{Alith, ware behind!}

Ir'alith turned as her feet hit the ground, feeling dazed and somehow heavy.

"Die, devilspawn!" A white-glowing broadsword wielded by a bellowing human was about to strike at her unprotected middle.

Instead, the sword clanged and rebounded severely, throwing the lightly-armored fighter some distance back towards the entrance, a round, opening that led through a twisting, winding path to the village outside the Great Tree where the Throne of Darkness had existed since a time before those hateful goddesses had arrived.

"My thanks, stranger," said a familiar voice from behind her, in the direction of the throne.

She turned back in confusion, her disorientation total after the sudden shift in location and events.

Jungrathol, her trusted general, was cautiously raising himself off the ground in front of the black throne. His armor was in tatters with large swathes cut out of it. Blood dripped from a number of small, circular holes which did not close and heal as they should have. His left horn—one of the pair that he had prided himself on, each polished daily until they gleamed under the suns—was fractured, a metal slug embedded near its base. His frail wife, Dor'ennan, peeked out from behind the throne, her wispy, incorporeal state belying her fear.

Ir'alith looked down with the intent of figuring out why she suddenly felt encumbered, but she found her vision oddly obscured and restricted. The polished, bloody, wood floor of the Great Tree came into partial view, but the rest of her sight was—

{Daughter, that armor!} Her father's voice sounded excited. {It must be a parting gift!}

"You dare turn your back to me, devilspawn?"

Something clanged off her now-broad shoulders while she wasn't paying attention, and she felt only the slightest of impacts. She turned back towards the attackers as her mind attempted to catch up from where it had been left behind.

She glowed. The finned armor she wore gave off a greenish light that matched—

Her eyes widened.

{The primordial sea god's armor!} Her father cackled with glee. {This Carl fellow must be more serious about you than he let on, Alith! I had thought your words not direct enough, but he must simply have been moved to court you even more elaborately!}

A bullet—fired from humanity's newest and most deadly weapon from the past decade, a gun, the sudden appearance of which had marked a significant upgrade to the failure-prone muskets and boomsticks—dinked harmlessly off her helmet next to her eye slit, and Ir'alith felt a sense of clarity return at last.

Fighting.

Battles.

War.

Revenge.

These were things that she understood without effort or consideration.

She once more shut away the parts of her that were unnecessary for protecting.

"Jungrathol," she called as she turned to face her foes, "apprise me of our status."

The one with the glowing sword charged at her once more.

"That hair!" exclaimed a second human with a gun near the entrance. He instantly turned to run, most likely to report her return. "She's—"

Ir'alith's axe, thrown from across the room, obliterated his skull and upper torso as it passed through before warping back to her side. Blood and brain matter exploded outwards along with chunks of bone and flesh, but an orb of purple light consumed the body before it toppled, sparing her kin the indignity of having to clean the remains of a human out of the ceremonial chambers.

"Protector!" Jungrathol shouted, his voice filled with awe. "Is it truly you?"

The woman with the glowing sword faltered, her helmet blown away from the latest rebound of her blade off of the invulnerable armor. She was still a pace away when the axe returned. Her lips moved, and she suddenly accelerated, blurring almost too fast to see.

{She flees to warn her—}

I know, Papa. The protector reached within, grasping the conduit of energy that flowed through her, and directed its course through the kingdom's defense glyphs that her soul had been tied to at birth—the responsibility thrust upon her family's line.

The glyphs which had been her mother's responsibility before her, which only the kin of a dragon—those possessing the third heart—could possibly have the raw strength to activate.

She felt the shield begin to draw power from her, siphoning a massive portion of magical energy to cover the entire land.

None would escape.

She would savor this.

"Protector," Jungrathol called again, seeming to have shaken off his stupor at last, "the humans attacked not a day after you departed with the rescue force! They said…" he trailed off, and she turned her head over her shoulder to regard him. "They said you had been captured," he said, his expression conveying that he understood some small fragment of what that meant. "That you—"

"Remind me not of that time," Ir'alith snarled, her grip tightening on her axe. A single day? I was surely held for longer. Weeks. Seasons. Decades. "Our kin—they endure?" She waved for him to follow with her tail as she strode towards the entrance at a brisk pace.

