Lost Caverns of the Count of St. Germain

[Adminenkainen]

Altona, The Duchy of Schleswig
1784

The carriage came to a stop outside the old factory. The woman who stepped out was almost hidden from view in her hat, wig, and voluminous dress with its wide, padded skirt, but her face and chest were exposed down to her cleavage and revealed her to be a beautiful woman. Not the sort of visitor one expected for the dying Count of St. Germain, and certainly not at this hour. The Count kept few servants in his private wing of the factory, but one greeted her at the door and let her in without even questioning her. Magical wards were equally ineffective at stopping her progress. And so she passed unmolested into the Count’s very bedchambers.

“Oh good, I have found you still awake,” she said, removing her travel gloves. “Though, if I were to start with being completely honest, the thought of slapping you awake was amusing me on the way in here.”

“As charming as ever…Louhi,” The Count breathed with a raspy voice from what the physicians told him would be his deathbed. Until this very moment he had thought them fools, but now they seemed remarkably prescient. “Are the Swiss Cantons not enough to keep you busy these days? Are you setting your sights on Schleswig as well?”

“Oh, perhaps,” she said, sitting down beside his bed in a chair. “You know how I love new challenges and a change of scenery every few centuries. But, no, silly. I of course came to see you. One last time.”

“So kind. I hardly feel I warrant so much of your time.”

“Yes…it has been a long time since you were any threat to my plans, hasn’t it? You failed to stop me when I charmed the last member of the last free parliament of the Swiss Confederation, giving me absolute control over all thirteen cantons from behind the scenes. And what did you do after that? Stay and rally the peasants against me? No, you robbed me of my fun, fled here to Schleswig, and have been mooching off Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel ever since as an…alchemist? Mystic? I suppose he doesn’t know you’re the second most powerful arch-mage on the planet. How droll.”

“I suppose so…did you really come alone? You might find the second most powerful arch-mage on the planet can still hurl a spell or two.”

Louhi laughed. “Of course I didn’t. I never go anywhere without my favorite pet.” She snapped her fingers, and the demon prince Tz’zarg stepped out of the shadows. Both handsome and hideous at once, Tz’zarg sent an uncontrollable shiver down the Count’s aged spine at just the sight of him. “He’s been ever so helpful. Tz’zarg knows so much, you know. Demons tend to. He was able to tell me where your famously lost caverns were. Practically under my nose this whole time. I’ve been having a good time redecorating the place. Love your old book collection…”

“I have a book here you missed. I bet you would love to see it.”

“Is it that charming little triangular manuscript?”

“Its sequel. Fetch my lantern and perhaps I will give you a look.”

Louhi looked to the table across the room and the lantern on it, a brass lantern with colored lenses. She started to rise, more interested in the lantern than she should have been. This sounded mental alarm bells for her. She was still curious what was special about this lantern, but she would foil whatever trick it had in store for her.

“Tz’zarg, fetch that lantern,” she commanded.

“At once…” the demon prince growled. He moved across the room, scooped up the lantern by its handle -- and shouted in surprise as the room was suddenly filled with a prismatic spray of blinding colors. And in a moment, Tz’zarg was gone.

Now Louhi bolted from her seat. She started at the space where her demon prince slave had just been, then at the lantern, and finally at the Count, as he lay there, now chuckling weakly. “What have you done?” she demanded.

“I have done many things in my long life, both good and bad…but my last good act in life will have been robbing you of your demon. Now you have all of the Swiss under your thumb, but without the demon, you haven’t the power to do anything with them…”

“I’ll destroy your stupid lantern!” Louhi roared as she strode across the room towards it.

“I wouldn’t, even if you could. You will need it intact to unlock the puzzle of how to free your prince. I figure it should take you…at least 150 years…”

[Adminenkainen]

A secret cave in the Swiss Alps
1934

“You summoned me, mother?”

Louhi turned her old, bent frame to look to the door. She had been so consumed in her studies for so long that she had long since abandoned maintaining a youthful appearance. But the look of the old crone did not disturb her youngest daughter, Elina, in the least.

“Ahh, Elina…” Louhi cooed, or the closest she could manage to a coo out of her cracked throat. “My sweet child. The girl who should have been the general in charge of my great army. Come closer. Look.”

Elina did, and as Louhi put her arm around her, Elina’s attention was focused on the brass lantern with colored lenses that sat on her mother’s worktable. The item her mother had obsessed over for the entirety of Elina’s life. “I know it well, Mother.”

Louhi cackled. “Of course you do. It’s what we came here for, after all. Living in caves, like animals, all this time, but it has paid off. This location was key to solving how my old nemesis unlocked this cursed prison in lantern form.”

“You always speak in riddles, Mother. What is the key you have found after these many years?”

“It only requires…sacrifice…” Louhi said, and she looked on the waking eyes of her daughter for the last time.

No one else was around to hear Elina scream, or see her fall to the floor. Louhi stepped away as if nothing had happened and began completing the spell that would, at last, unlock the lantern-prison. The red lens on the lantern shattered, a blur of shadow escaped from inside, and Tz’zarg stretched his limbs for the first time in 150 years.

“My prince, my lover, my weapon,” Louhi said. “I have freed you at last.”

“In a way you did…” the demon prince said in a voice both lovely and horrible. “But in another way, the lantern freed me first. I am no longer bound to you in any way…”

The terrifying truth of this dawned on Louhi as Tz’zarg drew his wavy-bladed sword. She began casting her best defensive spell, knowing she would need it for the battle of her life.

