It had taken all of a day for Lana to get resummoned to Reath. At least by Reath time, the hells own clock being rather more malleable. The battle against Tza’rahlitzek, her own master, had damn near killed her, and not just because she’d been beheaded by the imperator.

It was all about concept. Battles between devils and imperators, fae and gods, were seldom about mere power and force of arms. They were in many way literal battles of ideas.

And in killing Erebus, Tza’rahlitzek had broken Lana’s.

Guardianship. The desire to protect. When the imperator had backhanded the necromancer hard enough to shatter his skull, part of Lana had died with him.

It was impossible to just be a devil, it had be a devil of something. Devils of slaughter, devils of intrigue, devils of just about anything. The only requirement was depth of understanding of the chosen aspect.

It’s why devils of slaughter, war and bladecraft were the most common, any rage demon that lived long enough would almost inevitably become one. But it was also why the easiest way to kill them was to simply be a master of the blade, to refute their concept so directly could kill a devil.

Lana hadn’t died when the man she’d been ordered to bodyguard had been slain, but going by the gnawing ache in her chest it had a been close run thing. Certainly it would have been enough to kill her when she’d first come to Reath but she’d had a chance to grow out from under her master’s eye, had a chance to think about what it meant to be a guardian away from Tza’rahlitzek’s guidance, and even more specifically to think about what it meant to guard someone like her beloved Erebus who cared not one whit whether he lived or died.

It had, Lana had realised, been an impossible task from the very beginning and Tza’rahlitzek had likely known it. So instead she’d focused on defending the things that mattered to Erebus, his ideas, his principles, his friends; the things that were actually important to him. In the doing so she’d survived her great failure.

It hadn’t been something her master had planned upon. Of that at least she was certain. Tza’rahlitzek had not been one of the Hells’ great planners. People like Erebus and Jr’agenthek planned. The imperator of shadow and madness had much preferred just creating high pressure situations and seeing what happened.

When Lana had returned to the Hells, wounded, weary and heartbroken, she had been stunned to find just how much powerful she’d grown in her aspect.

Of course the Hells were a much easier place for a devil to exercise power, the fundamental reality malleable to a sufficiently powerful will. While she herself was certainly still vulnerable in the many overlapping planes that constituted her home it was doubtful anyone short of Jr’agenthek could kill someone under her protection, at least without killing her first.

And it had to be Jr’agenthek, the Imperator of Order and Light’s concept was superordinate to hers and could likely just order her to remove her aegis from someone.

But one of the big changes was that she could shapeshift again. Nothing so extreme as that shown by the warshifter Alice, who had been able to turn into a towering colossus in open defiance of physics and biology, but the more casual swapping from face to face that succubi were famed for.

It was important to be clear that she wasn’t a succubus, or an incubus, though in truth the two were identical beyond personal preference, and even then it was extremely common for the two to swap day to day.

That she could change her form again spoke to an incredible depth of knowledge for a devil so young, and both favoured and condemned her in the same moment.

Most devils could not appear any different to how they were, that was one of the big sacrifices of embodying and manipulating the very building blocks of reality, that you had to embody it, and that meant to pretend to be something else was to wound yourself.

Devils of deception could do it, amongst a handful of others, but even other devils regarded them as a kill on sight threat. An infohazard that could break a victim’s perception of reality, doubting everything, believing nothing or left so gullible they could be persuaded to try and breathe water.

There were others, of course, aspects that included a light bit of deception, a devil of strategy for example. But noone would believe that that was their nature, not when it could all have been a deception from the very beginning. Better to be safe and just kill them.

That would be her fate if a single living (or otherwise) soul discovered her new ability. And the fallen gods’ entire plan hinged upon it, naturally.

Realising that sometimes to be a good guardian it was necessary to lie had been hard. Making the decision to return to Reath had been far harder.

It was not a thing she could easily put into words, but to live on Reath was to be lesser, restrained. The world had been designed first and foremost as an impenetrable fortress for creatures of a far grander nature than her own. To step onto its soil was to leave so much of herself behind.

