The City of Tombstones was not a quiet place at night; like all big cities, its lights were on at all hours - if slightly more neon at certain times - and crowds still crossed its untended intersections. It was, however, just as lonesome a place as during the day, and so it was with comparative ease that Caedes and Yaaroghkh made their way to their first pitstop of the night, the one whistling in his hat and suit, the other slinking softly in his sweater.

Yaaroghkh had shrunk himself down, till he was standing but three feet tall (which had no impact on his indescribability, for watchers were now obliged to try and understand how an entity of such immense figures could fit in so small a space), and he appeared like a tiny child as he walked along beside the taller, obviously adult Caedes. From a distance the two looked like father and son, if sons could have phantasmagorical visages whose very sight plunged one into an ever-shifting dreamscape of fragmentary verisimilitudes. Currently, said daemoniac child was catching snowflakes with his tongue as they strolled down a freshly ploughed sidewalk.

They had left the bad part of town behind and were heading into the good part - or, as Caedes put it, they had left the bad part of town behind, and were heading into the shinier bad part of town. The buildings, though no less dilapidated, had a grandiose air to them, with fancy gables and ornate designs on the window frames and officious looking door guards keeping people from entering the apartment complexes.

They had gone there at Caedes’ suggestion.

“Think about it this way,” he’d said, while crunching down on a Christmas cookie (Yaaroghkh was impressed to see he had his own supply). “Whoever orchestrated the attack on Santa’s workshop knew where it was, and had trained soldiers for the assault itself. This can’t just happen out of nowhere: it takes immense amounts of resources and time to train cultivators, on top of needing the connections to find good potential cultivators, good trainers, and good cultivation materials. These requirements are all far beyond the capabilities of the average person or organisation.

“And it’s not just financing the creation and training of cultivators. I know about the challenges one faces on the journey north of the north pole as well as anyone else - fighting dragon pirates in itchy underwear; defeating Ugoth, daimon of Interior Decorating, in a shoe closet design contest; surviving the technosirens while swimming through the Sea of Unwashed Goblin Gym Socks. That doesn’t just take pluck, it takes cash. Mountains of cash. You need the resources to find out about the dangers of the journey, and the resources to overcome those dangers.

“In other words, we’re not even looking for the wealthy. Those grandiose buildings with fancy gables and ornate designs on the window frames and officious looking door guards keeping people from entering the apartment complexes? Plebs. Nothings. Wastes. Absolute trash. There are maybe three or four dozen people in this city wealthy enough to have orchestrated that assault - and all of them can afford their own buildings.”

Their own buildings, and their own walls - for not even five minutes after he’d said that, the two of them reached what they were looking for: a stone wall, some fifteen feet high, which separated the rest of the city from its wealthiest district, a place known as the Bridal Path. There was a single gate separating the inside from the outside, one with guards, but our two adventurers had no need to use it - they just hopped the fence.

They landed, strange to say, in a collection of bushes. They were in a carefully tended and well-maintained garden, with a winding cobblestone path for walks and benches to relax upon in summer. The garden designer had picked species of evergreen for their masterwork, ensuring it remained stylish even in winter.

The strangest part of the whole affair, however, is that this was not the garden of a house. Those all had their separate, privately walled gardens. No, this was merely a general garden, integrated into the walkway - a lovely ornament to a lovingly designed public area, replete with cast iron street lamps with webbed ladder bars casting a glow over the empty, snow-dusted streets. The houses here were in impeccable shape, monumental masterpieces of good taste and better income.

Caedes motioned for Yaaroghkh to follow him, and then led him around the edge of the district until they reached a house that was more than sumptuous in appearance, to the point of garishness. Maybe it was something about the use of gold on the balustrades, or the fact that the wall was painted a particularly unpleasant shade of pink, but whatever it was there was a certain indescribable je ne sais quoi about the house that rubbed Yaaroghkh the wrong way.

They leapt the fence, and Yaaroghkh noted with annoyance that the yard of the house was worse than its outside, for they’d removed the regular grass and trees and replaced them with concrete and bubbly metal trees. Much to the elf's surprise there were actually guards assigned to watch over this monstrosity - two of them, patrolling the perimeter.

The first was a mere six feet away from the home invaders, and went down with only a thud as Caedes pinched a vital acupoint. The other, startled by the noise, spun around to face them, but whatever he was going to cry died in his throat as his torch shone on Yaaroghkh.

"Hullo," said the elf affably as the man began foaming at the mouth, and keeled over. Caedes looked over at his colleague.

"Perhaps you better hide yourself until we meet the Young Master of the Ell Company."

For they had not picked this house arbitrarily. Caedes had argued that the one with the most to gain was the one most likely to be responsible, and in the City of Tombstones that was unambiguously the Ell Company, the city's largest supplier of toys and games. It was an old company, which dated itself back to the days when computers existed, and the family for which it was named had been in charge just as long. They were none of them cultivators, but they had more than enough money to employ them and a history of shady dealings and equally shady bodies behind them. Thus the two had decided to check them out first.

Yaaroghkh nodded, accepting the wisdom of Caedes' suggestion, and gave his hat a turn. With a poof he was no more than a small black stain upon the floor, a trick that would have made him all but invisible were it not for the fact that he kept making super secret spy noises.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Sneaking…I’m sneaking…can’t see me…doo doo doo” he whispered conspicuously, as he dashed from cover to cover. Caedes tried not to laugh as he walked to the back door, quietly using qi to shatter the lock.

The mansion itself was a twisting, turning mess - not in the sense that Yaaroghkh was, with his alveolate body and anamorphic limbs flowing along the carpet - but in the more prosaic sense that it was literally a mess, hallways piling out and pouring around and massive rooms spewing out in another. They’d started with a normal, if pompous house, and through that fell enemy of cosiness everywhere - endless renovations - ended up crafting a worm burrow for pachyderms.

