Escadril’s dead was probably the last thing Milaro expected Sarila to say. He kept his eyes locked on her, schooling his face. Despite her words, something still felt off.
“He’s dead?” he asked, keeping his tone as even as possible.
“Yes,” she said, a slight hitch in her voice, “he’s gone...”
She almost sounded like she was asking a question, and Milaro was taken aback. That was unexpected. Escadril should have lived for another decade or two. He was just rotting in place. It might have been eating away at him since his life force was so low, but still... he should have had years left in him, not weeks.
Nishpa seemed most distraught. Probably because she’d been one of the primary initial healers attending him. “What happened? How did it worsen? Was it something else we overlooked?”
Sarila’s eyes clouded over even more, and she sighed, looking from Nishpa to Milaro. “He died, all right. I’m not exactly proud of it.” But it seemed like she was proud of it.
Milaro put everything he could into not showing his disbelief, in to controlling his expression. He began examining the odd sensations surrounding her in more detail. It wasn’t like an aura or magic leakage, but more like a sensation the web was subtly picking up.
Nishpa was fine, just as he expected, just as she always was. Sarila, on the other hand, felt off. Not enough to set off alarms from the system, but definitely enough to make it hesitant. Sarila had never visited his palace before, not with Escadril or on her own. He couldn’t tell if this was her or the result of her coming into contact with the security web.
Which didn’t really matter, because the security web was programmed, for want of a better word, with being able to identify potential threats. It hadn’t quite pushed her over the edge yet, but it was wary. But the juxtaposition of signals it was sending to him was concerning. He hadn’t experienced this before.
Nishpa, meanwhile, had placed herself in between Sarila and Milaro, and was looking at the celosia with some confusion. She seemed paler than usual, and as her bark was very similar to a birch tree, it was already fairly pale. Was she sick as well?
“Are you feeling quite all right?” Nishpa asked. There was genuine worry in her voice. Nishpa had known Sarila for centuries, if not very well, at least somewhat well. They hadn’t been close, not like Milaro’s wife and her, but they had known each other.
“Oh yes,” Sarila said, “I’m fine.” And almost as an afterthought, she added, “Well, considering Escadril is dead.”
Milaro couldn’t help it. He narrowed his eyes. The cadence was off. There was no true emotion coming from her. He could feel it. Sometimes being a mind mage was annoying. This time, it helped him pinpoint that Sarila was indeed emoting her actual feelings, which made no sense.
He’d visited them in their home several times over many years, and she always seemed to be a loving companion, not his original wife. Emilin had died under strange circumstances in a brief skirmish on the outskirts of their empire. Sarila came along. Oh, a few decades later, but not immediately.
Milaro frowned, watching her. He could sense from his mind scan that she was 100% the person he knew and had known, had interacted with for the past few centuries, but there was something different about her this time. She offered him a wan smile, and he could tell that she was still pretending. She thought she still had them hooked, which gave Nishpa and him a slight advantage because he wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. All he knew was that Escadril shouldn’t have died for a good few years yet. He’d been dying, not dead.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Sarila. I don’t quite know what to say,” Milaro said. Nishpa flashed him a very brief look of surprise before she schooled her face and caught on to, well, perhaps some of what he was doing.
Nispha played along. “I’m so sorry. I was shocked. I wasn’t expecting him to die for quite some time. His mind was so healthy.”
There was a flash of something that passed through Sarila’s eyes that he couldn’t quite read, but Milaro was certain more than ever that Sarila wasn’t their friend. He just had to figure out for how long that had been the case and just what he could do to combat her here. He very slowly began to pull some of the power reserves and feed them into the web, strengthening it further. He needed more of a read on her, more of something without actually being invasive, since he was fairly certain that him asking to rifle through her thoughts would be perceived as hostile... he had to figure out a different option.
“Do you want a seat?” Nishpa said, flitting back and forth, keeping herself in between Milaro and the Salosier.
There was an ever-so-brief scowl that passed over Sarila’s face, and she shook her head. “No, I...” And then she laughed. It was a cold, cutting sound that ripped through the underlying white noise in the room. It was derisive, full of hatred, full of something that shouldn’t belong in laughter.
“Do you guys have any, any idea how complex a task it has been to stay in plain sight all these years?” Her voice had changed, the timbre of it completely different now.
“What do you mean?” Nishpa said, although Milaro was quite certain that Nishpa was just stalling for time. He could feel people running toward the room, the slight thrum of the webbing giving out an ever-so-faint warning.
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“What do I mean? You know what I mean. You can tell. I can feel it. There’s something that senses other in here. I’m surprised you couldn’t sense it immediately, Milaro. Getting a little stodgy in your old age?”
Milaro resisted the urge to react, knowing it was exactly what she’d planned for. He fed more power into the web, and was now certain that this was the Sarila she’d always been. The mask she’d been wearing had simply been too good.
“Are you waiting for something?” she asked, but then shook her head with a chuckle. “It doesn’t really matter.” She shrugged, reached her hands up, and flexed her shoulders. “We can get down to it shortly. Ahhh I get it... You feel like you need to understand me, don’t you? That’s why you guys will always lose.”
Nishpa couldn’t suppress the slight gasp that escaped her.
