Elantia of the Narvonni was a pagan witch and idolater who burned her enemies alive as sacrifices to the ghūls of the northern woods. Any people who truly worshiped the Angelus would have put her to death, but instead they made her a queen.
* The Commentaries of Aram ibn Bashear
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8th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC
A thread of blazing, orange fire hummed within Trist’s chest and hazed the edges of his vision. Mud sprayed up from the steel toe of the sabaton that encased his right boot as he pushed off the ground. In the sky overhead, the lightning slowed: no longer a single line that merely flashed into existence, he could now perceive it pouring down out of the clouds, like a serpent coiling through dead leaves on the forest floor. The drops of rain seemed to hang, pulsating, caught in an eternal moment. Individual orbs of water burst against the steel of his armor as he ran forward through them, and he could see the expanding splash that marked the arc of his blade as he cut toward the daemon Vinea’s feline snout.
The daemon was already moving, raising its vambraced left forearm to block Trist’s swing, and he realized that it had read the shift in his weight to predict how he would come at it. The vambrace didn’t catch his sword in a bind, but set it aside instead, deflecting the attack off to the left and over the monster’s head. The claws of its right hand were already coming in at Trist’s stomach, and he slid back only to feel every hair of his body stand on end. Trist shot a look up into the sky, through the slit of his helm, and saw one of those bright lightning strikes coming down, like a horse charging directly at him.
Any mortal man would have been struck by the fury of the storm before he could react, but Trist threw himself to the side, out of the way of the bolt. It hit the sodden ground where he’d been standing, blasting mud up in all directions and leaving a scorched, blackened mark where the explosion had taken place. A wave of heat washed over Trist, as if he’d been standing next to a bonfire.
He rolled across the mud like a log, and a massive shadow falling across his vision was the only clue that Vinea was on him. The daemon’s wings were spread, clawed hands extended to either side as it came down from the apex of its leap, directly on top of Trist. Again, there should not have been time to react: again, the preternatural speed granted by the Boon of the faeries let Trist raise the tip of his sword and brace the pommel on the earth, set like a spear against a charge.
The daemon’s bloody eyes widened, and with a mighty beat of its wings, it altered its trajectory, crashing down just to Trist’s right, sending more mud flying. Instead of impaling the monster through its massive chest, Trist’s blade scraped along its ribs, tracing a line of dark ichor where his edge split the corpse-blue skin. Another thread flared to life, the power of Tithed souls roiling through Trist’s arms and into his sword, and the flesh along the cut he’d made blackened and curled, like leaves thrown into a fire. Vinea roared in pain.
Trist rolled away and scrambled to his feet, raising his sword up into a plow guard, hands in front of his left hip, sword tip in line with the monster’s chest. Vinea came up, too, perhaps ten feet from him, claws flexing.
With a thump, the daemon was forced back a step. A single arrow, with a shaft of black Iebara wood and rain-bedraggled white feather fletching, quivered just beneath Vinea’s collarbone. “Finish it off, m’lord!” Henry called from back where he waited with Yaél and Cazador.
Determined to do just that, Trist cracked his neck to loosen it, raised his sword into High Guard again, and lunged forward. “Tor!” He called, and the puddles of mud on the ground froze over in a thin sheen of ice. The ghost of Sir Tor De Lancey, warhammer in hand, moved in at Trist’s side. Even in death, the big man moved like a mortal - which was to say nowhere near as fast as Trist; but he didn’t need to. Trist cut in from his left side on the diagonal, forcing the daemon Vinea directly into Tor’s path.
The daemon moved to set Trist’s blade aside again, with the vambrace on its right forearm, just like before, but this time Trist was feinting. He arrested his own cut, rotated his hands around his wrists, and sent the sword off in a crooked, downward arc at the monster’s left thigh. It was left with the choice to block either his cut, or Tor’s hammer, and chose to let the ghost strike true.
It was the smart choice; Trist’s Daemon Bane Boon was far more of a threat, humming along the edge of his longsword, than the ghost’s ethereal warhammer. It was the smart move, and so it was predictable. As Tor’s warhammer crashed into the monster’s side, and his own blade hit Vinea’s left vambrace, Trist flicked the tip of his blade up to scratch the daemon’s abdomen.
Vinea roared, in either pain or frustration, as the skin along its muscled belly split, oozing stinking black fluid, and then curled up, smoking, as if it had been burned with a torch. The monster leapt back, wings outstretched to glide for distance, but Trist was already lunging forward, blade extended out, and the tip took the monster in its chest.
“Predictable,” Trist shouted over the rain. “You all use the same trick when you want space.” He retreated two steps and raised his blade into the Ox Guard, parallel to the ground, tip pointed right back at the daemon’s center of mass.
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“I can see how Adrammelech died,” the feline-headed monster growled, spine contorted, body curled in on itself as if to shelter the smoking wounds left by Trist’s sword. “I am grateful, boy,” Vinea said. “To have taken your measure. If I remained any longer, you might even manage to destroy me.”
