Terendelev, the guardian of the city, assumes her full draconic form. Her head is level with the dome, though not the spires, of the grand cathedral. She burns with holy might.

She launches himself at him with the fury of

a dog, yapping at an armed knight.

His weapon, a morningstar with a head like the sun in miniature, slams into her and sends her body straight through that very cathedral.

She regains her feet and blasts him with frost, the kind of cold that cannot exist outside the void of night, or the lungs of a silver wyrm.

If his burning dims, surely it is the imagination of the viewer, because it doesn't last.

He strikes again. Down. Her head bounces on the foundation-stones of her city.

She latches her teeth on his ankle and clamps her jaws shut with the last of her strength. If she can do nothing else, perhaps she can cripple him.

Her teeth meet against his bone.

He laughs, and it's not hard to see why: the ichor that flows from the wound floods down the cathedral steps into the square, burning like Hell's own fire, fiends rising from it like flowers after spring rain.

The first thing that fire destroys is Terendelev. It sticks where it touches, and burns slowly. How could such a terrible flame cook with such patience? How can stone bubble and liquefy, and dragonhide still have time to crackle like roasting pig?

Really, the most amazing thing is that she can concentrate on the spell.

The portal forms beneath her soon-to-be corpse. She falls through, along with a tide of burning blood, and then it snaps shut.

"Coward."

Eamon can't run anymore.

It isn't the stitch in his side, though that doesn't help. It's not the fact that the flowing fire will reach him soon and running isn't even meaningful, anymore - though, again. That doesn't help.

It's that he's angry.

He's so angry that it hurts. It hurts more than his chest, which still hurts enormously. He's furious. It's too much for his body to hold. He wonders, in some corner of his mind shadowed from that anger, if this is what it felt like for Pietro, when he stood up to those men, when Iomedae chose him for a paladin. It probably wasn't. That was righteous anger, holy anger, the anger that wants to protect.

This anger hates. This anger wants to destroy. This anger wants to make this golden god pay, make him hurt, make him suffer. Kill him. Gnaw his bones. DESTROY THIS ARROGANT PITSPAWNED WRETCH, PUT HIS HEAD ON YOUR WALL! DOES HIS BLOOD BURN? LET IT BURN IN RIVERS!

He dropped the bow, a few streets back. That doesn't matter anymore.

He rips the arrow through his shirt and throws it.

The missile flies through the air. Surely it's the size of a matchstick, next to Nurgal's titanic frame? Surely it can't have enough force to carry all the way to him? But, maybe it's a trick of perspective... it doesn't look like it. Instead of shrinking into the distance, it grows. It accretes weight, meaning, truth. It becomes too real to ignore. And it screams.

It screams fury, it screams hatred, it screams anguish. It screams in tune with Eamon's heart. It glows, like a candle through black blood, and it grows, like an infection in a wound in the air, and it screams, and it lodges in the fiend's eye with force enough to snap his head back.

He roars.

Towers crumble; the streets split. Molten blood fountains from the ruined socket, along with a single drop of black ichor that freezes on the way down and lands on its own obsidian pedestal amidst the rushing flames and shrieking fiends.

And then the clouds of smoke part, and the moon blocks the sun, and a beam of moonlight strikes like a bolt of lightning -

in an empty field. He's gone.

The ichor cools in his absence. Now it's only fire, raging through half the city. The streets are still crazed with rifts, strewn with rubble and demons. Something is flickering like a strobe, out of the ruins of the Wardstone tower.

But he is gone.

And a boy is falling into the darkness.

He clutches his sister's hand like it's the only thing that exists.

Pietro wasn't having a good day to begin with.

It sounds petty, when you put it like that. My toast burnt, and my little brother was being a brat while I was trying to get my armor on, and, oh, trouble really does come in threes, a demon lord has invaded the city I'm sworn to protect.

That doesn't make it not true, but it makes an embarrassing last thought when one's falling through a hole in the earth. Instead of thinking tragically about his family, or nobly about his sacrifice, or, Hells, wondering what managed to hit the great bastard that hard - he's thinking gods, what a fucking day.

...he's been falling longer than seems reasonable, actually. And... he doesn't hit the ground, just lands softly on both feet.

"What now?" he asks stupidly.

"You're welcome, prick," says his sister, who conjures up a ball of light above her own head.

"Su! Hells, I'm glad to see you - welcome for - did you slow my fall?"

He grapples her in a crushing hug.

"It wasn't the five stone of scrap metal you're wearing," she wheezes dramatically. "Get off me, you beast. Anyway, I saw you falling in and I... well, I wasn't just going to let you."

He unhugs. "Well, thanks. My day's looking up... which might not say much, but trust me, I appreciate it. You didn't see the littles, did you?"

She shakes her head. "...it's a big city," she says, instead of if we find them at all it'll be a miracle, let alone alive.

Pietro hears it anyway, of course.

"I know," he agrees. "Just... we'll keep looking."

She shakes her head again, slower.

"Pietro, the city's on fire and full of demons. I can hang four spells, and you haven't worked out your angelic bond. We've got no supplies except your lunch, I'm in dancing slippers, and as near as I can tell, we've fallen halfway to the Underdark. We won't keep looking. We're going to try as hard as we can to stay alive."

"Let's see if we can wrap your feet. The slippers aren't going to do you any good."

"That isn't the part of what I said that matters and you know it."

"...it's the part I can help."

He takes a spare tunic out of his pack and starts cutting it to pieces.

Susanna lets out a breath and scrubs her face with the heels of her palms for a few seconds.

Then she crouches to help too. Many hands make light work, and even two more can do something.

When Eamon wakes up for the third time that day, he feels worse than either of the two previous. It's, frankly, very impressive. His lungs burn; he coughs, and then regrets it for how it sets the hole in his chest to screaming at him again.

"Lu?" he rasps.