pebbles left of ruined masonry. There were many aspects of Efrain’s castle that surprised new visitors - the lack of feasting tables, some truly magnificent gardens, and the preponderance of cats. He had mixed feelings about the animals - on one hand they were one of the few that were not spooked by the undead. On the other, they tended to leave hair everywhere unlike his more or less traceless creations. For the most part they left each other be, but the felines clearly held beliefs about the ownership of the castle that didn't reflect reality.

One of them, an orange tabby with dull green eyes, came up to him as he attempted to sit on what remained of his throne. It sat attentively, curling its tail around its haunches and stared expectedly at him.

“I don't know what you want from me,” said Efrain.

The cat did not reply, merely licked its paw impassively.

Efrain sat and stared at it as it continued to groom up its leg.

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“You know what? If I’m going to watch nothing happening, it might as well be in the service of something greater.”

Once again, the cat remained silent. Efrain rose, sending it scampering up into the darkness of the hall. The northern doors to his left of the throne stood large and recessed into the walls, calling for his touch. He approached and produced something that more resembled a iron ingot than a key. It slotted into the hole, and the tiny ridges and bumps slid the pins into place as Efrain dragged his hand across the stone, the bolt following it with a click.

He had spared no expense with the security of the castle north wing. Traps, locks, and alarms of both physical and magical construction were strewn far and wide through out the complex. Even a experienced plunderer would’ve had difficulty noticing every switch and trip, and a missed one could wreck havoc on any escape attempt. Gates would slam shut as walls switched orientations, gaps would widen, leading to chutes that would send a clumsy trespasser hurtling off the cliff side.

Even worse, arguably, was the magical traps, designed to work in concert with the physical ones. If an adventurer had no issue navigating locks and latches, they may suddenly find themselves swarmed from below by lesser undead. Or perhaps a glob of living oil that would flow up nostrils and into mouths would suddenly drop from the ceiling, only being able to be burned away. Banks of a thin mist lurked around corners, and those that breathed it in would soon be confused and disorientated, which was inadvisable when a fall could only be a stumble away.

All of these, save for the fall, was very much ineffective on Efrain. Oil fire, unless exceptionally hot, would not injure his bones, he couldn’t inhale the mist, and even in the exceptionally unlikely occurrence the undead choose to turn on him, it would be a relatively simple matter to dispel their binds to reduce them to dead flesh once more. Even if that wasn’t the case, Efrain could see every string, every switch, every last button and recess in the dim light. On top of that, he had walked this path often enough over the year that he knew each placement by heart. Though that was more due to having to reset the damn things after some unfortunate adventurer inevitably tripped them.

He he turned right past a trap that would let a series of sticky strings fall and follow it up with a series of blaring alarms, the stonework changed. It became rougher, older, more worn and made of darker stone the the previous rocks, though in the gloom few were inclined to notice. This was the heart of his castle, if not in a strictly geometrical sense. It had been one of the few remaining structures of note that still stood when he had first discovered this place. A few short steps later, including one over a poison gas trip, he stepped into the low, hexagonal room, affectionately referred to by him as the ‘crossroad’.

Three of the six arches had been bricked off during the construction of the larger castle. One of the remaining corridors lead directly to his personal quarters and principle workshop. The other lead lead to the left and down deep into the mountain side, to a series of vaults. Instead of taking either of these, he began to climb the spiral staircase in the middle of the room.

As he went step by step, newer, brighter stone began to mix, then totally replaced the older masonry. The narrow windows that lined each side showed that, if he hurried, he would be just in time to catch the moon-rise. As he emerged out onto the top of the tower, a light but quite cold wind led Efrain to obtain the set of furs that had been thrown over the back of one of several chairs. While the chill would never be fatal unless it was intense enough to shatter his bones, it was still an unpleasant sensation to him.

He laid his hands on the stone wall, the only thing that separated him from the precipitous drop, and leaned over the edge. From here he could see over the cliff side and down into the meadows below. Waves of silver raced across the long grass as it flexed under the moon that rose over the northern ridge. Some ways beyond that, a wall of evergreens stood defiant to the winter night. That was the forest of the Frozen Vale, more-or-less untouched by the hands of man for centuries.

The handful of deciduous trees were almost all stripped bare by winter’s touch, but a few splotches of yellows and reds still marked the valley sides. The Vale already had its first snows, and soon the valley would be completely submersed in it. That would make travel exceptionally difficult, for the passes out to the wider world world were both high and notoriously prone to gusts which could knock off a careless traveller. Despite the difficulty it inflicted on the rebuilding efforts, Efrain had hoped that it would would prove an effective deterrent for most intruders.

Unfortunately, he’d been incorrect in that assumption. It wasn't just the latest paladin - adventurers of all kinds came to see the monster that ‘ruled’ the Frozen Vale. He’d always scoffed at that characterization - he didn’t have any legal claim or title to the land. If anything, ownership belonged to the small native tribes that lived further west in the cliffs and kept livestock in the valleys. He’d more-or-less left them alone during his ‘tenure’, interacting with them only when he needed to secure goods from the outside worlds. He briefly wondered whether they may have acquired some undue reputation as his servants or representatives - another thing he needed to fix he supposed.