With Tza’rahlitzek it had been a visible effect in the air as countless effects the gods had decided were far too dangerous to ever be allowed on Reath were bound and rejected. Her own strength wasn’t quite so formidable or her abilities so myriad, but it was still a big difference.

The difference between a person being safe simply because she desired it so and actually having the grab the dagger descending towards their chest as a totally non-random example.

Young (defined as anyone less than a thousand years old) Alexander’s eyes were closed when she stopped the blade, the young man not wanting to see his death coming.

It took him a few seconds to realise that the pain he’d been anticipating was yet to materialize, the teenager cautiously opened one eye before both shot wide to stare at the thorned and armoured monster standing over and protecting him, but his shock was a guttering candle to the burning pillar of disbelief that was Agatha.

“What are you? Where’s Lana?” The summoner demanded, still pressing down on the dagger, more out of executive dysfunction than any intent to kill. It was what she’d been doing when shocked, and she was going to keep doing it until her brain caught up with things. It could take a while.

“I am Lana.” The demon told her coldly, “And our bargain is fulfilled.”

Alexander didn’t even see the blow that killed Agatha. Neither did she. One moment the cultist had been grappling with Lana for the knife, the next there was a roughly human shaped dent in the wall where the devil’s fist had in a single backhanded strike popped her defensive measures like a soap bubble before sending the old woman into the thoroughly sound-proofed walls of her basement, the back of her head cracked open in the impact.

There was a damn good reason people didn’t want devils on Reath. A centuries old demon summoner, with so much stolen power most First Response mages would have balked, dead in seconds, and Lana was just getting started.

Agatha had not been alone, the entire cult’s senior leadership gathered in the basement in case something had gone wrong. Unfortunately geriatrics made poor combatants, and trying to burn a devil with hellfire was simply adorable, Lana pushing Alexander off the altar and into cover before wading through it towards the quaking cultists.

Which wasn’t to say they were a total nonthreat, they might have been so out of their depth they were admiring the light on the fish but they were still veteran mages who had survived in the heart of their enemy’s stronghold for decades.

One of them stamped on the floor and Lana was forced to hurriedly claw out a section of the stone beneath with her feet as a binding circle tried to write itself around her. Two particularly nasty curses, some sort of bad luck jinx and a curse of drunkenness, splashed off of her armour, Lana shielding her face with her arm.

Another cultist drew a crimson dagger, and Lana would put damned good money that it was a bane blade keyed to demons. Not really a huge threat given the arthritic hand holding it, at least until the cultist whispered to it and it began to fly at her of its own accord.

Irritated she swatted the blade up into the ceiling, trusting to her armour of sin to stop the blade from cutting her, the dagger piercing into the rafters only to tug itself free a few moments later to barrel down towards the back of her head only to drop down as she finally reached its master and drove her claws through his eye sockets. Gruesome perhaps, but a lesser death wound would have kept the dagger in play while he bled out and while the bane blade was not an insurmountable obstacle it was a drain on her attention she could ill afford.

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For example the woman who’d tried the binding circle had tried to invoke another the moment she’d stepped out of Lana’s peripheral vision, the devil only just managing to flick vitreous gore and grey matter onto it before it could finish writing itself.

Letting the body slump to the floor she took in the five surviving cultists, all of them moving to distance themselves from her and each other, which made sense. The longer it took her to run them down the more chances they’d get to bind or kill her.

What was concerning was the lack of yelling or talking. Either they’d fought together for an age or one of them was maintaining a telepathic link to the rest.

A few moments of observation later confirmed it, one of the mages had blue glowing fingers pressed to her temple – a rookie error really – and was yet to try and attack her. The other cultist yet to do anything had also been magically scribing circles onto the floor, not the intricate runework of bindings but absolutely barebones summoning circles, presumably for pre-contracted demons.

It occurred to Lana, somewhat belatedly, that she might actually be in danger here.

The summoning circles activated and three ragos burst through into Reath, their summoner breaking the circles with a gesture to release them and pointing at Lana, “Kill that one.” He ordered, already working on more circles.

