The next morning the party left the Silver District and headed into the worst of the slums, Eris leading the way, onward toward the Inner Gate and the Old District. Like everything of Old Kingdom craft the Old Inner Walls of Katharos were enormous and foreboding; the citizenry were wary of living in their shadows. Soon the houses dilapidated. Any hint of nighttime fireflies or silver enchantments in the air disappeared as mundane lampposts broke from the side of the road, and no force of flood could wash away the cadaverous stench that pervaded every inch of the pavement.
Aletheia hopped over puddles. Streams trickled along the sidewalk. A man in poor attire was face-down in a miniature lake. Yet the storm fled as quickly as it came, and a gentle sun was out within a clear sky. The air was humid. Eris remembered well how much smoke and soot clogged the air of this place even during the day, and especially at night, but the rain had washed away much of the pollutants and particulates from the atmosphere, and except for the smell, each breath was almost clean. One small blessing.
Prostitutes were already on the prowl. Eris kept close to Rook, possessively.
“Aren’t they out early?” Aletheia asked.
“‘Tis never too early for some men,” Eris said.
“But there are guards…”
“You think they come to this place?”
The girl fell silent. The three of them looked less impressive with Eris’ glamor over them, their weapons and armor less rich, and they earned nothing more than suspicious stares from impoverished wastrels as they approached the distant walls. But it was daytime, and busy at that. With the exception of pickpockets there was little to be wary of.
Then at last they came to the end of the Regal Avenue, to the Inner Wall gatehouse. The gate itself was enormous—and closed. Large enough for a creature thirty feet tall to stride through, and no doubt they did at one time in the past. To the left and right the Oldwalls extended for miles unbroken.
No staircase up.
Beyond Eris saw the continuance of the road, and the overgrown ruins of the Outer Walls. The location Jason sent them to was located in the Old District; this was less recently abandoned than some others beyond, known collectively as the Outer Fields. The Fields had been reclaimed entirely by nature. Little remained but forest and plains of grass, the occasional ruin, and some brave settlers who farmed within. It was a place indistinguishable from the outside of Katharos except by the Oldwalls that framed its borders distantly, still forming a perimeter around where the ancient city once stood.
The Old District was still more urban than wilderness. There were plenty of buildings for malefactors to use as cover. Eris had very intentionally never visited it.
“Can you melt through the gate?” Aletheia asked. She tried to shake the bars, but they were bronze and solid and heavier than a mountain.
“I could,” Eris said, “yet one must wonder if those who closed this gate would prefer to keep it so.”
“She’s right,” Rook said. “The two districts are best kept separate.”
“Then again, it would be no tragedy if a swarm of carrion crawlers was let loose into the slums. They might be able to clean the place up.”
“Unneeded attention for us,” Rook said. “Can you levitate us over?”
“No,” Eris said. “I can, however, use real magic.”
Pyraz had left the impression of Blink in her Essence. Normally she would be cautious before attempting teleportation without proper instruction, but she had received some sense of the spell when he used it on her in the Dungeons of Pyrthos, and although she hadn’t practiced it, she was confident she could cast it with aid of her staff and arcane focus.
“Grab hold of me,” she commanded. Rook did so, but Aletheia hesitated.
“Are you sure you know how—”
“Of course I am sure. Pyraz taught me to do this.”
“You said teleportation was dangerous…”
“For you. For me, ‘tis perfectly safe, for I am powerful.”
It was a point of pride. She wanted to be impressive, to use magic effortlessly, to master spells as soon as they came to her. After needing rescue and falling within Pyraz’s shadow as a sorcerer she felt the need to reassert her power. A moment passed and Aletheia gave in, grabbing Eris by the arm.
She spotted a location on the ramparts far above them. They would drop several feet onto it from the air—it was tremendously high up, these walls at least fifty feet tall—then Blink again to the ground.
She recalled the shape of the spell. From a static position it was like the fifth line in a song, or the eighth letter in the alphabet; she knew it with all certainty, but to get to it, she had to repeat the steps as they were imparted to her. For Blink such a process was simple. She needed only to erase where they were standing and redraw them, in her mind, atop the wall. Then once she was done…
“Blink,” she commanded.
