Ado was on fire. It was all she could do to cool the air around her into a falling spray of slushy crystals before the heat burned through her skin and hair.

She hit the ground, scrambled back and put an icicle clean through a Knight as he closed. That was the third one killed, leaving only the magus. All the others had gone with the King.

“Fucking bitch!” The old man snarled, displaying a roughly typical attitude for one of his order. Lightning started building at his hands, and that was bad. Lightning was rare magic, not for the difficulty of conjuring it- for the alarming regularity with which the idiots learning to got themselves fried to death. It was pure destruction, and Ado knew better than to trust in a wall of damned ice against it. She used her precious moments well, freezing over the magus’ fingers as he focused on conducting it.

The delay wasn’t long, a second maybe as he desperately unstuck thumb and index. But long enough for his control to wane. The lightning went wild, and by the time it had finished dancing around the room there wasn’t anything at all left to recognise the magus by.

Ado took a moment, trembling. She really was getting into a lot of death matches, lately, and this one wouldn’t have gone her way at all if Dazarick hadn’t hurried off to find that incompetent buffoon Baird. But she had a task to accomplish, and Shaiagrazni’s displeasure was something she’d seen demonstrated all too clearly to risk experiencing again. She headed off briskly .

Fortunately, Ado did not have so hard a time finding where she needed to be. All she had to do was follow the heat and smoke. It was remarkable, the very air started to sting as she closed in on her location, as if someone had dumped a dozen furnaces’ contents out into the palace and allowed the molten iron to flow out down the halls. Her sweat built, eyes teared, and fatigue grew with every new step taken to the source.

When, at last, Ado barged into the library, she found it rather less incendiary than she’d feared. Which was hardly an improvement. There were easily a half dozen Knights present, and Dazarick was at the head of them. He had a ridiculously sized sword held in one hand as if it were light as a feather, raised high and ready to bring down upon a cowering young man she could only guess was Prince Nemo. The decision was not really hers to make, in the end. Ado had her mission, and no room for failure. As fast as she was able, she conjured the ice and sent it flying in a jagged streak.

Dazarick cursed, stumbling forwards as the ice broke against his backplate and threw him off balance. The Knights turned all as one, and Ado barely had time to hit another with her power before they were moving. At such close range, and with all her power, the jagged icicle flew like a trebuchet stone and caught the man clean in his gorget. She winced at the sight of metal, then meat surrendering as blood touched the air, but Ado didn’t have time to dwell on it for long.

Things would probably not have ended well for her, had Ado been alone. Baird, however, seemed to have needed only a moment to stumble back to his feet.

She watched as he moved in behind one of the Knights, faster than she’d have thought possible, and neatly cut his throat before moving aside to knife another beneath the shoulder. The moments of hesitation this bought let her send a third back with yet another blast of ice.

Near death experiences were certainly not Ado’s favourite thing, and she hoped she’d never adjust to them. This one, though, was over fast. Within half a minute she and Baird stood around six corpses, and King Dazarick was poised opposite them, blade torn from his grip and eyes narrowed.

“Go on then,” He spat, “Do it, damned assassins.”

Ado hesitated, and considered the merits of trying to dissuade the man of their malfeasance now that he was under her power. That thought was dashed by the sound of rapid footfalls down the hallway at her back.

Knights, of course. Standard armsmen lagging behind the ten or so armoured men fronting the charge, and a single, familiarly-robed magus at the back. Evidently Dazarick’s household guard was somewhat more elite than they’d been led to believe. Ado felt her nerves fraying at the sight of them, raising her hands and conjuring a wall of ice before the door, thickening it as best she could before their new enemies could enter.

“You can’t hold them forever.” Dazarick laughed, triumphantly, “You-”

Baird kicked him between the legs, harder than Ado had ever seen any man kicked by anything. He actually lifted up off the ground, rising a solid yard or two into the air as the steel plate around his groin buckled and folded, then fell groaning. The second kick, she thought, was probably not needed. The seven that followed it certainly weren’t, but they served their purpose in leaving him incapacitated for the time being.

“We need to go.” The Kaltan said, directing his words to the Prince, and projecting them with the tone Ado had heard on those precious few occasions where he’d left her truly convinced she might be facing down death. It affected the young Prince as she might have expected, setting him to trembling with fear and uncertainty, tears running down his cheeks.

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“Uncle…Dazarick.” He whispered, not even seeming connected to the scene around him. “He…”

“There’s no time for that.” Baird snapped, empathetic as ever. “We need to fucking leave, and you’re coming with me.”

Something reared up before him, at that, and Ado took an instinctual step back as she felt the magic pouring out into the room. It was like standing before a volcano, almost hotter than the actual flames conjured by the source. Her mouth went dry, legs weak, mind liquid.

The burning monstrosity now just yards from Baird was unlike anything she’d seen since Shaiagrazni himself.

“You will not frighten him.” It declared, voice like a chorus of screams in her ears. Baird only stared up at it.

“Oh, or what, you’ll burn me to death? Good luck getting him out without me, idiot.”

It probably said something bad about Baird that he reacted to the towering flame Demon more or less as he did all other things, but Ado couldn’t for the life of her muster anything other than relief to see it so openly challenged. Clearly, the Demon itself was surprised.

“Prince, I know you’re scared, and I know it’ll be hard to leave your home…But please, you need to come with us. That door won’t hold forever, and we don’t have long.”

As if on cue, the pounding began. Ado watched the thick oaken doors shatter behind her wall, and then saw the ice itself began to shiver before repeated blows from axes and polearms. It was stronger than normal ice, she’d made sure of that, but there were limits to her power. A wall of iron would have provided more protection, and she wouldn’t have been confident in that holding for long against the assault she now faced, either.

“Okay.” The Prince breathed, eyes on the ice now, and betraying no less concern than Ado felt. “Okay, just…Please help me leave.”

Baird relaxed, sighed, and looked around the room for a moment. Ado realised only then that their only exit was covered with ice and barring the entrance to their death sentence.

“These walls look…Breakable.” The Kaltan breathed. “I think we could-”

“No.”

The low, rumbling voice of the Demon shook Ado to her core, more cutting for the abruptness of it than its nature. She turned just in time to see the entity grow back into a pillar of searing fire and make for her barricade.

One flash of fire and Ado’s wall of ice was half-liquefied, running down what was left of its structure in thick rivers, puddling at its base. It broke apart as the Knights beyond continued their assault, letting the armoured men storm into the library with weapons in hand. They barely had time for surprise before the next gout of fire washed over them.

The smell was by far the worst of it, like cooking pork. Ado felt sick rising in her gullet as she watched steel glow, collapse inwards and then melt, sticking to the charring meat below as bubbles rose and burst in the metallurgic fluid. She found herself looking away, eyes physically stung by the light’s intensity.

Fortunately the display didn’t last long, barely a few moments more.

“Cool the corridor as you go.” Baird hissed, stumbling past Ado and speaking with the same, irritatingly practical composure he always showed. She followed after, doing as he’d advised and reducing the ambient temperature of the hall as their group waded past blackened corpses and pooling steel. Her nostrils were stung by the acrid reek of smelting as they went, and even with her magic doing its work she still felt as if it were a desert around her, and not a corridor in a mountain region.

That corridor didn’t stay warm for long, and it certainly didn’t stay empty. They’d barely turned the first corner before more of Dazarick’s men were at their back.

“Not that way.” Baird noted, bow out instantly and arrow flying. These were not Knights, though they moved with the preternatural speed of Vigour. His metal bolt clove clean through the gambeson protecting one of them and even exited the man’s back, dropping him like a stone to almost trip his allies. “Someone make us an exit.” The Kaltan breathed, nocking and drawing another as if he were shooting on a practice range. “I only have about twelve arrows left.”

It was a uniquely potent incentive, Ado had to admit, and not one she had any intention of wasting. Evidently, the Demon had similar ideas.

Another gout of flame, this time aimed behind them. Ado felt her skin blister and hair singe as the flames splashed against stone, running over the wall behind them. It melted within moments, turning to a molten river which ran glowing out of the hall and hissed in the cold air exposed outside.

“Outside.” The Demon ordered, dragging all of them along, as a Demon’s voice tended to do. The Prince was hesitant to leave, until his Demon carried him down, and Ado lowered herself gently to the ground below with a shrinking pillar of ice. Baird was out last, simply jumping the distance and falling sixty feet with nothing but the bending of his knees upon impact. Show-off.

“The escape’s this way.” He announced, taking off at a jog easily half again the speed of most men’s sprints. Ado did her best to follow, but the fatigue was quicker in building than they were in reaching their destination.

Around them the ground was flat, for a mountain region, but it didn’t take long for word to spread through the city. Within minutes arrows were whistling for them. Baird was careful in guiding them to areas of difficult shooting and great distance from the largest guard concentrations, ensuring that no clean shots were taken, but even still more than one projectile came uncomfortably close.

“There.” Baird grunted, nodding ahead to their vehicle. It was surrounded by men, of course, and in the process of seizure. It was all Ado could do to force down her exhaustion long enough to call on her magic.

Baird had three arrows in the air in two seconds, and each one found its mark in a man’s skull. Their heads just came apart, without Vigour to add resilience and durability the bone and flesh making them up was too insubstantial a resistance against the unearthly force of his weapon. Explosions of wet meat sprayed viscera in all directions, then they were on the enemy.