Luca and I were in the dungeons below the demon temple in the In Between.
“You don’t even have to breathe?” I exclaimed.
“Is there even oxygen here?” he asked. As I pondered that, I realized that although air was filling my lungs, I felt like I was drowning. I tried breathing deeply and slowly as well as shallowly and quickly, but nothing was helping.
“It works because you believe it works,” Luca said alarmed. “Don’t think about it!” Have you ever tried to not think about something? Think about consciously breathing right now. Sorry, that was a dick move, but have fun breathing manually for the next two minutes. Anyway, I blacked out.
“Wake up, you fool,” Luca said slapping me in the face. “Don’t think about things too hard; in the In Between, thought is as real as anything else.”
Before I could retort, the ground shook around us. “They’re here to rescue me!” I exclaimed excitedly. Then my heart fell as I realized there was no way out of this room; any magic that could open the door would obliterate me into atoms. “You have super powers right?” I asked Luca, my brain working slowly.
“I wouldn’t call them super powers, but I can change my form or strength and speed,” he replied.
“Can you rip the door open or slither under it or something?” I was hopeful but skeptical.
“No. The door is heavily warded, but you could let us out.”
I raised my eyebrows at him before I realized we were in complete darkness, and he couldn’t see me. “How could I do that?”
“You’re possessed. It’s the only reason why they would bring you here,” he said confidently. “This place is a temple; it was built to glorify demons. If you tell the door to open in the demonic tongue, it will likely open.”
There was no point in denying it; “I don’t know the demon language.”
“No, but it does. It’s using your soul as a dwelling place; charge it rent!”
I closed my eyes even though it was redundant in the darkness and prepared myself to talk to the demon.
{Nice try; just tell me the word,} I responded internally.
The demon chuckled,
“Let’s go!” I cried as Luca and I left the room. I saw him for the first time; he looked like a typical emaciated old man except his skin was a shade of grey as were his pupils. Once we were a few steps from the dungeon, he took a deep breath and changed before my eyes: he grew taller, more muscular, and younger. The only thing that didn’t change was his skin color: it was still grey. I realized this was probably some sort of incremental change into a goblin; the longer he lived in the In Between, the more its influence robbed him of his humanity, a process that’s accelerated as realizes he’s no longer human by changing his shape, strength, etc. With his new body, Luca closed his eyes and knelt as a suit of armor appeared on him including a helmet covering everything but his eyes and mouth and a “purple” feather sprouting from it. With a shift of his arms, a shield with a two-headed bird on it appeared in one hand and a short sword in the other.
“You were a peasant?” I asked skeptically.
He looked at me and smiled, “Well, I was a peasant.” His face shifted growing more somber, “I don’t know what we’ll see out there.” When he saw my look of apprehension he chuckled, “Don’t worry you will be fine; they wouldn’t dare lose out on a demon. They’ll kill me on sight though.”
I clasped my hand on his shoulder; after his transformation, he was a good bit taller than me, so I had to reach up to do it. “Let’s make a deal then; I’ll watch your back, and you’ll watch mine.”
A genuine smile reappeared on his face as he replied, “Deal!”
We ascended the stairs to the sanctuary to find dozens, maybe hundreds of demons of various forms rushing out the main gate. Luca nearly ran into the room before I grabbed him and pulled him back into the stairway. The building shook again as Luca asked, “We’ll never make it out through there; is there another way out?”
“The only other way I know is up a bajillion flights of stairs and on the other side of the sanctuary,” I replied. “And there’s no possibility of breaking through the building with this many defensive runes on it.”
Luca’s eyes widened, and he exclaimed, “But only the walls are warded. Not the ceilings.”
“Not a bad idea. I’ll need at least a few seconds in sight of the ceiling, and that’s certainly to be noticed.” I agreed.
“That should be fine; I can keep them off you for a few seconds,” he reassured me.
“You’ll have to get out of there fast once I’m done,” I warned him. He nodded at me, and it was time.
