Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"I just want you to stop killing!"

She doesn't dare take her eyes off Minagho but she wishes she could look at Ember.

Minagho tries her best to nod frantically around the dragon claw pinning her to the ground, and manages a result at least mostly recognizable as such.

"I will! If you let me go I'll go straight back to the abyss and stay there! If you want my obedience I'll give it!"

She still wants to look at Ember but instead she looks at Terendelev. "Is she telling the truth? Is it possible to tell if she's telling the truth?"

She doesn't lower her sword.

“Lilitus lie as easily as they breathe; I wouldn’t trust one as far as I can throw them, though I suppose for you or I that’s noticeably farther. And even if she’s telling the truth I wouldn’t expect it to last too long once she’s out of your sight and doesn’t have a reminder to be afraid. She’d laugh off any truth spell we could throw at her if she chose, but I suppose it’s not impossible she doesn’t have the means on her to fake Abadar’s truth so I would trust that more than nothing.”

So, trusting her would be a risk bordering on the massively naive.

But she can see a future laid out before her like a highway, the path she'll be going down if she kills this person begging for her life because she was too afraid not to. At the end of that road is a perfectly functional, untraumatized, fearless, ruthless death machine.

"If you swear to stop doing evil, Minagho, I'll let you live. But if you make me regret that choice, then no matter how far you run, I will make it my quest to track you down and fix my mistake. Understand?"

"Yes, I will! I swear, you won't regret this!"

Terendelev is kind of reluctant about this, but if an ally has accepted someone's surrender than killing them anyway would be unthinkable. She'll loosen her claws enough that Minagho can move her limbs to teleport, though not enough that she's free to swing her tail around.

And then in a puff of brimstone Minagho is gone. She doesn't reappear elsewhere on the battlefield either, so at least that much of what she claimed was honest.

She really hopes she hasn't just done something idiotic, but before she apologizes to Terendelev: is there any remaining active combat going on in this room?

There are some demons that haven't fled yet, but significantly fewer of them; the bomb thrower and minotaurs are down and Hulrun is in the process of decapitating the Nabasu he was dealing with.

She kills anyone who seems to need additional killing and then turns back to Terendelev.

"I'm sorry. I hope I scared her enough. I just . . . " Couldn't. Didn't want to be able to. Could, and chose not to. "I'm sorry."

The fighting is over enough that it shouldn't need her personal intervention, so she can return to her human form; people tend not to find claws as reassuring as hands.

"I'd hardly have done better at your age. Besides, while I wouldn't have spared her it would be an injustice to you to demand you refrain. There's an instinct in each of us towards mercy, and while we do sometimes need to ignore it it's rarely as often as we end up doing so."

"Thank you. I need to learn--all the things that people who are good at fighting and do a lot of it need to learn."

"I expect I'll be busy enough for the next few days with repairs and showing the flag that it'll be a bit before I can spend too much time helping you with that, though if you plan to leave soon I'll try and make the time; otherwise, Irabeth, Ramien, or Jhoran would be able to give you good advice in perhaps the nearer future if you spoke with them."

"Of course. I don't want to take up your time."

On that note: they didn't just come here to kill. How's the Wardstone looking?

About the same as it did this morning. It's gotten a little worse in the past few hours, but not so much so that it would be obvious she wasn't imagining it if it wasn't for her enhanced memory. Now that she's not in the middle of a fight, she can see that in addition to the angry looking red splotch there are little veins of red stretching out further into the gold and blue structure.

Wow, that's pretty fucked up looking! She invites Hulrun to come take a look at it.

"There's nothing here. Not that defeating a Lilitu and her minions wasn't well worth the time spent, but I'm not seeing any of this damage you're talking about."

He places his hand on the stone to be sure, but when that fails to reveal any illusion he seems convinced.

Terendelev, however is frowning unhappily.

"No, there's definitely an illusion, just an exceptionally powerful one. I'm not surprised you didn't see through it, but it doesn't look good. Let me see if I can dispel it."

Terendelev chants a short phrase aloud to no affect, but the second go through catches. If Brenda is using detect magic up, she can see the structure of the illusion come apart like peeling off a covering of saran wrap.

"Inheritor preserve us."

Hulrun's face whitens like he just went another round with the Nabasu.

"Can you remove the taint?"

"My healing is meant for living beings, and my dispels didn't even shake it. Perhaps a cleric can get somewhere with dispel evil, but I'm not optimistic."

"Then it sounds like our options, if a dispel evil doesn't work, are to do nothing and let the Wardstone be destroyed, or to try my long-shot option that might still destroy it but might fix it."

And the fact that Areelu Vorlesh could have assured its destruction by simply stealing the sword is a reason to believe that the crystal knife does something other than that.

“That’s correct. I already asked Lastwall if they would be able to afford a miracle to fix a wardstone, but we are not so fortunate. If you didn’t have an option, I would try asking Cheliax and Morgethai and Clepati, but this would be even more of a long shot, especially since I think Clepati preemptively turned me down. I’ll go speak to Jhoran about the dispel evil.”