Installment 35 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment035.png]
"Hey, I stabbed you!" Wikwocket complained to the demon-possessed tiger skin.
The fight didn't last long. Gruntle was quick to pull the rug off of Al and tear into it with his teeth while Bote invoked the searing divine light onto it. Al was so angry he went straight to arcane violence, invoking the inerrant slivers of magical force. As they struck the torn and smouldering skin it shuddered and the swirling red mist poured from the tiger's mouth to evaporate away. The skin went limp. Gruntle gnawed on it a bit more just to make sure, while Bote got out the first-aid supplies and one of the bottles of Notamimic Manor's healing potions for Al.
"No miraculous healing for the wizard?" Al asked between clenched teeth - the bite to his calf was deep and painful.
"I have reached the limit of my allotted Celestial Authority for such things for the day, I fear."
"But it's night," Al deadpanned. "Anyway, that makes no sense."
"Of course it doesn't. It's ineffable."
Al grumbled as he accepted the bottle of health-giving dairy-product from Bote and drank it down. The bleeding from his leg stopped and the pain subsided, though the bite didn't disappear completely.
The codex turned out to be a journal of sorts, though there was no obvious indication who it belonged to. Without any preamble, the first pages were dated four years ago, and were simply a dry ledger of taxes collected and expenses incurred. Flipping quickly through the pages, they continued in this manner until the pages dated less than two years ago began to include alchemical notes. Skipping ahead through later pages, Al found an entry dated just over a year prior that had the first instance of a personal entry. An alchemical experiment catastrophically failing. The author bitterly complained of a casualty: "My Julia."
Al shut the book. "I'm taking this with me. This looks like it will answer a lot of questions about what happened here, but I'm sure you don't want to stand around for hours while I read through it right now."
"Some of these look like magic books!" Wikwocket enthused from in front of one of the bookcases. She reached up for one of them, then turned to watch the room warily as she took it out. When nothing assaulted her for doing it, she grinned and sat down on the floor to start thumbing through it.
"And of course some are not, but the selection may be enlightening" Bote added, pointing to another, slightly dustier bookshelf. Al went to look. The bookshelf had an impressive collection of interesting references. Al spotted books on local history, biographies of a few notable Casusian nobles, economics, medical knowledge, plants and animals of the region, mineral resources, and basic alchemical practices. Bote took The Wealth of Casusia to thumb through while he waited for the others. Gruntle slouched back into the chair, whose legs finally broke under his weight.
Al went to look at the other shelves. As Wikwocket had assumed, the entire set seemed to be dedicated to arcane matters, at least the ones with comprehensible titles. The lower shelves had a number of introductory texts on magical theory and the practice of wizardry. The higher shelves trended towards some disturbing specialties - blood, necromancy, and infernal influences. Above these, the titles were written in an indecipherable script that made Al feel uncomfortable to look at.
"How do you make sense of any of this?" a perplexed Wikwocket asked, looking at pages of arcane diagrams in the common-language translation of De Re Praecontatio, a well-known Elven treatise on supernatural means of gaining knowledge.
"Many years of practice." Al told her. She made a sour face and put the book back where she got it.
Struck by a thought, Al selected one of the smaller books with the unknown writing on it, and took it to Gruntle.
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"Can you read this?" he asked. Gruntle snorted awake and opened his eyes to look.
"Nah." he said.
Al closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them and tried again.
"Gruntle, can you understand what this says?"
Gruntle examined the writing on the cover.
"Yeah." He finally said. His brow furrowed and muzzle wrinkled into a grimace with the mental effort as he tried to fit the meaning into words he could understand. "It's...a book...about dangerous spirits...and...what they want from shaman."
Curious, Al opened the book and flipped through a few pages. The text was as alien as ever, but there were some illustrations. They were stylized rather than realistic, but they seemed to depict a variety of obviously unnatural creatures. Some appeared to be wearing articles of clothing or carrying obvious tools or weaponry. Al stopped at a page depicting some sort of two-headed snake-bird thing holding a pitchfork-like object. He showed it to Gruntle.