She closed her eyes.
Air rushed around her ears. She felt her hair pick up and drag behind head.
Aletheia screamed. Eris opened her eyes.
They were above the wall. Far above the wall, a hundred feet, plummeting back down to the ground on the other side.
She did it. She used Blink flawlessly.
…yet she had misjudged distances with her two tools for magical amplification in either hand.
Eris had no time to do anything but act; she still held her staff and she raised it in the air, weaving a net with her imagination, willing it to grab herself first, then Rook, and finally Aletheia right before she hit the ground. Arcane Semblance failed as she channeled all the mana she could through the staff to slow their falls.
She felt their weights strain against her mind. She gasped in pain…
And all three were set down gently on a road overgrown with grass.
Aletheia let out a small yelp again. Rook only panted. Eris righted herself, then made sure her hair looked well.
“There,” she said. “We are over.”
“Next time,” Rook said, taking her in an embrace around the shoulders, “I think I’ll find the stairs.”
“You did that on purpose?” Aletheia said.
“Of course I did,” Eris lied. “You act as though you have never fallen an inch before. I was never without control. Now pick yourself up.” She gazed forward. “We do not want to linger here after dark.”
----------------------------------------
From beyond the gate they were on a raised vantage point. Thus they saw the Old District. The Regal Avenue snaked downhill, through blocks of ruined homes, and everywhere sprouted trees between bricks. Vines covered apartment buildings. Old streets were turned to rivers. Eris wondered if this wasn’t the fate of any city, given time. Katharos was decomposing one district at a time, one century at a time.
The Mirror Factory was visible from some distance off. A low wall surrounded a square building on a hill, like a microscopic fortress. A forest surrounded it. The path to its gates was green and overgrown.
They plunged into the trees. Soon the sun disappeared behind the canopy. The streets were shrouded by leaves. When the Oldwalls fell out of view it was soon hard to imagine they were anywhere near civilization. It was almost serene, for those who didn’t know better. The ruins around them held the shape of a city like water in a glass: the container was nearly invisible, yet it was still recognizable as the remnant of a boulevard. Every toppled structure was strewn with moss. Every old statue draped with greenery of some kind. In a storm one could never go without shelter here, but its atmosphere was no different from the Sanguine Forest where Eris had met the owlbear, where they’d found the teleportation chamber. A chorus of birds followed them a mile down the path.
She liked it here. There was something serene and beautiful in nature taking back what man made. She liked to see civilization crumble, to imagine this same fate for all the cities of Esenia and Pyrthos most especially. But she knew well she was being deceived. The comfort she felt here was a trick. This was no place to enjoy.
“…what did you say lives here?” Aletheia asked as she eyed the trees nervously. They passed an ancient fountain, still filled with water, now blooming with green invaders.
“Demons, evidently,” Eris said.
“Knights come here to hunt fugitives,” Rook said. “Other highwaymen, too. There are chimeras, kobolds and hobgoblins especially, but things far worse come out at night.”
“Like Eris?” Aletheia said.
“Even worse than me,” Eris said.
The gates to the Mirror Factory were left open. Time had destroyed the walls. Some of the trees within their perimeter had been cut recently, but rotted logs were left in place on the ground. They followed the grass-covered road all the way to the front door of the factory.
Two huge bronze doors chained shut.. They stepped back to appraise the factory itself: it looked more like a warehouse, large and windowless. The construction was simple brick, and while vines covered its walls, it was but centuries—rather than millennia—old.
“Leave it to Jason to think a place like this could be turned into a business,” Rook said. He walked toward a trough filled with rainwater to wash his face.
“Can you feel it?” Aletheia said to Eris.
“You ask a great many questions,” Eris replied.
Aletheia hung her head. “I’m curious.”
“You are ignorant.”
“Everyone is, I just admit it.”
