These days, the archetypal wood elf was a young woman with a miserable upbringing who went through a few years of intensive and mandatory military training to get her up to Level 5, whereupon she was given a guaranteed-compatible life partner and let loose back into society, to make some more wood elves, and who responded to all of this pressure and trauma by becoming an unbridled hedonist who fucked like a champion on account they all had near-identical figures with flared hips, fat tits, and long legs.

Four hundred years ago, however, they made 'em pretty different, and the wizened old Spellblade who was responsible for teaching me Old Elvish looked very little like her modern countrymen, keeping only the pale skin and pointy ears- her hair had gone grey, with only a few strands of rust left in the midst of all that steel. She was short, and bent shorter by age, with a stocky figure that simply was not, and likely never had been, the sort of hourglass bombshell that ranchers bred into their prestige livestock, and that the wood elves all sported because knocking up the prestige livestock was their only option for survival as a people.

"You're learning fast," the old Spellblade said, in Old Elvish- a name that only got used in Azelish, the shared language of Vega, the modern day Red Forest, and Dorn (where it was called Dornish, although that was legitimately a distinct (if still mutually-intelligible) dialect); in the language itself, it was called 'The Official Language,' with 'official' carrying connotations of both 'this is the language the government wants you to speak' and 'this is the language that government officials use to conduct their business and write their documents.' "Now, for your final test... Read this passage for me."

"The Time Capsule," I read aloud. "In this location, a wealthy eccentric has created a deep subterranean vault, and stored within it a full library of modern knowledge and technology, as well as a number of useful tools and objects for making use of the library. Their stated intent for this project was to ensure that, in the event that civilization collapses, it can be rebuilt even if everyone who knew how to do that is dead and gone."

"Good, good," the old Spellblade said. "Now, you know what you must do, yes?"

"Go there right now and start digging, and wishing I hadn't spent the past two weeks sitting here doing nothing?" I said. "You knew about this place the whole time!"

"Yes, and now when you go to this place, with your archaeologists, all of you will be able to actually read whatever writing you find there," the old Spellblade said, smirking. "I am four hundred and fifty years old; I don't want to go into that dark, dirty hole in the ground, and you cannot make me."

"...Well," I said, sighing. "Fair enough, I suppose. Thank you for the instruction, Master."

"Thank you for actually learning, despite your misgivings," she said. "Now go. I have nothing more for you."

Finding the place was pretty easy, with a magic GPS that simply knew my latitude and longitude- admittedly, getting the longitude set properly took a bit, on account the Prime Meridian was a matter of law rather than simple geometry, and also the fucking map was in gradians rather than degrees (where there were 360 degrees in a circle, there were 400 gradians in that same circle, making a right angle equal to 100 gradians; being base-100 rather than base-90 made some math a bit easier, and a lot of other math a bit trickier). Getting to that place was also pretty easy; it had been a month since I introduced trucks to the Red Forest, and some people found they really liked driving these trucks, and had gotten really good at it, even in the challenging terrain of 'a forest without paved roads.'

When we were about two kilometers out from our final destination, we stopped, because we'd already found something archaeologically interesting- a remnant of a stone wall, clearly damaged and decayed from both siege and centuries of neglect.

"What's this doing here?" Lisa asked.

"This used to be the capital of the Red Forest, four hundred years ago," I said, placing a hand on the remnant of the outer wall. "The city of Carmine stood here for more than two thousand years, built around a stone marker from before the Elven Epoch, which is said to have been marked, 'Stand fast, and strike the earth.'"

"...That marker," Anzerath began.

"That's our destination," I agreed, nodding. "What that marker likely meant was 'dig straight down right here,' but it was interpreted to mean 'build your city here.'"

"So that's why you brought so many archaeologists," Lisa said. "You knew there was going to be a city here."

"Which is why I said 'there's going to be a city there,'" I said. "All of this information was in the handout that, apparently, none of you read."

