"So this is Greybeak, huh?" We were floating in the air above Lake Starfall looking down at a moderate sized town stretching out from the lakeshore in rows of brightly colored houses. "You know for a town with 'grey' in the name, I really didn't expect it to be so colorful."

"Right!?" Rivi clapped her hands next to me. "Oooh the colors look so good, I haven't been back since they started the remodeling. The color palette used to be far more boring, but a few decades ago one of my subordinates took over the management of the town and decided to completely change the aesthetic."

"Oh? And who's this?"

"Her name's Falling Mist. She used to be a demon enslaved in the Continent of the Gods, but she died in captivity and Our Lady decided to give her the chance to resurrect. I only spent a few years with her, and she was still pretty shell-shocked at the time, so I never got to know her super well, but I hear she's much better nowadays."

"I can tell! If she's painting grey houses pink and running a pretty little vacation town like this, that must have been quite the change."

"Yeah," Rivi shrugged. "Maybe, though it's hard to really tell from the outside. Shall we go see her? I want to request a few servants for my mansion while we're here."

"Mansion!?" I nearly choked. Of course it shouldn't have come as that much of a surprise to me given Rivi's true identity, but suddenly rolling up to a forgotten mansion like some kind of high class noble did not match with the past couple weeks we'd spent slumming it in tents and small villages.

Rivi giggled. "Yeah, Lake Starfall and Preteregnia are so pretty I've kept a house here for a while. Though what kind of state it's in, I have no clue." She suddenly frowned realizing that her property might not do them that much good if it was left under centuries of neglect and mismanagement. "Hopefully the housekeeper I left has kept things in good order…"

"Hmm, maybe we should actually head there first and visit Falling Mist later. I wouldn't want to request maids only to have them show up to a house that's in ruin."

"Fair enough, lead the way!"

I'd briefly lived in the Kingdom of Aver's royal palace for a week when I first arrived in Andar, but getting to see a real noble's mansion up close and moreover get to stay in it still made me feel a little giddy, especially after all the nights spent in futons laid over magic-flattened land.

"There, you see it's that…" Rivi pointed at a large manor that stuck out from the surrounding town mainly because of the huge tract of gardens that stretched behind it immune to the surrounding creep of the town. "Damn, has the town grown this big…?" Rivi muttered, seeing the development stretching all the way around to the far back of the gardens.

We landed on the street outside the front gate, to the mild interest of several passing civilians. I really expected a bigger splash, if I'm being honest, but looking around I realized that these weren't the vanilla human civilians that I'd subconsciously been expecting when I heard the word town.

There were various species of both humanoid and four-legged beasts, several ghosts, a skeleton, and I thought I might have caught a glimpse of the purple skin of a demon, but they disappeared before I got a good look. In other words all people used to a far higher tolerance for what was 'normal,' than I would have otherwise expected.

Turning away from my people watching I looked up at the mansion we had come to visit. At four stories tall and with a firm brick exterior it didn't look like a centuries old ruin. Even the gates that cordoned off the gravel driveway from visitors looked relatively fresh and well-maintained, though it being locked up so tight did give off a somewhat disused or foreboding air.

Rivi walked up to the side of the gate where she pressed a button that signalled a magic chime that could be heard distantly from inside a small gatehouse that sat on the other side of the black-iron fence.

After a few moments a skeleton wearing a guard's outfit laboured up to the door. It looked blankly at us for a moment, then its blue soul-fire eyes burned purple all of a sudden as it looked at Rivi, and it quickly took out keys to open up the gate.

"I see the constructs I left are still in good shape." Rivi looked at the skeleton a certain smug satisfaction creeping over her face. "Come on! This mansion's pretty cool."

She took me by the hand and pulled me through the opening gate towards the front doors of the mansion.

We were just about to reach the doors when they flung open abruptly.

"RIVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!" A girl screeched and a ghost flew out of the doors, wrapping her arms around Rivi's neck and spinning around her multiple times. "It's been so looooong!!!! Why haven't you come to visit!? You haven't even called, and it's been nearly a century!!"

"Oh who's this?" She poked her head around Rivi's to look at me and Rufi. "A new little friend of yours? Lover? Subordinate?" She looked at Rivi with a sly grin. "Knowing you it's probably all of the above, eh?"

"Sera!" Rivi's face flushed red. "Don't give her any wrong ideas. I'm not that bad. I haven't had a lover for nearly half a century…" She scratched the back of her neck.

"But you always bring them here, eh?" The ghost giggled. "Alright, alright, enough chitchat, why don't you all come in, and you can do your inspections of the place. I'm sure Tevera is just dying to meet with her employer and show you all the expense sheets and official requests from the last century."

Rivi groaned. "Oh great, paperwork, my favorite."

"Come on," Sera giggled. "It's what you pay her for. I'm just here as decoration, really."

"Very playful decoration." Rivi laughed back.

Kyoo! I felt something strange and sharp in my heart looking at the two laughing together. What? I felt my form grow wavery and misty and I nearly collapsed as different parts of my body turned insubstantial at the wrong moments. "What the…" I gasped. "I thought I had control over this…" I muttered, letting myself fall to the ground.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.