Eris frowned. In fact she did feel it—she had been concentrating. There was something here she didn’t recognize, but she wasn’t certain what. It wasn’t like Lord Arqa’s Essence. It was…
“Come here!” Rook shouted. He was leaning over the trough now, a wooden thing set out for pack animals by the logs.
Aletheia rushed to his side. Eris was less swift, but came to him eventually. She was still thinking, right up until she came behind his shoulder and saw.
The water was pink. Like a cloudy sky during sunset. Rook picked up a stick and probed its surface, and sure enough it was water like any other…only dyed.
“…do you think it’s safe to drink?” Rook said.
Her head was near his. She looked into his eyes. “There is only one way to know for certain.”
He smiled at her and pushed her to the side. “Jason said things would be wrong here. The demon taints the water?”
Eris played with her hair while she thought over the possibilities. In the past the demons Eris had encountered leaked mana, so that elektron plants colonized the sites of their hauntings. She saw no such plants here. She felt nothing of the kind, either. There was the mana in the air, and something else, but…
She withdrew her waterskin. The bottle was opaque, so she poured out a small bit.
The water wasn’t pink, but bright orange. She went back to the trough—
The water in the trough was orange. A few moments later it darkened to green. Another ounce from the bottle…
The water was green.
Eris took a taste from her waterskin, presuming it to be safe. It was the same as it ever was. Then she used Hydropneumonic Purification on the trough—but to no effect.
“This is a dread haunting indeed,” Rook said, “the water supply is chameloning.”
“Do not be an idiot,” Eris said. “Challenging, I know, yet let me think.” She had an idea. “Do you have a torch?”
“A torch?” Rook asked.
“A piece of wood with which one can make flames.”
“I’m not familiar with the concept.”
“When I spoke of idiocy…”
He smiled at her. “Why would I bring torches, when I have you and Aletheia?”
“We could be in bad moods,” Aletheia said.
“Oh. Well. Shows me. But the answer is still no.”
Eris regretted asking already. Instead she picked up a stick off the ground. She cast a quick spell to ignite the tip; a gust of green fire overtook the wood, but once the magic was gone a normal red flame burned in its place.
…or it should have. For a moment the fire was red. Then it went green again, as if one of Eris’ spells. Then yellow. Then orange. Then blue. Then violet. Et cetera. Every color, just as the water, pulsating, drifting like the aurora in the aether.
Eris snuffed the fire out.
“This ‘demon’ is no creature like those we have encountered in our travels before,” Eris said. “I believe it has infected this place; the air, the water, the fire that crosses its threshold. It perverts these things in small ways. Its Essence is in the very earth around us—not within some incorporeal shade of a body, as Arqa, or the demon I encountered in Nanos.”
“But it’s still a demon?” Rook said.
“You and I are animals of the corporeal world,” Eris said. “And so too is a giant clam. You are mistaken to think all creatures of the aether must bear resemblance to one another. A ‘demon’ is nothing more than a being of mana; I think we have discovered a new expression of its kind.”
“Can we still banish it?”
“Of course I can banish it. I think. Yet eerie as it may be to have our water change color, and perhaps there will be more effects as we enter the factory, I do not believe this demon can harm us directly—nor am I certain it would possess the desire to do.”
He inspected the factory’s front door, its bronze gates, and said, “One day you’ll need to teach the two of us all this. So you don’t need to explain it aloud so often.”
“Impossible,” Eris said. “You would never understand. Regardless a duke does not need to know such things.”
“I do,” Aletheia said.
Eris frowned at her. “Then ‘one day’ I shall give you a reading list.”
Rook pulled at the door’s chain, held by a lock at its center. He showed it to Eris. The mechanism was old, very old, pitted and rusted and likely inoperable. She took it in her palm and let the arcane focus levitate over her hand, then tapped a closed fist with the staff. Ash poured from between her fingers as she used Disintegrate.
The chain fell loose to the sides. Rook tugged at a knocker to pull the door ajar—
A latch caught on the other side.
He frowned. “There’s no lock on this side.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He was right. Eris saw no mechanism. There could be a latch beyond, but…she glanced at him. “Jason said he had not been inside. How might the door have been chained outside, yet latched within?”
