Self-preservation was an interesting instinct. Not the fact that it existed—that was perfectly understandable—simply the way that the brain went about its task of keeping itself alive. For instance, Alyssa had to wonder exactly what was going through some poor villager’s head when they opened the door to leave their home for the day but saw a parade of frightening characters walking past. One gigantic dinosaur, one Darth Vader, one hellhound with literal fire pouring from her eyes, and three girls who, in comparison, were relatively normal—though one of those three was a mimic. The villager screamed and slammed his door shut again. Like the flimsy wood would protect him from a four ton monster.
And then, because of the scream, a few other people started emerging from their homes as well. Alyssa could see them move with her soul-sight. The moment the first villager screamed, bits of his soul lanced off to a few of the surrounding houses, interacting with the people inside. And, for some reason that Alyssa couldn’t fathom, a blood-curdling shout from a member of their own community triggered curiosity rather than any kind of fight or flight instinct.
Two more doors opened. One with a younger woman. One with an older woman and a little child that couldn’t be older than four. The older woman grabbed her daughter and dragged her back inside without a word. The younger woman… Alyssa managed to send out a quick Levitate to keep her head from slamming into the ground as she fainted. The fainting didn’t last long. Maybe thirty seconds. By the time she started to stir, Alyssa and the others were well past her house.
That didn’t stop the woman from getting to her feet and rushing away toward the fields, maybe to warn some of the people out taking care of them. Really, running didn’t seem like a very good option when confronted with a draken either. They were fast and strong. If Ensou so wished, she probably wouldn’t have made it five steps before he chomped off her head.
Alyssa was really glad that the draken were on her side.
The house with the infected was right at the southern edge of the town. The furthest building from the Temple. That was probably coincidence, but it was convenient. There were less houses around. Less chance of bystanders being caught up in any fight that went down.
And there definitely was going to be a fight. Fela walked in an aggressive stance. Her entire body was poised to pounce mid-stride. Brakkt had his sword in hand as he marched forward. Ensou was less obviously ready to attack, but having been around draken for quite a bit of time, Alyssa could see how the tension in its muscles differed from a casual jaunt through the forest. Irulon simply walked forward, looking furious as her hand hovered over her open tome.
For her part, Alyssa summoned a scythe. Tenebrael had called her a reaper on occasion. As much as she protested the title whenever it got brought up, she definitely had some reaping to do right now.
“It’s in the south west corner of the house. I can’t tell exactly what it is doing.”
“Is it up against the wall? Or closer to the center of the house?”
“Definitely closer to the wall.”
“Close enough to reach with your scythe?”
Alyssa blinked her eyes open, looking at Irulon. “Through the wall?”
“Spectral Axe passes through physical objects without interacting with them. If this infected is right up against the wall, just slice right through him. Easy.”
“That’s…” It would be possible. Looking up at her scythe, it was taller than she was if she put the base of the haft right up against the ground. The house wasn’t even that large. Unless someone stood right in the very center, she could probably hit them from some point around the building. Like almost every building in the village, its walls were made up of cobblestone up to about the waist level where it turned into wood logs. Mud or clay had been slathered between the cracks. Without a window, it was impossible to see inside with normal eyes. So she could hit their target, but…
“What if we’re wrong?”
Brakkt took the words right out of Alyssa’s mouth. If this wasn’t a demon, if this was just someone with a strange soul, or perhaps even a monster just trying to live among the villagers in peace, she would have just murdered them. Fela’s sense of smell was a fairly damning bit of evidence against the idea that they were mistaken, but what if the actual infected had run off, leaving someone behind who was currently in trouble?
“I’ll check.”
Kasita, having just volunteered herself, was already walking up to the house.
No one stopped her. Especially not Alyssa. She knew well how much Kasita wanted to help out. The actual fighting wasn’t something she could do, but a quick peek? That was her specialty.
Right before she reached the door, Kasita’s form vanished. Closing her eyes, Alyssa watched her soul worm its way underneath the door.
Kasita’s soul was different. Humans all had roughly the same kind of soul. Fela’s was more fiery, but still had recognizable elements of human souls. The draken… were like eggs? It was harder to say exactly. It didn’t help that the forms were probably all just Alyssa’s imagination and her projecting ideas on them. But Kasita’s soul was tiny. Just a little tiny spider-like orb. Even when she was in her human form, it was the same. Alyssa assumed that the size had something to do with how most of her real body was in another reality, or something similar.
The moment Kasita was fully under the door, an interaction occurred. One of those sharings of souls that happened all the time. Except this was one-way. A tiny bit of Kasita broke off—though her main soul never shrank—and dashed toward the suspected demon.
The very instant Kasita’s soul touched the demon, it reacted, rising into the air like someone jumping to their feet.
“It noticed!”
“Sever Reality.” A mirrored dome built itself from the ground up, forming around the building in a wide enough circle to encompass it entirely along with a sizable amount of land around it.
Alyssa and her allies were all inside, trapped with the demon.
“Split Reality,” Irulon said, not finished. A lance of glass fired from her outstretched hand, impacting the wall near the door that Kasita was moving back under. The wood and cobblestone immediately began falling apart with the pieces breaking into smaller and smaller chunks.
Between the dust and debris, Alyssa got her first look at the being inside.
It was a child. Like the one Alyssa had seen earlier, it couldn’t have been more than five years old. If she were standing next to it, the child wouldn’t have come up to her waist. But that was where the innocence ended. Everything else about the creature was just… wrong. Its aggressive stance, the way its face twisted and snarled at them, and, above all, the burning embers in its eyes.
There was at least one body in the room with it. At least one because it was somewhat hard to tell. Not only was the gap in the building’s wall constantly shifting as more debris turned to dust, but the body wasn’t all in one piece. Much like those corpses Alyssa had stumbled upon with the Pharaoh, it had been torn apart. One of the arms was jutting out of a pentagram that had been carved out of the ground. The fingers had been severed and were placed at the tips of the star. From the side of a bed, the head looked down at the array with gouged out eyes.
It had the same brown hair that the child had. A parent.
While Alyssa stared, stunned at the scene in front of her, Irulon and Brakkt had none of her hesitation. Three more spells fired off toward the child, two directly at it while the third bounced off the mirrored dome. The first dodge was a simple hop. To dodge the second, it twisted its spine in almost a full one-eighty, bending as it moved to go into a handstand. It twisted again, barely scraping beneath the third spell, planting its feet into the ground. Rising to a standing position like a puppet on strings, the child gripped a severed leg by the ankles.
Brakkt strode forward, dauntless and imposing. Even when it flung the leg in his direction, he didn’t react beyond slicing with his sword, severing the leg into two pieces that fell to either side of him. Fela moved behind him, keeping her distance to the point where she wouldn’t get in the way, but where she would be able to provide backup if necessary.
Alyssa, finally falling out of her stupor, allowed the scythe in her hands to vanish. It was too dangerous a weapon with three people fighting in close quarters. A small scratch could kill Brakkt or Fela. Or Kasita, who hadn’t yet reappeared.
This demon was clearly more alert and aware than the one she had happened across with the Pharaoh, but it didn’t seem quite as dangerous as the Taker. Even if it had only been for a short time, Alyssa had managed to stall the Taker with Spectral Chains.
Some sixth sense must have warned the infected. Just before Alyssa cast her spell, it kicked out, slamming a foot against the bed. The severed head flew off, aimed directly at Brakkt, while the bed popped into the air, blocking Alyssa’s view of the demon. The chains wrapped around the wooden frame. A tug pulled it out of the way.
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The demon was nowhere to be seen.
Tense, Alyssa scanned the area. Brakkt and Fela paused while Irulon rotated slowly, like she expected to find the demon behind them.
Alyssa closed her eyes. Scanning the area with her ability to sense souls worked a lot better.
“It is behind the house, clinging to the wall, I think.” Her sight wasn’t all that precise, but within Irulon’s dome, there weren’t that many places it could be.
Brakkt started forward again, moving toward the side of the still crumbling house. But he paused, waiting just a moment.
Ensou jumped from behind Alyssa, making her stumble. It demolished the remains of the house with its landing, sending a tremor through the earth.
The demon tried to get away, but wasn’t fast enough for the draken. Its razor sharp teeth clamped around the child’s leg. Whipping its head to one side slammed the kid against the ground. A thrash to the left crushed one still-standing log of the house. Ensou wasn’t finished with only that much. Back and forth, back and forth. The child hit the ground over and over again with enough to turn bone to dust in any normal human.
Ensou only stopped when Brakkt got close enough. One last flip of its head impaled the child on Brakkt’s sword.
Even that didn’t put it down for good. The child grasped at the sword, trying to pull itself off. Both Ensou and Brakkt kept it from moving properly.