Thankfully the demons balked at the command, not charging forwards in a berserk rage to try and tear her apart with their bare hands. Not that she blamed them, just because they were rage demons didn’t mean they wanted to die. It was also a mistake, their best chance to best her and live would have been to just fling themselves at her with no regard for their own safety.

Lana was under no illusions as to her skills. She was good, damned good, but in those close confines there just wasn’t the space she’d need to fight. She hadn’t even bothered to draw the blade at her hip for fear of getting it stuck in the ceiling or a wall, and most of her spells would prove devastating, particularly to the architecture above her and the human she had, in her summoning, found herself sworn to protect.

Fights were a lot like this in Lana’s experience. It was one of the greater secrets Tza’rahlitzek had bestowed on her. Chance mattered so much more than people wanted to believe. Numbers even more than chance, at least in terms of the overall victor, but for individuals? Skill was a vanishingly small variable, and it took an absurd amount of it to change the odds of survival.

A brawl was its own special brand of madness. It was perhaps what had made her master so very, very good at them.

It took about three seconds for the bravest of the ragos to charge her, time enough for her destroy yet another binding circle with her feet and shoulder charge the cultist responsible. There was an ooph of air leaving lungs at speed as she drove the woman into the stone wall of the basement hard enough something crunched and she went limp, Lana turning just in time to tear out the lead ragos’ throat with her armoured claws.

A lot of traditional mages would have criticised her choice of victim. Conventional wisdom said to kill the telepath but in Lana’s opinion the close confines made it far more important to kill the walking mosquito bite that had been forcing her to all but tapdance her way around the basement.

The next two ragos were hot on the heels of the second, the rage demons belaying their names as they instead tried to grab an arm each, not even trying to wishbone her as they might with a human but just restrain her overwhelming strength long enough for their reinforcements to help.

It was a good attempt against a stronger enemy. Under better circumstances Lana would have liked to learn the true names of the trio and recruited them to her own banner. Real life wasn’t so kind, Lana simply overpowering the two, her claws sinking into the chests like a knife to pluck out their hearts.

Which was the point the next three ragos hit her, and these three either had no doubts or were very good at turning fear into anger, the demoness almost losing an eye as one raked at her with its oversized talons.

The good news was that her armour stopped the other two, and it only took a few strikes to murder each of them. The bad news was that the summonings weren’t slowing down.

Lana glanced at the altar for a moment, thankfully Alexander was ducked down behind the stone still rather than doing something foolish like helping while the demoness took the scant seconds before the next gaggle of ragos closed the distance to think about her options.

The most obvious option was to just keep killing the demons as they came. There were only so many demons the summoner could have pre-contracted and if this were the best of them, which given this was a life or death fight against a devil they almost certainly were, she could easily weather that storm. But it was also just as likely that they’d fill the basement with too many bodies to move and then make their escape.

So she needed to kill the summoner, or at least break the circles he was using. And to do it in a way that didn’t kill poor Alexander.

That last part was the real complicating factor. A devil of guardianship it turned out needed someone or something to guard to access their full strength, yet none of the magic of the hells that Tza’rahlitzek had taught her was anything less than devastating. An odd choice when training a bodyguard perhaps, but she’d been trained to guard Erebus specifically, and the kind of threats that he needed protecting from weren’t going to by stymied by a couple minor hexes.

That and the necromancer’s personal spell-shield had been the stuff of legend. She could have merrily levelled a small town with Erebus inside it sans fear for his safety. Alexander on the other hand… Lana made a mental note to confiscate any sharp objects in the vicinity once the battle was done, that and to check his blood type.

The ragos backed up sharply as Lana finally drew her sword, the lifedrinker glowly faintly crimson in the dim basement. At least one sneered as the devil’s nerve apparently broke. There was no doubt that whichever of them went first would get skewered, but the basement was really too small for a blade of that length, a dagger or shortsword might have defended her handily.

