James Wyatt - Oath of Vigilance

What old Albanon? he wondered. He couldn’t remember anything before opening his eyes on the stone stairs a few moments ago.

“Which makes our one task all the more important,” the Doomdreamer said. “We must see the one we serve.”

Albanon stepped closer to the Doomdreamer, curious and anxious. The Doomdreamer moved to stand beside a makeshift altar, decorated with a single candle and an opened manacle. With a word from the Doomdreamer, the candle burst into flame, and a chorus of mad whispers filled the room. Albanon murmured something senseless, adding his voice to the chorus, and shuffled still closer to the table.

The Doomdreamer snapped the manacle into place on his own wrist and wrapped the attached length of chain around his forearm. “Chained God,” he intoned, “Patient One, He Who Waits, my fate is bound to yours. While you are chained, I am chained. When you are free, only then will I be free.”

The whispering chorus grew louder, and here and there a keening wail rose above the other voices. Albanon chanted numbers, factors and multiples of seventy-two, the seeds of arcane formulas that could create or destroy.

“Dark God, Black Sun, God of Eternal Darkness, I bring this candle to your darkness, seeking a glimpse of your majesty.”

The chorus was more wails than whispers. Thirty thousand, three hundred and seventy five was the product of the next two primes with their exponents inverted. That number would produce a much larger burst of flame.

“Anathema!” the Doomdreamer screamed over the unearthly chorus. “Undoer! Ender! Eater of Worlds! Reveal yourself and end our clinging to the false reality of this world.”

The next product was so large that Albanon could barely calculate it, but he was confident that he could scorch the earth across an entire farm by manipulating those numbers. Could he create more than a billion magic missiles to tear the Doomdreamer’s body to ribbons?

The Doomdreamer’s eyes rolled back in his head and he convulsed, dropping to his knees behind the makeshift altar. Albanon dropped to his knees at well, unsure what he was supposed to be doing.

The wailing chorus ceased and the Doomdreamer collapsed on the floor. “One billion, three hundred and thirteen million, forty-six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five,” Albanon said, and then he, too, fell silent.

Panting with exertion, the Doomdreamer lifted himself off the floor. “Did you see, Albanon?” he asked. “Now do you understand?”

“I understand,” Albanon said. You are Kri, he realized suddenly. I understand perfectly.

Shara yanked her sword from its sheath as the fiery demon surged forward. “Quarhaun!” she shouted.

Dozens of tiny flames caught in curtains and on posts and floorboards as the demon entered the inn and lunged at her. Its entire substance was fire, except the crystalline head in its core, and Shara couldn’t see any difference between the flames left in its wake and the demon itself. It extended a tendril toward her and she slashed at it with her sword, but as the blade passed through the fire she didn’t feel any resistance and it didn’t seem to slow or hinder the attack at all. She followed her blade’s arc, twisting her body out of the tendril’s direct path, but it still seared across her back, igniting her cloak.

With a muttered curse, Shara loosened the cloak’s clasp and let it fall smoking to the floor. Sweat trickled down her face as the demon’s heat washed over her, and she smiled. “Into the fire,” she muttered, and inched closer to the inferno.

A bolt of blue-white light whistled over her shoulder and struck near the demon’s leering face, blossoming into a sheet of ice that spread across the surface of the fire, stilling the dancing tongues of flame for a moment. Shara took advantage of that moment and followed the bolt’s path with her sword, striking hard where the demon’s substance had grown solid and-she hoped-brittle. Her blade struck something hard, making a loud crack, and the demon recoiled with a monstrous roar. Its fury seemed to intensify its heat, melting away the coating of frost that Quarhaun’s spell had created, and it curled in around Shara, extending more tendrils of flame to enfold her.

She ignored the coiling tendrils and drove her sword into the demon’s face. She expected to hit solid crystal, hard as rock, but instead found liquid that flowed around her blade. The demon’s light and heat faltered with the blow, and the tendrils that struck her stung but didn’t burn her. Pressing her momentary advantage, she sliced her sword clean through the demonic face, drawing a trail of crystalline liquid out with her blade. The face dissolved into floating globules of red liquid as the demon’s fiery form contracted. A moment later, the liquid globs fell to the floor, burning like lantern oil, and the demon was no more.

She bent to pick up her cloak, then used it to swat out the little fires left behind from the demon’s passing. Quarhaun added his own cloak to her effort, then put his hand on her shoulder.

“You fight like you have nothing to live for,” he said.

Shouts from the street outside suggested that the threat had not passed, but she clasped Quarhaun’s hand anyway. “If I had killed Vestapalk when I thought I did,” she said, “would these demons be here now?”

“We are the same, you and I.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, and he responded with a wink and nodded at the door. “There’s more killing to do,” he said.

Smiling, she stepped to the wreckage of the door left behind from the demon’s entrance and peered into the street.

Roghar looked up and down the hall, trying to find the source of the scream that had stopped him in his tracks as he came upstairs. Wisps of smoke snaked out around a door midway down the hall, and another cry for help came from the same direction. He glanced at Tempest, who nodded, and then sprinted to the door. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked the door open, releasing billowing clouds of smoke into the hallway.

Flames roared in the room beyond, lighting the room in lurid reds. The thick smoke made it hard to see what was happening, but Roghar plunged in without a moment of hesitation, following the sound of a man coughing. He stumbled over something on the floor, looked down, and found a woman’s body.

“Tempest!” he shouted. “Get her out of here!” He crouched beside the woman at his feet, and a word of prayer sent Bahamut’s power into her, simultaneously strengthening her against the fire and smoke and lighting her like a beacon so Tempest could find her in the smoke.

As he stood again, a column of fire roared up right in front of him. A demonic face, mouth open in a shriek of fury, floated in the midst of the flames, evidently formed of a glittering liquid similar to Nu Alin’s true substance. Roghar drew his sword.

“Vile spawn of chaos and destruction,” he said, “you are not welcome in this world. Get back where you came from.”

He didn’t expect any kind of response, but the demon answered him, in a voice like the crackling of flame. “The Plaguedeep grows, mortal. Soon this world shall be consumed.”

As long as the demon was willing to talk, Roghar used the opportunity to get his shield off his back and into position on his arm. “I don’t know what the Plaguedeep is, but I’m here to make sure that this world stays as the gods intended it to be.”

“The Plaguedeep is the place whence I came, and it is in this world. Until it grows to consume the world. As I shall consume you!”

I guess it’s done talking, Roghar thought, interposing his shield between himself and the demon’s fiery tendrils. His sword erupted with brilliant light as he swung at the demon’s liquid crystal face. It recoiled from the divine light, and his blows seemed to burn the liquid crystal in a way that the roaring flames could not.