“Someone never left,” Rook guessed.
“Or there is some other way in,” Eris said. “Let us look around before we storm into a lair of bandits.”
So look around they did. They found no side entrances or emergency escapes, which seemed quite the fire hazard in a building without windows. Thick trees grew all around the foundation. Aletheia was the one who spotted a crawl space under the buildings, but none in the party save her were slender enough to fit.
“Do you think it leads inside?” she said. “Maybe to a basement?”
“You could turn me into a mouse and the two of us could check,” Rook said to Eris.
Eris considered this. “Very well. Be still.” She raised her staff, but he grabbed her a moment later.
“I was joking,” he said. “How long has this building been here? At least a century? Whoever locked that door is likely gone, if it wasn’t the owners. If it isn’t, I’d guess it a feral child, a goblin, a kobold—something slender. No reason not to take the front door.”
“‘Tis less fun, that is some reason,” Eris said. “But very well.”
She wielded the arcane focus to extend her Essence beyond the doors. She could not use her imagination to feel what she could not see, but she did not need to feel an object to move it. With closed eyes she attempted to lift the latch on the other side, to allow the door to open. It was like standing in a dark room at midnight while she searched for an exit. Reaching out for walls that weren’t there. Picturing different layouts, applying focused energy with help from the staff to draw more mana from the air, until…
Something clattered on the other side. Rook pulled at the door again—and this time it opened.
“I’m surprised,” Rook said. He peeked through. Eris had expected the other side to be pitch black, but in fact it was bright as daylight. The factory did have windows: skylights. Countless skylights. He grinned back at her. “I thought you would have blown the whole wall down. More fun.”
“More fun,” she said, “but less challenging. The two must be taken together.”
She stepped through the doors.
A lobby. She was confronted by the fifteen-foot-tall statue of a balding, greasy, and gelatinous man. At his feet was an inscription that read NIKOLAI MORONOS. Eris loathed the ugly in general, but it was a rare specimen who could make her shudder from so far beyond the grave. Nikolai Moronos was such a man.
An archway to her right led into another room. This bubbled with light. She saw the back of a mirror—and heard a voice. She stopped to listen when Rook pulled her into cover at the archway’s side, under the gaze of Moronos’ statue.
“Thehy whant to destrahct yhou, dhont thehy?” it might have been a woman, but its timbre was like dust given speech. She used an Elvish dialect of Regal. “Nho! Ihm noht listehning!”
Soft footsteps. Eris glanced around the corner.
It was a showroom. Four large mirrors with gilt borders were attached to the walls, while nine more hung suspended from nearly-invisible wires that ran up to the ceiling.
Patrolling about the showroom’s center, gazing at herself in each mirror, was an elf. She was frail and thin and emaciated and skeletonized, wearing nothing more than the tattered rags of a white dress so long ruined that it left her nearly naked. Eris had seen beggars starve, seen famine and hunger first hand and felt it herself, and even so she had never beheld a creature so utterly boney. This elf had not eaten in decades.
Her hair was dark and matted and receding. Her skin was pitted with holes and splotched like an old human. Her ears were sagged. Yet she was no orc; her eyes were still white.
She stopped in front of a mirror and gazed into herself. A fingernail five inches long trailed across her cheek, a cheek so sunken and sallow and with skin so thin and stretched to tightly across the bone that even a poke from a pinky might tear it open, but she smiled at herself.
“Yhour beauthy ihs eternhal.”
Eris was entranced as this most disgusting of all creatures proceeded to admire its own body. Posing before the mirrors. Twirling herself and lifting up the strands of cloth about her waist which covered nothing. Turning around and arching her back, to admire a curvature that no longer existed, almost like…
Almost like Eris did. That was a horrifying thought.
The rest of the party stared with her. Their entrance hadn’t been quiet, and they were hardly out of sight, but this elf paid them no attention, so transfixed was she on herself. For another minute she danced around the showroom like an anorexic ballerina on the tip of her toes, never losing sight of her reflection, until—
Eris wasn’t certain. Nothing seemed to change at all, but the elf fell to her knees before a mirror and began to sob dry tears. She cried out in pain.
“Why? Why tahke me awahy? Gihve mhe backh! Iht isnt night yeht! Givhe mhe backh!”
The party watched her cry on the floor. Somehow she was more disgusting than any other number of horrors Eris had seen over the course of years—and something so easily killed, too.
No. She wasn’t disgusted. She was revolted.
“Is that the demon?” Rook whispered.
“No,” Eris muttered with contempt.
“We should kill it,” Aletheia said.
“She may know something,” Rook said. “How—how does it live like this?”
Eris sighed. “Elves do not need to eat to stay alive, nor sleep, nor drink, nor even breathe. Yet if they forgo such things…”
The elf still screeched on the floor. “Givhe mhe backh! Givhe mhe backh!”
Aletheia drew her sword and stepped into the open. Rook grabbed her, saying, “We might be able to help her—Aletheia!”
But she pulled away. “Get up!” she said.
The elf didn’t listen until Aletheia came very close. Then she looked up, and with a look of absolute confusion she said, “Havhe yhou cohme to seeh mhe?”
Eris was proud of the girl for having the courage to commit this act of homicide, and on a deserving victim too. Perhaps she was having a good influence after all. But as she came within striking distance of the elf she gazed into one of the mirrors—and she screamed at what she saw. She scrambled back to Rook, nearly dropping her sword, and he grabbed her by the waist like a wild dog.
Eris looked at one of the gilt-bordered mirrors. For a moment she saw herself and the room reflected. The elf on the ground started sobbing again, yet a few seconds later it looked up at the glass again, and it touched the surface, and it gazed into itself once more.
“Thehre! Thehre!”
Just as Eris was about to look back to the room as it was, she saw a shadow move in the reflection. She caught it, a black, amorphous shape descending onto Rook, and so she turned to catch it—
But there was nothing there. The room was bright. Rook was comforting Aletheia, who had seen something terrible herself. The elf was back to admiring her reflection. Eris gazed at the mirror nearest to her once more…
Herself again, for a moment. And then…her hair turned white. Her skin yellow. Her muscles lost their definition. Her skin became flabby and wrinkled. She became the woman she saw in Aletheia’s locket, the miserable, withered, aged creature, and for a brief time her heart raced as her mind was deceived—
But she knew what was happening. She looked away. Aletheia gasped again, and Rook was staring into a mirror of his own, eyes wide.
“Do not look in the mirrors!” Eris said. “The demon tries to drive us away, it shows us what we fear. Cover your eyes if you must. This just the start of its tricks.” She stormed to the place where the elf kneeled, lowering and lifting herself, flexing her shoulders to admire—what? The shape of her bones, perhaps? “You!” Eris said. “Stop this. I said stop!”
The elf did not listen. She continued the repulsive motion until Eris grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. Her skin was cold to the touch and lacked all elasticity, like paper wrapped around bone. She shrieked when her head was forced away from herself. Now she acknowledged Eris’ existence, but she returned to the mirror at once. Eris nearly killed her then—but she needed to know something.
“You linger here—you have for decades, haven’t you? You wish only to see yourself? How, when this room is cursed, and you cannot see yourself?”
“Yhou seeh mhe? Isnt mhe bueatifhul? I alwahys cahn seeh mhe except aht night, ohnly aht night.”
“You were sobbing not seconds ago, and ‘tis not night!”
“Night cahme ihn, night cohmes ihn; sometihmes lohng, sometihmes shorht; nohw day ihs backh.”
Eris turned to her party. Rook had covered Aletheia’s eyes and himself was trying not to look into one mirror, then another, but they were everywhere around them in this room. She said his name and earned his attention thusly. “She is mad beyond rescue. If I want peace for my ritual then she must be dispatched.”
He closed his eyes and sighed, but nodded. He drew his sword—
The sky darkened. Slowly, like when a stormcloud moves in overhead, except complete. The sunlight became weaker and weaker and weaker with each second until there was no light left at all. The showroom was left in darkness.