Which gave Alyssa the time to approach. A fresh scythe appeared in her hand. With a grimace at how disgusting the whole situation was, she pierced the child’s chest and pulled.
It wasn’t as hard as pulling the Taker’s soul had been, but it was a fair deal more difficult than either of the other infected she had killed. It took three rough tugs to pull the sticky tar-like soul from the body. Even when the body went limp, the soul tried to grasp onto Brakkt, Ensou, and even Alyssa. She kept it well away from anyone, moving it to a clear area on the ruins of the house.
The demon… The real demon would show up soon.
Alyssa had half a mind to swing her scythe through the demon’s head. Maybe it wouldn’t do anything. In fact, it probably wouldn’t do anything. But even if it was just for the cathartic release, it might be worth it. Everything was the demon’s fault. Perhaps it hadn’t been a coincidence that the temple fell at roughly the same time that Alyssa met with the demon, but it wasn’t her who had destroyed it. The demons had decided to cause that misery, to cause a poor child to tear apart its own mother.
And now, Teneville, already disheartened because of Tenebrael’s temple being destroyed, was going to suffer the same fate that had befallen Lyria in the wake of the Taker and Octavia incident. The faithhazard was going to strike, potentially turning more and more of them into infected.
Looking around, Alyssa met the faces of her companions. Fela, Irulon, and even the recently reformed Kasita all had stony expressions. No smiles, no amusement, no joy in their victory without injury. Similar thoughts were probably going through their minds. They had been forced to kill a child. Even if it was an infected one, that didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like a victory. Knowing what might befall Teneville just soured their success all the more.
The demon appeared before Alyssa could think further on the situation. Just like the other times, a pentagram burned itself into the ground near the soul. Flames flashed bright for a moment.
Then, the demon was there. Waving. She gave a jaunty flick of her wrist the way a friend might wave at someone they haven’t seen in some time.
Alyssa scowled. Almost, almost, she considered saying something. But last time, she had inadvertently wound up challenging the demon to… corrupt her? Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been good. So Alyssa said nothing. Even though she had wanted to, she didn’t even try to attack the demon with her scythe. She allowed the scythe to vanish and simply watched as the demon used her own scythe to reap the soul. Another pentagram appeared beneath it, sucking the tar-black soul down into the ground.
The demon waited a few moments after. She watched Alyssa with her one uncovered eye, perhaps expecting some conversation. When it became apparent that Alyssa was not going to say anything, she simply shrugged her shoulders and vanished just as quickly as she had come.
Which, honestly, was worrying in its own way. The demon hadn’t left behind an ember. Did that mean that it had gotten what it wanted from the one time that it had? Had that ember somehow caused the temple to collapse? Now that she was thinking about it that way, this whole incident could have been a complete byproduct of something else destroying the temple. The child could simply have lost faith in Tenebrael as a result of the temple falling and have wound up corrupted by the plague because of that.
“We should incinerate the bodies,” Irulon said, tone low.
“What will we tell the rest of the village?” Alyssa had to ask. “The dome might have hidden the truth from them, but they’ll know. In a community this small, everyone will know what happened by evening.”
“I don’t know. I… don’t know.” Irulon pulled out two cards. One, she aimed directly at the child’s body. A quiet utterance sent dark red flames rolling across its form. The second spell card was aimed at the heart of what had been a house only a few minutes ago. The flames didn’t rage. They simply burned. Irulon stared into the flames. “What does it mean, Alyssa?”
“Mean?”
“I’ve seen that temple three times in the past,” Irulon said, not breaking eye contact with the fire. “Each time, I found myself struck dumb at how… inhuman it was. Not just inhuman. It clearly had not been built by mortal hands. And now it is a pile of rubble.”
It was happening already. That wasn’t like Irulon at all. She knew what Alyssa’s glowing eyes meant and yet she was still looking like someone had crushed her hopes and dreams.
Something had to be done. And that something needed to be more than just Irulon glumly going about destroying the pentagrams with her splitting spells. It needed to be something big. Something that could give the people hope back if only to prevent more demons from popping up among them. None of the spells in her deck would fix the temple. Fractal spells could do a number of strange things, but Alyssa wasn’t sure that fixing the temple was one of them. Most of Irulon’s spells were centered around destruction anyway. If the Pharaoh were here, or if he had allowed Alyssa to photograph all his spell cards, rewinding the temple to a state where it had still been standing might have been possible.
But he wasn’t here.
A Message might get him moving, but unless his Time magic was powerful enough to bring him here instantly, it might well be too late. These people needed something uplifting now. Adding two deaths to their already disheartened community, one of them having been infected, would destroy what little morale they had.
“The dome is coming down,” Irulon said to the silent group.
As she spoke, the mirrored dome melted away.
Three dozen people had gathered around on the other side. Not the entire population of Teneville. Most were probably still out in the fields, unaware of the goings on within their home. Those here weren’t quite looking in the right direction, but, as per Irulon’s explanation the last time she had used that spell, the dome removed the contents from the outside world entirely. To them, it must have looked like a whole house had vanished.
Now, it had reappeared destroyed with two monsters standing nearby.
It only took a few seconds before the first person panicked. From there, the fear spread like a wildfire. Even before they screamed, Alyssa could see the terrified looks form on their faces as if in slow motion. In the distance, Lazhar and Yzhemal were running forward with Lisa trailing after them—Tess must have stayed back with the draken at the temple. But they weren’t going to arrive in time to calm everyone down. If the people left with their fears intact, the damage would have been done. The demon hadn’t needed to drop another ember. She had probably predicted this exact scenario.
“Sorry,” Alyssa said, not sure who she was apologizing to. Irulon? Her mother? Tenebrael? Whoever it was, only one of them heard her. Maybe she was apologizing to herself.
But she couldn’t let this stand.
“Silence!” Alyssa shouted. Reaching up, she pinched the corner of her sunglasses and pulled them off. A few people who saw her eyes gasped. One even dropped to their knees in reverence. This was Teneville. The people here had heard every word by those pilgrims who had gone through the festival. They, more than anyone else in the world, should be aware of Tenebrael’s characteristics.
But it wasn’t enough. Four people calming out of three dozen wasn’t enough. She needed everyone’s attention.
Alyssa raised her deck of cards, Annihilator on her mind. But, at the last second, she hesitated. A blast into the air would get their attention, but Annihilator was hot. It burned even those it didn’t directly touch to the point of being painful. She needed something calmer. Something more gentle. The same kind of feeling that she got when she touched angels.
Letting the deck drop, she kept one finger pointed upward. The same pose that she had seen Tenebrael perform dozens of times. She had no idea what she was doing. She couldn’t even tell if it was instinct or some divine hand guiding her. Whatever it was, the warmth from her connection to Tenebrael surged.
“Tenebrael,” she spoke aloud. “Please grace your faithful with a sliver of your light!”
A mystic circle of criss-crossing lines and shapes exploded from her raised hand. Unlike all the spells angels had cast over the past months, other people could see this one. The black light of the circle shined like a beacon. She could hear the gasps from Kasita and Irulon. More of the panicking villagers had paused to stare at her. Some, she could tell, were even more nervous than before.
The mystic circle shrunk in on itself as a blinding dark light covered the entire village. It wasn’t the harsh burn of Annihilator. It soothed. Even Alyssa could feel the soft warmth from the light.
Alyssa wasn’t trying to do anything complicated. Certainly nothing dangerous. She was simply attempting to grab attention. Light. The simplest spell. If she could cast anything using Tenebrael’s power, it would be that.
And it worked. It worked almost too well. It was so bright that no one could look at her. She had to tone it down.
The villagers and her companions came back into view as Alyssa’s eyes adjusted to the gradually dimming light. She could see them. And they could see her. Even those who had been in the middle of running away stopped to look back. Alyssa made sure to rotate slowly, meeting each pair of eyes. One by one, people gasped and put on a sudden air of reverence.
Alyssa really… had not thought far enough ahead. What was she supposed to say now? She had to say something, right?
“The… The temple was just a building,” Alyssa said, trying to project her voice just like she had learned in all those useless speech classes. “One Tenebrael hardly inhabited over the course of the year. Its destruction does not mean that she is gone or that she has abandoned us!” Suppressing a grimace—This is blasphemy. This is definitely blasphemy—Alyssa shaped the light. A simple act of will twisted it into a vague ring. Not quite a halo, but hopefully something similar to aureole from old paintings of religious figures.
Lazhar, finally having joined the ring of onlookers, clutched his hat in his hands as he dropped to his knees. “It is just like the book says,” he whispered, somehow loud enough for Alyssa to hear.
That seemed to be the trigger for everyone who hadn’t decided to kneel when she made eye contact. Seeing the high priest of Tenebrael get on his knees made everyone else drop as well.
Everyone except Alyssa’s immediate companions and… her mother.