The Demon Sage, Fraise discovered, had done the magical equivalent of disabling his ankle monitor hundreds of years ago. This made sense, for if one’s superior were put under house arrest by a tyrannical god on charges of rebellion, one would dunk out, burn all traces, and go off-grid at the earliest convenience.
Luckily, Fraise knew of the Demon Sage’s haunts.
From Castle-between-Chasms, Fraise directed the Lockpick Hero to the icy-cold peak of Mount Atheneum in the northernmost reaches of the demon kingdom ruled by vampires. There held the entrance to the Demon Sage’s private library.
It was a cave. The Lockpick Hero was grateful to be out of the blizzard behind him. Before him was a pair of obsidian doors with the thickest magical seals he had ever seen—t’was to be expected from someone who had access to all the knowledge in the world.
For the first time in his life, the Lockpick Hero found a lock quite vexing. In a world where most locks, magical and physical, relied on the idea of spatial alignment, this one relied on temporal alignment.
The seal was magical, and he suspected an anti-tampering mechanism. Ideally, as a determined attacker, he would copy the mechanism and attempt a solution, many thousands of times if he had to.
However, as a lawyer, he was not mainly a determined attacker, but a smart one.
The Demon Sage was a known collector of arcane knowledge. If he had been holed up here for many hundreds of years, then it would figure that he must have been starving for something new. Indeed, the key to someone’s cooperation was always, first and foremost, trade.
The Lockpick Hero knocked on the door. “Good morning! Is there a ‘Demonious Sanguinius the First and Only’ here who ordered a LIMITED EDITION, I’ll say that again, LIMITED EDITION ‘Guide to the Other World’?”
This was no false advertising. He had actually taken over a week to hand-scribe a 107-page manuscript briefly describing Earth’s cultures, technologies, and recommended restaurants around the San Francisco Bay Area.
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All this was necessary, because in front of the Dealer of Secrets, nothing was secret. All lies and omissions were revealed before him, and all truths, bared naked.
That’s why, the door flung open, and a cloaked individual whose face was eternally in the shadow of a fuzzy cloak came out. “I didn’t order anything—but give me that!”
The Lockpick Hero pulled the book back, evading the grasp of the Sage’s stringy fingers. “Oh, apologies, sir, but if there’s been a mistake with the order, I’m not allowed to distribute our products.”
“Blasted!” The Demon Sage balled his fist. “Is there any way I can acquire that dazzling manuscript written in alien texts!”
“Why, of course, sir!” The Lockpick Hero’s words inspired hope in the Sage. “We have a Product Exchange Program that allows me to trade our products with those of yours of equivalent value.”
“I see.” The Demon Sage narrowed his eyes. “You seek knowledge of the Seals?” Alas, all truths were bare before him.
“That’s right,” the Lockpick Hero said, dropping the skit. The Sage appreciated that.
“Come inside,” he said.
The Demon Sage’s library…was just a room. There was a bed, a kitchen, and a thick book upon a lectern, where ghostly glyphs manifested and flew around like faeries.
The Sage walked up to the lectern, flipping through the pages. He flipped through thousands of pages, eventually, and it never seemed that the thickness of the book ever decreased nor increased on either side of its spine.
The Sage motioned for the Lockpick Hero to come hither, and he moved beside him.
A mere glance of the book knocked the Lockpick Hero unconscious.
***
Upon awakening, he remembered his time in law school. Strangely enough, the headaches and hardship he had suffered there were much greater than the pain of learning about the Second Seal.
He sat up on the bed. He was still in the Sage’s room, and the Sage was there, standing by the lectern, feeding the Guide to the Other World to the book on the lectern, physically disappearing straight into its pages.
“If you must unlock the Second Seal,” the Sage said, “please do so outside. This book will suffer no damage, but I would like to have a bed and a kitchen, still.”
The Lockpick Hero thanked him and left. The snow outside the cave had melted, and the rocky face of the mountain was exposed.
On that day, the peak of Mount Atheneum shone like a second sun in mid-day, serving as the signal for the Archangel of the Elves to call her forest friends to arms, and for Her Majesty, the Demon Queen Fraise, to once again raise her mighty armies—in want to achieve what had been attempted 400 years ago.