“See, I knew it.” Sarila stretched her arms out and cracked her neck from side to side, which was a very odd movement for a literal tree person. “What you don’t understand is that I don’t care if you understand me. I don’t need that sort of validation from you because I believe in what I’m doing, and I know that I’m right.”
Without any warning or telegraphing, she pushed a wall of force out from her. She obviously hadn’t quite understood what the security web did because her magic was shut down almost as soon as she initiated it. She scowled. Nishpa and Milaro managed to put distance between themselves just as Hilrick and Nordon, Milaro’s grandsons, burst into the room.
“Grandfather, if she’s... oh, I guess you know,” Nordon said, his words petering off as he realized what was happening.
“Yes,” Milaro echoed, “we definitely know.”
Sarila crunched down on something in her mouth, and Milaro felt the sense of power swell.
“Watch out,” he said.
“We’re not blind or dumb,” Nordon yelled. “We can feel it too.”
It was a wave of anti-growth magic that withered the table directly in front of her. Nishpa barely got out of the way of the wave force before the web hit in. The web was designed to protect anybody secured within it from potential harmful attacks within the boundaries of it. But the force with which Sarila was able to cast her magic overwhelmed it ever so slightly on initiation. She sent out a force wave again. It was like she had backup generators, helping her push out so much power. Hilrick and Nordon countered ever so slightly, breaking it before it reached Nishpa and Milaro. Even though the webbing stepped in to help, that was when the dam broke.
Nishpa fired back several force spells of her own while Sarila peppered force bullets all around, trying to break through the defenses of the web. Overall, if he hadn’t just enforced them, those bullets probably would have cut through the weakness. At least some of them would have. And Milaro didn’t like to think what the damage would have done. He had no idea what was contained in them. He activated the web’s ability to analyze and had it suck in several of the bullets. He needed to know what they were up against. But even so, he still had to put more power into the webbing and actually reach into his reserves to repel some of the attacks himself.
Sarila flung more and more power at them, and then the black smoke that had permeated her eyes began to spill down her body. It didn’t change her look. This was not an illusion, nor was it a parasite trick. She was a hundred percent a Salosier. He frowned and watched as the smoky black screen began to form into smoky black looking dog-like creatures that stood about three feet from the ground. And when they opened their shadow mouths, he could see rows of serrated teeth. These were things the webbing wasn’t designed to keep out. They registered for all intents and purposes, as animals.
The vicious shadow dogs began to bolt around the room toward his grandsons, whom he wasn’t particularly worried about. He knew they were perfectly combat-capable. And toward Nishpa, who hovered enough up off the ground that even with their giant jumps they couldn’t reach her. And for him. All he had to do was apply a heavy dose of body armor around his form, and they couldn’t penetrate it. But it did sap a lot of mana and energy, and some concentration. With a few of them set on attacking him, it meant his attention was already divided.
For a few precious moments, it left Sarila free to set up her incantations while they were preoccupied with the shadow dogs.
Two for Nishpa and two for Milaro. One each for his grandsons.
The creatures locked on to one of Milaro’s arms and, while not penetrating through to the flesh, he had to push a lot of energy and power into his shielding to make sure that they didn’t penetrate his flesh. He didn’t think he was going to like what happened to him if the dog’s teeth got through. Something black and sludge like oozed out of their mouths. That was an infection waiting to seep into the bloodstream if he ever saw it.
However, even worse than that, it began to give him suspicions that perhaps the injury Escadril had retained from their original attacks when they went to retrieve the book wasn’t actually what killed him. It made him wonder just how depraved Sarila was. He remembered seeing fading bite marks in Escadril’s wounds, and had assumed it came from the fight. But now, he was no longer so sure.
Fighting off the dogs and splitting his attention was difficult, but just as he had taught Quinn to do, Milaro was also a master of splitting his attention. Nishpa, high enough above them that she could fire down her attacks on the offending Salosier, wasn’t bothered by the dogs even if they kept jumping up at where she was. Her distracting attacks were enough that Sarila couldn’t finish her incantations. Every time the vicious black smoke began to bubble up like a strange concoction in a cauldron, Nishpa managed to interrupt her.
Over and over again she interrupted her as Milaro took care of the shadow hounds. He kept a watch, making sure she was fine and monitoring the progress being made. All the while using pinpoint offensive force and ice attacks to slice through the shadow beasts and siphon off the energy that maintained their form.
Nordon and Hilrick managed to defeat their own pups and came over to help Milaro with the last two that’d belonged to Nishpa.
Even with that, it happened too fast for Milaro to register and react to.
Sarila, angry, annoyed, and frustrated at the fact that Nishpa had successfully interrupted every single one of the incantations since she cast the dogs, finally lost her temper.
Power exploded out from her in a massive wave that hit Nishpa dead on with explosive force.
Milaro heard the wet thud as it rocketed into his friend, and he scrambled to catch her while calling down as much power as he could from the web and to squash Sarila in front of him. The blast hit her with such force the ground trembled. But he didn’t even look at his handiwork. He no longer cared if she was still alive for questioning.
At the same moment, Quinn, Aradie, and Malakai burst through the door, panting, just in time to see Nishpa fall into Milaro’s outstretched arms.