It was Lucia's fault. No one was going to say it was Lucia's fault, but it was.
She dared him. Mother would say he was too old to fall for dares, even though she knew just how to say them so he'd agree. There were those great big walls around the city, and really, who puts walls there if you're not supposed to climb them? And Lucia said she'd got that soft fall spell working. Which she had; when he fell off the wall, it didn't hurt.
It just dropped him right on top of a demon.
(Demon is a strong word. And yet, insufficient.)
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.
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?"
"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? chuckles, 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.
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.
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 and cackling fiends 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 riotous 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 only hang four proper 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 Darklands. 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.
Lucia's standing over him. She's holding his belt knife.
"Who's asking?"
"Are you my brother? That is, are you being controlled, or are you some demon taking his form, or are you some other demon wearing his body like a coat?
"Whatever kind of demon I am, I'm the kind that gets headaches," he mutters.
Her grip on the knife tightens. "I'm not kidding. I didn't trust that guardsman who gave you that arrow, so I used my fiend-sight spell, and he was a fiend, and you were a fiend too. A worse one."
Eamon shuts his eyes for a second.
"Lu, you're being really brave. And I think that's great. But I want you to think about something for a minute. What kind of demon was the guard?"
"...a dretch, I think. They mess with infantry by setting clouds of gas on them, and their claws-"
"Great. Could you beat a dretch in a fight? Give you the knife, so it's fair."
"No. I mean - no. I don't even have fighting cantrips like Susanna, and the knife wouldn't go through..."
"Great. Now, Lu, I want you to think really hard about this part. If I'm some kind of really powerful demon, what in the holy living fuck makes you think you could do anything about it?"
"Also," he says, smirking a little, "I don't think demons respond to death threats by nitpicking them."
He hugs back. Even though she's putting pressure on his wound - that just matters less than how much he needs this, right now.
"I'm going to get blood all over you," he notes eventually.
"Talk about your lost causes," she snorts, but she lets go; it sounds more like let go of me than any actual concern about her dress.
She brushes her fingers over his forehead and concentrates, and the wound pales back into the aching scar that it was before they fell.
"Thanks," he says, testing his range of motion. "The Sarkorians might've been wrong about you magic types after all."
"You know, I don't actually have to heal you. It's something I'm doing because I'm a nice person."
"Don't I ever."
She sits beside him. "...you don't know what happened, then. With the fiend-sight."
"...no. We're both missing time. I've got this chest wound, and I don't know where from. Anything that could've happened in a few hours might have. I might be some impostor demon, but if I am, I've got no way of telling and you've got no way to tell if that's even true."
"Lu, do you think the Prelate burned all those people because he was just that much of an idiot?"
"You're playing Hulrun's Advocate? ...in favor of setting you on fire?"
"No! But - a demon could make me say this. A demon could say this himself. Demons are good at what they do. Prelate Hulrun burned all those people because even though he had fiendsight and teams of interrogators and all Mendev behind him, he couldn't tell if somebody might be controlled by demons. And he decided that it was better to kill a hundred innocents than let a thousand demon slaves run around. And, you know. He was wrong. But. You don't know that I'm not enchanted, or even that I'm not a demon. I don't know that you're not a demon or enchanted by one, for that matter, but I've got less evidence than you have. I said you shouldn't kill me because it would be stupid, and because if I was a demon, you couldn't anyway, and - there's a lot of reasons not to kill me. But you shouldn't think I'm safe. I can't even think I'm safe."
"If you can't, I think someone has to. And I don't see anyone else to do it."
He tries to say something clever about that, but he starts crying, instead.
"You idiot," he sobs.
She rubs his back. "You too," she replies, more like a promise than anything.
It's decided that Susanna, being poorly shod, will set up their encampment, while Pietro goes foraging and looking for other survivors. (They can't be the only people in the city who had the feather-fall spell.) So she sets to cleaning their little cave. Not sweeping up all of the dirt like an idiot, but - making sure the stones are dry. Peeling moss from the walls and withering it for tinder or other uses. Divining whether the mushrooms she finds are toxic, and when enough of them turn out not to be, seeing if she can figure out how to prepare them. (Not poison doesn't mean tastes good - or, for that matter, won't give you a night of misery if you prepare them wrong. But if she checks them again when they're done, it'll mean something closer to the latter.)
Pietro stumbles back. He's bleeding in a couple of places.
He is also dragging a lizard the size of a small pony, which has seen some equally rough treatment. (Probably worse.)
"Pietro -"
What's she going to say, here. You're hurt is a completely vacuous statement; he knows. Are you alright? He'll tell her if he isn't, physically; emotionally, of course he isn't. I hate this, I love you, I want to kill every demon in the world for doing this to us?
...it'd get old.
"Well. This sure is meat," he says, kicking the dead lizard. "...no survivors I could find. Some corpses."
"Did you... find anything of note."
Did you loot them. Is what she might say, if she weren't a coward.
He turns, revealing himself to be burdened with more bags than he set out with.
"I didn't take anything that was. On. Anyone. But bags don't really... count."
There's blood on most of the bags. One, a sort of backpack, looks positively gruesome at the straps, which have been sawn apart. Susanna wonders how on someone it might have been.
"It doesn't seem like they would count," she says, helping him unload and not thinking about whether she believes it. "By any reasonable definition."
When the bags are off of him, Pietro nods curtly at her, walks about ten feet back out into the passageway he took, and vomits.
Then he wobbles back into their cave-camp and sits down.
Well. Cleaning magic exists for a reason.
She takes care of the main event, then starts on her brother.
"I hate this," she says. "And I love you."
"Love you too," he says, automatically.
Then he shakes his head. "I love you too," he says again, more firmly. "We'll get through."
"We will," she says.
She doesn't think about whether she believes it.
Eamon cries himself out in pretty short order. There are higher priorities, right now.
"We need to look for other survivors."
"No," Eamon lies, climbing to his feet and trying not to hiss in agony.
"Ass," Lucia diagnoses. "Don't lie to healers about whether you're hurt, it doesn't help."
...yeah he can't actually dispute that.
"Sorry. My chest still hurts. It hasn't stopped hurting since I woke up - before the fire, I mean. I don't think you can heal it or it'd feel better already."
"Ass," Lucia repeats, laughing a little. "Come on. Searching."
She makes the light she conjured bob along at shoulder-height (for them, not for an adult.)
Searching.
A lot of people are dead. That happens, when chasms open up throughout an entire city. Twisted, broken bodies, many of them charred, are scattered through the tunnels. The one good thing is that they haven't had time to putrefy.
Lucia's a good sight less squeamish than Eamon. It's unclear how, or why, or when her stomach got so strong. But she takes a quarterstaff from the partially eaten corpse of an elf, and vigorously prods any body that seems ambiguous.
"Gods," Eamon says miserably, after a few corpses. "Lu, is this really the best way?"
"Ma'am???"
That wasn't really one of the more plausible bodies. Her lower half is under a massive amount of stone.
Her eyes flicker open and behold... her rescuers(?)...
"How long since the demon?" she rasps.
"Not more than a few hours," Eamon says, also looking fairly bewildered that this woman is alive.
"How would you know, you were unconscious. But, um. Yes. I can heal you, I think? ...partly?"
"That's not actually going to help that much, with..."
Gesture towards rocks.
Saying I'm thirteen, actually will not help the situation in any way.
