Styx was not excited about her sleepless marathon, but it was what she had trained for. The sugar from the honey was wearing off, but she had enough coffee to last a week. She had found an alcove to keep her backpack and other belongings- a half-attic between chimneys. The only way to access it was a loose brick in the second attic. She could tell, from the dust, no one had visited since Kedin himself discovered it, size ten leather boots, marking a steady path; it was heavily dusted over, but still visible.
Standing now, above the demon king, she could make out some of the writing on the documents: "An In-depth Analysis of Human Activity" and "Religions: The Humor of Humans." Styx was never a religious nut- maybe as a child she had believed, but things had changed. Seeing people die- seeing her friends die- it was hard to believe anything was sacred. The dirt she saw was not made of miracles, the dirt was made of blood. The sun does not shine holy light, just empty brightness, through clouds of grief. Fate was not godly plan, but an insane mess of last minute changes. Cecile was dead and didn’t die peacefully- how could any god plan that?
She shook her head, trying to forget. She didn’t have time for this, for grief. She had to focus, to stay, to finish. This was what it was all for, this is what they died for.
She had to do it right.
Demon King (OxO) (CLOSEDDD?)
The more Orchid thought about it, the more it made sense. But the lands here were very barren, and anything of value was stolen. The citizens also wouldn’t be very keen on giving back anything.
Supplying the humans with obsidian or any metals that could be found here, probably wouldn’t be a good idea either. They could very easily make more weapons and such that way. Giving anything away of too high a value wouldn’t be good either, since they could take advantage of the situation.
The humans could also still have ulterior motives and could lean towards betraying any kind of alliance.
What was there that the other races didn’t have, that the Demons could offer?
Orchid sighed, jotted down her idea, and then picked up another scroll.
This one contained information on a merchants organization. This scroll was a bit shorter than the others, possibly because in the books, it wasn’t written about a lot.
An alliance with a merchant would be good, or if Orchid could just get the chance to speak with one. She could figure out what the races wanted and how she could get these items to them, as well as how she should run these sorts of things.
How would Orchid secure any kind of alliance in the first place? If she left the realm, firstly, she wouldn’t be able to leave for long, but who knows what would happen in the kingdom. No one would willingly meet her either, most likely. It would be so much more convenient if someone would just show up with no ill intent, a friendly personality, and useful information. But that was hoping for too much.
(I feel like we're going in circles? Styx is trying to figure out what Orchid is like and it's not the most interesting part of the story- we could try where you do like a montage of scenes and then I do it again from Styx's perspective to see what she gathered that way we could skip to the battle/meeting- unless, of course, you're building up to something in this scene? idk it's running long)
(I agree with you, eheheh. Though this is on me. For the original plot I had in this idea, the King was confronted pretty early on so I hadn’t put much thought into it. I would prefer to do a montage of scenes, however, I probably won’t have enough time to write all out. So … we should probably skip up to the meeting between the two characters to get this going somewhere.)