"Ding, ding, ding." Minagho straightens back up, and turns her head to grin straight at him, laying her hand demonstratively on the Wardstone's glowing surface. "It's broken. If you could fix it, you wouldn't want it at the cost. Defending it from you would be a waste of my valuable time... and if I want to waste my time, I have better ways to do it."

She licks her lips. "As to that prize - care for a Wish? I get one a week, usable only at a mortal's behest, and I never get to spend them on anything interesting. I don't know what you'd want, but I know it'd be interesting."

So, on one hand: it's a trap.

On the other hand: it's a Wish.

".... All right, I'll bite. I wish to use it to dissolve the contracts of people who have sold their souls to devils, regret this decision, and who would go into an afterlife they consider better without a dumb piece of metaphysical paper saying they belong to someone else. Nice and easy for a demon to get behind, yeah?"

She gasps with delight. "Oh, I love it! Now, I'm not going to be able to cover all of the contracts, or even that many objectively speaking, because trying to fit that into a Wish would result in the destruction of a significant portion of this planet, and I'm keeping some things there. But I can set up... hmmm... a loop, we might call it? That will go through contract history, inconspicuously gathering data on the circumstances thereof, and then, after it's gone through a few hundred million and sorted them by worthiness according to your lights, start dissolving as many of them as it can, starting at the top. Do you like it? Please say you like it!"

All right. Sometimes when you disarm a trap, it's not neatly. It's by carefully and systematically setting it off. It's often about weighing the risks, and...

... Well. It'd help a lot of people.

"I do, yes. Thank you for not blowing up the planet, I appreciate that. Pleasure doing business with you, hope I never do again."

This is going to suck, isn't it.

She lowers her head and starts chanting.

It's... not like any other spell that he's seen. The chant isn't even words. It's just... tones. She's not singing, she's just emitting tones, one after another, so fast the individual sounds aren't audible, just the cascading noise of it going up and down and across itself, jangling like a sore tooth in his ears. Her lips are open, not moving; he can see her tongue, and that's still too. She's just making that noise.

It takes her almost a full minute. Over the course of that minute, things start happening. First her skin goes dry, then patches of it crack and flake like old paint. One of her horns starts smoking. Her nose bleeds, her ears, her gums, her fingernails. The place where her eyes should be bulges with something that isn't flesh. The horn that isn't smoking suddenly explodes, shards of keratin flying everywhere. Her tail lashes along her own legs, leaving them criss-crossed with lines of blood. Still, the chant goes on -

and then she stops. She collapses to the ground, laughing giddily. The wounds remain, but they stop worsening.

It's done.

Yeah, he can fucking tell.

It's - it's like his cleverly worded wish is being twisted against him. It's like he willingly opened the door to something awful, and now it can put its feet up on the table and make itself at home. It's like raw malevolent chaos itself is reaching into his mind for his sincerely offered desire, and using it as leverage to make him just like it. It doesn't matter if it succeeds or not, not really. It will suck if it fails and it'll suck if it works, and he was stupid either way. This risk, this sacrifice, to maybe save people he doesn't know, will probably never meet, and who almost certainly do not deserve it, was not worth it. None of it is worth it. Nothing will ever be good, ever again, so he might as well just burn it all down to watch the way the ashes fall. Better yet, tear it down to fall in ways that'll amuse him. C'mon, he enjoyed the game of hide and seek with the Archon, wouldn't he like to do something like that whenever he wants? He could just find people and play with them.

He flinches like a man burned and belatedly remembers that, oh right, he is kind of weaker than normal to mind-affecting things, isn't he. This was, in retrospect, the obvious way this trap would go off.

It almost, almost looks like it works, almost clicks perfectly into place, that right now he is weak enough and badly geared enough and arrogant enough to get him into this situation and...

just...

fall.

And tear it all down because he's powerful and he can.

But that 'almost' is pretty important, and Veron took the Slippery Mind feat. This new way his mind is meant to function does not... make sense, and so...

He gets to try again.

"Nggh," he says, eloquently, as he flinches again and refuses.

"You know," he says, rubbing the bridge of his nose and nursing a brand new massive headache, "I think I would have preferred if you'd just tried to kill me, to be perfectly honest."

Minagho's still cackling, give her a minute.

"This is going to be so fun!!!!!!!!!"

Then she's gone. Only the blood, and the ruins of her horn, remain.

No, wait, that's a very thick book with a gold-embossed title plate of PEOPLE MINAGHO HATES VOL. 1: NOT DEAD YET thumping to the floor.

Yeah. Yeah, that's. About what he expected, really.

Ow.

... Worth it?

