"I can't help but notice," Steve said when we had all exited the odd space that was a god's direct contact with the world, "that we didn't exactly get any useful tactical information from all of that."

"Now that you mention it," Jess said, her voice going in a few words from sounding distracted to suddenly focused. "I had a list of question I wanted to ask, but I couldn't. None of them came to mind at all."

I looked briefly at Alice, but she said nothing. I think that she and I might have been thinking the same thing--that it wasn't the point of these meetings. We'd met a god face to face not to ensure we won, but to get us through a crisis of faith, a hitch in our willpower. Her power made her in some ways an envoy of the gods, so I knew that she must have understood.

And me... the Bracers whispered things to me that made this much, at least, make sense. It was about our Will.

"We needed to be pointed in the right direction," I finally said into the quiet. "I agree that we should have been given more, but we needed what we got--an answer that helped us understand why we're even here, and whether this was all a sick game."

"Sure, sure," said Steve, sounding bitter and grouchy, but not... not lost, in any way. "I just wish I understood what was happening. So one of the Eight Demon Generals is risen. What now? What are the consequences? Who do we need to tell? Are all of the conflicts going to be happening in this part of the world, or do we need to travel the globe?"

Alice shook her head, and the Orb--once again hung around her neck like an amulet--raised up slightly off her chest and glowed, releasing a light that hung in the air like a fog, but a gentle one. "There are answers to those things," she said, "...but we should wait for the next Hero to arrive. And, also... I think we need to... to grieve. And to rest."

Nobody had a good answer to that. For myself, I weighed her words, but I found my thoughts dragged in another direction.

"Before we do that," I finally said, "I have to ask. What's with the duck?"

The other three looked at me, each making some variant of an annoyed face.

"You're one to talk," Jess said, but I only glanced at her before returning my attention to Alice.

"I... I can spare Demons," she said, "in exchange for favors. It's not the same as your familiars, and I don't think..." Alice turned her head, as though listening, and then continued. "...you were never supposed to adopt a full-blooded demon anyway. The poem refers to a child of demons, which should be different."

I had to admit, that made more sense. It also, however, got me immediately thinking about the dead fox. Instead of bothering them with it, though, I just nodded. "So you had your duck friend banish the other?"

"No," Alice said, hesitantly. "I think... getting called back like that just happens. She... the duck just kind of distracted him for a minute."

"Great." I sighed. "Does he have any other powers, or are you just going to be able to call on... a demonic duck of some sort, as a distraction, two more times?"

Alice just looked me in the eyes, and I could tell that she had an answer to that, but she was also...

I had forgotten that she and John had been intimate, but meeting her eyes showed the deep pain there, and I felt terrible. I looked away after a few moments, waving in her direction. "I'm sorry," I said. "Let's... let's get out of here, for now."

The others filed out of the vault, and I resealed it, even though there was nothing in it except a glass ball that was now harmless.

They went to their quarters, for now, and I chose to instead confer with Carli about tracking down the potential child of the Demon fox.

Will search! Carli said, sounding proud. And she should be proud, I suppose; she'd brought me back, and held things down here, and now I was entrusting her with an important task. She scampered off, and I jumped myself to the top of the plateau, looking down on the town and the area around it.

It looked so small.

I realized as I stood there looking at it that the massive crater that had been formed by the rise of the Demon Mole would have fit the town and most of its outlying houses comfortably. Of course, if we were talking about dangers on the scale of planets and interstellar conduits, even a large city was mere dust in comparison; it's not like I couldn't understand that. But... the small town felt so much bigger than me, and some part of me still felt bigger than that Demon Mole, at least in his lesser form. Yet, he could crush the town in a heartbeat, and I realized then and there that all of this--everything I had taken to be so much larger than me--that it could all be erased without it even being a deliberate action. All it would take was a battle happening nearby, and the consequences, the side effects would shatter their whole worlds, their whole lives.

I didn't want to invalidate everything these people lived for. I didn't want to spit on their history, their lives, and say that I was more important than them. But I wasn't sure how to protect them, either. I scanned the horizon, seeing the spot in the distance where a shockwave had torn a hole in the clouds. It was far enough, in one sense, while also being far too close. What could I possibly do? Not only for the people here, but for people everywhere? What was I fighting for?