"It's a name. Someone important. Says they like fresh meat." Gruntle gave a relaxed smile at the shared interest and, unbidden, reached out to turn the page. That one seemed to have a winged slug with a long barbed tongue. "Another name. Kind of important. Says they like blood from dead people." Gruntle turned the page again. The apparently-kind-of-important almost human-like figure with its facial features in completely the wrong places seemed to like injuries done to children. The corpulent sharp-toothed moose-thing with a gaping mouth on its belly on the next page reportedly liked excessive eating and drinking.
Al was about to pull the book away, getting worried about Gruntle's enthusiasm for the subject-matter, when Gruntle stopped to stare silently for a moment at the page he'd just turned to. A terrible creature built like a bear, but with too-long arms and sharp claws, an array of barbed spines sticking out of its back, and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth. In one...hand?...it held chains with a variety of skulls at the end of each.
Gruntle gazed upon the page in wonder.
"Grandma?" he said.
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Al closed the book and put it in his pack with the journal, not wanting to take the experiment any further. They still had one more room to check before they left, and although they hadn't really been inside the keep for long, the late hour and the exhaustion of the experience made it seem like much longer. Bote put their book back where they'd gotten it.
"Apparently, there are deposits of lead ore not far north of here." they said with a smirk, as if they hadn't all just arrived recently from Silveroak, with its well-established lead mine.
They gathered themselves in front of the last door. Wikwocket looked it over and declared it safe. Gruntle said it smelled a little like the apothecary back in Silveroak.
Pushing the door open, they found a room with complex alchemical apparatus assembled along one wall, and a small pantry in the corner with glassware and supplies. The room itself had seen some abuse - the stone walls were chipped, scorched, and stained in several places, and there were signs that the floor had possibly caught fire at some point in the past, though it appeared someone got it under control before it was structurally damaged. There were a few small glass bottles of fluid on a table by the apparatus. Al recognized the name of a potent acid written on one's label. A few others seemed to be stocks of precursor mixtures. Two of the bottles were filled with opaque red fluid that looked suspiciously like fresh blood, though the dust on everything indicated that nothing in this room was the least bit fresh. One of them was labeled "Julia". The other had a blank label.
There was also a lantern for light, still mostly full of oil, much to Al's relief as the old candles in the candelabra were down to nearly nothing. He lit the lantern and set the candelabra on the table, blowing the remaining candle stubs out.
Al found himself yawning along with Gruntle, who looked bored.
Al offered his opinion. "Some of this stuff is probably quite valuable but we don't need to waste time digging through it all now. It looks like nobody's used this room in a while and I don't see anything that's going to get any more dangerous before tomorrow. Does anyone mind if we go back to Henhaven and get some rest now? We can come back tomorrow in the daytime."
"Don't forget we're bringing the treasure chest with us!" Wikwocket was quick to say.
"You know the 'treasure' is probably just more clothing or something, right?"
"We'll see, once I get it open!"
In fact, the muffled but unmistakable sound of coins sliding against coins was heard when Gruntle lifted the chest, drawing a cackle of gleeful avarice from Wikwocket. The cackle rose to almost maniacal laughter when Gruntle complained that it was very heavy and would be hard to carry the whole way back. Al was talked into getting out his wizardry reference and conjuring up the "invisible cart" again for Gruntle to set the chest on. The beast's skull, which was deceptively light now that there was nothing but dead, dry bone to it, was set atop the chest floating behind Al. With the lantern for light, the party exited the keep, closed the front door, and made their way back down to the road.
The village seemed as eerily dark and quiet as it had when they left. The same donkey that had watched them leave was the only one to see them returning. Though it was quiet, there was a light under the door at the Biggest Coop. Al sagged with tired relief, but Wikwocket rushed to the front to knock on the door, raising some surprised conversation and a lone startled scream from somewhere inside.
"We have returned!" she shouted, pushing open the door, "The Demonic Flesh-beast of Henhaven is slain!"
The rest of the night was a blur for a tired Al. The villagers cheered loudly as they entered, and louder still when Wikwocket introduced the skull atop the chest as the remains of "the Demonic Flesh-beast of Henhaven". Al took the chest to the room where they'd be sleeping before the magic that held it up ran out, then returned to drink some small-ale and accept enough gratitude from the villagers to be polite, before excusing himself to get some sleep. He drifted out of consciousness to the sound of Wikwocket's enthusiastic retelling of what they'd experienced.