...... yeah. Kinda. Because it worked. But that's the only reason why, because otherwise, it was phenomenally, cosmically stupid. It might possibly be the dumbest thing he's ever done, and this is from a man that has been adventuring for a decade and done very many stupid things.

He needs to not do anything like that ever again, even if it's very very tempting, and he's very very clever and very very powerful. Deekin is going to tear him a new asshole. And Ksxksskrth! He's going to be strangled in his sleep by the people that love him the most, and he will deserve it.

But it is very nice that he saved so many people. Maybe. Probably. Just the chance. It's very possible they might still go to an evil afterlife, and then, well. He didn't really help them at all, did he. Ugh.

He picks up the book, and he checks that the garrison is in fact free of demons now. And then he can go get the wizard and see if she can come look at what's wrong with the Wardstone, because he does not want to try and do it on his own right now. That is what stupid people do. Stupid people who very nearly almost become superpowerful demon-alikes, what the fuck, Veron!!!

The wizard has made herself very red, very tall, and very emaciated, put on a concealing black cloak, and is currently hanging out inside an illusory pile of masonry.

"Hello!" she says. "I just witnessed the most powerful magical aura I have ever seen. Was that you?"

"I probably at least helped. Wardstone's free to look at, if you still want to."

Meanwhile, he would like to crawl in a hole with the biggest keg of cheap booze the world has ever seen, drink until his stupid, empty head can't even pretend to think straight, and then sleep it off until the world goes and fixes itself while he's not looking. That's reasonable, right? Totally doable? No? Damnation.

"I do!"

She hups to her feet and enters the Garrison. She does not dismiss Disguise Self, though she does stop concentrating on Silent Image.

Ehhnn, whatever, she's a grown woman and can...

Ngh. Fine. He's a 'good person' who 'cares about others' or whatever, and if this is a flinch response to almost getting twisted into evil, good.

"It'll be a good idea to dismiss the disguise, too, so no one gets confused. I expect the crusadery types to show up, uh, eventually."

"Ah! Thank you. I forget, sometimes, that other people cannot see the truth of illusions."

She melts back into her natural human form.

"You're welcome."

Okay, time to be silent with his own self hatred, please and thank you. The wizard is now fine, she will happily wizard at the thing and tell him how he's fucked and the eyeless demon lady was totally right all along.

Stairs, stairs, stairs. The wizard has almost entirely recovered from her track and field adventure earlier, and thus does not need Veron to physically carry her at any point. Though she does wobble sort of alarmingly a few times.

Then: the Wardstone chamber. She looks around, fascinated.

"This room contains many magical auras. It actually makes it slightly difficult to see!"

He'll make a note to do his next incredibly dumb evil ritual that risks his soul somewhere away from the gigantic fucking Wardstone, how about?

Eugh. He really wants to be able to not think thoughts. It sucks so much.

"Well. Sorry about that. I don't think I can move the Wardstone out of here to somewhere cleaner. Can you work through it?"

"Oh, yes. I can still focus on individual auras! It's mostly just the walls and floor that I have trouble with. Please prevent me from falling over."

She walks over to the Wardstone without major incident, sits cross-legged, and engages in a staring contest with it.

This makes preventing her from falling over pretty straightforward.

He waits. And kind of hates himself. And his choices. And wonders when Deekin will inevitably show up. (Damn it, he's going to know immediately, isn't he, now Veron wants to go somewhere he can never ever be found, forevermore.)

Nenio looks up. "This Wardstone is broken," she says.

This almost causes him to laugh out loud, at the absurdity of the statement. Yes. Yes, he knows.

"..... Yes," he agrees, blandly. "Do... you know how?"

"Its function is the product of a collaborative effort between a number of similar but distinct magical fields within the artifact itself. If they were perfectly aligned, the Wardstone would work perfectly, radiating a field which demons cannot penetrate and linking to the network of other Wardstones to project one large field of only slightly reduced power. The fields have come out of alignment, with almost none of them aligned perfectly, and nearly 30% of them in active conflict with the rest. The misalignment is itself corrosive to the function and alignment of the remaining fields, and if a sufficient number of them 'flipped', as it were, then the Wardstone might, depending on various thaumaturgical factors, begin attracting demons, strengthening demons, repelling Good- or Lawful-aligned actors, weakening or harming those actors, creating a violent primal magic field, or exploding with sufficient force to create a new Lake Encarthan. Would you like me to continue looking?"

Oh, gods, now he has to try to understand the wizard.

He takes a minute to try and wrap his head around the words being used.

".... that's an odd way for it to fail," he observes instead of engaging with most of that, frowning. "The - coming into active conflict with itself, instead of just. Running out of power or something."