A small part of her, the part that wasn’t devoted to the task of desperately parrying blows from a magic pitchfork, really marveled at the ridiculousness of what was going on at the moment. Here she was, a woman from another world trapped in someone else’s life, with no clue how to get home, wielding a cane of all things, and she was getting attacked by a pair of siblings who hadn’t explained a goddamn thing about any damn thing. There was a hint of mania creeping into her thoughts as she watched it all play out, almost a passenger in her own body. The attacks didn’t cease, a full flurry of rage and, was that hate? Why would they hate her that strongly upon first meeting her? What did any of this mean?
She knocked a particularly clumsy thrust of the fork upward, leaving the headless knight exposed for a half-second. She closed the gap between them and slammed the heel of her palm into the area she assumed the creature’s sternum would be. The chain links around its torso offered no resistance to her blow, and she was rewarded with the satisfying feeling of something fleshy breaking under the pressure. The monster staggered back, shook itself, and recovered. It didn’t seem winded by the blow but did seem more cautious all around.
A thing she’d noticed whenever she was directly using Pitch’s powers was that her awareness of the things around her was heightened. This time, that experience was multiplied a hundred-fold. Not only could she sense more of the shade’s intentions than she’d ever been able to, she could sense the siblings. Their almost rabid fury at this opposition. From their wielder, though, she felt nothing. Whatever it was, it was utterly empty, a tool for their whims and nothing more. She might have thought that sad, if not for the fact that it was currently trying to kill her.
When you got down to it, this didn’t feel like the most danger she’d ever been in here on this new world. She was scared, yes, but somehow these opponents were missing something she’d seen in other threats. They had fury, they had power, but they were lacking a fundamental feature that made her other foes more dangerous: cunning.
There was no guile to their attacks, no danger beyond the straight line they cut in their attempts to take her life. Now that she was wielding Pitch, they almost seemed quaint by comparison to any of the foes she’d taken on, up to and including sparring with the goblins. Whatever they were, they’d been able to skate to victory in the fights they’d had on brute force alone, on the fear they instilled in whoever they’d come across. Len didn’t have any of that.
At most, they reminded her of Vrek, the beast of a troll she’d fought her first day here. But even he, for all his brutishness, had had more intellect behind his attacks. He’d been calculating in his cruelty. These two? They seemed almost incapable of it. Any time they’d attack, she’d leave herself just enough of a window to react if they changed tactics, but that change never came. They’d strike with all their might in a blow that would certainly have destroyed her if it had hit but did nothing as she flowed away from it or knocked it just far enough to the side to strike the ground.
“You should probably go ahead and quit now,” she said, trying to sound as bored as possible. “This really isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Be quiet!” snapped the stereo. “You’ll be broken, you’ll be food!”
“Gotta say,” she replied coolly, brushing aside a blow meant for her skull. “You had me fooled when you first showed up. Creepy brother/sister acts have worked on me ever since I stayed up late watching a movie I really shouldn’t have as a kid. It’s just… the hell is up with that, right?”
“Shut up shut up shut up!”
“But… you’re not some terrifying force of unknowable horror, are you? You’re just… a couple of weaklings pretending to be strong. Oh man, that’s what it is, isn’t it?”
That elicited a snarl from the pair, the fork beginning to glow almost incandescent white. Len observed their reaction, pondered it for a moment, then released Pitch from her hand. She could sense the moment of confusion followed by exultation as the two began their latest strike. That sense returned to confusion a moment later.
Instead of clattering to the ground uselessly, the cane that was Pitch fell INTO the earth, sinking past the snow and vanishing entirely. The pair seemed to take notice of it but had fully committed to their charge and couldn’t correct. Branching tendrils of shadow shot out of the ground ensnaring the creature and the weapon it wielded, stopping it mid-thrust and dragging it to the ground with staggering force. There was a moment of stillness in the air as Len loomed over them.
“What is this?!” The fork screamed in stereo.
“Oh, just a little trick I figured out. Pitch does love the tricky tactics. Now then, are you going to be good little children and accept defeat gracefully?”
The two gnashed and howled and looked to be doing nothing of the sort. Len stared at them coldly. The worst part of all of this was that she still didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on. Clearly this had more to do with Pitch than her, but she was also stuck with the consequences of her pact and couldn’t very well walk away now.
“Well, Pitch, what do we do with them?”
“We devour them,” the creature said with barely suppressed glee.
“Um… no.”
“It is the only way to be sure that they won’t come for us again. Do it, grant me your blessing.”
“Again, no. I’m not gonna have you devouring two seriously deranged kids just to be sure that they can’t come at us again.”