----------------------------------------
“Nho! Nho, nho, nho! Brihng it bachk! Brihng it backh! Yhou senht it awayh! Nho! Nho!”
She wailed in screeches worse than death. Eris had enough. She prepared a quick spell of fire in her palm to light up the darkness, yet even as she saw the flame in her hand flickering there like a miniature sun, no light extended outward. She could not see anything except the point of that conjured flame.
The elf attacked her. She screamed nonsense, raving, blaming Eris for darkening the mirrors, and even as she was pulled to the ground by the skeletal shape, she was blind. Her staff clattered to her side.
Fingernails scraped down her torso and across her legs. Emaciated as she was this elf was still an elf and she was faster and stronger than she looked, strong enough to pin a human down. Eris brought her fire to where she thought the elf’s head would be and there was a brief flare at the point of impact and the elf screamed again, but the onslaught continued.
“Help me!” Eris shouted.
“I can’t see!” Rook shouted, some feet off.
Aletheia sent an arcane light into the air, golden and glowing overhead, but just like Eris’ flame it gave off no light beyond itself. Eris swore and tried to grab hold of the elf to use Disintegration, but each time she did the disgusting creature pulled away, or headbutted her, or bit her to force her to let go, so she did the only other thing that came to mind:
She let the arcane focus fall into her left hand, no longer honing energy, and she brought it against the elf’s head like a rock. The elf screamed as Eris beat her with it again and again, and once she had reversed their positions, once she was the one on top, she used Disintegrate on the elf’s head—
But an elf was not so easily defeated. Even in her mad, starving state, she still had magic, and a blast of energy blew past Eris’ gauntlet and knocked her backward.
That was when the sky reappeared. In a single instant the room was bright as blinding day, and unlike stepping out from a dark room into daylight, Eris’ eyes did nothing to readjust: there was no pain at all. She landed with her head against a mirror, but Aletheia was nearby to help her up, and now Rook knew where to go. He rushed to the fallen elf. She scrambled up to her feet—
And his sword sliced through her neck.
The elf vanished into the aether.
----------------------------------------
“Are you all right?” Rook said.
Eris felt blood trickling down her thigh and a dull burning across her chest, but the cuts left by the elf were minor and clotted quickly. Worse was the cloudiness in her head. She shook it away. “I am fine,” she said.
The mirrors were back to mere mirrors. She spent a moment to focus in on the air. The sensation of something was far stronger here, yet still nothing like Arqa’s Essence. He had been a distinct signature to focus on. A beacon to channel mana toward. A target for her banishment. This was…yes, it was the same impression of a being, a single smell in the air, but it was diffused. It lingered in a miasma all about her.
“What did you see in the mirrors?” Rook asked her.
“Nothing too terrible to ignore. And you?”
“Spiders. Everywhere. But they’re gone now.”
“Horrors fashioned for the individual,” Eris said. “For the elf, darkness—the only horror she feared was the inability to see herself.”
“What was she? She wasn’t—she wasn’t really an elf,” Aletheia said.
“Perhaps the demon here drove her mad,” Rook said.
“Or perhaps madness attracted her to the mirrors, and thus the demon,” Eris said. “I sense its Essence here, but there may be someplace better to perform the ritual yet.”
Rook nodded. “Let’s look around.”
Attached to the showroom they found an office lined with pulleys, the mechanism for controlling the mirrors and revealing the skylights. They found a large room with worktables and furnaces, long demolished by time. They found a room filled with ancient, rotted crates, where water had creeped in and created a stagnant, molded, disgusting bog. And they found a staircase to a basement.
The stench of the demon tugged Eris downstairs.
The basement was halfway flooded. Mushrooms sprouted along the walls. Eris stepped in a puddle, and the moment her foot was submerged she felt intense cold.
She pulled herself away with a hiss of pain. Her socks were covered in flakes of frost. A moment passed and the water turned from white to red—and it bubbled and hissed, boiling, steam trailing into the air.
“Do not touch the water,” Eris said.
