Erin Evans - Brimstone Angels

Rohini’s hands closed on the thing out of impulse, instinct. What her hands touched … there were no words in the languages of mortals. Only the secret parts of Rohini’s brain, the parts that still stoked a demon spark of madness, knew the words to describe what she held .

The Hex Locus froze her hands colder than the blessings of the chapel, colder than the blood of the Stygian general-but blisters erupted allover her palms and up her arms as if she held the sun itself. She was screaming-she could feel her throat tearing and the power of the Hex Locus snaking down, down into her very core. Tendrils of magic seized her limbs, her neck, and squeezed as if to crush the life out of her. As if to bury themselves in her flesh. All she saw was blue as the heart of a glacier, blue as the heart of a flame. The Hex Locus’s tendrils plunged into her eyes, into her nostrils, into her ears, all the while singing the maddening prophecy that already boiled her mind .

Her breath failed. Her lungs sucked into themselves. Her screams echoed into a thin, high vibration and the world swirled-shadows and blue magic fighting for supremacy .

Out of the depths of her dying vision, strange shapes swam closer. The same shapes, perhaps, she had glimpsed when the Hex Locus first insinuated itself into her thoughts. Monstrous shapes that dwarfed Rohini-even though, here, there was no Rohini. There might not even be a Rohini in Toril any longer.…

The creatures moved closer, great behemoths that swam through the nightmare ether she drowned in. Their tentacles encircled her. Their great ruby eyes pierced every layer of her being, through the artifice and the carefully crafted barriers, into what remained: ambition and the demon spark of madness .

The aboleths’ thoughts tore through her like a hurricane wind, exposing that demon spark to the winds of the Far Realm. Coaxing a fire from her as the images of a world reformed, reborn into shifting, shapeless powers that would drive a lesser devil mad .

She had served madness. She had served ambition. She had served chaos and order and destruction and hierarchy. Now Rohini could serve this nameless entity that sought something unnameable which was all this and more .

Rohini returned to her bones and her breath, the sudden grossness, the abruptness more a violation than anything she had ever experienced. She did not belong in a succubus’s skin … and she realized why .

The servitors stood quietly by, watching her stir. Vartan hovered over her, holding the bronze coffer she’d kept possets in. Only now … now Rohini was in it .

No-she fought to press that thought back into a more secure place. It wouldn’t budge. She was in the box because the Hex Locus was in the box. They were entwined now, united. Its song pulsed in her ears, demandingto be spoken, but when she hushed it, it coiled deeper, deep as the heartbeats in the bottom of the Chasm. Waiting .

She looked down at her arms, as if she could see the pulse there, throbbing in time with those of the creatures waiting in the Chasm, ready to be called forth .

“ You live,” the proxy said. “We were correct. ”

“ You are the Prophet,” the second servitor added, bowing. “You are the one who will gather the Choir, to sing the Symphony of Madness into being. ”

“ I am Rohini,” she said. The Hex Locus buzzed angrily and clenched its powers around her guts. “Your spell cannot change that, whatever it is. ”

“ It is a fragment of the spellplague,” the proxy said, “made solid and discrete. You held the blue fire. ”

She held it still, Rohini knew. The Hex Locus had chained itself to her very being. It thrummed in her blood and in her thoughts. Her secrets were its secrets now. Its powers were hers .

“ Most impressive,” the proxy added. “You ought to have died. ”

The girl. Rohini looked around. Farideh had burst the box somehow … with Glasya’s magic, she had shattered it .

“ Where did she go?” Rohini asked. “Where are the devil and the tiefling warlock?

“ Your allies?” said the proxy who remained. “Why do you protect them? They have given you up for lost. ”

Rohini didn’t answer. Her mind was reeling. Invadiah had said the erinyes would capture and kill Lorcan, and yet there he’d been. She had herself left the warlock girl to be torn apart by the Ashmadai. And yet there she’d stood, taunting Rohini.… She was the one who’d put the Hex Locus in Rohini’s hands. Using Glasya’s spells .

Invadiah lied, the voice of the Hex Locus said, and it sounded so like Arunika, taunting her. Glasya lied. You were meant to die .

“ Not my allies,” Rohini said. “Not anymore. ”

“ Then prove your loyalty. Tell us why you came. ”

Rohini stared at the proxy, the half-formed words of prophecy fighting to break from her lips. She wanted to snarl, to tell him she was no slave of his .

He would die soon. She could see it in the shifting patterns of the fabric of Toril. Her loyalty wouldn’t matter in the end, and it would nevermatter to those behemoths in the shadows. She was a tool to them-and a tool’s reasons for performing its task did not matter .

A desperate smile tugged at the corners of her lips. It sounded like something Arunika would say, were she not dead and waiting to be reborn under the thumb of the archdevils. The slithering monsters attuned to the Hex Locus’s song, the things waiting in the Chasm-Rohini stared again at her wrists. Would it be so different to command the playthings of the aboleths instead of mortal fools?

You were meant to die, she reminded herself, and the voice in her thoughts might have been hers and it might have been the Hex Locus’s and it might have been her dead sister’s, but it was right. The Hells held no allies of hers. Not anymore .

“ I served Glasya, princess of the Nine Hells, Archduchess of the Sixth Layer,” Rohini said. “I answer to Exalted Invadiah, foremost of the erinyes of Malbolge. My orders were to infiltrate the servants of the Sovereignty through Brother Vartan and deliver an offer to your masters. She has in her possession an artifact which she believes they would find most desirable-a portal knife crafted in their Far Realm. I was to deliver the offer, and the meeting place, a warehouse near to the river. She will come only for one of your masters, though. Invadiah believed Glasya would ambush them and use them as she wishes once they are hers. ”

“ Does she think we are fools?” the servitor asked. “She cannot make servants of the Sovereignty. And now we know of the artifact, what is to stop our masters from breaching the Hells and taking it? What would stop them from agreeing and sending their terrible minions to meet her? ”

Rohini hesitated. To say more was beyond treason .

You are already beyond treason, the voice reminded her. If Glasya does not fall, you will .

“ Should you or your masters attempt to breach Malbolge, you would fail,” she said. “The Sovereignty is no doubt wise enough to know that. They are also wise enough not to make such a vulnerable gesture for a mere artifact that might or might not even exist .

“ But what you miss, to your detriment, is that Glasya is not foolish enough to think you would. ”

Sairche waited outside the door to Invadiah’s chambers, counting the erinyes that entered in full armor: Eretria. Chaeronea. Suessula. Zela. Megara. Sabis. Tanagra. Bibracte. Lutetia. Oenophyta. Noreia. Alesia. With Invadiah a full thirteen armed to the teeth and ready for Invadiah’s command, to kill Lorcan, to kill Rohini, and to finish what had been started in Neverwinter.