The interior decoration was hardly better. Yaaroghkh detected the dread hand of Ugoth in the couches, which were encrusted with rhinestones, while the carpet was thicker than some prairies. The lamps - which had been colour-coded, idiosyncratically enough, to match the trees outside - were shining brightly, shining with all their might.

“ …and this was odd, because it was the middle of the night,” Yaaroghkh hummed, as the two moved through the house, dropping the guards as they progressed. The art itself was exceedingly impressive; the elf had never seen such a noble attempt at replicating his form on paint.

They reached the top of the stairs, where someone had installed a low hanging chandelier, and pressed on. Ahead of them they could hear someone yelling in anger, though it wasn’t till they rounded a corner into some sort of office that they saw the object of his rage.

“What do you mean, your shift is over? You dare tell me what you want to do, when I’m the one paying you? You’re courting death!” A young man was screaming at a maid, who was bowing nervously over a tea set. He held up one finger, returning to his phone. “I said get it to market. Who cares if it’s unsafe? Either fix the product, or fix the law so we can sell it, safety be d---ed. But I want it on the market by next week, no excuses.”

He slammed the receiver in disgust, muttering about people being useless, and was about to return to tearing the maid a new one when he caught sight of Caedes at the door (Yaaroghkh was still invisible, muttering spy noises as he edged across the walls).

“You! Who are you, and-”

“Be quiet,” Caedes murmured, moving two fingers in a slice across the air. Matthew froze, his eyes flicking across the room in shock. Caedes idled into the room, hands hooked in his belt, until he reached the maid. He grabbed her hands, and tucked a pouch of poker winnings into them.

“You see nothing,” he said, continuing on his way. The maid nodded, and ran. Caedes waited as the patter of her feet faded, yawning, until he heard the door slam. Then he lazily raised one hand, his fingers forming a cage.

Yaaroghkh watched as demonic qi poured from the tips of fingers, flowing towards the Young Master of the Ell Company. It was an impressive technique, he had to admit, if intensely discomfiting. He’d seen demonic cultivators do qi puppetry before, but hadn’t seen a technique like this for a millennium. Usually they hijacked the body and rode it like a stallion - with a dangerous fall if anything went wrong. Caedes’ technique, however, harmonised his qi with that of his target, treating them as two instruments with the surroundings as a background symphony. It was a brutally difficult technique that involved controlling his own qi as much as anyone else’s, but the result was, well…

He would have said it was effective, but more accurately it was hilarious. Matthew was on the floor, his muscles straining as he did one-handed pushups, while Caedes kneeled beside him, fingers twisting.

“Come on, you want to do another ten,” he chirped merrily, as Matthew gave him a death glare.

“What, don’t want to ask me why I’m doing this?” He said, as the latter strained with all his might to open his mouth. “Oh, my apologies.”

He flicked his fingers with a flourish, and Matthew’s mouth opened. The Young Master barked a sharp, bitter laugh. “So, the Master of Puppets finally pays me a visit. I wondered when we’d meet.”

Caedes lit a cigar, taking a drag. “I hate that name, and frankly hoped we’d never meet.”

Matthew laughed, involuntarily switching to situps. “Spare me. Who doesn’t know of your vendetta against the rich?”

Caedes waved his cigar towards the curtain (where Yaaroghkh was hiding expertly, making only occasional spy noises), breathing the smoke in the opposite direction. “An overstated vendetta. That’s just me helping out a friend of mine.”

The elf wasn’t unduly surprised. He’d doubted that a demonic cultivator would ever help him out for free, not that the contrary bothered him - if they both benefited, so much the better. He wondered who the friend was, though.

Caedes leaned back on his haunches, motioning for Matthew to begin doing laps. “Not that I’m here on their part. I’m here with only one question - were you the one who orchestrated an assault on Santa’s workshop?”

Matthew sneered at the home invader, trying to spit on the floor. “Don’t tell me you still believe in fairytales. Everyone knows there is no Santa - the presents generate themselves spontaneously. And here I thought the Master of Puppets had some class.”

Caedes examined him. He didn’t seem to be lying, and anyways he didn’t really hold with torture. (Besides, that would require a Content Warning.)

“My beliefs are none of your concern. Now, did you orchestrate the assault on Santa’s workshop?”

Matthew stared at him, as he continued to make laps around the room. “Wait, you’re serious? You’re not here about the lead in the lifesize dolls?”

“ …Well I wasn’t, but I am now.” Caedes said, looking straight ahead, face blank, then continued.

“So you really weren’t responsible, huh?”

“Of course not! I have more important things to do than chase after the vapid delusions of children.”

Caedes glanced at Yaaroghkh, who nodded. He could see in the man’s heart that, sad to say, he wasn’t lying: he didn’t believe in Innocence enough to desire its destruction.

"Ahem," Caedes coughed, gesturing with grandiosity towards the curtains. There was a small movement, and Matthew was surprised to see what looked like a small child slink forwards quietly, though he was still out of the circle of light. This confused Matthew - why would he bring his toddler with him on a home invasion - but frankly he had bigger concerns.

"Fair enough," Caedes continued. "But we still have the other matter to deal with. So, choose: Death, or the Christmas Elf?"

Silence filled the room, the silence of complete and utter bewilderment.

"What? Why would I choose Death?" Matthew asked, completely flummoxed.

"I choose the Christmas Elf, obviously."

Caedes shrugged, and with one movement grabbed Yaaroghkh by the scruff of his neck and held him up in front of Matthew. The elf dangled amicably in the air.

"Hullo, pleasure to meet you," he said, and waved.

"Aaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhhhhh."