Chapter 19: Cooking and Cremations

We considered following the winged demon on foot, but she was so fast and the trees so thick overhead that we were unlikely to catch another glimpse of her. In fact the tree cover was so great that we could only have seen her in the first place if she'd gone directly above our fire just as she had done. Meaning she had deliberately given us a clue. There was also no need to risk the Shadelocks or other nocturnal denizens of the forests, Merri had been shot full of arrows but she wasn't carrying anyone so she obviously hadn't completed her task of seizing the Lady Delacroft, I highly doubted she'd tried very hard, resisting the orders of her superior in whatever manner she could, probably flying directly at the settlement and making sure all of the guards could get advance warning instead of infiltrating in whatever guise she'd used before.

And so we slept through the night, passing the watch amongst us until dawn light broke through the trees and the smell of frying eggs roused me from my slumber. Victoria had changed into another white tunic/trouser combo and was flipping eggs while her sister dressed a rabbit that had wandered into a snare she'd set up while I made camp the night before. "You get enough sleep?" I blinked sleep from my eyes and looked around for the waterskin I'd been provided. "Yeah, I slept ok" I lied, knowing I had dreamt of Merrilax descending from the sky while we slept and rending our flesh under orders she could not disobey.

"I came through here with Ruthax and the others, there's a few caves half a days walk from here in the same direction your friend was flying." I looked over at Victoria who seemed to have something to add. "There's not many villages out this way, it's mostly frontier land, Shadelocks, Ogres and Monster races until you get to the Steppes and eventually the lower sections of the Draconic Tablelands." She realised she'd gone of topic and focused in on her original point. "I know that because I've read a lot of maps, the caves Ruthax told Luna about are all along the Nyall River. If we want to find the Carnifect we should avoid the Delacroft and Yuno rivers and head straight there. We'll see soon enough if its flowing with his work, carcasses and the like I mean."

It was a good plan, better than anything either of us had anyway, so off we went after first consuming a meal of rabbit and eggs. I had offered some of my own supplies, the remnants of that fateful shopping trip in the lands of Kroger and been turned down. "No sense in wasting canned goods if we don't need them."

Now we were coming up to that half-day of walking through forest and true enough we had come to the banks of a river, over 50 metres wide and tranquil if not for the chunks of skinned and filleted people caught in the reeds closest to us. Victoria turned away, face as white as usual but with revulsion lending an undertone of green. Luna moved close and crouched to check it out while I eyed the opposite side of the bank and saw nothing, although a hundred metres upstream I saw crows pecking at something red that had been dragged up onto the loamy river bank. "Its fresh, might not have floated too far because the fish haven't had a go at it. We get carnivorous fish in these parts by the way Jack, don't go swimming. It's a miracle you made it as far as you did without local knowledge honestly, there's a reason Imperial expansion shifted to the Scourgelands and Untamed Archipelagos, the wildlife we have and the resources we lack don't make it a very welcoming place "

I hadn't really had such a bad time of it but I knew it would be much worse with a demonic legion running amok so i stayed clear of the water and walked upstream with Luna carrying the first piece of meat skewered on a sharp stick. This time the flesh was more complete, more immediately obvious that it had been a person, multiple hunks of unidentifiable meat made very identifiable by the presence of a skinned human hand and ear. The crows scattered as we approached, one grabbing up the ear in its beak and taking wing with a flurry of movement.

I barely saw the knife, just heard a squawk of surprise as the bird dropped like a stone. Luna kicked the feathery corpse over to the chunks that had been a person and gestured to Victoria and I. I lit a candle, intending to take charge but Victoria intervened, steeling herself and approaching the pile of gore that would make monsters.

Looking right at it she murmured an incantation, crushed a handful of leaves in one hand and pointed her wand right at the demonically tainted flesh. A pillar of flame shot up out of the ground, 6 feet high and burning white-hot at its centre. The flesh within crackled and turned charcoal black as it was rapidly cremated. Luna put a hand on her sister's shoulder. "Really good work Vicky. Get used to seeing that though, those wolves we fought were nasty-looking."