A bastard sword was a terrible weapon for this kind of fighting, and they also were a nightmare to throw if one were so foolishly inclined. Which made it a testament to Lana’s aim that it managed to pinwheel through the crimson skinned monsters without touching even one to behead their summoner.

There was a moment of silence as the demons realised they were now unbound on Reath. Lana barely managed to cross the room and dive over the altar to drive a cautiously peeking Alexander to the ground, the young man letting out a gasp of pain as some of the spikes on her armour dug into him.

That was a secondary concern as the ragos demons went off like grenades, the room filling with hellfire and screams as they lay into what remained of Grandaunt Agatha’s Knitting Circle.

“Stay down.” Lana hissed as she propped herself up on her elbows over her ward. Alexander managed a terrified and bewildered nod.

Twice hellfire that would have reduced him to cinders washed over her and her armour before the sounds of fighting stopped entirely.

Cautiously Lana stood up to gaze over the altar and was pleasantly unsurprised to find the surviving five ragos knelt obediently before her, even if one was busily chewing on Agatha’s arm.

One of the rage demons slowly raised their head, “We pledge ourselves to your service your devilness.”

“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t?” Lana checked as she walked slowly around the altar, taking her time with it as she tried to envisage how this could be a trap and came up blank.

“Just so.” The lead demon confirmed, clearly expecting to be killed anyway going by how he leaned away at her glacial approach.

“I have no use for servants.” Lana declared, watching the twitch of pure terror pass before the kneeling demons. As amusing as it was she decided to throw them a bone, “But I have no intentions of killing you unless you attack me or those under my aegis.”

This didn’t enthuse them as much as she’d hoped. The demons conferring silently before their leader was eventually nudged back into speech, less ruling through strength but expendability it seemed.

“We would really like to be of service.” He said meekly, staring down at his clawed feet.

“Why?” Lana demanded, the devil bemused and uncertain at whatever was going on. If this had been the Hells she would have understood it, most devils maintained vast territories and working under one was a lot safer than trying to survive alone. Mostly because of the devils killing those that defied their authority.

There was a long pause. Long enough for Lana to realise she was missing something obvious, at least to the demons before her, all of them far too scared to correct whatever assumption she was making.

Finally the lead demon found his courage, or just was that resigned to death, “H-have you never been summoned to Reath before, your devilness?”

“I have. Recently in fact.” Lana assured them, not liking the way comprehension dawned in the ragos’ eyes.

“Not before you gained your aspect?” The rage demon inquired politely.

“No.” The devil of guardianship admitted, perplexed. “Why do you ask?”

“Because- because you have never known what it is to be weak on Reath.” The demon said hurriedly, as if by saying them quickly enough he could escape before their meaning sank in.

Lana’s first thought was to protest that he was wrong. She had certainly felt weak on Reath, several times in-fact. Against the Encroaching Darkness, against Charigris, against Tza’rahlitzek, even against Healer Evans.

And that, she realised was her mistake. Things like Charigris to most of Reath, and to most of demonkind, were not people to be afraid of. They were natural disasters to be endured.

To a lone demon, a squad of paladin guards was a deadly threat. An armed and armoured paladin a death sentence. And they had been summoned into the very heart of the Holy Paladin Order.

Now she realised why they were so desperate to cling to her coattails, it was their one chance of survival. They needed protecting.

Lana let out a groan as the realisation hit, just wonderful, now she couldn’t abandon them without actively harming her aspect.

“I will do whatever is in my power to see you all safely back to the Hells or to a place of safety on Reath.” She promised, the words like ashes in her mouth as delay she could ill afford was added to her trip.

After that it was just a matter of leading everyone up out of the basement, with Alexander and the demons keeping a mutual cautious distance from each other, and out into the afternoon light, demons, devil and man blinking their eyes into focus to take in the several rows of pikes and crossbows directed at the door while a rather nervous looking guard captain stood in front of the weapons, not bothering to hide how dearly he wanted to be behind them instead.

“His greatness, High Paladin Gregor, wishes to speak with you demon.” He stated, trying to make it more demanding than pleading, and frankly failing.

Which was around the point that life got complicated for Lana.