A chorus of howls reverberated through the forest as Diane ran with Thistleman towards the mountain. Today had gone far more poorly than Diane could have anticipated; her hopes from earlier in the morning had been dashed.
At first, things hadn’t been too bad. They had found a few patches of crow grass by following the birds flocking in the sky. Shortly afterwards, they stumbled across a stream. and while it had mostly been picked clean of tuffle weed, they were soon able to find a few patches. However, things turned south as soon as Thistle seemed to catch wind of something. He said it smelled like a pack of dire wolves and they were heading in their direction. They quickly moved towards the mountain, trying to get lost amongst a herd of thunder deer, which locals sometimes called styars. They were strange creatures that could shoot lightning from their horns, but were mainly peaceful.
As soon as it saw them, the herd made a sharp turn, leaping over them and then cutting away across the river. And now, the dire wolf pack was on their trail. Mistakenly, Diane wondered how the day could get any worse.
Haraldr was dashing through the woods as fast as his legs could carry him. He was terrified. Behind him, he heard the buzzing of two, maybe three giant hornets.
“HELP! SOMEONE, ANYONE, HELP!”
He dodged two hornets coming from both sides only for a third to drop out of the sky above him.
At that moment, he heard a loud chorus of howls. Dire wolves. The gods had abandoned him. He couldn’t help but laugh. The only thing worse than giant hornets were dire wolves. Even as the giant hornet’s mandibles tore into him, he couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t even notice the two kids running towards him. One of them yelled something and the girl leaped onto the hornet. It took off, still holding him in its claws and he never stopped laughing.
“Diane, jump on the hornet now! Use your rapier to stab into its back and hold on!”
“What? Are you crazy? That thing is huge and disgusting!”
“So what? It’s better than the direwolves! Don’t worry, I have a plan! We will use the hornets to get out of here!”
Diane looked at the massive bug with absolute disgust. The other two hornets had fled back to the mountain at the sound of the dire wolves’ approach. This last one was too distracted with its prey to notice the incoming threat.
As the chorus of howls rose in volume behind her, she sprinted and leapt onto the giant hornet’s back, stabbing down with her rapier. The point of the blade hits its carapace and bent, denting the chitin but otherwise failing to pierce it.
“Shit I need more power!”
She closed her eyes as the hornet rose in the air. She focused her mana into her rapier and stabbed again. The blade pierced the chitin and lodged into the muscle beneath, helping her to hang on.
“Thistle! Thistleeee!!!!”
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine! Just no matter what, hold on!”
The pack of dire wolves erupted from the brush and Thistleman promptly disappeared back into the foliage, heading towards the mountain.
Tears start filling her eyes and Diane was gripped by an indescribable anger. She was angry at everything, but most of all, she was angry at herself for being so weak. She could feel the surge of rage filling her, energizing her. Her muscles began to tremble in anticipation. She just wanted to destroy them all.
Thistleman cursed to himself as he ran from the dire wolves, leading them to the mountain.
“Devils Sight!”
His eyes focused on the hornet carrying Diane. He could also see a young man, oozing blood and laughing to himself. At the very least, he was thankful for that idiot giving Diane a way out of this mess. He was having incredible difficulty coming up with a way to not only lose the dire wolves, but to do so in a way which didn’t harm anyone or anything. He didn’t want to experience the more severe consequences of violating the core tenets of his contract. Just breaking a small order hurt more than enough, and he was still so far from the zenith of his power.
Thistleman leaped over a large fallen tree, not too worried about keeping up appearances since he was out of sight of Diane. He looked back, and could see the drool flying out of the dire wolves as they chased him down.
Thistleman shook his head and continued his pursuit.
Diane could see the cliff coming in to sharp relief as the giant hornet approached it. Two other hornets flew in low for a moment, a strange powder dusting off their wings. As soon as they got close enough, she would finish off this hornet and get back onto solid ground, killing any others that got in her way.
Before she could execute her plan, a massive swarm lifted off from the ground, covered in blood from a recent feeding frenzy. More began to erupt from the cliff. The powder she had seen carried a warning pheromone that the hive was under threat.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
However, the fury was already taking hold of Diane. A minute earlier, and she would have been lost in fear… but now, her plan was just to kill. She held on tight to her rapier as the wind started to pick, causing her hair to unravel and flow behind her. A black and red aura began to cloak her body.
She grabbed onto a wing joint and pulled her blade out of the hornet’s back, before stabbing it in the eye, piercing its skull and brain. The giant hornet began to descend rapidly. However, Diane didn’t want to land… not yet. A the swarm began to thicken and fly towards her, she leaped off the back of the hornet, stabbing straight into the mouth of another hornet. The blood started to rain down.
She started to smile, a mad laugh escaping her lips. Another hornet was coming up from below. Perfect, it would help her ride higher into the skies!
Thistleman saw the massive swarm rising in the distance. This was bad, really bad. Even with the dire wolves as a distraction, there were far too many hornets. No matter how much mana he provided to Diane, eventually they would swarm over her, and she would be torn to pieces. The dire wolves would have no problems killing large numbers of hornets, but they would be nowhere near fast enough.
Shit! What do I do?
As he brought the dire wolf pack close to the hornet’s nest, he could see Diane leaping between hornets in the sky, dropping them like flies. The smell of fresh blood excited the pack into a frenzy.
