"Wait, Aranka?"

Daeran starts laughing. 

"...Yes. She's a song-sorceress who--"

"Who picked the option you didn't! In terms of hiding out at Daeran's place. It got attacked by demons, she did really well." 

"I'm sorry to hear that," Ramien says to Daeran specifically. 

Shrug. "It would have been quite the tale to have outlasted the demon invasion without pausing in revelry, but I suppose it was not to be."

"Okay. We'll talk to her, see if she knows anything about the others. Good luck not getting horribly murdered." 

Soft laugh. "And the same to you." 

They leave, then; Daeran's place is in the same general direction as the Tower of Estrod, where they're heading, so that's no inconvenience. 

Slightly more of an inconvenience to run into another band of cultists without the sense to run away, though. 

Finally!!! VIOLENCE. 

How sad. At least, for some of these people, they can go quietly in their sleep, instead of struggling on behalf of powers that never cared for them. 

Camellia would have expected the little beggar's attitude to impact the quality of the fight, but really, all it seems to be doing, at least so far, is to increase the number of helpless enemies to finish off. Oh, don't get her wrong, there's very much something to be desired about thrusting your blade into a victim's struggling flesh, but there's also something lovely to being able to take the time to leisurely cut someone's throat, to really appreciate every drip and glimmering crimson splash of the arterial spray. 

Oho. Well isn't that interesting. 

(The witch-girl, not the bloodthirsty shaman. Bloodthirsty maniacs are a copper piece a dozen.)

Oh, good, these guys have weapons and armor to bring back to the Defender's Heart. Makes their staying to die instead of running off marginally less of a tragedy.

There are kind of a lot of demons-and-cultists, actually, on the way to...the place where the demons have set up enough of a headquarters to be worth spying on...which makes a lot of sense. 

It's still a lot of fighting, though, even managing to sneak past a reasonable fraction of them. 

"You're a cleric, right?" she asks Dànpiàn. The elderly Ysoki had described herself as an "emissary" of her god, and had cast some Cure Light over the course of people getting clawed by demons. 

"Indeed." 

"So do you channel positive, or...?"

"In fact, unlike most clerics, I do not channel at all." Which is no big loss since Lǎo Shǔ Pó does technically count as evil and negative channels are pretty useless if you aren't really into necromancy.

"Oh, huh." That's weird but, like, she still doesn't know what's up with Daeran and his ability to channel, so, like, whatever.

"Still, it's a shame, though." 

It would in fact be a shame if the alternative were channeling positive, a counterfactual that she is not going to disabuse him of. 

"I get a few tricks of my own, to compensate. Not all of the demons that fell asleep were little Ember's work." She recognizes that Ember is older than her, but: Elves, man. 

"--What, really?"

Nod nod. Actually it had not occurred to Ember that this wasn't obvious!

UGH. Maybe if Camellia learns to put people to sleep they won't have to keep the BEGGAR and the LITERAL RAT around. She has less faith that this will work than she feels like she ought to be able to have, but she doesn't have any better ideas right now. 

Eventually, they FINALLY get to the Tower of Estrod. 

The building is pretty badly damaged, by some combination of Deskari's own personal destruction and having had demons crawling over it for a while, but what remains seems to be structurally sound, at least for now. 

There are cultists and demons wandering around and in and out of it periodically, but it doesn't seem to be formally guarded--possibly there would be no point, with demonic infighting--so it isn't that hard to find a moment when nobody is looking to slip right in.