"...Ah," Anzerath said, sheepishly.

"Bold of you to assume I can read," Lisa said, folding her arms.

"Right. Well... Let's disembark here, and set up our base camp. Take pictures of everything before you touch it, alright?" I would readily admit that I wasn't a real archaeologist, and was likely doing things that'd make a real archaeologist cringe, but I was trying, okay? At least I gave them cameras that'd put very precise coordinate tags on every single photo they took.

We spent a good week exploring and lightly excavating the ruins of Carmine, slowly but surely spiraling around the city and working our way inward. If we really wanted to, we could've made a beeline straight for the center of the city, where the ruins of the old palace were still visible, but... it felt wrong to simply ignore this city where so many people had once lived and died.

Finally, though, we did make our way to the old palace ruins, and... it was an absolute wreck. It had, quite clearly, been trashed on purpose by crusaders; not quite to the degree of 'no two stones stacked atop each other,' but certainly close enough that we had kept finding pieces of the palace (the only building in town to be built out of marble, rather than the local granite) scattered throughout town, as though it had been blown up, throwing pieces of it high up into the air.

Many of the floor tiles that once lined the halls of the palace were gone- not simply sunken into the earth and covered over, but pried out and taken; likely this was the work of Vegan crusaders, unsatisfied with simply destroying the palace, and wanting to take trophies as well.

As we drew closer to the exact coordinates we'd found in the book, the destruction and looting increased, until, on the spot where the stone marker should have been, there was only a muddy sinkhole.

"...Anzerath," I said quietly. "Can you cast a spell to find the stone marker that was once here?"

"I can try," Anzerath said. "It... it helps that I can be pretty sure it's in Vega."

"We need that closure," I said, closing my eyes.

"I understand," she said, nodding. "It'll be a bit."

"Right, well," I began, turning to address the archaeologists. "Start taking pictures and cataloging everything. We've got a lot of ground to cover. I want to know if there's enough marble rubble in this city to account for the entire royal palace, or if we think there was even more that got stolen."

There was a chorus of affirmative shouts, and they all got to work documenting the ruins of the old Carmine Palace. I turned back around to regard the hole in the ground, and sighed.

"Found it," Anzerath said, breaking me out of my reverie. "It's in the Royal Palace in Vega, in their museum wing where they keep a bunch more trophies they stole from the Red Forest, including the hundred or so marble statues that used to be here, in Carmine."

"You know," I said calmly, "I think that it's very fortunate for our neighbors that Veronica Vega is my subby little pillow princess, because if I didn't know her well enough that I could assert ownership over her that she didn't contest, then I would otherwise extinguish the entire royal house of Vega, leaving them with nobody who had any legitimacy to claim the throne."

"Hey, easy, tiger," Lisa said. "I know that Vega sucks, but you've gotta focus on what's in front of us."

I sighed profoundly, as she rubbed my back.

"It's just... fucking hell," I said. "What I don't understand is why they would do this! Yeah, racism is usually pretty unmoored from reality, but there's still always some sort of cause behind every effect. What the fuck happened to Vega that attempted genocide became an accepted part of their coronation rituals? What is wrong with these people?"

"The answers might be lost to history," Anzerath said. "Has Rachel said anything about it?"

"She said it wasn't always this bad, but she's never conveyed a time when Vega and Carmine weren't some kind of enemies," I said, shaking my head. "It's... something to ask her about, I guess, but... later. Right now... Right now, we need to figure out how we're getting into that vault without desecrating an active dig site."

"Well, as for that, I have a few ideas," Anzerath said. "I've got plenty of magic still in the tank, and since we're standing right over the vault, I can probably spin up a scrying spell to find it, and then just teleport us there."

"...We'll teleport in a few pseudofamiliar drones, first," I said. "I'd rather not die in an ancient deathtrap without anyone having a chance to find my body. But otherwise... I'm in."