[https://i.imgur.com/HZ279jQ.png]

The giant hands that had clasped hard around Dodd were now taking her away. She could feel the motion even though her numb, crushed body couldn’t feel anything else.

No, no, no... She wasn’t going to let herself be taken by force down a different path. Not this soon, and not like this. She went over all the magic skills available to her: smoke, steam, heating up, fire-breathing...

The world filled with light. She gasped.

The giant hands had been slashed apart. So had her right arm.

For a moment, all she could see was magma expanse.

Then the hellsmoke and howling began. First, the hellsmoke and howling from her captor—her just-a-few-moments-ago captor. She rolled out and escaped in the tumult. Then the hellsmoke from her own gaping wound, the arm that a blade had sliced off to the shoulder. Dodd gulped down her shouts of pain and kept running.

She heard demons scrambling behind her, felt the scratches and thumps of their claws against the earth as they muscled past each other and gave chase. She just ran, trusting her mind and the underworld’s universal laws of attraction to pull her where she needed to be.

Dodd burst through a stone door she hadn’t even seen coming, elbowed it closed, and fell against it with a soul-deep sigh. She wanted to pant like she’d seen Lord Nightfall do, though the bodies of imps didn’t run on air.

She was in a demonic bar—because despite not needing air, food, or drink, people everywhere needed ways to divert and entertain themselves. There was no music, only the conversation of a few groups of demons huddled together. All taller than imps, but none much higher on the social ladder. The lights and the volume and the general glow in this bar were low. Little could be seen except what was lit by the magma bubbles glistening in demons’ hands...only five bubbles in the whole place. Little could be heard except murmurs, which were so vague that they may as well have been wind.

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Dodd approached one of the groups. She let instinct drive her, seeing no other choice. As she got closer, she realized she was looking up at the backs of armored demimanders, and demicrows rustling their wings.

The salamanders stood a little taller than humans. Beneath their charred armor, splotches of black and searing orange crossed their scales. If not for the fact that they stood on two legs and armed themselves, they wouldn’t have looked much different from gila monsters.

Their crow companions looked far more human, with grey skin and expressive faces under their messy hair and feathers. They stood about four feet high. Dodd looked down and saw their bird-feet and massive talons scratching at the stone floor.

Dodd wedged herself between two crows and acted, to the best of her ability, like she was meant to be there. She gulped, tried to cross her arms, remembered that one of her arms was gone and the gaping wound had only just started the slow process of regeneration, put her arm by her side, and waited.

The lizards and crows ignored her completely. Didn’t even offer her a glance. And they continued to talk in wind-whispers.

Dodd wasn’t surprised. And she even knew why the whispers were unintelligible to her: they’d put an enchantment on their speech. It could've been a death sentence not to.

Dodd cleared her throat and said, “I don’t want to interrupt, b-but if you would kindly take the enchantment off your words, that’d mean the world to me.”

The wind-whispers stopped. All eyes fell on her. Fangs came out.

“I mean what I said,” said Dodd. But she smiled.

Salamanders balled their fists.

“Okay, let me be more specific,” Dodd added. “I’m looking for information on a...Lord Nightfall?”

One salamander nudged a crow with floor-length hair, then whispered in her ear. She nodded, but she also winced.

“Alright,” the crow said to Dodd. “But what’s in it for me?”

“Uh, I wasn’t aware that—”

With a whip of her hand, the crow unleashed a feather like a knife. It glided through Dodd’s other arm as smoothly as a knife through butter. The arm, again, was cut to the shoulder. It fell to Dodd’s feet, curled up, and shriveled into the shape of a sausage.

Dodd was shivering, and so was her voice, but she tried her durnedest not to acknowledge that. “I-i-it’s fine. I don’t n-n-need them anyway,” she said. The wound spewed.

“You’re funny,” said the crow. “I’ll bite.”

Dodd showed her appreciation by fainting.