Astral Odyssey: Dying Ember

World 4.23: Vanora

The castle must be quite a distance away from the inn since it took quite a long while before the fog cleared up.

The first thing Vanora noticed was not how ridiculously large and spacious the room was but the humongous messy stack of paper by a majestic looking rosewood table, followed by other smaller messy stacks of paper scattered around the room. Vanora looked down at their feet and found that they were even standing on some important looking documents right now.

If not for the mess, the room was pretty decent and simple. It has dark red walls and a black cement floor. The brown double-door stood behind her, the study table in front of her, a ceiling to floor window that stretched from one end of the room to the other was to her right, a ceiling to floor rosewood drawer with countless compartments was to her left. Besides the golden hanging chandelier, a black thin chute that looked just big enough for documents extended from the ceiling and ended beside the table. She guessed that something that was supposed to hold the delivery was hidden in that mountain of papers.

"Bloody hell. Didn't Raven say that she took over my duties? How's it still such a mess? I don't think two months worth of work is even this much." He frowned, perplexed by the situation of his study.

"She probably did a bad job for you in vengeance." Vanora explained offhandedly. It definitely sounded like something Raven would do based on what Raven said to Vlad earlier.

He looked at her with surprise. "You think so?" He seemed to seriously consider what she just said then agreed with her. "It must be so then. What a prick."

His hand slid away from her waist to hold onto her hand then he led her to the only thing that seemed randomly placed in the simple room. A black curtain about 3 metres long and 2 metres wide hung from the wall beside the gigantic drawer. When he pushed it aside, it revealed a doorway leading into another smaller room. This room has a black king-sized bed with gold trimmings and a large wall-to-wall fish tank in front of it. The room was dark and was only illuminated by the blue glow of the fish tank. Seeing how the bed has a very comfy looking cushioned headrest, she guessed that it was a room for Vlad to either nap or admire the fishes.

"You can sleep in here while I work. We'll leave when you wake up." Vlad said but quickly noticed that Vanora's attention was still on the fish tank. He followed her gaze and realised that she was looking at the fishes swimming about in his tank.

"Nice, right?" He said proudly. "They only exist in the dimension between the living and the dead so are rare and hard to find."

Nice? Big skeleton fishes were indeed unique and interesting at best, but Vanora was not sure if she would use "nice" to describe them. "How are they not dead yet? You've been coming back to feed them? A servant?"

"They don't need to eat. It's like they're frozen in time. Don't they make the best pets?" He grinned.

"I guess they're the best if you intend to neglect them and only look at them when you're bored." She answered honestly.

"What pet do you like then?"

Vanora found herself stumped by his question. "Never thought about it." It may have sounded dismissive but it was also an honest answer. Not wanting to continue the conversation, she walked to the bed and tucked herself in with her back facing him. He took the hint and walked off to clean up the mess that his study was in.

It may have seemed like a lot of work, and it truly was, but the inhuman speed that Vlad could work at made it seem like it was not much to begin with. He was already done with almost half of all the papers strewn around. 

Vanora had told BaoBao to wake her up after 3 hours. She did not want to waste the day away since she would be sleeping tonight anyway. When Vanora walked out of the room, she was surprised to see everything looking so orderly. Perhaps there was no need to worry about wasting time waiting for him to do some administrative work every morning after all.