Lyrazesque, Moon Demoness of the Fallen Plains, Scourge of Heckran, and currently Holder of the Seat of Ayre, stood before the hidden Waystone 20 crosses south of her palace. She was still getting used to maneuvering the golem’s body, its limbs a bit stiffer than her own true demon form, and its face lacking all the fierceness of her red-and-white features/visage. But she surmised that this was a good thing, given what she needed to accomplish.
Even though she had forced the powers that controlled the Great Cities into extremely unfavorable terms centuries ago, Lyra had no doubt that the descendants of those shamed men had spent the intervening time seeking to gain a leg up on her. That probably included all manner of detection runes at regular intervals along the border of her territory and further inland. They did not trust her intent, and she couldn’t blame them, given what she had done. But that is why she has sent her daughter into their courts, to act as her eyes and ears. And that project had been an unqualified success.
Lyra placed her palm on the Waystone and began to channel magick from her body, which was secured behind countless wards within the upper floors of her Keep overlooking the Vastness, the ocean that separated the Continent from the Isles Beyond and perhaps other continents past that. Her golem had magick of its own, but only in sufficient quantities to dispatch the regular flora and fauna she predicted she would encounter on her short trek to Guardial.
“Open the Way to Guardial,” she said in a language that was not of this realm. The stone shimmered in response, and Lyra felt a tiny portion of her mana reserves discharge with her words. This was ancient magick known only to a few in the modern ave, and thankfully the others were now long dead.
She stepped forward into the portal, and felt an odd twinge reverberate through the golem as she was pulled into the Waystone. Most of her previous voyages through the Stones were in yet a different form, and those journeys did not impact her in the slightest.
This was not one of those times. Instead, Lyra felt her golem being twisted and pulled in multiple directions all at once, and at the same time, she felt her mind split, as if one part was inside the first Stone, one was inside the destination Stone, and one part was back in her Keep. It was not a pleasant feeling.
Thankfully, the whole ordeal was over rather quickly, even relative to a nearly immortal demoness such as herself, and the next thing Lyra knew, her golem was being thrown out of the Guardial Stone like a rag doll. She regained her bearings in time to brace her fall on the soft grass, executing a rather magnificent back handspring to return to her feet.
Looking up to survey her surroundings, Lyra unfortunately locked eyes with a young girl, no older than 18, foraging nearby. She saw the girl’s body start to shake, and within seconds, Lyra was on her, like a lyone smothering its prey. But before she could sunder the veins in the human’s neck, a desperate please escaped her lips.
“Please, I’ll do anything,” the girl whimpered.
“Just what I needed to hear,” said Lyra. She drew blood from one of the golem’s fingertips and used it to mark a small sigil on the girl’s forehead.
“This binding magick will sting slightly less because you are so willing. Now, repeat after me: I bind my soul to your service.”
The girl repeated the words in the demon language, and her eyes began to glow until they were nothing but white. As the spell crescendoed, the poor human couldn’t help but let out a pitiful wail, as the chains formed around her soul. And then it was done, and Lyra had a new servant.
“Arise, young one. For you are born again.”
The girl did as she was told. It would be the first of many such times.
“My boon grants you extra strength and agility, especially at night. See that you don’t draw too attention to yourself though. That will be bad for both of us.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“Good. Now tell me, how fares the City of Guardial?”
The girl unfortunately was from a lower class than Lyra would have liked for a spy, but perhaps her lack of any noble blood would help her move about the city unnoticed. She recounted as much of the current political climate as she knew, especially the unrest growing in the lower tiers, as the current Magister’s corruption compounded for the benefit of the nobles and few else. And there were rumors that Porrezan’s economic aggression could soon make way for violence. Overall, it was all fairly boring, which is what Lyra was hoping to hear.
“And what of Lady Elara? How fares she?”
“I do not know,” said the girl. “She mostly keeps to herself on the High Tier. What whispers make their way down are few and far between.”
“I suppose that is to be expected. Now, I will make my way into the City in seven days’ time. This coin,” said Lyra, handing the girl a pouch, “should be enough for a spacious-but-not-extravagant room. Come find me in the Market when I arrive. You will know when and where. Until then, let this meeting fade into the back of your mind.”
She pressed her fingers onto the girl’s brow, forcing the memory of the encounter to dissolve like a waking dream. It would be almost an hour before the poor thing would come to, giving Lyra time enough for one last task near the Stone.
