AabahranThe rain had not stopped in three days, and it showed no sign of relenting now. It churned the trail to a thick, sucking mud that clung to hoof and boot alike, while overhead the sky boiled with a strange, restless energy, the mark of some far off working of magic bending the light above them.
Vanek the Ferryman rode point, wings half furled against the wet, his ever present bodyguard trudging along beside him with his chest puffed out despite the misery of the weather. Behind them came Ulti, Master of Divination, seated easy on his warhorse as though the storm were beneath his notice, murmuring the words of some quiet working under his breath. And behind them all walked Osturm, wielding an icepick dagger newly drawn, boots sinking ankle deep with every step, a small treant trailing along in their wake for reasons none of them had bothered to question.
The trail narrowed. Thorns and brambles crowded close, and the trees here grew thin and skeletal, stripped of leaf and life alike. No birdsong. No rustle of small things in the underbrush. Even the wild things, it seemed, knew better than to linger on this path.
"The sky's getting cloudy," Vanek muttered, though the observation felt almost like a joke given the state of things.
They pressed on, north, then east, then north again, past a small, ragged man trying uselessly to hide beneath a dull tarp, until at last the trail opened into a place none of them had words ready for.
The smell hit first, sulfur, thick enough to taste, rolling off ash choked ground that shifted underfoot like it was alive. Ahead loomed a gate of black spiked iron, and beyond it, walls of blackened bone and onyx that climbed without visible end into a sky writhing with shapes too distant and too dark to name.
It was silent as a grave. That silence, more than anything, told them they'd found what they were looking for.
A winged demon, scales like tarnished obsidian, dropped from the dark above and landed just past the gate, watching them with the patient, hungry stillness of something that had all the time in the world.
Ulti spoke the working first, "gaiqhjabral", and a white aura kindled around him, a ward against whatever waited beyond. Vanek didn't wait for ceremony. With a shove of will he threw the Brimstone Gate wide.
"After you," he said to no one in particular, and flew through.
The world past the gate was worse than the smell had promised. Reddish ash, slick and sticky underfoot. Walls stretching in every direction with no roof above them, a fortress built by something that had never feared the sky. Osturm's dagger caught what little light there was as they pressed east, then north, following the winding paths between the bone walls, until the first true resistance found them.
A demon of living fire descended into their path, and it did not come alone.
"Which of you invited the tree?" it sneered, flames guttering with something like amusement as it eyed the treant that had tagged along since the Narrow Path. "I dislike meals with roots."
"That would be my tree," Osturm said flatly, already circling for an opening.
The icepick dagger answered where words wouldn't, a freezing bite that tore through flame like water through fire, an irony none of them missed. Vanek's life drain followed, again and again, each strike dismembering, massacring, reducing the flame demon's bravado to ash and wounds. Ulti's ice storm rolled in on its heels, a vortex of cold conjured to answer heat with heat's opposite, and the demon staggered, its confidence cracking along with its scorched hide.
"That all?" it managed, though its voice had lost its earlier swagger. "I have been scratched harder by fools with flutes."
It would not get the chance to say much else. Between Vanek's riposte and Osturm's relentless freezing bite, the flame demon went down in a shower of ash and ember, and the party pressed on, deeper into the maze of bone and brimstone.
More demons came, ice cold things this time, pale and grinning, thinking themselves cleverer than their fire born kin. Osturm watched one circle, weighing something in silence before speaking it aloud.
"Perhaps it is the growing power of the moons giving them,... sense," Osturm mused, half to the others, half to the demon itself.
The ice demon bristled at that, chill radiating off its cracked hide. "You thought us dumb?" it snapped.
"Experience the flames of awakening!" Ulti answered, and meant it literally, his magic answering their arrogance with fire enough to make even ice demons reconsider their footing.
Overhead, unrelated to the fight or perhaps not, a beam of moonlight broke through the boiling sky and settled on Osturm alone, cold and pale and almost indignant, as though the moon itself objected to being spoken of in the same breath as demons.
It was mid battle, almost as an aside, that one of the flame demons said something that would derail the entire encounter. "We are all above human intelligence, I'd say. Except for Gregory. That one is not..."
