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Once again the village council met. Once again, five Kharlins were representing the village of New Haven. Participating as guests were Nuala, as well as Dawn and the rangers. But this time the atmosphere in the council hut was not nearly as tense. Halvar was greeted warmly by everyone when he entered.Even the Kharlin with the deep brown fur who had sided with Ristop at the last council meeting and been fairly antagonistic towards Dawn, showed him sincere respect.
After he had greeted everyone personally, Halvar clapped his hands finally and stood up.
“First, let me say that I’m very glad to see you all once again." He began.
"Just yesterday, I believed myself destined to meet the Vixen, so it is a very pleasant surprise for me to be on my feet and healthy once more. Now, let’s face facts. Our relations to Dawn and humans in general have formerly been controversial, to say the least. But let’s keep the past in the past. Dawn has healed me and undoubtedly saved my life in the process and, more important still, she saved our priestess from the demons. So, I ask you all to think of the aid she has given us and to treat her as an ally not an enemy.”
He looked at each of the participating Kharlins, one after another, until everyone gave a nod, to assure him they had understood and were willing to comply with his request.
Halvar continued. “The most important thing to start with, should be an honest exchange of information. We didn’t take the opportunity to talk to Dawn when she came to us after her first encounter with the demons, something I’m sure we all sincerely regret by now. Dawn, would you please tell us how you came first into contact with them and what happened afterwards in your encounters with the demons?”
Dawn looked at him for a moment and then nodded. Taking a deep breath, she stood up, collected her thoughts for a moment and then haltingly started to tell them that she had fled her village to escape from an unwanted marriage after she had gotten her blessing early by the trickster. How she had gone to her hidden valley, met Ankou and by accident stumbled into the passage to the ruined city when she had tried to hide from hunters from her village. She told of her exploration of the ancient city and the recorded memory in the library. How she had hid when the gray demons appeared and wasn’t able to get out the way she had come, because the door out had closed. She talked of her quest to eliminate the demons, ridiculous as it appeared to her at the time, of her journey through the different levels of Raknavor and her arrival in the caves under the city where the demons dwelled. Finally, she came to the discovery of the spider eggs and an unconscious Kharma, webbed in spider threads. She explained how she had rescued Kharma and destroyed the eggs, their subsequent flight through the dark waterways and their return to Kharma’s tribe, only to find an eerily quiet village with all the villagers gone.
Then she told of their search for the villagers, finding Lutha and their ensuing desperate attempt to get the Kharlins out of the demon’s clutches after she told them the villagers had been abducted by the spiders. Finally, she mentioned the underground laboratory she had found while they hid in the caves and the echo stone with the story of Saida and her husband. That he had tried to heal his wife, using blood magic, though maybe heal her was not exactly the right word. He had somehow gotten a new body for her and transferred her to that through blood magic, in the process killing her old one. That, at first everything seemed to have worked, but in the end something must have gone wrong, because Saida started to transform into a monster, the demon queen, taking delight in killing. How her husband had despaired at finding out she was gleefully killing his people and had turned himself in to the leadership of the city for practicing forbidden blood magic and apparently been sentenced to death for his transgressions. That she herself had been caught by the demons during their attempt to get the Kharlins out, had met the demon queen personally, though of course at that time she didn’t know the story of the echo stone and that she used to be a human being. That she had been dumbstruck to hear the queen talk and had seen her sacrificing several Kharlins to her eggs and only escaped through luck and the help of Ankou when the queen had been distracted by the cave-in.
Dawn smiled wrily. “The story of my first meeting with your tribe you know. Afterwards, I stayed in your old village for a few days when you were gone, and finally met Grinna and Teren, who took me with them when they returned to Atelang.” She fell silent, having almost talked herself hoarse.
The faces of the Kharlins around her were grave. Lutha finally broke the silence. “Sweet Vixen, so the queen was created by blood magic. No wonder she is called a demon. It is one of the sacred laws laid down by our Goddess: The practice of blood magic is anathema and absolutely forbidden. You all see what came of it. Her husband tried to save one person and in the end that person destroyed her own people.”
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Dawn said tentatively: “I really don’t understand the whole thing. How can you transfer a person to a new body? It should be impossible. And where does this blood magic come from? Whenever it is mentioned, everyone agrees that it is an awful thing, and the story of the demons certainly seems to confirm it. But then, who started this magic? And there must have been many people practicing it in the past, otherwise where would all these cautionary tales and the laws against it come from?”
