No Knowledge of Wisdom

[Visla Eraclaire]

Closed

Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages, it is the rule.

"Aelva, listen to this," Visla said as she closed the book and placed it back in her traveling bag.

"I swear, Vis, if you read me another aphorism, I'm going to burn that book while you sleep," Aelva moaned.

The two trudged through the thawing Salvic countryside cast in the warm auburn of late afternoon. Spring had brought with it the slightest respite from icy gales and the crunch of snow beneath their boots was replaced from time to time with the sloshing of slush.

"I don't see you suggesting topics for conversation," Visla replied, slowing her pace and putting distance between herself and her newly obstinate companion.

"How about this: What can we do differently with the next baron so we don't have to walk this forsaken land until your legs fall off?" Aelva suggested, coming to a full stop and turning around to allow Visla to catch up.

"Wait to leave until evening is the most obvious answer," Visla laughed a bit.

"I'm tired of flying even, Vis. Why are we still here? Looking for Abaraxx was a disaster. I thought you would be ready to go back to Radasanth or Uiria. For once, I'd be happy to be back on your fourteen-hour sleep schedule," Aelva demanded.

"I thought you didn't need rest. Shouldn't I be the one complaining?" Visla said, still avoiding the issue.

The two were now standing perfectly still in the middle of the muddy road that lead from one fief to another. Neither of them were quite sure where they were. Salvar was more or less 'over there' in Visla's estimation for most of her life. As such, her ignorance of the land, its people, and its customs had frequently put them back on the road.

"Fine, look," Visla extended her hands, a ring on each. "I would probably not have come here for this reason alone, but finding out whether you were summoned for good convinced me. I know that turned out badly, but now we have a chance to make a difference. I was raised to believe in the rights of nobility," she clinched her right hand, which bore her signet ring. "I already watched a bunch of religious fanatics ruin my homeland. What if one of these barons has a daughter who's spent her whole life getting kicked around by the church? I couldn't do anything to help myself, or Uiria, but now I can," she clinched her left hand, displaying the Godshard.

"I realize that I was busy being annihilated when you picked that thing up, Vis, but I really don't understand how you think it's going to turn the tide of a civil war," Aelva explained.

"I don't. I'm not a hero, and I'm definitely not a general. I don't think this thing will crush the Church, but I know I can kill some of them. Well, you can," Visla corrected herself. "When Evalyn died, something happened to the shard. I want to know what that was. But I'll be honest, it's not curiosity or duty that drives me to keep walking down these miserable little roads. The Church thinks I'm a heretic, and if I thought they were going to win, I'd flee back to Radasanth in an instant. But I don't. I think they're on the run, and I want to grind them into the dirt for everything any of the faithful have ever done to us," Visla concluded.

"One has to repay good and ill – but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?" Aelva quoted.

"You have been reading!" Visla smiled.

"While you sleep," Aelva admitted.

The two decided to rest their feet and wait by the roadside until the sun fell beneath the horizon. Then they would take wing once more and plead their case to another nobleman. Perhaps this time Visla would have a clearer heart and a stronger message.

[Visla Eraclaire]

Before they even took to the skies, Visla and Aelva could see tiny torchlights in the distance that denoted another tract of land, and another lord to rule it. They soared on the winds toward the faint flickering, coming to land a distance away so as not to startle the guardsmen. It had all become very routine after so many meetings and rejections with so many nobles. The pair had become practiced, at the very least, at getting an audience.

Here they found a single man in a lower tower ringed by torches far too dim to aid his watch. They were nearly upon him, before he hailed them.

"Who goes there?" he called, the absolute cliché line that guards seemed contractually bound to say.

"A noble traveler seeking audience with your lord, we bring news and aid for the Salvic States," Aelva called back. Originally Visla had shouted back, but she quickly learned that having her 'retainer' do the shouting made her seem much more legitimate.

The guard seemed to be muttering something in Salvic as he grabbed one of his torches and made his way down from his post to examine the pair. Visla turned to Aelva and whispered in Infernal to her companion, "I still don't understand why you don't know more languages. If a demon showed up in Salvar how would he get by." Aelva shrugged and whispered back, "Everyone speaks Common."

"Prove yourself, then," the guard interrupted as he came out from the wooden enclosure and thrust the torch toward them.

Visla looked very ignoble with her common traveling cloak slung over her head, her pale skin, and frail constitution. She was nothing like the rosy plump lass that a noble upbringing should produce, but she extended a slender hand with her signet all the same. Nobody in Salvar would recognize the exact symbol, but guards seemed to be convinced well enough by any signet ring. Visla wondered if the Church had been clever enough to realize this, but she imagined not.

"The Lord is on campaign," the man said after squinting at the ring on Visla's finger.

Why didn't you just say that at first? Visla scowled, but kept her mouth shut for a moment, letting Aelva take the lead.

"Then we request shelter for the night. Surely your Lord would not want you to be inhospitable to wayfarers of high birth?" Aelva said. She noticed her words seemed to go straight through the man's head without stopping anywhere between his ears, dimwitted like most. Her hood rose up suddenly as she revealed her horns and her eyes glinted with a very persuasive sparkle. "Let us come in."

The first few times, they had been afraid to use Aelva's demonic allure to gain entry, but the longer they traveled, the more she gazed into men's eyes and gave them simple commands. Even if it saved just a few more words of discussion with a dimwitted man-at-arms, the chance of being run off with flames and pitchforks seemed remote enough to justify it.

The guard stepped aside with a dazed stagger and Aelva began muttering the words of her flight ritual once more. The light of the manor house was visible at the top of a nearby hill, and she knew that if Visla were to climb it, it might be another hour or more before they could be inside. A few moments later, her black wings spread once more and she clutched Visla against her chest.

"Thank you kindly," she smirked at the guard before taking off toward the manor.

"I guess I get a night off from my oratory. No baron, just a bed," Visla said with notable satisfaction.

"If you just want a bed, I can turn back toward Corone right now. I don't know if we can make it tonight but—"

"Nice try," Visla interrupted. "Set down just outside the gates, and don't use your eyes on these guards. The ones at the house are usually more suspicious."

[Visla Eraclaire]

"Who goes there?"

There it went again, Visla wondered if she could somehow arrange to receive a gold piece every time a guard said that line. Aelva stepped up to answer, appearing fully human once again. The two men at the gate were armored mostly in leather with steel pothelms and gaudy-looking pauldrons in a vain attempt to cover for their lordship's apparently limited means.

"We spoke with your watchman at the base of the hill. This is the Lady Eraclaire from Estervale, west of Corone, she has come to aid your Lord against the Church, but as he is on campaign, she now seeks shelter within your walls for the night," Aelva declared, and Visla extended her signet right again.

"Allies of the Salvic states, then?" the shorter and younger looking of the two guards asked. He turned toward the more striking of the pair, a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard jutting out beneath his helm. The elder man nodded and before Aelva could give a measured response, the younger drew a long sword from his belt and plunged it straight into Visla's chest.

The blade sliced into her slender form with ease, snapping atrophied muscle, slicing tendon and sliding between ribs straight through to the other side. The man retracted it and swished it to remove the blood, but there was none. Visla fell to her knees, but without a scratch on her body, even as a massive gash began to bleed through Aelva's cloak. In the moment of confusion, Aelva bore her claws and lunged toward the attacker.

Her strike went straight for the man's neck, slicing his throat open and cleaving most of his jaw cleanly off. She breathed heavily and turned toward the elder guard, whose sword was still in its sheath. Her bloody right hand was still dripping with his comrade's viscera as she spoke to him with. Twisted horns sprouted from her head and cloven hooves stood on the cobblestone walkway laid out before the gate. She said but a single word, ready to strike at him just the same.

"Explain."

"We serve the Sway, demon," he said with confidence. Rather than reaching for his sword, he muttered a prayer even as Aelva's claws flew toward his face. The succubus expected a spell, but as the man fell into a bloody heap, she realized he was simply giving a last devotion to whatever god he served.

Visla managed to get to her feet as Aelva ensured the two men's deaths with a few more gashes. A faint trail, like the wisp of smoke from the daintiest cigarette, flowed from each of the men and into her ring as each man breathed his last breath. Aelva took scraps of linen from their bodies and dressed her wound. It looked rather serious, but it was Visla's pain from it that troubled her more than a steady flow of blood, only staunched by balled up undershirts.

"I thought the Church had been beaten back to but a few enclaves," the warlock pondered between labored, painful breaths.

"Evidently, this is one of them. No bed rest for you, it would seem" Aelva said, and reached down toward the older man's body to retrieve the gate's key.

With a click and a groan of old iron, it swung open. Visla took off her signet ring and put it in her pocket and Aelva returned to her human guise. The pair had already suffered a terrible wound by being caught off guard. Now they hoped to return the favor.

[Visla Eraclaire]

As Visla pushed one of two mighty oak doors to the manor open, a long hall sprawled out before her. Where her own childhood home was lined with statuary, portraits, and a long crimson carpet, this place was a shambles. The hall was littered on either side by cots with injured soldiers and clerics, the walls were bare except for the occasional devotional symbol hung hastily above a slumbering man or woman. The red carpet was replaced with a wooden floor stained with the blood of martyrs. For the dozens of injured adherents there were but two attendants, both young woman draped in white gowns, spattered liberally with red spots. Thinking quickly, Visla shouted out to them.

"Help, sisters! This woman has been gravely injured!" she cried, darting her eyes toward Aelva, who feigned a collapse in her arms a bit too well. The weight of the succubus, was such that Visla almost toppled over. One of the two nurses shuffled down the hall while the other prepared a spot along the wall to lay the new patient.

With the nurse taking the shoulders and Visla supporting Aelva's legs, they carried her over to the pile of blankets that awaited her. One young woman muttered devotions as the other examined the gash in Aelva's abdomen.

"Great providence, sister. She may be frail in flesh, but her soul burns strongly. The wound is not poisoned. I can heal it easily," she examining nurse said before beginning to intone the words of a healing cant.

"Is that what happened to these others?" Visla asked the other, with genuine interest and feigned concern.

"Yes, a terrible blight was put into their wounds that keeps them from the healing energies of the Sway. Whatever cursed soul drempt up such an abomination will surely suffer torment eternal," the woman replied, almost teary-eyed at the fate of her comrades. "All we can do is let them slumber and pray for their salvation."

The bodies of the fallen did seem unusually still, now that the nurse mentioned it. Visla recognized it as the magical slumber that had dominated much of her early, painful life. When the sick are beyond the cleric's healing power they are eased into a long rest. It is a merciful thing to do, but too many never awake and linger longer than they ought to, hopeless. The warlock cleared a lump that formed in her throat from the memories and looked down to see Aelva's wound knitting up neatly.

"Thank you, sister," Aelva said with a smirk. She propped herself up and took a cursory glance around the room, assuring herself that there were no guardsmen. Visla took a look toward all the cots and was satisfied that none of the wounded were stirring either. She nodded to her companion.

"Sway… be praised?" the warlock said awkwardly.

The healer turned toward her with a skeptical look and Visla gripped her cane tightly and swung it at the young woman's head with all the might she could muster. In the same instant, Aelva's hand vanished and her fearsome claw came up toward the other attendant's neck.

[Visla Eraclaire]

The bone of the cane slammed into the woman's skull with a deadened thwack rather than a more satisfying crunch. Visla was nowhere near the point of cracking skulls with her feeble arms. Still, the surprise blow broke the skin and left the nurse clutching her head in pain as blood trickled down her cheek.

Aelva's strike was even less productive, as the young woman slipped from her grasp before the claws could dig into her flesh. She staggered back several feet and called upon her faith to invoke a torrent of white flames that burst through the air toward the succubus. As they came close to Visla, she felt a warmth on her left ring finger and the flames were snuffed out.

"Show her what fire is supposed to do," Visla crowed, as she continued to beat other attendant about the head and shoulders with her cane. Her victim simply clutched her hands over her head, unable to recover after each successive blow.

"Gladly," Aelva replied and ignited the area around the offending spellcaster with the sickly green light of balefire. As the cloying supernatural flames lapped at her skin, she felt a terrible chill. Out of reflex, she threw herself to the ground, rolling and attempting to put the demonic fire out to no avail.

"Oh, let me give you a hand with that," Aelva snapped her fingers and snuffed the balefire with a sudden burst of painful freezing. The young woman's skin cracked and bled, her hair withered and she screamed in agony as Aelva walked slowly over to finish her off.

"I can beat you like this all day, or at least until my companion comes over to slit your throat. Your faith isn't going to save you, so why not repent and maybe I'll spare you," Visla offered as she dropped another stroke of her cane onto the nurse's head.

Visla heard a gurgling sound from across the room as Aelva's claws dug into the neck of another faithful servant of the Sway. A thicker current of white energy flowed into the ring. She relented for a moment to watch it filter into the misshapen little shard on her finger, and to give the woman an opportunity to answer.

"I surrender," she murmured between sobs and groans, uncovered her bruised face and looking up at her attacker. "What do you want from me?"

Visla sighed with relief. Killing was justified in war, to be sure, and she had little doubt that this pious woman would burn her off the face of the world, given the chance, but brutalizing someone to death with a blunt instrument was more than she had bargained for. "What is this place? Where are the nobles?"

"They're our prisoners. I'll show you where they're held," the woman said and reached inside her robes as if to produce a map. In a flash, a dagger flew into Visla's shoulder. She reeled back in pain and a fresh wound formed on Aelva.

Unshaken, the succubus, already standing behind the defiant young devotee, dug her claws into the woman's back and hoisted her up in the air. Visla carefully removed the dagger, revealing no wound once it was out, and pointing it at the woman's face as she hung helplessly suspended by the meat hooks that were Aelva's fingers in her back.

"Why did you do that?" Visla asked with genuine curiosity.

"I spit at you filth," the woman said and did just that. What came out was mostly blood.

"Say hello to your gods for me," Visla said with resignation, and slit the woman's throat.

[Visla Eraclaire]

Visla turned away as the woman choked and coughed her last. She shook her head in disgust and knelt to wipe the dagger against the blankets where not moments before that same woman had healed Aelva. The succubus tossed the body to the ground with the thump and another trail of sacred energy fed the Godshard. Visla turned to her with a despondent look.

"We can go back to Radasanth now," she stuttered, still unable to release her death grip on the dagger. "I don't want to see blood anymore."

Aelva wiped her claws on the blankets and dismissed them to embrace Visla with softer human hands. She patted the warlock on the back and pulled her up to her feet. "I'll take you if you want to go, but your determination can't seriously be shaken that easily. You've killed people before, Visla. Blades and bludgeons made it more personal, but it's the same killing. Do you think they deserved to die?"

"Yes," Visla answered without hesitation.

"Then there are more to kill, I’m afraid," Aelva said, gesturing at the slumbering troops. Some were already on the verge of death, hanging by the barest thread as they slept away the final moments of their lives. "I'll take the left side."

She let Visla go and started the grim work. The warlock slunk to the entrance of the hall with her cane in her right hand and the dagger in her left. She lowered herself down and looked at the peaceful face of her first victim. It was a blond haired man, no older than she was. He had a strong jaw and high cheekbones, fair skin, and a strong body except for a cut across his belly, buried under gauze. She imagined that if he opened his eyes, they would be blue, calm, but determined.

As she stared, she heard gasps from behind her as some of Aelva's assigned targets awoke from their slumber before dying. The ring on her finger grew ever warmer as the energy flowed in, now more like a raging river than the slow trickle of a spring thaw. Still she stared at the man's face. What had he done to her? Wasn't killing him just the same sort of vile persecution that she hated from zealots?

Her hand and the blade it grasped lingered over the man's motionless neck until finally Aelva stood behind her. All the other beds lay bloodied, their occupants given their final respite. Still she hesitated.

"To be ashamed of one's immorality – that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality," Aelva recited. "These people would banish me and burn you as a witch. Moral or immoral, just be done with it. They are our enemy."

Visla slid the blade in and dragged it across. The man mercifully did not wake, but drifted peacefully into death as Visla whispered a different aphorism, "One is best punished for one's virtues."

[Visla Eraclaire]

The hall was silent, an audience of corpses, and Visla and Aelva stood at their center, still bloody after wiping their hands time and again against dressings and blankets. They stared at each other and at the doors at the stairs at the end of the hall, one set up, one set down. Visla imagined there were not any more people in the house, at least none that were vigilant servants of the Church. Still, if there were any, she suggested they would be up, occupying the former bedchambers of the noble family.

The pair walked up the stairs, Aelva in her full demonic glory and carrying a torch from the wall of the hall below. With the blood stains on their clothes and the occasional screams of the past few minutes, subtlety was long gone. Visla still had the dagger that had taken two lives on the belt of her traveling clothes. There had been a sheath on the belt the whole time she had owned it, but she had never bothered to fill it until now.

At the top of the stairs, three oaken doors lay open, equally spaced down a long hallway. In the shadows at the end of the hall, a set of double doors, stained to look like a fine cherry wood, were still firmly shut. As they walked toward those doors, the two peered into dark rooms. Aelva thrust her torch through the doorway and found bedchambers, ransacked for valuables, but otherwise unused in some time. The beds were stripped for linens and old piles in the corner still smelled with the ash of burned books. All looked the same, the trinkets that distinguished them as a son or daughter's room, an old or a younger child, were all taken or burned. Leaving them as they were, the pair approached what they deduced to be the master bedroom.

Aelva took the point and kicked the door open, jumping inside and spinning the torch from side to side. The illumination was unneeded. The master bedroom was in perfect order, candles still burned and a woman still lay in the bed. Aelva lowered her guard provisionally and signaled Visla to join her in the room. The warlock walked in and looked around.

A large cushioned bed with embroidered blankets, a desk made of dark-stained wood and piled with correspondence, a porcelin basin, a pair of fine chairs positioned close to one another in an alcove by a window, it all looked not so different from her late father's chambers. The two expected the woman to stir, but she lay as still as any of those below. From the look of her, she was the room's proper occupant, the Lady of the house, and not some interloper. She had fine jewelry and a silk nightgown, painted lips and styled hair, with none of the modesty of a cleric. Still, such hypocrisy was not beneath holywomen in Visla's own land, so she kept her eyes fixed on the woman as Aelva continued to search the room.

The succubus sifted through the papers, scanning the lines. They seemed bland at first glance, pleasantries between the Lady and her Lord on campaign. Nothing that suggested the house was under siege by the enemy, converted into a hospital for the Church, but this was just what she would expect from a woman not in control of her own pen. Before she could finish perusing the desk, both the succubus and the warlock heard a sudden tumult from downstairs. Glancing briefly at one another, they immediately agreed and ran to the closet, closing the flimsy wooden door behind them. Aelva started to cast the ritual to cloak them in darkness, but Visla put a hand over hers and stopped her. She wanted to be able to see out, and so she knelt and peered through the slats into the room.

[Visla Eraclaire]

Footsteps echoed in the hallway, closer. Whoever it was walked slowly, cautiously, and most importantly, alone. The door to the room had itself had been left open. Visla watched as a man walked in, draped in clerical regalia. If his robes were to believed, he was no one to trifle with. Still, there was little choice. She could see in his beady eyes the knowledge that they were in the room. It was only a few moments before he found them, Visla huddled lower to the ground and tried to be silent. The room was full of curtains, perhaps he would check them first, perhaps under the bed.

The man clapped a pair of time-weathered hands together and the woman in bed shot stock upright with a gasp.

"You've had visitors," he said, thankfully in Common. His voice had a strained sound to it. It started out deep but sounded as if every syllable stretched it through a throat too narrow to hold it. "I do not know where they are, but I suspect they are in this room and can hear me as I speak."

He turned around as he spoke, to the curtains, a chest in the corner, and ultimately the closet. "Greetings little rats, you needn't come out. The pitiful nobleman who used to own this land has sent you to liberate his wife, no doubt. He was warned that any such attempt would be met with the direst of consequences."

He raised a hand toward the woman in bed and she suddenly seized up, completely stiff, and extended her right arm over the bedside table. From within his vestments he drew a lengthy seemingly ceremonial blade. Its hilt was silver and there were intricate flowing inscriptions down its center, but the way he held it made clear that for all its beauty it was razor sharp and fully functional. He spun it about in his hand with great finesse, more than any would expect from a man whose little remaining hair was a withered grey. The woman's body would not respond, but Visla could see her eyes darting frantically in their sockets, between the blade and her extended arm.

"Now, I am going to sever the good lady's arm and I would like you to do me the favor of returning it to her husband. Do you think you could do that, little rats?" the grizzled cleric said with glee as he reeled back with the blade.

A sphere of darkness formed in an instant around the old man's bald head and Visla thrust open the door. To her surprise, he simply jumped to the side with astounding grace and glared at the two of them as a smokeless white flame spread up the gilded blade. Aelva charged forward as the unnaturally lithe geriatric lunged toward Visla with his argent blade.

Visla simply fell to the ground, with no delusions she could dodge his blow gracefully. Aelva's claws scraped along the blade with a terrible grinding, parrying it to the side as they passed one another. The warlock raised her cane and swung at the man's kneecaps, causing him to tumble to join her on the ground.

It troubled him not and he swung wildly toward the warlock. The blade missed, but the pure white flames seemed to reach toward her skin. They seemed to flicker and abate somewhat as they approached her flesh, but still it singed her. Or rather, it would have. Burns formed across Aelva's arm and shoulder and Visla screamed out from the searing pain.

Aelva tried first to snuff the flame out, pointing toward it and muttering the Infernal words of her spell. It was useless, they were far too strong for her cantrip, and the man was already on his feet with Visla crawling away from him back into the closet, cornered. The succubus conjured balefire and ignited the holyman's back, chilling his spine and garnering his focus away from the helpless warlock.

"You shall be purged from this world, child of darkness," he vowed and pointed toward her, issuing forth a cascade of blinding rays of light. Aelva fell back against the wall, her face blackened and smoldering and Visla screamed out in shared pain.

[Visla Eraclaire]

Even as she screamed and felt the horrifying pain of being burned alive, Visla pulled herself up with her cane and raised it up against the man's exposed back. Aelva lay across the room, her skin crumbling to ash, twitching helplessly as her body seemed to fall apart before her swiftly blackening eyes. Visla's eyes grew wide with tears as she looked at the sight and she brought her inscribed cane down against the man's skull.

Crack.

Again, again, again, she swung harder each time, drawing back a bloodier grip with each blow. There were no screams. There was no mercy in her strikes. For all her frailty, her hatred pushed her to plunge the bloody bone shaft further into the man's skull. Even as his shimmering white spirit flowed out of him and into her ring, she did not relent. She swung again, again, as Aelva's body fell away into a pile of blackened dust. She would leave him in no better state, a bloodied headless mess on the floor.

Heaving with exhaustion, dripping with sweat, she stepped over his body and toward the bed. The woman was no longer frozen by his spell, but by fear as she looked at the blood-spattered wretch that was her rescuer. Visla let out a heavy sigh and sat herself on the bed, staining the fine blankets without objection from her hostess.

"Who… are you?" the terrified noblewoman finally managed to say.

"Enemies of the Church, friends of yours if you'll have us," Visla said, still panting. "My name is Visla Eraclaire, that was Aelva," she pointed toward the pile of ash with more exasperation than remorse. She knew she could bring her beloved back, but the arduous ritual would likely put her out of commission for the remainder of the Civil War.

"I'm sorry… thank you," the Lady could speak only simple phrases, still regaining her senses.

"How did the Church capture your lands?" Visla asked purposefully.

"They… came in the night, from nowhere. They took our children somewhere, a monastery near here. That man came," she pointed at the mess on the floor. "He made me write my husband, tell him what had happened, tell him that for every battle he won, he would take a limb from one of us, and that if he returned he would kill us all. It's been this way… I don't know how long. What season is it?"

"Spring," Visla answered and finally stood up.

"Truly? I've been here for months… Only waking to torment my husband by letter, you have to tell him I'm alright," she pleaded.

"You aren't alright. If the Church has a monastery near here, they won't leave us be for long enough for me to recover from summoning Aelva back. She's our only way out of here. They still have guards at the edge of your lands and, despite what you may have seen, I am really no fighter," Visla said, resigned.

"Summon? She… really was a demon, wasn't she? Then you'll be bringing her back with…" the lady asked, incredulous.