He charged out into the demon infested hellhole with me on his heels. Closest to the stairway was a group of weird fish people things. Think Admiral Ackbar but a centaur version with a fish tail. In a single motion, Luca slashed his sword, flipped around slashing again, and two of the Ackbars fell into pieces. Without a pause, he kicked a balloon octopus twenty feet and decapitated a bat creature crawling on the ground.
I ripped my eyes away from Luca and took a deep breath: I was about to break the first rule of magic that Kaine ever taught me. I raised my hand toward the ceiling as a pink sigil appeared, and I began focusing pure arcane energy into the palm of my hand, an unstable pink blob appearing and growing and shifting a few inches above my palm. Usually sigils not only focus pneuma, they also transform it into various other forms of energy, but this sigil was preventing the energy from shifting forms; arcane energy is highly volatile. Any slip in my concentration, and the orb would explode in my hand; as I added pneuma to the ball, it grew and grew. It started out about the size of a drop of water, but I grew it until it was the size of a soccer ball. Energy cracked all around the orb, and it wasn’t exactly spherical: small deformations rapidly came into and out of existence all over its surface. I used nearly all of my remaining pneuma to create it saving only enough back to protect Luca and me from the fallout. Once it became so unstable, I could barely contain it, I launched it at the ceiling of the sanctuary at close to the speed of sound. The second I jettisoned the power, I tackled Luca to the ground and put every last bit of pneuma I had into raising my shield. This was a solid shield; the dome was glowing so brightly, it was partially opaque. It should have been damn near soundproof, but even through it, when the energy struck the ceiling, it nearly deafened me, and I felt vibration through my bones. Just the shockwave from the blast greatly strained the shield. I don’t know how many floors the blast destroyed, but judging from the amount of rubble that fell, it was at least ten. What had to be multiple tons of rocks pelted the sanctuary including my shield. When things finally settled, I there were so many rocks, I couldn’t see through them. I could also feel blood dripping from my nose, and I was dangerously close to passing out; eventually I dropped my shield and closed my eyes.
I waited for death… and waited and waited. I finally opened my eyes and saw Luca kneeling over my body holding up the stone with his own body. With a grunt of effort, he stood up and pushed all of the rock away from us. I got to my feet with the assistance of Luca, and we climbed on top of the rubble. The sanctuary looked like it had been hit with a bomb; the room was covered in multiple layers of rock, but the walls of the structure were untarnished. As he let go of my hand, my vision blurred, and I nearly fell to my knees. “I have you, Dante,” Luca reassured me as he grabbed me. “I don’t know what we’ll see outside of this god-forsaken temple, but I will endeavor to keep you alive.”
“That makes me feel much better,” I feigned sarcasm, but it was genuine. “It’s gotta be the Gnosilepides; I’ll make sure they don’t kill you,” I said flashing him a grin. He returned the gesture and nodded. Luckily, the doorway was nearly twenty feet high because only about a yard of it stood above the rubble. We cautiously left the building and beheld something out of a fairy tale. We were at the base of the mountain now, and dozens of knights dressed just like Luca were rushing toward the temple as hundreds of demons of different shapes and sizes tried to stop them.
“The knights of the first and second orders!” Luca exclaimed. “We must help them!” This didn’t make any sense; just hours after I was captured, a different group is storming my prison? Just as that thought crossed my mind, a bolt of lightning came from nowhere and struck a flying demon. I whipped my head toward the source and saw Kaine. I furiously looked around and saw Emma and Neil as well as several other spellswords from the order. Manthei had said the Gnosilepides had allies; is this what he meant? The knights were holding their own, but they were drastically outnumbered; if I hadn’t partially collapsed the temple, things would be even worse.