They saw by Aletheia’s conjured light. The spell itself was unaffected, remaining golden, but as its rays bounced off the walls they flickered most unnaturally. What should have been pure brightness cast the sides of the dank basement in dark blue, brown, and sanguine shades which shifted like a lantern being dimmed and brightened again and again.
Boxes and crates of supplies lined the walls here in ruin. Eris approached another puddle as she made her way to an island of dryness at the room’s center, and she saw her reflection for a moment in the water—before the surface went pitch black.
“All this for an old factory,” Rook said.
“Set out the Manastone,” Eris commanded. “I can perform the ritual quickly here.”
She could. She felt a tingling like she did at the top of the Tower of Pyrthos, a sensation like being engulfed in the aether. This was where the Demon of Moronos was anchored to the physical world. This was where she would banish him.
There were six small managems and three larger pieces of refined Manastone between Aletheia and Rook’s packs. Eris suspected that would be sufficient, now that she had her staff and focus, but it was a terrible waste of resources. For a moment she doubted if Jason could possibly fulfill his side of their deal. Agreeing to this was lunacy. Had her desire to see Rook with a crown atop his head blinded her to all sense?
Boiling, bubbling water and the hissing of steam grew louder. The basement was getting very hot. There was no time to delay the ritual. She sat down with the Manastone arrayed before her and closed her eyes. It was too late to think of some other plan now.
At Keep Arqa she had needed to focus to find the vampire’s Essence beneath the ground. It was not challenging, but it had taken effort. Here no such concentration was required. The Demon was all around her. It was—more than around her. It was within her. In her blood, in the air in her lungs, infecting her as much as the water around her. As that realization came she felt her whole body tingle in fright, yet it was reassuring, for it made the ritual to come far easier.
Banishing a vampire was about revealing its physical form, to render it vulnerable. For a demon without a physical form Eris knew it merely needed to be eradicated, blown away through force of magic back into the aether. It was like sewing her own wound shut. The first prick was the worst, where all her inhibitions were at play. Once she had started, the avalanche would follow. And…
She tapped every gem and each stone at once. She visualized the Demon in the air and the water and the light all around her like smoke and, filling herself with as much mana as she could, she let it loose, blasting any trace of the unnatural Essence from herself, from the basement, and then from all the property around her.
The ground shook. Behind her closed eyelids she saw Aletheia’s light flicker on and off and through every color in the rainbow. Her compatriots screamed and yelled in terror but still she focused, sustaining the spell, maintaining her focus on the fading scent of the Demon around her, until—
She heard nothing. Her vision became only black. She no longer smelled the rot of mold and foul air. A chill overcame her.
She opened her eyes.
She stood on a black plain.
----------------------------------------
There was no color below her or above her, no sky nor ground, yet the floor was solid underfoot, and when she glanced at herself, she saw her own body.
She called out for Rook, but turning in every direction he was nowhere to be seen. No one was to be seen. Nothing was to be seen. There was nothing. She was nowhere.
A voice echoed through her mind.
It is potent.
Eris’ heart palpitated as memories of the Manawyrm shot through her mind. It had returned after a year in absence, somehow coming for her again—but quickly she realized. She had confidence. The Wyrm was dead. She had triumphed over it. No, this was not the Manawyrm’s voice. These words came in no language at all, imparting meaning without speech.
The Demon of Moronos was communicating with her.
Does it know?
She gazed about the darkness as if that might reveal something. “I am not interested in conversing with you,” she shouted. “Be gone!”
But it interests me.
“Your threats do not frighten me! You have been banished!”
Frighten? But I am grateful.
Eris was prepared to be furious, to shout obscenities, yet she was taken aback at once. She sputtered, “Grateful?”
It has freed me from my prison.
“…were you not attempting to drive us off?”
I attempt nothing in this world. My presence perverts it. I have no will.
She knew ‘demons’ were not necessary malicious by nature, but she found this admission difficult to believe. Yet perhaps…
“Then go,” she said. “You are freed.”
The Demon hesitated for a long time before responding. Eris felt suspended in the void for an eternity. Until…
I will reward it.
“Reward?”
To show my gratitude toward the two of it.