[Adminenkainen]

Munich, Germany
1940

Adolf Hitler was going over the notes for his speech when he heard someone in the room with him. “I thought I said I was not to be disturbed!”

He turned, looked into the shadows of the room, and one of the shadows stepped out to greet him. “I am Tz’zarg,” the demon prince said in his lovely/terrible voice, “and I seek allies who will help me gain dominion over this world.”

[Adminenkainen]

London, England
October 1941

Quietly, only through intermediaries, each of you were contacted by agents of the Government-in-Exile of France and arrangements were made to smuggle you into England so no one would officially know you were here. In some cases, you did this as a favor to a friend, out of a willingness to do anything to spite the Nazis, or just plain old curiosity. But for whatever reason you found yourselves gathered in a nondescript office in the presence of Charles de Gaulle.

“You all came, tres bonne,” Charles said, wearing a military-style jacket and standing behind a desk. He made eye contact with each of you in turn. “The situation in my home country, I am sure you are all very much aware. I have not asked you to come here because of that. Instead, I asked you to come here because of -- this.”

In front of Charles was a dictaphone and a book. He began recording your conversation and then picked up the book to move it closer to your side of the desk. “It is called the Grimoire of Elina, and it is a most unusual read. Besides being a book about magic spells, it purports to be the diary of the daughter of a witch named Louhi, supposedly the same Louhi of Finnish mythology, only written in Switzerland in 1932. I would never have put any stock in magic and witchcraft, but there is an unusual property to this book that cannot be explained any other way. The book explains that Louhi used magic to rule over the Swiss Cantons for a period of five years during the eighteenth century. Without having read this book, this fact cannot be remembered by anyone. We can test this even now. Please, state your names, or at least your hero names, for the dictaphone.”

He then had everyone leave the room and come back in. He asked what they had just been discussing and the answer back was the book. Then he played the dictaphone record. No one recalled the part of the conversation on the dictaphone record where Louhi ruling Switzerland was discussed, yet there were all their voices, stating their names afterwards.

“This, to my mind, lends credence to the book’s story,” Charles continued. “Which makes the next part all the more terrible. For Louhi secured her rulership of Switzerland, not just through enchantment magic, but with the aid of a terrible demon called Tz’zarg. It is said to be both handsome and hideous at once, and black as a shadow. Which brings us up to these photographs.” Charles reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a handful of color photographs to spread out on the desk. Each showed Adolph Hitler standing with what appeared at first to just be a shadow behind him, but closer scrutiny revealed the silhouette of a handsome-looking man, wearing a long, wrap-around black cape fastened at his shoulder with an ebony brooch. Just staring at the picture too long made you shiver.

“This man - if he is truly a man - matches the description of Tz’zarg perfectly. And if he is truly a demon, then Hitler has Hell on his side. And to deal with this is why you were summoned.

“A clue for how to deal with this demon is found in the grimoire, in a poem. Let me read it out loud to you,” he said, opening the book to a bookmarked page.

“Le prince noir de Louhi
Avait volé son cœur
Regardez par-dessus votre épaule
Protégez votre chère sœur.
Démon insensé
Doit-il faire du mal non plus
Le piéger dans le lanthorn
Jaune, rouge, bleu

“It translates as this,” he said, and showed how it was written in English on the bookmark:

The dark prince of Louhi
Had stolen her heart-
Look over your shoulder,
Protect your dear sister.
Should he harm either,
Foolish demon,
Trap him in the lanthorn,
Yellow, red, blue.

“The lanthorn, it is described elsewhere in the grimoire and it said to reside in the lost caverns of the Count of St. Germain, at some undisclosed location in the Swiss Alps. Though the Count of St. Germain died in what is now part of Germany in 1784, he did travel extensively and could well have found previously unknown caves in the Alps before then. My administration has done the unprecedented and consulted with occultists who agree in their assessment of the grimoire. That, if true, this magic lanthorn could imprison the demon Tz’zarg, and remove this ally from Hitler’s forces, and from other clues sprinkled in the text, have concluded that the caverns are probably in the remotest area of the Alps, home to Switzerland’s highest mountains, in the Canton of Valais, bordering Italy.

“Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is complicated by one more factor. Both Germany and Italy know that we know of Tz’zarg and the lanthorn, and have their own agents in the Swiss Alps already searching for these caverns, as are the Swiss themselves now. It would be acceptable if this lanthorn fell into Swiss hands, but it must be kept out of the possession of Germany and Italy at all costs. Ordinary French agents would have too great a disadvantage arriving this late in the game, as it were, but you American heroes are known for being able to do the impossible.

“We can arrange transportation for you into Switzerland, smuggled in as quietly as you were into England. Once there, we would like it if you moved as stealthy as possible once there, so as not to tip off anyone else after the treasure -- preferable even keeping the Swiss in the dark.

“Lastly, a map has been prepared for you of this region of the Alps. It shows some roads you can use, plus eight numbered sites that our occult advisers label as their best guesses of where the lost caverns could be.”

That map was handed off to you, and you were given time to stock up on any supplies you felt you would need [please tell your Editor about those items now!]

After a quick nighttime flight from London, you were parachuted into the Alps without incident, landing near the Commune of Châtel. Before you is the winding road leading into the starkly beautiful mountains of Switzerland. There is naught else to do but proceed with the quest to find the Lost Caverns of the Count of St. Germain!