A group of orcs riding what looked like wyverns began flying straight for the biggest group of knights their swords held aloft when the ground moved up to meet them and swallowed them whole only to return to its natural state. A bit higher on the mountain stood Quinn with a staff held aloft; he was wearing what I guessed was his battle armor: an enchanted, black leather suit. He looked like the Witcher; unlike most spellswords, Quinn didn’t use a traditional weapon. In addition to his Gnosilepides training, he was also trained as a wizard, meaning he wielded a wooden staff with hundreds of very complicated sigils carved all over it. It looked very old; I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some staff of legend from thousands of years ago like the staff Moses turned into a snake or… I can’t think of any other famous staves, but it was probably one of them. I pointed him out to Luca, and we began making our way over to him when Manthei landed in front of us from the sky.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he spat, his eyes glowing purple with anger. Luca slashed his sword at the demon, but with a flash of pale white, a gust of wind pushed Luca twenty feet back and directly into an orc. As I turned my eyes back, Manthei was already right in front of me, and I barely managed to catch a glimpse of his hand shooting toward me as he grabbed me by the neck and slammed me to the ground. “I usually do this more carefully to ensure a safe transfer of an archdemon to another host, but in your case, the direct method will suffice,” he said raising a dagger with various glowing symbols on it. He plunged the blade toward my chest impossibly fast; I expected some kind of hallucination showing me how great my life was or how little I had done with it or something, but there was just fear. Right as the dagger began to dig into my skin, a hand wrapped around Manthei’s wrist preventing me from being shish kebabbed.
“I’m afraid you won’t be doing that, Jarod,” Quinn said calmly. Then Manthei did the creepiest thing he could: he smiled.
“I hoped it would be you Quinn,” he whispered. His eyes shone a brighter purple as he… changed. His skin became scaly, his canine teeth elongated as did his fingernails, and two appendages ripped through his clothes and appeared behind his cape: tails. “I’ve wanted to kill you for a loooong time!” His voice was different now, like it had doubled up: one voice was his own and the other was high pitched and malicious sounding. One of his tails slashed at Quinn who jumped back ten feet gracefully, and Manthei whipped around throwing his dagger directly at Quinn’s face. With a wave of his staff, he effortlessly deflected it, but in that time, Manthei raised both of his hands and with the glow of two green sigils, a wall of green flame twenty feet high shot toward Quinn. This fight was out of my league especially running on no pneuma as I was. I turned to look for Luca and found him fighting ten orcs alone; I searched around for a weapon, but all I could find was a rock. It was better than nothing: I grabbed it and ran up behind the closest orc striking him on the back of the head as hard as I could. Unfortunately, without adding arcane energy to my muscles, I was just a regular guy, a regular guy running on no sleep and no food. The orc turned to look at me menacingly; he raised his blade as the tip of Luca’s sword punctured his chest.
“Get out of here, Dante. In your state, you’re a liability!” Luca screamed barely dodging a blow from one of the other orcs before he could dislodge his blade. He had a point; I stepped backward slowly until I bumped into the base of the mountain.
Suddenly, an arm wrapped around me and lifted me off of the ground effortlessly. The arm was a sickly grey-brown color and ended in brown fingerless gloves with claws piercing its fingers. I looked up and saw Demonicunt’s face with her glowing orange eyes; every square inch of her skin was the same grey-brown, and she had appendages jutting out from her skin below where her belly shirt ended. To be more specific, there were four limbs protruding from her body covered in brown hair with two of them from her front and two from her back; they each had multiple joints allowing them to bend. As she grabbed me, she transferred her weight to the appendages causing both of us to raise several feet in the air. She pressed me close to her body with her arm and whispered in unison with her demon’s voice, “It’s time for your exorcism boy.”
I couldn’t match her strength or do any magic, so my only weapon was my voice. Unfortunately, I was (and am) too stupid to be a smooth talker, so I tried a different approach. “Fuck you, Demonicunt!” After all she did have a right to know her name.
She squinted her eyes at me and replied, “You dare address your betters that way?”
I laughed maniacally, “Oh no, I’d never say that to Kaine. Why? How do you address him?”
