(Demon is a strong word.)

She catches him in her arms, showing no sign of effort. She does not subsequently put him down; she looks him over, in a way that does not make him more comfortable with his circumstances at all.

"You know," she says, smoothing his hair, "you're not really old enough to go out into the field, yet."

Words aren't really working right now. But he's - he's fourteen, he's not a child. He can use a dagger and everything. Not that it'll help, since his beltknife is iron and not even cold iron. He can make the words come out.

"P. Uh. Please don't eat me."

Those aren't technically the words he was going for but he's calling it a win.

"That is not at all what I intend to do to you," she says.

She floats up above the wall and alights on a parapet.

"...you're... putting me back?"

This is really suspiciously nice. He tries wriggling out of her grip.

"No," she says. (Struggling doesn't work; her arms are like steel.) She casts about for Lucia - ah, there she is. She's very nearly reached the guardhouse; she's fast, for those little legs. But now she's asleep, and now she doesn't remember anything since her passing impulse to go to the walls with Eamon. It's not that this won't raise concerns; it's that it'll raise concerns about her, and those concerns won't be about her big brother. Until later.

And then she takes out a long golden rod, and a hole opens in the world, and she brings the boy through to Laboratory Seven. Time there won't pass for a while. Long enough to do her work.

Eamon looks around. It's clean, well organized, spartan; there are various arcane implements and instruments of torture, arrayed precisely on the black stone walls.

"...are you going to kill me?" he asks.

"No," she says again.

He reaches for his knife and tries as fast as he can to slam it through his own -

No he doesn't. Instead, he climbs up onto a long obsidian slab and removes his shirt, folding it and putting it on a side table.

But it's cute that he tried.

Well, cute is better than nothing.

"I won't hurt my family," he says while his body strips itself. "No matter what you do to me."

"Is that really the worst thing you can imagine I'd want you here for?" she asks, fascinated. "You're not worried I'll make you eat your own flesh, or turn you into a catatonic slave to serve my pleasure, or offer your beating virgin heart to my dark master?"

"I don't care about any of that."

"If I were trying to teach you anything," Areelu says, shaking her head, "lesson number one would be that you never let them know what you care about."

She selects a knife. "You're going to be conscious for this entire procedure. I'd apologize, but it would be completely disingenuous. And, apparently, you don't care about any of that."

Eamon is pretty sure he was right, before; hurting his family would be worse than this. But... he might have suffered a failure of imagination, about how much worse things can be than each other.

Eamon wakes up to the sound of strange voices. There's a halfling guard nudging him with a steel-toed boot. His chest hurts like every layer of Hell at once.

"Where am I?" he croaks.

The halfling points at a sign. ...he's in the northwest of the city, near the gates, which isn't that confusing except that he doesn't remember how he got here, and his chest hurts like there's an entire civilization of dwarves excavating his ribcage.

Lucia's lying next to him. He nudges her awake. "Lu, d'you remember where we are? Or why we're here?" Or why his fucking chest fucking hurts so fucking badly?

She rolls adroitly to her feet. "...we were going to the wall?" she says hesitantly. "To... see how hard it really was, to climb... I don't remember leaving the house, though."

"Sir," he says to the guard, "I think we need to speak with someone. We might be under demonic influence, and if not, we've probably been concussed."

The guard pats him on the shoulder.

He's... really remarkably ugly, at a closer look. His hair looks like a wig, and his teeth are... sharp...

He hands Eamon an arrow and unslings a shortbow from his back. "Know how to use a bow, kid?" he rasps.

"Yeah. We had... tutors. An elf."

If the guard's a goblin, that's really not his business.

"Tutors," the ?goblin? cackles, handing the bow over. "Well. We'll see how well they taught you. ...don't waste that arrow, though. It's good stuff."

Lucia hisses in a breath as she looks at the definitely not a halfling. "Eamon, that's not a guard." She turns to face her brother. "We have to-"

Then, as their eyes meet, she stops talking, a trickle of blood coming out of her nose. Her eyes are vacant.

"Didn't your mummy teach you not to look at bright lights?" the dretch chides.

Then he's gone.

...and his nose is full of choking smoke. And - people are screaming, and the bells are all ringing and it hurts -

He grabs Lucia's hand and drags her down the streets towards city center, towards home; she can't talk but she can stumble along. The arrow gets shoved through his shirtfront like a pin, the bow he holds in his trembling hand.

"Iomedae, you who Inherited what you did not earn."

The voice blasts through the city. It is loud like the sun is bright: too much, too much.

"Iomedae, you who call yourself the heir to a dead god who was an ant when I was the only light in the sky!"

The rift opens, and that's just bright, bright like the sun is bright, loud like his voice is loud, everything is too much.

"WITNESS ME! TOO LONG, THIS WAR HAS BEEN STALE: WATCH NOW, AS YOUR STRONGHOLDS TURN TO ASH!"

Something steps through. It stands like a man, but no man is so vast, no man is so terrible. He stands above the towers, bronze and gold and burning. The air would ignite before touching him.

Eamon is running, thank you very much. He keeps his head down and tries not to whimper when the demon-god speaks.