Another pause. “The two of it?”
It and its companion.
Eris chose her words cautiously. “I have two in my company, Demon. Two companions. There are three of ‘it.’”
It ignored her. I will leave the two of it a shard of my power. To show it and its companion my gratitude.
Eris tingled at the thought. A shard of its power. “A shard of your power?”
A gift.
Her mouth opened. A gift of a demon’s Essence. A slice of the aether within herself. A bolster to her Essence, this time with no strings attached, no deal to consider. And from a true demon. A creature from beyond. A being of a different realm, not a corporeal demon, a weak thing like a manawyrm…she might have drooled on herself.
But she remembered. A sword through her gut. A manashunt. Months without her powers. So little in return. The death of Kauom, and…
The words that followed were more painful than any admission of love or gratitude could ever be.
“I do not want your gift,” she muttered. In the silence that followed she repeated herself. “Do you hear me, demon? You are banished! I do not want your gift! Be off! I have freed you; consider my gift to be your gracious departure from this world! I ask for nothing more! Now send me back to my companions!”
There was a long time in dark silence. Then she felt a jolt across her skin, a rumbling in her mind as if more speech were to come, and then—
She was in Rook’s arms.
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“Eris!” he said. They were outside in late afternoon light, among the trees outside the factory. “Aletheia! She’s awake! Eris! Are you okay?”
He put her down. For a moment her head spun. She felt ill—but it passed, and she steadied herself against him, nodding.
“What happened?” Aletheia asked.
“Is the Demon gone? The mirrors, and the light—the water. They’re normal,” Rook said.
Eris nodded again. “It was trapped in this world. It was…grateful for being banished.” She thought back to all the Manastone expended—so much used to expel a friendly demon! Jason was an idiot indeed! She groaned in frustration, but managed to compose herself. She had, at least, learned something new. She would not soon forget this encounter. “It offered me a gift.”
“A gift?” Rook said.
“A reward.”
“But you turned it down, right?” Aletheia said.
Eris looked to her. “Well…” she said.
“Eris!” Rook said, but she turned to him quickly with a smile.
“Of course I turned it down,” she said seriously. “Who do you think I am?”
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They made it back to the Inner Gate by nightfall. Aletheia volunteered to lift them over the wall this time, and to Eris’ surprise she did so without any failings—although rather slowly. Then they began their trek back to the Silver District.
It was a long walk. Eris contemplated what the Demon had meant as they traveled. It and its companion. Singular. She thought of only two explanations: that Aletheia was so beneath notice that the Demon did not find her worth mentioning, which was accurate but unlikely, or that the Demon could not sense Rook—for he lacked an Essence. She regretted not interrogating the creature further, but there was little use dwelling on the caprice of aethereal monstrosities. Even friendly ones.
The dwarf let them into Jason’s manor.
“Is it done?” he asked with narrowed eyes.
“The Mirror Factory is cleansed,” Eris said. “And a squatter has been slain in addition, for free.”
“Good. Good. There’s—wait here.” The dwarf disappeared down a corridor, and a few minutes later returned. He instructed them to follow after him to the dining hall.
Jason and Diana were already set for the meal. The servants were all gone. The dwarf let the party inside, then closed the door behind them.
And here, standing beside a seated Jason, was a man. He had dark hair and dark eyes. He was tall, slightly taller than Eris, and strong, broad-shouldered, large in the arms, though he had a boyish look about him. Eris guessed him no older than herself. Quite handsome, she thought, and dressed in fine clothes. A sword at his hip. Yet there was a terrible scar down his cheek, and as he took a step toward them, it was with a lame gait.
Rook stopped dead at the sight of him. The newcomer likewise stared back. Both men looked in awe. Eris and Aletheia glanced back and forth in confusion.
“Once I told him,” Jason said, “he wouldn’t take waiting. That’s why we do business my way.”
Rook still stared. Eris sighed.
“Khelidon,” he said.
“Rook,” Khelidon said.
“Am I to gather you two know each other well, then?” Eris said.
“Yes,” Rook said. “He’s my brother.”