“That’s enough from you, boy!” She began squeezing tighter and tighter until my ribs felt like they were going to break. With some effort, I could take small, shallow breaths, but there was no way I could talk. She lifted herself on her back two spider-leg-things and put the front two on the surface of the rock, and we began scaling the mountain impossibly fast. It took us over an hour to climb down the stairs built within the mountain, but we climbed to the top in less than 5 minutes, me gasping for breath the entire time. We reached the upper entrance into the temple, and she threw me into the first room. The door was already open, the torches were lit, and in front of the bird bath was a stone bed with the angel statues towering over it. The disembodied demons danced around the alter agitatedly, ready to accept another of their number.
Demonicunt dropped me onto the alter unceremoniously, and all I could do was gasp for air. As my eyes refocused, I looked up at the angel statues above me, and I noticed something I hadn’t before. All of the angels’ eyes were pointed in the same direction: right at me. With a wave of her hand and a flash of a sigil, chains sprung forth from the alter, closed around my wrists and ankles and partially retracted, firmly locking me in place. What I thought was a birdbath lay right below my throat, and I realized its true function: to catch my blood. This must be where they had sacrifices I realized in horror. I pulled against the chains, but they didn’t budge in the slightest. “You can struggle all you wish, but it won’t help,” Demonicunt said with a smile as she removed a dagger identical to the one Manthei had before. Without another word she placed the dagger against my throat right as an eagle few through the opening to the room and swooped at her. She effortlessly dodged the bird standing on her demon legs and swiped at the creature with her claws; the bird landed on the ground before her… and changed into a naked Luca.
“We have a score to settle, demon!” he shouted at her.
“Indeed, we do,” she replied with a smile. She lifted her hand, a black sigil appearing before it. Luca tensed his body ready to dodge any strike, but there was none. Black rot appeared on his grey skin; at first, it was the size of a quarter right below his belly button, but it quickly spread out in all directions. It looked like necrosis, like his skin was dying in front of my eyes. He screamed as he dropped to his knees, the patch of death growing to cover his entire body… then his skin began to disintegrate, turning to small particles like sand. “Do you see my power little soul? Necromancy gives me power over the dead; your little band of wanna-be knights never stood a chance!” she screamed the last four words. Once his skin was gone, the same thing began happening to his muscles and veins until all that was left was a grey skeleton… which turned to black and disintegrated. My friend now lay as black sand in a demonic temple.
“NOOOO!” I screamed in anger. I had only known Luca a few hours, but we were a team. We worked together to escape, and then he risked and lost his life to try to save me. That was the first time I watched a comrade die in front of me; it never got any easier. My sorrow was instantly burned away by a white hot rage; I already hated Demonicunt, but now I wanted to rip her fucking throat out. I wanted to watch her suffer. Strong emotions have an interesting effect on one’s soul: souls naturally produce arcane energy called pneuma; this is a process that happens 24/7 regardless of external or internal circumstances. However, the rate at which generation occurs is not constant; powerful feelings like love, anger, fear, or hate cause the soul to create arcane energy much, much faster. As a result, I had enough pneuma to cast one, maybe two spells. I took a deep breath, gathered my thoughts, and prepared a lightning bolt to strike Demonicunt in the face. I heard her walking back toward me on her regular legs, so I opened my eyes, a blue sigil appearing in front of my chained hand. And Demonicunt slit my throat.
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I’m the only person that can describe what it’s like to have your throat slit; ok, I guess I don’t know that for sure, but I am reasonably certain throat slitting has a very high mortality rate. Maybe some guy in Florida survived it too… at least I can clearly imagine the headline: Florida Man Has Throat Slit and Survives. Anyway, it hurts really, really bad. Kind of like a papercut but on your fucking neck… There’s a misconception that you can’t breathe with your throat slit, but it’s not true. You can still gasp for air and get a little bit with the part of your windpipe that’s exposed in the hole in your neck, but you also get some blood in your lungs too; it’s not fun.
Demonicunt gripped my head and pushed it to the side as blood spurted out in droves with most of it landing in the birdbath. My vision started to tunnel as I choked on my own blood. I coughed weekly and wondered what was going to happen next. Were they going to separate the demon from my soul? Would that destroy it completely or would just enough of it survive for me to end up in hell? Things finally went completely black, and my thoughts started to echo in my mind before they went quiet too.