"Blood, right. We warlocks are as terrible as they say we are, except when we're rescuing you," Visla said spitefully.

"We may not be hopeless yet, then. When they first took the manor, they made me help them set up the hospital. There may be a potion in the storeroom that can heal you after your… ritual," she replied, clearly still uneasy.

Visla's eyes lit up a bit. It was still only the barest chance, but it was something. It was hope enough to begin preparing the ritual. She took the dagger from her hip and slashed her left wrist, wincing and turning up to the noblewoman as she began to scrawl the runes amongst the ashes. "Go."

[Visla Eraclaire]

Visla's blood flowed down her arm and into the sigils she drew around the spot where Aelva was incinerated. There was no requirement that the ritual be performed there, but Visla hoped that it might speed the lengthy and painful process along. She had the sinking feeling that even a few moments could make a difference.

The outer ring of the ritual circle was complete before the noblewoman returned carrying two crystal decanters full of a syrupy red liquid, somewhere between red wine and strawberry jam. The smell was distinctly unlike neither as she uncorked them. It was cloying, bitter, and altogether unpleasant. The one similarity Visla found was that it was like red wine in that it turned her weak stomach.

As the color would begin to drain out of the warlock's face, the woman who watched her work would thrust a mouth of the bottle up to her lips and force a swig of the vile liquid down her throat. Through the nausea, blood loss, and constant Infernal chanting, Visla's eyes glazed over, trace-like. Hours passed outside the window, the sun rose higher and higher in the sky and then began to fall again. Inside nothing changed, gulps of disgusting potion, vials worth of blood spilt, nearly unpronounceable syllables uttered from Visla's pale lips. All the while, the noblewoman watched dutifully, keeping her terror in check. Visla would have found her admirable if she had room in her mind for a spare thought.

As the sun crept once more beneath the horizon, Visla's preparations came to a climax. She threw herself down over the circle, penitent and weak. The blood continued to trickle down from her wound and a great red fissure began to form in the air above her. It was tiny at first, no bigger than a keyhole, but it grew larger before the lady's eyes. Suddenly, when it was still no wider her open, aghast mouth, there was noise from below. Footsteps, dozens, the clanking of steel, it stirred her to her feet. As Visla lay collapsed, the lady ran and slammed the doors shut. They opened into the chamber, and her eyes darted frantically around the room for something to barricade them.

Her gaze came to rest on a heavy armoire against the wall. She leaned against it with all her weight, scraping it along the floor even as she heard the heavy footsteps on the stairs outside. She set it in place with a mighty push just as an armored shoulder slammed against the door. The frame rattled and the contents of the armoire, mostly old flatware, clinked as the men outside battered against the entryway.

Visla was unconscious and the crimson gate was still only large enough for a dog as the lady turned around from her task. She looked for other furniture, but decided that an end table and a basin would make little difference against the burly paladins of the Sway that were ramming their meaty shoulders into her door. She focused on the warlock and poured another dose of potion down her throat, hoping to wake her.

Visla's eyes fluttered open, in time to see a blade thrust through the wooden barricade. In her wound-addled mind she was simply grateful that they didn't have an axe. The portal widened faster and faster, as more and more weapons began to puncture the door. Soon, men's eyes peered through splintered holes. They tore at the breaking wood with their arms. The noblewoman took the dagger from the ground, still sticky with Visla's blood and swiped at them briefly before retreating as they re-drew their swords and continued to hack away.

Aelva extended an arm through the passageway just as one of the Church's brutes did the same through the shattered door. He began to shove cracked bits of the armoire aside. As she stepped fully through, Aelva ignited the entryway in an inferno of green flame. She took the lady and Visla under each arm and threw the lot of them through a nearby window. Coils of shadow beneath her hooves slowed their descent and brought them safely to the ground.

She spoke the words to summon her wings as quickly as her lips could pronounce them and Visla twitched with anticipation with every syllable. The noblewoman glanced over her shoulder every few seconds for the sight of a soldier, and up toward the bedroom where the men still seemed stymied by the succubus' fiery impediment.

At last, the ebon wings came. The three held tightly to one another as they soared into the night sky. They made their way toward the horizon, back to the last baron who had turned Visla away with the anticipation of a warmer reception…