She dug a small hole with her bare hands, not wanting to waste any mana on such a trivial exercise. When it was large enough to hold a body, Lyra laid down inside, closed her eyes, and twisted her fingers. The golem’s form became clay once more, and from afar, she separated it into two, before returning her essence into one of the now two golems prone on the ground. She covered the duplicate with dirt, hoping not to have to use it anytime soon. But this redundancy would save her an innumerable amount of time if her current golem met an untimely end.
Satisfied that the refilled hole was sufficiently hidden, Lyra left her thrall and set off toward Porrezan, to make more preparations for the journey to come.
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Unlike its nearby neighbor, the Great City of Porrezan was not concerned with levels or tiers. Here, coin, not bloodline, ruled. As the grandest hub of trade in the Nine Dominions, fortunes could be wagered and lost before breakfast, if one was so careless or daring.
Lyra chuckled as she thought about the name the leaders of the Continent had once given themselves. There had been Nine Dominions once. And she supposed there still were. But three (or was it four?) fell within her territory on the northern end of the great landmass, and there was not much left of those that anyone would want to call a Dominion.
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She took a sip of the hot drink from small red cup in front of her. The proprietor of the little shop overlooking one of the hundreds of piers had called it “cofi,” and Lyra had to admit that it tasted delicious, a swirling mixture of dozens of different notes. Sure, she had peculiar taste buds as a demoness, but she always considered herself to have a refined palate for human food and drink in the time before she had been sealed. Now of course it was demon cuisine day and night, which lacked any subtlety and had grown a bit tiresome at some point. That was part of the reason she had wanted to set out on this journey in a traditional manner, to experience the portion of the Continent she had not conquered.
She closed her eyes for a moment and reached out for her daughter. The girl’s forearms were still slightly covered in muck from the excursion several days ago into a nearby swamp to fetch a dozen or so half-blind toads, one of Lyra’s favorite treats. If her daughter had uncovered this special link between them, she had hidden it deep inside her mind, but for now Lyra assumed that Elara did not know that anything that she learned seeped unconsciously into Lyra’s head as well. That included the means to fashion the module for the artificial friend Elara had created. A most impressive invention to be sure, but Lyra had hoped her daughter would have a proclivity to something more destructive. Perhaps it was something that could be gently discussed when she arrived.
The blast of a ship’s horn stirred Lyra from her spying session, and she left Elara to her cleaning and preparations. Downing the rest of the cofi in one sip, Lyra tossed a handful of gilnze on the table and made her way down to the booking hut at the end of the red pier.
“Good morning, miss,” said the weathered man behind the counter with salt and pepper hair. “What can I do for you today?”
“One ticket to Zanarkland, please,” said Lyra.
“Next ship headin’ that far south isn’t leaving for a spell, I’m afraid.”
The man pointed to the chalk-written schedule that hung on the wall behind him.
“I’m a bit early, I know,” she replied. “But still, I’d like to secure my passage now, just the same.”
The man looked her twice over, as if advance shipping arrangements were not something that frequently occurred here, before finally nodding.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “That will be three thousand gild, please.”
Lyra knew little of human commerce, as she left the specifics of trade in her lands to her finance ministers. But what she did know was that this man was trying to rip her off, to put it mildly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, resisting the urge to unleash all manner of hellfire on this pitiful soul. “Do I look like the type of woman who doesn’t know her ass from her brain? With that much coin, I could buy your entire company, and have enough leftover to buy your neighbor’s ships as well.
“Ha, that’s a good one!” croaked the man. “Was just teasin’ you. Been a bit boring here this morning. The fare’s two and a half gilver.”
“You have a peculiar sense of humor,” said Lyra. “But fine. Here you go.”
She slid the coins across the wooden counter, and the man grabbed them with his hand, which was noticeably missing its ring finger.
“Great,” he said, as he somehow worked the gilver up and down his incomplete set of digits, as if it were nothing.
“Is there a sad story there?” asked Lyra. “Or a tale of youthful indiscretion?” She ordinarily did not care one bit about any particular human, having slaughtered so many. But she felt oddly more mortal inside the golem’s body, and perhaps with that came a sense of sympathy for these pathetic creatures whose lives blinked in and out of existence in the time it took her to yawn.
“Both I’m afraid,” the man replied. “Perhaps I’ll tell you during the voyage, if the moment arises. Now, just need a name for the reservation if you won’t mind.”