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We walked along the river and repeated the process a few times, alternating between my own candle-based spells now that I had an entire bag of basic tallow and wax candles capable of 2-3 casts each. The excess wax or fat left behind went into separate heating pots for later recycling and Victoria got used to the sight and smell by the third such cremation. She'd read plenty about this creature after all, even if she hadn't been hardened by the horrors of the internet. I remembered the things I'd been shown in my own world, blood, gore, industrial accidents and war crimes committed accidentally or with gleeful abandon.

"Hey, look at that!"

A few hundred metres upstream something took flight, soaring into the sky and flying out of sight as it crossed the boundaries of the forest. "There she goes, showing us where to find him I'd wager."

I'd hoped we'd have fought a few things before we found the Carnifect's lair. Something to get the inexperienced wizard a taste of combat and another level up but that didn't seem to be in the cards so we advanced. A few minutes later we reached the lair and found it to be entirely unlike what we'd expected, bones, blood and scraps of rotting meat littered the lair along with a greenish-black ichor that Victoria uneasily confirmed was demonic in nature. "It doesn't make sense, where's the flensing tools, the circles of ritual sacrifice. I think your demoness led us to a Dead end."

I walked outside the small, filth-smelling lair and looked out at the river, a chunk of bloody meat drifted lazily along with the current. I looked upriver and saw another creature take flight, and another. This time they didn't fly over the forest, this time they flew towards us and a buzzing cry came from behind me, i turned and saw a third of the winged creatures, this was the first one we'd seen, returning to its lair with a bloody deer hanging from its forelimbs. I got a very good look at it and saw it was not Merrilax.

In fact the creature was not even another curvy demoness, it wasn't even humanoid. Well, sure it had two legs, two arms and a head but based on its friends it was supposed to have four legs and the two arms ended in black-iron blades not too dissimilar to mowing-scythes. The multi-jointed legs had grown too big for the exoskeleton and muscled, knotted meat now bulged through cracked chitin while great wings sprouted from its lower back, they would have looked batlike if not for the insectoid transparency of the membranes.

"Its a Shadelock, and it's been demonically tainted." Deadpanned Victoria, peeking her head out of the lair and looking right at one of the monster's she'd heard about in all the cautionary tales noble parents had for their children, at least until her father was killed by one and those tales became too painful to tell or to hear anymore.

I drew my special candle, the one I'd manually twisted and imbued two separate spells within, the experimental one I'd intended to try out on a log or big rock instead of in a fight. "Two more coming from behind as well. What's the plan?"

Victoria's set her shoulder and worked a spell as Luna came to her side, drawing an arrow back in her composite bow. I threw the unlit candle to the ground in front of the lair and drew a blue one instead. Raising it aloft I lit it with a click of the finger and unleashed the lightning mana it so naturally linked me to. Electricity arced further than my flames could hope to travel and struck the flying monster like a turbo-charged bug-zapper. Chitinous plating on the creatures torso was blown apart and its wings melted enough that it spiralled out of control, crashing into the water and making screeching, rage-filled sounds as it struggled against the current.

Another landed on top of the jumble of rocks concealing the lair and we scrambled back into the cave as it tried to behead us with its scythes, within the lair we heard a thump as the third and final demonic-Shadelock landed and began stomping around hunting for us. I saw my shrapnel candle lying unlit in front of the cave mouth and knew that was the best plan I had, the only problem was the lair might not shield us from the shards of metal and the blast might cause the haphazardly stacked rocks to collapse on top of us.

The Shadelocks stomped around above us, occasionally blocking the little chinks of light that came in from above. "Any cut will get infected, if you get cut more times than your constitution can handle there isn't enough medicine in all of Croftop to save you."

"Can we take them if they try to rush in here together?" Luna looked very unsure of that prospect and at the sound of insectoid limbs paddling through river water she shook her head. I knew my limits with a sword, I had only beaten the juvenile form of this thing because i'd slammed a shopping trolley into its leg and hacked the shit out of it while it was down. Said trolley now lay about 30 yards from the Lair as i hadn't wanted it to get damaged in case of demon attack. I felt the thickness of my coat and checked my exp to the next level, 21 experience points to level 5, 0/21 earned.

There would not be a level up to restore my hit points if I fucked this one up but as the third creature left the water I realised I didn't have another choice.

"I'm going to do something stupid, keep your heads down and don't draw their aggro."