The sentence never finished. But it didn't need to. Vanek's head came up like a hound catching scent. "I must meet this Gregory," he said.
"Yes... MEET..." Osturm echoed, tasting the word like it meant something more than it should have.
The ice demon nearest them paused mid strike, as if genuinely startled by the sudden interest. "You really don't want to meet Gregory," it said. "Ugly as sin. But a hell of a good cook."
"Bakes flesh pie very well indeed," another added, almost proudly.
Vanek considered this with the seriousness of a man weighing a business proposition in the middle of a battlefield. "Baked, you say..." He nodded slowly, parrying a strike without looking. "How crude. I prefer my food frozen."
"Well, if these are not the dumb ones," he added a moment later, ducking a swipe from a huge, lumbering shape that had joined the fray, "imagine what the dumb one is like, ehhhm?"
The huge demon in question did not appreciate being drawn into philosophy while under attack. "I dislike this," it growled, already backing toward the shadows between the bone walls. "I'm leaving."
"Oh, no you don't," Vanek said pleasantly, and made certain it didn't.
"Hey!" the demon protested as Vanek's grip, magical, absolute, closed around it. "I was leaving!"
"That was dumb," an ice demon commented dryly, watching its companion fail to escape. "They did not run far."
They pressed deeper still, through gate after gate, room after ash choked room, the Gregory question refusing to die. When a huge demon, talons still slick from some earlier meal, drifted too close, Osturm poked it square in the ribs to get its attention.
The demon poked back, unbothered. "This one has been eating," Osturm said, eyeing it, "said baked goods?"
Vanek, apparently past the point of subtlety, threw his head back and bellowed into the dark. "Bring me to your GREGORY!!!"
No answer came, not the one he wanted, but the demons kept fighting all the same, and somewhere in the exchange of blows Osturm offered another thought, half question, half challenge.
"Yes, we wish to... entertain... them?"
The battle ground on, brutal and constant, icicles, life drains, freezing bites, the treant lending its own slow, implacable strength wherever it was needed. In a rare lull, Osturm looked out over the ruin of ash and bone and voiced a thought that had clearly been sitting a while.
"I wonder if the Sentinel has met this Gregory," Osturm said. "They have been around for quite a long time."
No one answered that one either. Vanek only muttered, half to himself, that this might be more than they could chew, before wading back in regardless.
"No," a flame demon snapped, when Osturm pressed some point about mercy that had gone unspoken but was evidently understood. "We eat the flesh of our victims."
"Where one falls, another readily takes its place," an ice demon added, almost philosophical about it. "The pit has no end of souls."
"I see now," Osturm said quietly, and something in the tone suggested they meant it.
Vanek's laugh was cold as anything the ice demons could conjure. "You think us victims?"
"An endless source of material to burn," Ulti agreed, and the fire that followed made his meaning plain.
"Clever," Osturm added, watching the flame take hold.
"You are the victims indeed!" the huge demon roared, still smarting from its failed escape. "You cannot hope to fell us all!"
"Seems you ARE the victims," Osturm said back, not unkindly, as the demon fell.
Somewhere in the chaos, Ulti's attention shifted to something smaller, more practical. "Release your bodyguard?" he asked, not a demand exactly, but not far from one either.
Whatever charm or leverage he held, it worked. "Thank you," Ulti said simply, and Vanek's bodyguard, freed at last from whatever hold the demons had over him, fell back in step beside them, chest puffed out once more.
"I suppose we killed the mouth piece for now," Osturm said, surveying what was left of the loudest of their enemies.
"I wouldn't be so sure," Vanek answered, to a question none of the others had quite finished asking.
By the time the ash had settled and the last of the demons had either fled or fallen, the party stood battered but unbroken amid the ruin of the field. Vanek, ever practical in the aftermath of violence, glanced around at what remained of their erstwhile enemies.
"Can one of you make something to drink?" he called out, half joking, half not. "I'm parched."
No answer came, not a helpful one, anyway. Whatever hope he'd had of demon brewed refreshment died along with the rest of them.
They flew on, east, into the dark, toward whatever waited past the next gate, the next stretch of silent, ash choked ground, and whatever answers, if any, Gregory might have had for them.