"Barely," Jungrathol said, hurrying to catch up and walking a step behind her, as befitted his rank. The heavier footfalls of his larger frame thudded loudly, and one hand from his upper pair felt at his damaged horn while his lower ones tried to adjust his ruined armor into some semblance of decency.

She glanced over to him. "Your wounds… They do not heal?"

"No, Protector," he rumbled as they passed a pair of winged corpses, the venerable retainers Ragmonog and Ugdrinnon who had volunteered to care for the ceremonial chambers—where the protector resided—this season. "They have enchanted their guns—crafted their bullets with magesteel. The stronger, such as I, are merely unable to heal as rapidly." They passed more corpses, none of them human. "The weaker… Thoth'tothoch melted before my very eyes. Some powerful new form of corrosion."

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Ir'alith scowled. The tactics and weapons of the humans seemed to evolve to terrifying new levels by the day.

"No!" the piercing shriek of a girl emanated from the left.

The protector's head swiveled.

Mag'thes, the youngest daughter of the slain retainers they'd passed moments prior, was being dragged from her family's residence chambers and into the narrow side passage which connected to the main hall by a pair of armored knights. Her beautiful, black-feathered wings beat frantically as she struggled to free herself.

"Silence, devilspawn!" shouted one of the two humans restraining her. "Thought yourself safe under a bed, did you?" A crack rang out, and she went silent, hanging limp between them.

"Whoa, Wymund!" said the other, his tone one of chastisement. "Fuck, not her face! The fallen angel ones sell for far more, but only when unmarked and unbroken."

"Apologies, Lord Geraint," said the first knight, his voice contrite.

"Wait 'till we reach the portal. You've fought well today, young Wymund. I'll see that you receive a concubine of your own, just as Normannus—"

Ir'alith, having approached silently along the wood floor after shifting her feet to the padded paws of a great hunting cat, reached out with her right hand, grasping the so-called "lord" around his skull and lifting him easily off his feet. "Human," she snarled, feeling her eyes change to the blood-red color of hatred.

"What the—"

The one called Wymund whirled around, dropping the defenseless girl he'd been abducting. "Purple hair?" His expression changed to fear.

Ir'alith sensed the man's fear.

She reveled in it.

"Flee!" shouted the lord, voicing the only sensible advice rather than waste effort in a futile struggle against the inevitable. "You must warn—" his words cut off in a pained groan, followed by a scream as the razor-sharp edge of a heart-shaped tail end cleanly severed first one arm, then the other from his torso. They fell to the floor, each with its own soft thump.

The protector tossed the crippled man to the side, her tail lashing once more to separate the lower half of his left leg to prevent his escape. She murmured a lesser incantation, healing the man's wounds enough to prevent his premature death from blood loss. A spell of sleeping came next, preserving the intruder for her later attention.

A slow death would not do.

Not for a human.

A man.

The detached lower leg, blood spurting out of it, flew at the angle she directed, tangling in the legs of the other, shorter human who was already attempting to flee—surely a credit to his training that he remained unaffected by the dismemberment of his superior—and sending him sprawling. He scrambled, trying to regain his feet, but her tail wrapped tightly around his neck.

"Jungrathol, remain here," she ordered, gesturing to the prone girl. "See to Mag'thes. Care for her in her time of grief when she wakes." She pointed at the incapacitated "lord". "If she wishes, let her vent anger on that thing when it regains consciousness. If not, you may do as you please with it."