Jess found me, somehow. I wasn't paying attention to notice how, or when, but that's not to doubt that the Hero of Diamond Mind, meant to be the greatest arcane caster in the world, could reach me if she set her mind to it. But it did surprise me when she placed a hand on my shoulder, having gotten there without my notice. And I turned and looked, and remembered that she and John had also been a thing, and I had to suppress a wince, because I knew that all of them had been holding back a lot more grief than I had been. Now, looking at her, I could see it, and I reached over and took her hand, trying to offer comfort, but she pulled away quickly.

"I think that we technically can stay here and fight all the demons in this area, forever," she said, and I could feel her mind humming as she went over what she knew. "But I don't think it's right. Even here, I can feel the increase in the world's magic. If the enemy are going to attack us in order to create new generals, we need to move around the world. That way, if they do succeed and... and kill someone else," she said, finding it not too difficult to say, "then all that energy won't be poured into one area of the world."

"Makes sense," I said, although I wasn't sure how much it actually did.

"That means you, too," she said, and I wanted to flinch. "I don't really know what effect that much aether is going to have on the area, but if they kill you, here, the area nearby is going to be drowning in magic. I can... the Staff is telling me that it would be too much for the inhabitants. Mutations, demonification, all sorts of terrible things are going to happen around here."

Something about her words itched at my memory, and I thought of Miun. I frowned, suddenly, then forced myself to look straight at Jess. "Demonification? You mean people become monsters?"

"Sort of. Some people gain magic that they can't control, and it warps them."

"Shit." I turned and looked over the town, my eyes travelling to where Miun's shop should be, though I couldn't quite see it from here. "I think I need to go."

She started to say something else, but I was already moving, launching myself from the plateau out across the wasteland between. I noted as I came near that some of the town Elders were already gathered on the side of the town nearer me, in a place where I wasn't sure they had any reason to be except to come visit me, but I could have been paranoid--and frankly, at the moment, I didn't care.

I had to adjust my trajectory slightly as I neared, but since I wasn't concerned about hiding the Bracers, the act was second nature, making my approach look perfect and deliberate. I noticed a woman startle and fall over when I landed--to be fair, I came in hot and made a significant thud when I landed--but I ignored her and stepped into Miun's shop, already sensing something amiss. She wasn't in the front, but I could feel her, and I moved forwards nervously, following a faint suggestion from the Bracers.

She was in the back yard, next to the kiln that I had prepared, and she was sitting down heavily there, her head in her hands.

"Miun?"

Instead of turning to look at me, she cringed, curling further up into a ball. I moved closer, trusting her to trust me, and knelt in front of her, trying to understand what I saw.

The dark-skinned potter was, I could instantly see, undergoing a change. Wisps of blackish magic power released from her skin at points, points that made no real sense to me; I studied them with the Bracers, but they didn't seem to be harmful to her, and they didn't feel quite like the deep evil blackness of the demon magic. The way she held herself, I couldn't see her face; she had her head bent, and she had moved her arms to cover herself, maybe exactly so that I couldn't see her.

"Hey," I said softly, and when she didn't respond, I said, "I'm on your side, Miun. I promise."

That got her to at least turn her face to me, though the look she gave me was accusatory. Her features were changing even as I watched; not into some kind of twisted evil charicature, but into something else, something definitely 'other'. Marks underneath her skin were glowing faintly, and there was a definite light of black fire behind her eyes, and a consistent flicker of fire around her ears.

"You promised to tell me when they were coming," she said, her face set in a snarl. "Now it may be too late."

"They weren't here until just a bit ago," I said. "They--we--fought elsewhere, but... close enough. Is it the magic in the area that's causing this?"