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“Foolish.”
“Probably.”
“Why would they matter to you? They tried to destroy you. They are lost to the madness.”
“Care to explain that a bit more specifically,” she gazed at the tendrils, letting a dangerous edge slip into her voice.
“The madness,” said Pitch as if it should be obvious. “Any Pactmaker runs the risk of losing themselves. Spend enough time relying on the gifts we grant you and my kind takes greater control. The longer you stay in our realm, the more you will feel it. Without a doubt, the Dullahan that wields them now was once their blade. Now they are its.”
“But they’re clearly the ones that are talking here. Don’t really seem like they belong to it, even if they are creepily fused into a single weapon.”
“That’s what the three tines are about, are you just slow? Each one on the side is one of those siblings. The one in the middle? Dullahan.”
“Well, Dullahan?” she asked. “Anything to say for yourself?”
There was a rumbling sound almost like thunder within the creature, but no other response.
“It’s a risk,” said Pitch with a touch of amusement. “Spend too long connected and you can lose yourself just as easily as your Pactmates. It’s as bonded as they are.”
“Well that’s creepy as fuck, let’s not do that ourselves.”
“Agreed. Now that you understand that they’re already lost, give me your blessing to do what must be done. It will bolster our power and make future fights easier.”
“Is this going to happen a lot?”
“More now that we’ve finalized our pact. Before, they would have had to be right next to us to know what we are. Now? You have lit a beacon with your soul. Challengers will come to claim us.”
“Lovely. And I assume the stakes are the same every time?”
“Of course. Our sole purpose is to acquire power. We do it any number of ways, it just happens that one of the fastest is taking that power by force.”
“Well, that’s a lovely cherry on top of this damn month. All right, you two, what will you be doing if I let you go?”
“We’ll tear out your heart and feast on it,” they raged. “We will break you as we have broken others and make you a part of us. It’s only a matter of time.
“Really eager to be on Pitch’s side of this argument aren’t you, kiddies? I’d have kinda hoped for at least some attempt at deception of how you’ve seen the light. Nope, all in on the ‘kill us before we kill you’ posturing. All right, then, Pitch. Give me options.”
“I’ve already given you one. It’s not my fault if you refuse to accept it.”
“No, but it is your job to give me another option if I’ve found your idea unacceptable. Really think you’re gonna need to do some adjustment of your expectations here. You work for me now, not the reverse. If I say I’m not killing them, you need to come up with a workable solution within those parameters, not try to re-pitch the idea after I’ve said no.”
There was a pause as Pitch struggled to accept what it was hearing. Len allowed it that moment out of courtesy, but her patience was wearing thin. Eventually, begrudgingly, the creature shifted again.
“If you insist on doing things the hard way, you could shackle them.”
“Elaborate.”
“It’s a means of forcing the defeated to submit. It involves a test of wills that puts you at risks your sanity, but if you succeed: they will be bonded to you much as I am, only with less autonomy. They will only be able to interact with the world with your permission and will be at your beck and call.”
“So I beat them at whatever this test of wills thing is, and they get added to my arsenal? Sounds pretty damn good. What’s the catch?”
“The catch, as should be obvious, is that you’re risking lunacy to gain new servants when you could just let me devour them and have me become exponentially more powerful. It is wasted effort and unnecessary risk for an objectively lesser benefit. Surely you can see that.”
“I can see that you’re eager to power yourself up, sure. I’m not going to let that be what convinces me to snuff out two lives when I don’t have to.”
“This is folly!”
“Sure it is, so’s a bunch of my life lately. That’s hardly a reason for me to take the easy way out here. Besides, don’t even try to pretend that you’re some objective third party in all this. Never fear, if we find some formless black reservoir of unfathomable horror, I’ll be sure to let you have the first stab at devouring it for your own power. I’m just not gonna let you run around feasting on sentients. Even if they’re psychotic little shits like these.”
“How reassuring. As you wish, Namethief, I’ll let you have this opportunity. Understand, though, that if you lose yourself here, there is no second chance. You will be gone, they will claim that body of yours, and anything you might have hoped to accomplish will fall to ruin. Are you so sure that you can take that risk?”
She wasn’t. Frankly, it made a lot of sense to just listen to Pitch and be rid of this pair. Still, she couldn’t quite convince herself that this was a situation where taking the easy route was the right thing to do. Maybe it was just that she’d seen enough of that sort of behavior before, throwing aside unnecessary things because they might be a problem in the future, rather than finding a place for them to fit in the world, or maybe it was just that she was letting Curly’s morals influence her own decisions, either way, she was going to try and find something better for this pair than simple oblivion.