“You are a fool if you think I will let you leave now,” Trist growled.
“And you are a fool to leave your wife unprotected,” Vinea taunted him with a cruel smile, showing off the sharp teeth that filled its predator’s mouth. “We will meet again at your home, if you can move fast enough. It is long past time I had words with your father.”
Trist shouted and charged, but a lattice of sparking yellow threads erupted behind the daemon, peeling back the air itself and ripping open a hole large enough to drive a wagon through. The yellow threads shivered, as if struggling to hold the hole open, and beyond Trist could see a road. Beneath a clear sky and a sunny day, troops marched in columns: not Narvonnian men, but Kimmerian mercenaries with their axes and furred coats. A second demon was there, too, its hand extended, the yellow whirls of fire braiding into a cord that led back to its palm. It was nearly entirely naked, with spread wings blue as early evening sky, gleaming red eyes, and the tail of a great serpent.
Vinea stepped through the hole in the air, and before Trist could get there the yellow threads unwove themselves and were sucked back into the palm of the second daemon. With their leaving, the hole collapsed, leaving Trist alone on the top of a rain drenched, muddy hill, under the dark clouds of an ongoing storm.
“You nearly had him!” Yaél shouted, as he and Henry scrambled and splashed their way through the puddles to join him, leading the three horses. Trist saluted Tor, who nodded back and dissolved into motes of light, which were themselves caught on the wind and dispersed.
“We need to ride back,” Trist said, taking Cazador’s reins from his squire. “It knew Clarisant is with the army.” He swung up into the saddle, wheeled the destrier’s head around, and kicked him into a mad gallop back down the hill.
By the time they had gotten back in view of the column, the storm had abated to a light drizzle, the clouds were beginning to part, and the barest trace of a rainbow arched overhead. Everything seemed to have ground to a halt, and Trist could see soldiers straining their muscles to move a supply wagon, where the edge of the old Etalan road seemed to have crumbled at the edge and washed out.
Trist didn’t stop to investigate further, however, riding Caz through the mud alongside the stone road at a canter as he searched for the carriage with the green, black and white pennant of Camaret-à-Arden. When he caught sight of it, he steered Caz left up the embankment. The destrier leapt onto the road, and men dived out of the way as they headed straight for the carriage. Yaél and Henry followed him more slowly, with the archer muttering apologies to the men as he passed.
“Clair!” Trist shouted, pulled Caz up, and slid down out of the saddle without bothering to tie the reins to anything. The carriage, like the rest of the column, was halted, and he rushed right up to the door, yanked it open, put one boot on the footplate, and thrust his torso inside.
“Trist?” Clarisant gasped, while the maid, Anais, pushed herself back into the cushioned seat, away from him.
“You’re safe?” Trist asked, pulling his helm off with his left hand. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and the fresh air was a shock compared to the heat inside the steel helm.
“Quite safe,” his wife assured him. “Is everything alright?”
“The daemon,” Trist said. “Vineas.” He swallowed against a painfully parched throat. “Said I’d been a fool to leave you unprotected. I thought…”
Clarisant scooted forward along the padded bench seat of the carriage, until she was close enough to raise a hand to his face, and rest her palm against his hot cheek. “Trist,” she began. “I am perfectly safe. Nothing came anywhere near us here.”
With a great exhalation, Trist closed his eyes, and leaned his body forward until his forehead touched hers. Every muscle in his body seemed to loosen, as if he’d been lifting a great stone, and had finally pushed it aside. “I was afraid something had happened to you,” he murmured.
“Nothing happened to me.” There was the sound of shuffling, and he was dimly aware of the maid squeezing past him to leave the carriage. “The road was washed out in several places,” Clarisant told him. “which stopped everything. And I am told there was an attack on the rear, but that General Ismet routed it.”
Trist ripped his gauntlets off, one after the other, and dropped them onto the carriage floor so that he could feel his wife with bare hands when he wrapped his arms around her. The metal shell of his armor had never been more distasteful to him than it was now.
“I do not know what I would do if something happened to you,” he confessed.
“Nothing did.” Her hand stroked back his sweat-matted hair. “I am still cross with you,” Clarisant confessed, and then smiled. “But I admit, it is nice to see you care.”
“I should have told you everything before the wedding,” Trist said, pulling back and opening his eyes. “But I will tell you it all now. You deserve to know.”
Clarisant frowned, meeting his gaze, and seemed to think for a moment. “Tonight,” she said. “We can speak tonight, after the army makes camp. In the meanwhile, I think that you had better go and report your fight with the daemon - I heard that right, did I not? - to the King. And to see what he might have for you to do.”
“Aye,” Trist said. “Tonight, then.” He grabbed his helmet off the floor of the carriage, and his wife handed him his discarded gauntlets. He clambered down out of the carriage, and looked back inside once more.
“Go,” Clarisant said. “I will be here.”
Trist went.