It felt like no time passed before I regained awareness; I was lying on cold, hard ground. I seriously considered not moving and trying to go to sleep, but with an audible sigh, I opened my eyes and stood up. There I was in front of the fucking dam in my mind or soul or whatever.
I opened my eyes on the stone alter shattering the chains containing me and stood. Demonicunt flinched away from me on her spider legs; my eyes were glowing red so brightly, there was a red glare on her face. I felt my throat close back together as pain shot through my me directly below my shoulder blades and a strange sound. It sounded like bones bending and breaking; I glanced behind me and saw I had two wings protruding from each side of my back like an angel. My wingspan was about twelve feet, and the wings were covered in black feathers with red tips. I definitely needed a new Wolverine shirt now. As I looked back to face the bitch that had just killed my friend, I realized that I had an innate understanding of the universe. Somehow, the demon’s thoughts at least some of them had merged with my own. Everything made sense; I knew the rules the universe was based on both the science rules like quantum field theory and general relativity as well as the magical rules of the different realms and their place in the greater continuum. Even more, I knew how they fit together: magic was just science humans didn’t understand yet. I knew the history of everything even what predated the big bang. I’d love to tell you all of these things, but I can’t remember them. Maybe my physical brain is incapable of processing the information, or maybe the demon doesn’t want me to know, but either way all of the knowledge and understanding left when all of the demon was resealed behind the dam (spoiler alert.) The only information that was retained in my mind is part of the personal history of the demon. When the gods created the first mortal realm, what’s now the first layer of hell, they forced the mortals they had created to worship them. The mortals danced, sang, drank, and even killed to honor various gods. The pantheon was tiered: there were the true capital G gods and below them were demigods. Three of the true gods created a mortal rebellion along with a third of the demigods; they inspired a desire to be left alone to live their lives without divine interference. I strongly suspect there was a selfish motive in there somewhere, but these are the memories I was left with. The rebellion angered the rest of the pantheon so much, they cursed the entire mortal realm to be in constant internal war and drain it of all physicality leaving only spirit, ultimately causing it to become the first layer of hell. The three gods which instigated these events became known as betrayers, and it was one of these that lived within my soul. If the story sounds familiar, it should; the vast majority of religions on earth are based on the pantheon in some form another, in Genesis, god is described in the plural referencing the entire pantheon rather than a single individual being. The rebellion was ultimately transcribed as the fall of Lucifer; in any case, I didn’t just have a demon in me or an archdemon but a literal god.
I looked back at Demonicunt and summoned my sword. It’s usually a transparent pink, but this time it was crackling with red energy within it and outside of it. “Manthei… he was right. You’re one of the three lords,” she said indicating the statues. Demonicunt knelt before me – a pretty amazing feat considering she had four ten-foot long arachnid legs. She had to bend them in a weird way, but she managed to get on her legs. “My lord,” he said lowering her head. Without taking my eyes off of her, I lifted my hand and shot a fireball completely obliterating all of the statues. As the fire ricocheted off of the runed walls, I moved and lifted my wings to protect both of us from the fire. She looked up at me in shock, “What are you doing?”
“I’m not your god, but I am going to kill you,” I spat. My voice… it came out in unison with the same voice I had been hearing in my head.
