Daemons, daemon demigods exponentially more so, had very developed senses. Sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste were all equally strong, allowing a canny daemon to smell when blinded, hear when overpowered, touch when deafened and taste his way around him when paralyzed. Daemons handy in the perception department could map their surroundings by releasing short bursts of sound and listening to how the echoes bounced back, taste the air to locate prey and danger and make their way out of a maze by decoding the information given by the very sensitive nerve endings in their tails and skin.
A sixth sense, the Sizgenh, the Glow-Sight, allowed them to see the undercurrent lines of energy that flew beneath and sustained the material world, and were manipulated to accomplish the feat of magic, the Gennoth. The Sizanal, the Soul-Sight, was the seventh sense, and let a daemon glimpse into the world of spirits, with many a fire-sage arguing that sixth and seventh overlapped easy and often. An eight sense, the Dag’Dromha, was the exclusive territory of daemonlords, letting them disconnect themselves slightly from the normal flow of time. The ninth sense belonged to those chosen and blessed by the Father himself and had no name, since He had deigned not to bestow one, and let the chosen daemon peer into the weave of destinies and probabilities, albeit not without costs.
That’s how the Father made them, the ultimate hunters and warriors, and daemons that didn’t perform to the high standards their God and society demanded from them ended as Ghrazi, the food-that-walk, and were quickly winnowed out.
Kiarak always prided herself on her senses’ accuracy. And, as she watched dubiously the wall in front of her, they all told her that there wasn’t a thing that could dent it, let alone blow a hole in it. Her physical senses showed her that same crazy granulate spiraling down into infinity, and honestly, she couldn’t fathom a way past it. She had given up using the sixth and seventh when the resulting glare put a phantom ache inside her chest and head. The eighth was useless in this particular situation, and the ninth… she wasn’t exactly sure what the mad tangle it had given her was supposed to mean. But admittedly, she was never the best with it. Zongatis could have some answer, but Kiarak lacked the inclination to ask.
With all that, she had just as much inkling of what the staff she held could do. The power it contained made it feel both scalding and frigid cold against her hands, and she fervently hoped the numbness in her fingers wasn’t permanent, and that hollow void sucking in her gut would go away.
“Now.” At Zongatis’ command, Ulvanach detached himself from the wall he had been sniffing with deep breaths, joining Zubar in puzzling the correct position for the staves. They weren’t used to working in a group, each Ascended was usually deployed as a single weapon, and it showed. On their own, Kiarak knew they would have been far more efficient. But then, she wouldn’t be here, would she?
“Smell something nice…” Zubar said, vacant stare fixed on the wall. The daemon didn’t bother to wipe out the drool bubbling on his thick lips and gathering on his chin. “Smells… heavenly.”
Ulvanach growled, unconvinced that anything “heavenly” could be found in that desert. His own definition of the word consisted of a great deal of ready-available worthy prey anyway.
“Let me hunt those flame-things, brog-koroth,” he growled greedily at Zonbatis. “I’ll feast on their flesh and make a tribute to the Uk-Bathoth of their souls.” He reinforced the image by making the Sign of Darkness, his many fingers interlocking.
Busy manipulating her own staff, Zonbatis glared at him. “We’re here for reconnaissance and information-gathering,” she replied, her frosty self-control giving way to a hint of weariness. “Father wants to know exactly what lives in this plane, and especially beyond this wall. He spoke of something that is both precious and protected. Hewants us to get our claws on it more than anything, and hunting down flamelings is both disruptive to this endeavor and sure to incur in His displeasure.” She left the rest unsaid, as all of them knew exactly what kind of legendary levels of pain an angry Darkness could bring on disobedient Children. To Kiarak’s relief, Ulvanach backed down immediately, covering his eyes, mouth and ears in a gesture of submission – no dominant daemon would show himself anything less than battle-ready at any given time – and taking out a scalpel from the many tools on his harness to carve glyphs of obedience and penance on his scales.
Kiarak made a show of looking focused on her staff while pondering intently Zonbatis’ words. She already suspected that Zonbatis knew more than the rest of them were let on, but that bit about “precious and protected” was new, and troubling. Precious for whom? Protected by what?
She watched the wall going up, covering the sky as it went far above than she could see, every inch of it built to be absolutely unassailable to anything less of the Father’s power. She wondered if she really wanted to know the answer, or if she had any choice in the matter. Zonbatis wouldn’t let those details slip out so easily if they weren’t too deep to pull back already. And anyway, where could she even pull back to?
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Repressing a spike of despair, Kiarak focused on what she could have a hand in changing for her own benefit. Taking hostages was an honored and well-practiced custom among daemons, not because of the emotional weight, they just didn’t think that way, but having bargaining chips in the shape of valuable, hard-to-replace soldiers, fire-breathers, Gennoth-Ikrar and Sizani was both a tool and a currency that no daemonlord worth his name would do without. She wasn’t sure the same principle was good enough to apply here, but having some chips against… whatever it was that lived there sat well with her. Still, she did her best not to think about what could push the Darkness to search for that type of leverage. The Father wasn’t exactly short on absolute power…
For once, Zonbatis’ orders came as a relief, since having something to do was better than dwelling on horrifying thoughts.