"Ir—Protector!" the massive, four-armed, red-skinned demon general protested. "You cannot mean to go alone! Their new weapons—"

"Your concern is misplaced," Ir'alith called over her shoulder, already striding away. She lengthened and thinned the claws on her free hand—her other casually resting her axe over her shoulder—then carefully stuck them into the whimpering, dripping human's left eye socket and began to slowly—ever so slowly—pry his eyeball free. He began to scream with what little air she permitted him to draw in with her tail. "Do you not recognize this armor, Jungrathol?" she continued. "A gift from the dragons!"

"By the ancestors," Jungrathol's footfalls stopped following after her. "That aura! The primordial sea god's—the dragons? They have returned?!"

The eyeball, having resisted for far longer than she expected, finally came free, and she squished it between her fingers for effect, causing the screaming man to faint. Blood poured from the empty socket.

"Only one," Ir'alith replied, lingering a moment before she rounded the corner to exit the hollowed-out tree she'd called home for her entire life—save for a single, seemingly infinite length of time trapped in a bright prison of horrors that she wished she could forget. "Carl, from Eyetee," she said, her lips curving into a wide grin inside her helmet. "He wields a power even I cannot comprehend, and he speaks of hunting them with a quiet confidence that even a true deity would envy."

Jungrathol, her unflappable, reliable general for the past decade, stared.

"Today marks the end of our hiding, our fear," the protector proclaimed. "I alone shall be enough: the Van, the Main, and the Rear for this war. Humanity will be expunged from our lands—our kin returned from their enslavement!" She exhaled, and a plume of hot smoke blew through the fine grating of the impenetrable helmet's mouthguard. "I will free every last elf, lead the dark ones back to the surface, smash the barricades at Khir, Turuhm, Khag Daruhm, and the other dwarven cities to bring an end to their forced labor, and bring the deep ones under my protection! Only then shall the humans begin to know true horror, true fear! All this I swear as the daughter of Seth'tith and Ira'unne!"

Jungrathol had fallen to his knees as she spoke, his head bowed in reverence. He did not reply this time, for it was not his place to commend or rebuke her on a decided course of action.

"Be well until my return, Jungrathol," she said with finality. "The barrier shall not falter again so long as a single human still draws breath." She rounded the corner, stepping out into the bright, warm daylight that had been denied to her for so long. The man in her grasp gurgled as a stronger healing spell brought him back to consciousness and regenerated his eye so that she might enjoy removing it once more.

"Humans!" she roared, catching sight of a dozen soldiers charging towards her with an assortment of glowing weapons and gleaming heavy armor.

She flicked a freshly-removed eyeball at them, watching them skid to a stop in apparent horror.

She knew all of the ways to terrify humans.

She grinned even more widely.

Their enchantments and false blessings could no longer save them—could no longer affect her. Not so long as she wore the magic-nullifying armor of the first dragon to reach the realm of the deities.

She also knew all the fastest way to kill humans.

She flipped up the helmet's mouthguard and opened her mouth. A jet of purple dragonflame erupted, a comforting heat that warmed her throat and tongue as it passed.

The soldiers were vaporized instantly as they began to charge once again, their flame-warding armor unable to stand up to flames backed by the power of a true deity.

Ir'alith's pointed teeth glittered under the noonday suns, and she regarded the now-struggling human who was still held carefully around the neck by her tail. He was missing an eye again.

She resolved that matter for him once more.

"Now then, Wymund," she said, shifting her legs as she prepared to set off through the forest that lay between the small, spread out houses at a light jog that would leave a galloping racehorse panting in her wake. "Tell me of this portal, and I will tell you of Mag'thes—the girl you struck—and how I played with her when she was a child, how I watched her beautiful wings grow into the pride and delight of all who saw them, how I tutored her in the arcane after her uncle was slain by your kin in decades past, how I watched you drag her—while she pleaded for her release—from her room to be sold as chattel."

The eye came out more slowly and noisily the third time, managed steadily by the psychic manifestation of her will as she ran towards the beacon of dense magical power that she sensed in the distance.

The Demon Queen needed no human—no man—to tell her of a no-longer-functional portal within the lands she protected.

She merely wished to relish his despair when she reached it.