He handed Lyra a quill pen and a form that contained a bunch of words she cared not to translate, with a blank line at the bottom, where she supposed her name was meant to be inserted.
Had she written her True Name, the man’s eyes would have burnt out in their sockets upon reading, which of course wouldn’t be helpful to anyone. So Lyra concentrated for a moment, drawing forth her daughter’s knowledge of letters, and scribbled something on the paper.
“Thank ye, kindly, Ms. Aryl, is it? Demona Aryl. Quiet a fanciful name if you ask me. And a tad dark. Are you from the Outskirts then?”
The Outskirts lay just on the human side of the border between Lyra’s northern Dominions and the rest of the Continent. For several generations, families had been trying to curry favor with her by naming their children in her honor. It was a particularly useless attempt, if she had to be honest, as she would much have preferred a first-born sacrifice, so she knew they were serious. But she surmised that the tradition was coming in handy now, if only a tiny bit.
“Yes, that’s right. It’s a hard land up there, but somehow, we get by.”
“Wouldn’t have thought it from the look of you. Your face sings a song of the western desert, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t, but I guess I’ll take the compliment. See you in a spell.”
Lyra walked away before the desire to tear off the man’s arms overwhelmed her, and instead retreated to the nearby inn to gather her things. Truth be told, she hadn’t needed to come here this early, as she doubted the ship’s manifest would fill up so quickly. But she wanted a few days to see how this particular City had fared in the intervening centuries, and also wanted to make her daughter wait a bit for her arrival. There was nothing like sparking a sense of dread into someone else.
With her small pack in toe, Lyra made her way out of Porrezan and onto the Via Emperato. The road system that stretched throughout the Continent looked relatively pristine compared to the last time she used it, which only reinforced her supposition that she had grown soft in her vicennial negotiations. If the rulers of the Cities had this much treasure to upkeep their roads, who knew how much else they had to spend? But that was an issue to raise at another time.
If she hurried, she could make it to the Sunken Wood by nightfall, through it by daybreak, and from there, it was a straight shot back to Guardial.
Lyra broke off into a run, but in a measured way. She knew from Elara’s studies that the Academy was particularly focused in the study of demonology and demon magick. And she had no doubt that at some point over the years, they had discovered a method to detect higher than normal incidences of demonic energy. She did not want any undue attention during her sojourn, which would risk an unnecessary confrontation.
Even at her reduced pace, she easily arrived at the edge of the Wood just as the sun fell under the horizon. For a being such as her, sleep was a fairly useless activity, and so she pressed on as the darkness enveloped her surroundings.
It was probably a bad decision, in retrospect. Because about two hours in, she heard the crunching of leaves and the deep breathes of a desperate creature approaching. Lyra stilled the golem to a halt, hoping that the artificial nature of her body would provide sufficient camouflage. But there was no hiding from the red-eyed giant boar that emerged from between the trees a few moments later.
It stood about half a span tall, with sharp tusks that looked like they had been used recently in a violent way. Its gaze darted back and forth, frantically searching for something, until finally it took a giant snort of air in through its nose. And then immediately locked eyes with Lyra.
She muttered a minor curse word that in her normal body would have summoned a sea of disgusting flies. Instead, she blinked and the knowledge of Elara’s hand-to-hand combat and animal physiology flowed to the forefront of her consciousness. In an instant, she knew the beast’s weak points and the most efficient way to exploit them. It was all just a matter of exec-
The boar sprung forward in a single leap and impaled one of its tusks into Lyra’s abdomen, and she screamed in pain.
Such a sensation, she had not felt it in ... well, at the moment, she could not recall when. This close to the animal, she realized it was no ordinary beast, but a yokai, the spawn of creatures from her realm who had crossed over to this world in the ancient past. She had helped vanquish many such monstrosities in her previous adventures, including right here in the Wood. And she would have kicked herself for forgetting such a thing, if the boar hadn’t lifted her off the ground.
Lyra focused the golem’s body, reminding herself that she wasn’t there, that this was merely a husk, and that it wasn’t really her blood that was dripping out of her side. But all that did was make the creature even angrier, and it broke into a charge, Lyra bouncing helplessly up and down on the tusk. But in the end, all she could do was watch as the yokai slammed her into the trunk of a giant Sunken tree, and the last thing Lyra remembered before she blacked out was the sound of her arm being obliterated into a thousand pieces.