Following her elder sister’s instructions, and doing her best to ignore how she seemed to secretly enjoy lording over her kin, Kiarak warily pushed the staff against the wall. The weapon, giving off confusing emotions as her physical and spiritual senses warred to classify it, appeared to distort as the distance closed, the black, burned-out-looking material stretching out into a spiraling thin thread that seemed to be both repelled and attracted. The golden granulate acted just as strangely, turning almost liquid in a circle as small as her forefinger, twisting like a miniature lava whirlpool.
Watching the point of contact scrambled her senses and sparked all kinds of unpleasant tremors inside her head, so Kiarak closed her eyes and pushed the staff forward. A violent jolt shook her, agony spearing through her arms. Well-trained instincts jumped to the fore, and, as she yelped and let go, her claws formed signs through which her Danal, her internal energy, was channeled into a shield. It appeared as a wall of scales as molten red as her own, encasing her until she was a ball without weak points. She had long studied the Danal’Rak, the sigils and signs taught by His Darkness to His children upon which the Gennoth was built, trained herself to demigod height, and that meant being able to wipe out armies and resist blasts that would wipe out armies and clear out plains of roiling seas of rabble-daemons. Her shield still barely held against the impact that hit it, and she tasted blood on her tongue.
As she carefully let the shield fizzle away, she was welcomed by a massive hole, taller than the gates of the City of Rumbling Stones. Molten gold dripped from perfectly round edges, splattering on the ground to form bubbling puddles.
“Great Darkness…” Zubar’s breathless words encompassed well what they were all thinking.
What remained of the staves was fraying away, dusty fragments disappearing as picked by an invisible wind.
Zanbotis was just as entranced as Zubar, looking unsure if gazing at the disappearing weapons or the burning hole, her claws twitching beneath her cloak as she probably itched to get out her skins and start taking notes. Ulvanach took a sniff at the result, decided that the results mattered more than the process and that it wasn’t his business and peered beyond.
“There’s a...,” he grunted, frowned, and before they could get over the surprise, he ambled through the hole and inside.
Zanbotis watched him go with wide eyes, outraged both by the lack of discipline and by being robbed of the place of point-taker in such a pioneering endeavor. She marched after him, Zubar scampering to match her strides.
Kiarak didn’t like it, but she liked even less being in the presence of the work of two powers she couldn’t understand, even less keep away from her. Only one was well enough. Unwilling to go where that line of thought carried, she hurried after her kin.
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“Tastes good.” Zubar’s four eyes practically sparkled as he suckled on the… fruit? Kiarak wasn’t sure.
The fruit was perfectly round, like a pebble smoothed by fire-bugs for their nests, with a slight depression on the top from which a thin peduncle attached it to the tree’s branch. There were hundreds, thousands of them, all of them perfectly ripe and incredibly tasty, if the desperate, ecstatic way Zubar kept scarfing them down was of any saying.
Idiot. At least he was good as a poison-taster.
Kiarak knew many of the goods her kin feasted upon, from the simple Tolgran, the Meat-Feasts that the Thilgra cultivated and any daemon bastion kept as its staple food, the many-fingered Sannoch that daemonlord kept as delicacy, the meat-slurry made out of rejects and much more. But she had never seen anything like those fruits, or the strange things they hung from, all golden and shiny and smooth, with branches filled with both shining fruits and strange shapes that glowed with a mix between the omnipresent gold and a strange silvery sheen.
And they were among the tamest strangeness that made up that place. No magma, no black, ragged rock, no sulfur smell. The land was roiling and soft, the ground strangely pliable and covered with an array of thin blades that bent and ruffled with the breeze and tickled the feet. The air had a pleasant scent, and it played with her tendrils in playful ways that would have felt annoying but for some reason, they didn’t. Nothing did there. It was all so very… pleasant, eliciting a feeling of peace that refused her stubborn refusal.
Despite not being as stupidly gluttonous as Zubar, her remaining kin still felt the effect. Ulvanach clung to one of the fruit-bearing things, his lithe form moving quickly and smoothly as he climbed and then came back down, trying and failing to look anything but a happy bairn.
“Keep your wits to yourself,” Zonbatis ordered, slapping a fruit off Zubar’s hands to the daemon’s disappointment. The elder daemoness had bloodied her palm with her own claw, refreshing the glyph carved there in an attempt to keep focus. It wasn’t enough to keep her shoulders from relaxing by a fraction, but it seemed to keep her steady.
It was unnatural. Daemons were made for readiness and wariness, Kiarak’s instincts always looked for possible dangers and opportunities, and she fed on them. They had never, never, been so stubborn in telling her that she was safe there, nor her body had ever been so hellbent on relaxing. Everything she was just kept on telling her that lying down under those things and taking a nap was just the best thing to do right now.
She shook her head and slapped herself. The pain barely helped, forcing her to exert a lot of her not-inconsiderable will to remind herself that there was danger there. It made for a confusing sensation, logic and senses warring with conflicting urges.
Zonbatis kept them moving, to avoid whatever wicked influence inhabited that place taking root. Apart from threats and orders, she reminded them of all the possible fates they could meet if they lay down as their instincts told them to. Those fruit-things could smother them while they rested, or maybe they would drag them down the ground into hidden feeding organs, or another dozen of messy ways involving death and digestion.
They didn’t question her. Uthar was unforgiving for those who believed in such safety, and there was no reason to believe that place to be any different. Or worse.