"No. Yes. I do not know." Miun reached her hands up to her ears, clamping her fingers on them not like she wanted to keep out sound, but like the flames were burning her ears. "We have been hunted. We have been hated. We have been driven out of many places. I do not know what--"

Suddenly, Jess and Alice were both there. I don't know exactly how she did it; I guess Jess has options for teleporting shorter distances other than the spell that uses the marked circles. But they were there, and it wasn't subtle, and Miun startled and flinched back again, and I felt terrible, watching her flinching back from not only me, but all of us. As though we were anything but friends.

"Shit," hissed Jess, stepping forward. "That looks like demonization, yeah. Is she--"

"Miun is a good person. I trust her," I insisted, looking from her to Alice, hoping that my word on the matter would determine their next actions.

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Alice knelt like I had, looking at her. "It's a curse," she said almost immediately.

"It is NOT a curse!" Miun's head snapped up and she glared at Alice, who started to rise in surprise, before stopping. "It is simply the nature of my people. We are highly sensitive to the dark powers of the world. We are hated for it, despited, for it, feared for it. But we are not cursed creatures. We are not demons."

Jess held up her hands. "You are not a demon," she said. "That's just the word for it."

"Ah, I am glad," Miun snapped back, standing up suddenly, and I noticed black flames flaring to help propel her up. "I am glad that you do not believe the words, the evil words that they use when they destroy us. You use the words, but you do not believe them."

"Do your people have a word for it?" I asked, to shift the tone slightly.

"Zeh'la," Miun returned, and I flinched, the word sounding too much like zealot for my tastes. "Sorcerer of the black flames, herald of the coming storm, and gatherer of the lost. Those of my blood are feared, and because of that fear, all of our people are oppressed."

Alice raised a hand. "When I said you're cursed," she said, "I mean there is a spell on your bloodline, and that is truth. I don't mean that you are evil."

Miun seethed for a moment, as though looking for a hole to poke in Alice's argument, but after a moment, she released that pent-up anxiety. "You believe that you can see this."

"It is part of what I do," Alice said, calmly.

"I think I can see part of it," said Jess after a moment, and she created some little hologram in the air in front of her. Alice glanced at it, then at Miun, before nodding.

"That's part of it, but it's wider and deeper than that."

"I suppose you will say that you will release me from this spell," Miun said, her voice again having an acerbic edge to it. "That you will do it to me, for me, without asking."

Alice and Jess both looked at her, and I looked from them to Miun and back.

"No," Jess said after a moment. "We want to understand, first. After that, we were going to ask what you wanted. Right now we need to understand what's happening, and only then--"

I should have sensed it, I suppose, but suddenly there was a yell, and I turned my attention and found the old crone of an elder there, with two others besides her, standing and pointing at Miun. "I knew it! Demon! DEMON! Naishi witch! KILL her!"

I sighed; Miun flinched. But before I could so much as move between them, a flash of light caught my attention, which turned out to be Alice's Orb, now hovering in midair between us all.

Knowing what Alice had said about the wicked old woman, I felt nervous, but Alice spoke quietly.

"It is my power and my duty to deal with demons," she said, and I felt an odd tremor from beyond the world, one that assured me in way I could not deny that what she said was true. "If you want to see justice done, gather the townspeople in the square."

Somehow, the crone's mouth twisted into an impossible smile, and she grabbed the other two elders and dragged them out. The two of them were shocked, and nearly pulled off of their feet by the ferocity of her movement. One even banged his shoulder into the doorframe on the way out, giving a startled and pained gasp, but he was pulled along despite it.

I looked to Alice, trusting her implicitly, but I could feel Miun shrinking back even further. I wasn't sure how to prove anything... but I took Miun's hand in both of mine, and she let me--as much as sign as anything that she was breaking down, her pride suffocated under a thick panic--and moved myself slightly so I was right in front of her. "Easy," I said, gently. "Nothing bad is going to happen."

Miun looked at me, but my words couldn't throw off the weight that held her down. I considered trying to use the Bracers somehow--any way I could--to help her regain a bit of her calm and pride, but...

But as I looked at her face, and she looked away, I saw something there that pained me.

"You're going to exorcise the ghost," Jess said to Alice in the quiet, "and you want everyone to see that the magic only harms those who are evil."