“Warp.”
Thistleman disappeared from in front of him, but the dire wolves didn’t worry about it for a moment. Now they had new prey. One of the wolves sprinted up the side of a large tree, leaping off of it and snatching a hornet out of the air. The wolf was easily twice its size, and the hornet came crashing to the ground. With a single, precise bite, the dire wolf tore the head off the hornet. Immediately, the other dire wolves started to do the same, methodically ripping giant hornets from the air and beheading them. Swarms of hornets began to descend in a desperate defense against the wolves. Giant hornet larvae were a delicacy to the dire wolves, and if they made it into the nest, without a doubt all the larvae would get eaten, the queen would be killed, and the hive would die off.
These were not, however, Thistleman’s concerns. He needed to help Diane.
An extraordinarily sharp pain cut through his shoulder. His eyes, wide, Thistleman looked but couldn’t see a wound.
“What the…?”
He doubled over, the pain much worse. Diane saw him and, distracted, the claws from one of the hornets cut through her shoulder. He couldn’t imagine what he would suffer if she died, but that pain… he’d never felt anything like it before. An absolute, piercing, unstoppable pain. The consequences of breaking his contract scared him.
Then… he had a realization. He could still help Diane without killing, and he could also do so without any “demonplay”, as she had once put it. He simply could be both—a demon and her little peasant. But… he also wanted her dead. He wanted out. Or did he? Fulfilling the contract meant he would keep his life, but then, did that mean that failing it would….?
“AHHHHH, DAMN IT ALL! Here we go!” He’d made his decision. Her will, her authority, he would accept it as absolute.
Diane Culaine, Master of Demons, don’t let me down!
“Hall of Mirrors, I call upon you, and cast my vision in perfect clarity. Mirror Image! Warp! By the art of the skies, unbounded by law, I defy you! Levitation!”
A perfect copy of Thistleman appeared before him, before he disappeared high into the sky above the mountain. Now for the finale. There was one trait all creatures shared and that was fear. If this failed then nothing would work. He would release his aura and, with it, a cloud of powerful miasma. He had never seen a creature that didn’t flee from his approach when his powers were unleashed.
“From the farthest pits of hell, I call upon the powers of shadow and darkness! Show my true form and unleash despair!”
His body quickly morphed, its height rapidly increasing and mass returning to his formerly scrawny limbs as a massive fog of miasma began to explode from his body. The Demon Lord of Destruction was making an appearance.
The pain in her shoulder was intense but Diane couldn’t let up now. She couldn’t die. Thistle was waiting for her down below.
She managed the leap on top of another hornet, stabbing it through the head. She was afraid, and was losing blood quickly. She couldn’t keep this up. She felt a burning sensation in her chest. It was something she had never experienced before and caused her to double over in pain, holding tightly onto the giant hornet’s falling corpse.
On her chest, the mark began to glow and spread. She had been accepted as the master of a contract, her new status seared into her flesh. From the seal, she could feel an overwhelming power and a sea of emotion. She looked up to see a huge, dark cloud, growing and spinning faster and faster. An aura, dark and terrible, rained down on the creatures below. The hornets, the direwolves, even the bugs and birds, all of them were fleeing .
“PITIFUL CREATURES! WHO DARES TO STAND IN THE PRESENCE OF ONE WHO I HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED AS WORTHY OF BEING MY MASTER? BEGONE, OR FACE THINE END!”
The air and earth shook at the proclamation and large boulders came loose, tumbling down the mountain. The authority of the first and eldest Demon Lord, even in his weakened state, was not something any ordinary creature could look down upon or face.
Diane’s vision was becoming blurry, and she could barely see the outline of the being at the center of the maelstrom. She couldn’t hold on anymore and passed out.
----------------------------------------
Diane woke up a short while later. Night had fallen and she was next to a small fire. Her shoulder had some fresh bandages around it, and Haraldr was lying nearby, also patched up. Thistleman worked fervently at the pot over the fire.
She was about to sit up and speak, when Thistleman held up a finger to shush her.
“Save your energy. You’re really hurt.”
Both of them were gravely injured and wouldn’t survive a rough journey back into town. However, Thistleman was in the process of attempting to make a healing brew.
The moment he saw the first bubble rise, he pulled the pot off the heat. Then, he took out the tonba berry paste he had made and mixed it with the brew. He breathed a sigh of relief it turned a light pink color.
“Alright, Diane, relax. It’s going to be a little warm.”
“Ok. I trust you.”
She winced a little when the brew was poured on her shoulder, but then started to relax as the pain faded.
“That… feels a lot better. Since when did you learn to make potions?”
“I… I saw someone doing it when I was young. I was just trying to improvise from what I saw.”
That wasn’t a lie. He had seen someone working on potions when he was young. Over ten thousand years ago.
“Ok, seems I have a bit left over. Not the strongest stuff, but it will save his life.”
He walked over and poured the potion on Haraldr’s numerous wounds. Some of them started to close over a little, and a very thin membrane of skin covered the larger gashes. His labored breathing stabilized.
“Alright, he should be fine to be moved now. Diane, can you walk?”
“Y-yes, I should be fine!”
She carefully stood up and made sure not to move her damaged shoulder too much. In the darkness, they carefully and quietly made their way back into town.