Nuala eyed her thoughtfully and replied calmly: “I can’t tell you where blood magic came from. Most people believe that magic in general comes from the gods. In case of the spells that some people get with their blessings, that certainly is true. The blessing and the resulting skills and spells are gods-given and you have to pay for these only with your stamina or mana. But, it is possible to learn magic apart from the paths, though it is certainly very difficult to do so, and few people have the aptitude or the opportunity. There are several known schools of magic. Life magic or earth magic for example, and certainly blood magic. It is unknown if these come from the gods, and in the case of blood magic it is certainly not a god anyone would be willing to name. In any case, for these schools of magic you have to pay with something in addition to mana. It is known, that for life magic you have to pay with blood, for blood magic you have to pay with a life. So no matter who has practiced blood magic in the past and what we know of it, the cost for blood magic alone is something that would lead to it being anathema.”
Dawn was thinking furiously after Nuala’s explanation.
“Oh, so that’s what must have gone wrong with Saida!” she blurted out involuntarily.
The others looked at her in confusion and Halvar asked: “What do you mean?”
“Well, apparently you have to pay for blood magic with a life,” Dawn explained. “And in case of Saida she agreed to be killed to work the spell to transfer her into a new body, so her husband believed there was no inherent evil in the spell. But of course, Saida was deathly sick before he killed her, barely clinging to life by a thread, so the cost for the spell really wasn’t paid in full. Though I wonder why it worked at all in this case? And if her husband was a prodigy in magic and alchemy like she said, he should have thought of that, shouldn’t he?”
Lutha furrowed her brow, her ears going sideways. “We cannot know today, what her husband did or didn’t think of when he worked his magic.” She said slowly. “Though I for myself wonder if he did think at all. But you might have a point in saying that the price wasn’t paid in full. Though that needs not concern us now. Regardless of what went wrong in the past, we have to deal with the queen and her offspring today. It is certainly good to finally know exactly what we are fighting, but apart from that, it is as you say history.”
Halva stood up, cleared his throat and said:
“After hearing your report several things have been cleared up. But our task certainly didn’t get any easier. The demons are formidable foes. Though they seem to be somewhat susceptible to fire, that might be somewhere to start. Unfortunately I have to say, I’m a bit out of my depth here. We are not used to fighting such a strong and numerous enemy. We certainly are able to deal with a few beasts, albeit mostly that’s a matter of attacking from range with bows and having the numbers. But, bows seem to be fairly useless against these monsters.”
Teren stood up now and said: “That’s not exactly true. Certainly, their bodies are protected by strong natural armor, but if you manage to hit them in the eye, they are vulnerable indeed. I managed to kill some of them by multiple hits to the eyes.”
The Kharlins around the table murmured in admiration, but Halvar replied.
“That is impressive and certainly good to know, but I fear we have very few people in our village who can repeat your feat.”
Grinna, who had been uncharacteristically silent up to now, leapt to her feet and said emphatically:
“Well, we never will be able to fight the demons in a direct confrontation with the whole horde of them. They have the advantage of us in their reach, their armor and their numbers. Not to mention their venom. First, you have to thin out the herd, so to say. And the best way to do that is from ambush. We should start with the spiderlings by the way. The more time they have to grow, the greater our difficulties will be.”
The Kharlin with the deep brown fur who had never introduced himself to Dawn snorted contemptuously.
“How could we ambush these monsters? We don’t even know where they are, apart from their lair in the ancient city. I won’t go in there to fight them, and if we go out and search elsewhere, chances are we get ambushed by them instead.”
Grinna smiled mischievously and said.
“Well, obviously that’s what the bait is for. And lo and behold, here we have a girl who managed to fight the demons several times, destroy a bunch of their eggs and escape with some of their prisoners. The queen surely has to be foaming at the mouth by now. She certainly is eager to get hold of Dawn. I say we send Dawn out as bait and keep watch over her from a distance, see what happens. And have a troupe of us hidden there, prepared to fight any spiderlings or demons who come after her.”
She glanced at Dawn sideways and gave a slow wink.
“With your kind permission, of course.”