Her words only made Miun cringe more in fear, although as I held her hand, I could tell that the words struck her strangely, and that a thread of clear thought started despite the oppressive fear.

"Yes," said Alice, and I glanced over, noticing that her orb was held in her hand, not floating freely or reduced to a necklace. "There are others in the town haunted by the town's past, and it will do the place good to have them cured."

When my attention was returned to Miun, she had recovered just enough of her pride and presence of mind to hold her head up and look at me with inquisitive eyes. The terror was still there, draped around her, but she stubbornly matched my eyes, asking questions.

"We know you aren't evil," I told her, squeezing her hand again. "You suggested you don't want this curse erased."

"There are legends, centuries long, of those who bear the marks," the Naishi woman said. "The Zeh'la bring my people to an age of prosperity, they pull them out of misery and obscurity. They raise an army, and..."

I flinched, because there was exactly one way people raising an army would be good in troubled times like this, and it wouldn't make her pause in her speech.

"...and retake our lands," she said, reluctantly. "We will only prosper when we can no longer be conquered, when we can no longer be oppressed. The Legend of Zeh'la is one of hope and pride for our people, passed down from time immemorial."

I found myself blinking, too serious to find the phrasing amusing, and glanced at Jess and Alice, both of whom had an odd hitch to their serious faces as well. We shared that look a moment, and then all let it go at the same moment, turning to look at Miun instead.

My own thoughts were spinning, but I thought--hoped--I understood. Miun had said that her people had a bad history with Heroes, but she also didn't hate me, and I don't think that she hated the other Heroes. Considering they had legends going so far back in time... it wouldn't take more than being on the opposing side just once, joining the Demon Lord and being slaughtered for it, to leave a scar in their racial memory.

Instead of leaving it unspoken, I took a long moment to find the right words, then asked, "When was the last time your people ...joined the other side? Against us."

Miun's eyes met mine, and there was an unreadable wall behind them. "I am not a scholar of these things," she said, "but I believe it was recent."

I nodded, relieved by everything she could have implied, but didn't. "But it is not a certainty."

"We are not demons," the woman stood up, finally, and I realized that her blanket of panic had slowly faded and been replaced with other intense emotions, some of which seemed to stoke the black flames that now marked her ears, folding back along her hair like they were the shadowy remnants of a pair of longer, almost elfin ears--ears that also had burned away her hair, leaving an uneven look to her head. "Demons are those who wish to see the world destroyed. Her forearms, too, now had long planes of dark fire that ran towards her elbows, like they were some kind of armor, and a similar set of flaming plates covered her lower abdomen, burning away the cloth where it got too close. "We will not side with those who who wish our destruction."

I nodded to her. "We don't want your people's destruction."

Miun tilted her head at me for a moment, in that way she did when I said something dumb and obvious. "I appreciate that you say so," she replied, a bit of an edge to her voice, and for a moment I could remember that I was talking to a snarky potter in a rural town, and that the matters at hand weren't all world-shaking things about curses, armies, gods, and demons.

The relief must have been pretty obvious on my face, because she responded almost immediately by rolling her eyes and shifting her attention to the other two mages. "And what of you?"

"It's complicated," said Jess, "but we're basically on everyone's side, except the demons. Depending on what happens, that will change, but..."

"We have a mandate from the gods to help the world survive a... the coming crisis," Alice said. "I suspect your people have many stories about that."

Miun tilted her head just a bit, but replied directly to Alice. "There are stories," she said. "It... as I look on them as an adult, I notice that much is hidden. They talk about our prosperity. They talk of war. They echo long myths of a golden age of our people. But as I consider them, I am not sure what they are really saying."

This conversation was truly interesting, but it was interrupted by the slowly rising tide of voices from outside Miun's shop. More directly, shortly after she finished speaking, there was a thump as something--I didn't sense what--hit the outside of the building.

"We should go," I said, and the other Heroes nodded.

We ended up moving in a silent (on our part) procession, with Alice leading, her orb pressing the bodies back with a gentle light. Miun and I followed, her finally able to stand straight and look proud, and Jess followed behind us, her Staff suddenly in her hand and likewise pressing back the flow of bodies with an arcane spell of some type.