Her eyes grew even wider before they squinted into a glare. “You are not worthy of him!” she screeched and rose on her monster legs again. I slashed my sword at her, but she blocked it with the claws on her right hand. She raised her left, her black claws eerily reflecting the torch light; as she swiped them toward my neck, I flapped my wings shoving me backward. Unfortunately, I underestimated my own power and slammed into the wall behind me. It knocked the wind out of me, and I fell to my knees. I jumped back up just in time to see a cyclone of wind wound so tightly it looked like a whip headed directly at my face. I raised my shield, and the wind whip (should I trademark that? It sounds cool) harmlessly bounced off and dissipated. I let the shield fall and raised my left hand, a deep blue sigil appearing before it, and I pumped more pneuma into it than I ever had before. A single lightning bolt the thickness of my torso shot from my hand right toward Demonicunt. With unbelievable speed, she jumped with her demon legs, flipped around, and hung from the ceiling like Spider-man. Then something I didn’t think possible happened: the bolt of lightning struck the wall of the temple. The runes covering the surface glowed brightly as the current went through the wall, and then they failed. With a crack of thunder that shook the whole mountain, the wall exploded leaving a giant hole revealing the battlefield thousands of feet below. I stared at the hole in shock; after a few seconds, a smug smile grew across my face as I turned my eyes up toward the demon. Her face showed a mixture of horror and amazement that made me smile wider. I jumped toward her as she raised both clawed hands; an orange sigil appeared in front of one and a white sigil appeared before the other. A wall of flames shot toward me propelled forward with a gust of wind. I was midair headed right toward destruction, and I was moving so fast, I didn’t have time to raise my shield. Instead, I bent my wings around the front of me a fraction of a second before the wind fueled fire struck. It pushed me back to the ground and kept me in place for several seconds until the onslaught ended. I stood up and opened my wings again; there wasn’t a scratch on them. The wings were even stronger than my shield, damn close to impenetrable. I looked up and saw Demonicunt racing toward the hole in the wall; she had three of her four legs out of the hole when I managed to grab her last spider-y appendage. I pulled as hard as I could and slammed her against the ground, but I wasn’t done. I kicked her sending her flying until she struck the wall opposite the hole with enough force to shatter her body if she had been human. Before she regained her senses, I rushed over and sliced off two of her spider-legs. As she wailed, I pulled her to her feet – her regular feet and sliced off the other two.
“I’m going to gut you for that!” she shrieked.
“Oh really?” I taunted. I brought my foot down as hard as I could right on her left knee; I hit it at an odd angle, and it bent a way it’s not supposed to. “That was kidnapping me,” I screamed so she could hear me over her wails. I repeated the action this time striking her nose; I used less force to make sure I didn’t crush her brain, but I felt her skull fracture. “That was for making me ride a bat demon.” I grabbed both of her wrists in my left hand and lifted her up, holding her in place against the wall by her wrists. “And this,” I whispered. “Is for Luca.” I plunged my sword into her heart; the crackling energy seeped out of the blade like a poisoning spreading its way through her chest.
“Arghhh,” she choked on her blood as it poured out of her mouth. She was the first person I ever killed, and I never even learned her real name. I let go of her and the blade; she fell to the ground as my sword vanished into nothingness. When someone dies on the mortal realm, their soul usually sticks around close to the body for a few hours, sometimes even a few days, but it’s different for someone who’s possessed. I watched Demonicunt as the life left her eyes; her skin changed back to its normal color, her horns retracted into to her skull, and her eyes became brown, her pupils becoming circular as they stared into nothingness forever. The demon inside of her which I saw as a black stain on her soul was instantly thrown from her body, and it took her soul with it. The “veins” that had spread throughout her soul began to congeal into a single purple entity whose claws were ripping into a transparent version of Demonicunt. Eventually, the force pulling the demon away overcame it, but before he left, he ensured there were only small pieces left of her soul. I expected the pieces to vanish like goblins do, but this was the In Between. The various body parts and organs fell to the ground with a wet “thunk” along with a generous portion of blood. Eww. With nothing to bind it to this plane, the demon flew straight out of the hole in the wall and followed the current of the river presumably back to hell.