The crowd around us was not silent. Granted, Kurnal lacked the population for a truly imposing crowd; there had been more of a press of bodies in the trade caravan when it crowded into the market square at Amash. But I knew that Miun knew all of these people, and I heard what they whispered and muttered to each other.

Still, she kept her head held high.

When we reached the town square, for once I could feel it clearly, myself: a thin but undeniably present presence hanging over the crone elder. I frowned, casting my memory back to when she'd introduced herself to us briefly, the last time the Heroes came here; Rigni, I thought, though it was a name that didn't make sense to me. Still, she deserved to be recognized for who she was.

As we drew closer, my Bracers themselves began to identify a mumbling that rolled out from her, buoyed by a wave of dark energy. Witch witch witch witch witch, it chattered, no more meaning than that contained in the chattering spiritual noise that rolled out from her. Witch witch witch witch witch witch witch.

I noticed the faces of others in the crowd grow more complicated as that pressure washed over the crowd. I looked ahead to Alice, but she didn't adjust her light. She must have known--must have felt it. This seemed entirely within her wheelhouse. When she didn't act, I relaxed, trusting her.

Rigni stepped forward when we got close enough, her mouth spread in a nearly-inhuman smile, though my opinion on that might have been colored by the sunlight casing strange shadows across the wrinkles of her face. "At last, this Naishi bitch--"

Alice gestured strangely with one hand, and I felt a wave from Jess as she slammed her staff to the ground. The impact made the ground tremble beneath our feet, and Jess's voice projected across the crowd, an ice to her words that I had never heard before.

"YOU WILL BE SILENT."

There was no force compelling the crowd behind that spell, from what I could tell, but there didn't need to be. Everyone, even Rigni, stumbled and blanched back from us, and in the quiet, Alice suddenly lifted off the ground, her Orb casting inconsistent but beautiful, scintillating rays of light as she drew everyone's attention to herself.

As with Jess, there was a hardness to the Hero's face that I didn't normally see.

"My name is Alice Terrace," she said, her voice again ringing with Truth, "and it is my god-given task to bear the Orb of Purifying Light, to stand in defense of innocence, and to oppose corruption. This task I shall perform for you, here and now: it will be an even-handed justice, destroying corruption without regards to where it came from, or whom it dwells within."

My senses told me that the Orb carefully did not scatter its light to the far horizons or create a beacon that would light up the town for miles around, but aside from that, the wash of light that poured from it was every bit the nuclear blast that it had been when we fought in the cavern.

Rigni screamed, but she wasn't the only one.

Several in the crowd stumbled, but few fell. Rigni herself caught fire from the inside out, a hole in her chest appearing in an eruption of ash, before she finally tumbled backwards to the floor. As I watched, some of the fatty parts of her face seemed to also reduce to ash, but no more than that, leaving a scarred and grotesque corpse laying on the ground.

And Miun...

"NO!" I had been preoccupied by all else, and had more than half expected Miun to fall to one knee as the power struck her, as indeed it did. But as she forced herself to her feet, I saw the burns on her arms and her ears, and other parts of her skin. "You cannot take this from me! I was... It was my destiny to...!"

Alice turned a cold look from the crowd to Miun, and she ceased to float, coming down to the potter's level. The look in Alice's eyes was blank, and there was a light deep within. "I did not promise that," she said, a sadness to her voice. "It was not our desire, but it could not be avoided."

"But I was the Zeh'la!" screamed Miun into her face. "If we worked together--"

"What I destroyed," said Alice, her voice ringing in my ears, "was corruption, and nothing else."

Miun's head snapped backwards, as though she was suddenly being repelled by Alice's very presence, as though her words had been a physical blow. She stumbled, falling backwards, and Jess caught her. I looked at Miun's face, and I began to see something cross her features that I understood well enough.

Need. The need for purpose. The need to justify everything that she, and her people, had been through. The need for a promise to be fulfilled--a promise of peace, prosperity. Success.

As she came to truly understand that that success had been ripped away from her in an instant, and Miun turned fled into the crowd, the others too confused to even try to stop her.