“STOP!” I screamed as loudly as I could, instilling my voice with pneuma to make it louder. Even with magic, there’s no way my voice could have carried down an entire mountain; however, the demon’s voice was doubling my own, and it was much, much louder. It was so loud, my ears were ringing. It worked though; every single demonic possessed monster and orc had frozen in place. “RETURN TO THE PIT!” I yelled at the same volume. Thousands of transparent entities of various colors began escaping their monstrous hosts and flying in the same direction: the gates of hell. Even the free demons in the temple followed my command and left for damnation. All of the orcs dropped their weapons and got on their knees; the In Between natives, the monsters without demons controlling them looked around in confusion. There were a few skirmishes between the creatures and the knights and between the creatures themselves, but most of them walked/ran/flew off in different directions. It was over… except for Manthei. He was possessed by an archdemon who was apparently immune to divine commands. By the look of things, he wasn’t faring particularly well against Quinn: his cape was torn to shreds, one of his tails was currently regrowing, and he was covered in blood while Quinn looked completely untouched without even a spec of dirt on his outfit. Manthei was looking around in all directions watching his empire collapse. He glanced up and me and scowled before he vanished completely; becoming invisible is possible, but extremely difficult. You’d have to create an illusion of whatever is behind you in all directions and from every angle simultaneously, not an easy task. There might be a complicated wizard spell that can make you transparent to light, but the sigil would be ridiculously complicated necessitating a scroll, staff, or wand. The only other possibility is a potion, but I know of none capable of this. My point is this: it’s very unlikely he would be able to vanish at will like that. He didn’t create a sigil, use a scroll, or drink a potion, and even if he had, it wouldn’t hide him from the democculus. With demonic vision, I can see through solid objects and even souls; even if he became transparent, his soul would still be visible to me. Maybe he teleported, but there was no portal; I suppose he could have a hellblade like Kaine; however, he didn’t have time to swing a blade.
I had no intention of letting that mother fucker get away; on the assumption he was only hidden, I stepped off of the mountain and used my wings to glide down to his previous position. I raised my hand preparing to cast a large spell, and Quinn appeared next to me and grabbed my wrist.
“No,” he said. Kaine, Neil, and Emma rushed over. They were wearing the same clothes as they were yesterday and looked exhausted. Emma had a slice across her cheek that was bleeding profusely, and Neil’s arm was in a sling. Kaine looked disappointed in me like I had stolen a candy bar in front of him, Neil was just Neil, and Emma refused to directly at me, but she seemed horrified. After all, why shouldn’t she be? I didn’t just have a demon in me; I had one of the lords of hell inside of me. “They’re coming; you need to put those away now,” Quinn said urgently.
I looked up directly into his eyes and replied, “Who’s coming?”
“The Cloaks,” he said in a whisper. “You need to look human now!” I needed to look human? Ouch. Did that mean I wasn’t human anymore? I closed my eyes picturing the dam in my mind again when I heard the sound of a portal opening. I opened my eyes and saw a hooded figure clothed in a black robe; the garment was belted around his waist, and he was wearing black gloves, boots, and pants under the robe. I couldn’t see a single square inch of his flesh because a shadow covered his face under the hood.
“Demon!” he screamed in a manly voice. That sounds weird, but I don’t know how else to describe it; his voice was incredibly deep. He sounded like Darth Vader without the asthma. From under the hood, two glowing rings of fire lit up his face: they were his pupils. He raised his hand, and a torrent of fire came bellowing forth directly at me. That might not sound weird; after all I had done the same thing multiple times that day, but it was one of the strangest things I had ever seen. He didn’t use a sigil; the fire came out of his bare hand. There are some forms of magic that don’t require sigils, but none of them could generate fire from nothing. I summoned my shield, but as the fire struck it, my shield began vibrating rapidly and ultimately disintegrated. As the fire began shooting toward me again, I covered my body with my wings. The flames had destroyed my shield so quickly, I was afraid the demonic wings would burn up instantly, but they blocked all of the energy. I didn’t even feel any heat from behind them.
As the onslaught finished, I spread my wings out and the cloak drew his sword. Flame sprang up around the metal without consuming it. It’s the closest thing to a light saber that I’d ever seen in real life; I stared in amazement as he rushed toward me with the speed of a spellsword. Quinn lifted his hand and with a glow of white a highly localized gust of wind struck only the cloak, but symbols along his left bracer began to glow, and a transparent spherical dome appeared around him not too dissimilar from my own shield. The wind was completely blocked, and the instant it dissipated, the cloak jumped and swung his flaming sword right at me. I summoned my sword and blocked his; I half expected the fiery blade to slice through mine like butter, but it didn’t. My sword was still crackling with the demon’s power – that must have been what protected it. Before I could come up with a plan, there was a puff of smoke, and the cloak’s head fell off his body. His headless body collapsed to the ground, and I stared at the head for several seconds; it had rolled in such a way that I could see its eyes. His irises still looked like rings of fire, shifting hues and brightness just like real flame, but they slowly went out revealing grey-blue eyes. I looked up to see Kaine holstering the hellblade into the pouch on his leg.
“What the fuck magic was that? He burned through my shield like it was nothing,” I asked.
“More are coming. Dante, you have to revert forms right now,” Quinn replied urgently.
I closed my eyes picturing the dam again. I tried to picture it fully built, but there was a mental block in my mind. I didn’t know if the demon was doing something to me or if it was something subconscious. I pulled my wings in blocking my eyes – they’re the only things my eyes couldn’t see through plunging me into complete darkness, and I dropped my knees. With all my mental effort, the dam started rebuilding itself one little bit at a time. After thirty seconds of intense concentration, the demon’s power was no longer flowing into me. My back suddenly erupted in the horrendous pain; I thought another cloak had set me on fire for a moment, but it was just my wings retracting back into my body. I screamed as I fell face first into the snow. Everything was gone… My understanding of the world, my power, my strength. All that was left was me; after thirty seconds or so, Kaine pulled me to my feet.
“You need to get out of here before they,” he started, but before he could finish his sentence, an orc with Manthei’s eyes and dark blue skin jumped to his feet.
“Kill all of them but the boy,” he said gesturing at me, and just like that the fighting broke back out. I guessed that without a divine form, they no longer had to follow my orders. Luckily the knights of New Byzantium were there because at least a hundred orcs took up arms against us. Kaine let go of me to dodge an axe to the face, and I fell back to the ground. I was physically and mentally exhausted to the point I couldn’t stand up anymore. Kaine drew his rapier, slit an orc’s throat, and froze another in a solid block of ice all in a single motion. He rushed back to my side as portals opened all around the surrounding area. Right as several dozens hooded, cloaked figures walked through them, Kaine grabbed the remaining tatters of my Wolverine shirt and ripped it off throwing it to the ground.
“If you wanted to see my body, all you had to do was ask, Kaine,” I said half delirious.
“Things are already bad, Dante. We… I killed a cloak. If they even suspect you’re possessed, it’ll start a war. A war we might not win,” he replied. The Cloaks joined the fight against the orcs; the first cloak that arrived wasn’t a fluke: all of them could use magic without the need for sigils. Some of them had fire, others ice, one could kill orcs with a single touch, and another could pass through solid objects. Kaine was right: I’m not sure the Gnosilepides could beat these guys, especially if there were even more of them somewhere. “Neil, Emma!” Kaine shouted. They ran over to us dodging orcs; Emma sliced one across the abdomen as she ran. “Take Dante. Use the scroll and get out of here. DON’T do it in sight of the Cloaks. The other side of the mountain should be sufficient.”
I put my arm around Neil’s shoulder, and the three of us began walking. None of the orcs bothered us likely to avoid injuring me. The sounds of battle were inescapable: we heard thunder, felt the ground shake, and Emma had to tackle us to the ground to avoid a minivan-sized fireball. After we had made it a few hundred yards, Neil set me on the ground and laid out a scroll. It was a square a little over a yard long in both directions. Neil retrieved me, and the three of us stood on the scroll as Emma knelt, touching it with both hands. The sigils that covered it began to glow, and before I knew it, we were on the front lawn of the Krymmeno.
War was avoided that day; I don’t know if Kaine confessed to killing the cloak or if they blamed it on orcs or demons, but either way, the uneasy alliance between the Gnosilepides and the Cloaks continued at least in name. Eventually they found out about me… what I was… what lived inside me. Kaine was right: it started a war, a war everyone lost.