A/N: Finally, actual content!

I don't want to spend too much more time dwelling on the whole Nazarick hacking raid thing, but there are a few concerns I wanted to address:

- In regards to the poison traps, Sybiler would have had good enough resistances to bypass that; I left it out because I didn't think it was an important detail. I figure that if everyone in Ainz Ooal Gown could survive getting past it, any player of a similar level wouldn't have much trouble.

- It may seem strange that Momonga didn't realize the Bukubukuchagama he was talking to was an imposter, but you'd be surprised what people can fall for when they're not paying attention. They only exchanged a few sentences and Momonga was preoccupied with something else at the time. As much as he cares about his friends, he had no reason to be suspicious, so he didn't double-check her identity or anything like that.

- Based on what I read on the wiki, I assumed that the "no Rings of Ainz Ooal Gown outside of Nazarick" policy was something Momonga instituted after coming to the New World, not a practice that the guild followed before. I haven't read every light novel yet (so far I've only watched the anime and read volume 10), so I may miss details like this. For now I'll just say this incident happened before they agreed to leave the rings in their base. Sorry if I get anything else wrong!

I really do appreciate all of the feedback, though. I can't promise this fanfic will be perfectly accurate, but what I love about Overlord is that there's always more to learn. :D

In a similar vein, I am going to be taking a lot of liberties with the worldbuilding of Elf Country and the Slane Theocracy, since we don't know a ton about them (especially the former). I'll try to keep it as accurate as I can as of Volume 13, but I can't promise perfection.

Anyway, on with the story!

CONTENT WARNING: GORE

(at this rate I'll need to change the rating on this fic to M)

Khiaki stumbled on rubbery legs into a tree and leaned against it for a moment, panting.

She was used to walking. The commander would make her and the rest of the troops march from sunrise until sunset several times a week, without so much as a break for lunch. It wasn't the distance that had exhausted her—it was the incline.

Elf Country was a flat expanse of dense forest for the most part, with maybe an occasional hill as you wandered closer to the mountains in the south or west, but the army spent most of its time on the northern and eastern borders they shared with the Slane Theocracy. There weren't supposed to be any mountains in the middle of the Great Forest of Evasha. And yet, here one was, right under her feet.

The mountain had appeared out of nowhere mere hours ago, just a few miles away from their camp. Moments later, a pillar of fire like the wrath of all the gods combined crashed down upon a nearby farming village. The scouts who checked on the village claimed that there was nothing left but rubble and ash.

Since they found no clues about who was responsible in the remains of the village, another team of scouts had to be sent out immediately to investigate the mountain. Khiaki was one of the two unlucky souls picked for the job. The commander claimed that it was because she was the most knowledgable about magic out of everyone in the squadron, but deep down, she suspected it was because she had denied the commander's drunken advances a few nights ago. He'd been cold towards her ever since that incident. She feared that this was the punishment she had been bracing herself for; if it was, it didn't bode well for her chance of surviving this mission.

Don't come back until you find answers, the commander had told her, with a viciousness that implied failure meant death.

She glanced behind her, out through the sparse canopy of trees towards the ruins of the village. The sight nearly made her collapse in dispair. She was here to find whatever entity was capable of such unimaginable destruction, and she got the feeling that if she succeeded in finding them, that would mean death too. Her heart was close to bursting in fear just knowing something like that was out there and nearby, so she couldn't imagine surviving an actual encounter with it.

That only left one option—desertion. She'd considered it many times in the past, but where was a traitorous elf girl supposed to go? Her own people would arrest her, demihumans would eat her, the Theocracy would kill her, and any other human society would have her enslaved. Not to mention the gods would torture her for eternity as soon as she was dead. Her only chance was to hide in some remote corner of the forest and live off the land for the rest of her life while begging the gods for forgiveness. The farther she marched up this mountain towards her likely death, the more she yearned to run off in a random direction, never looking back.

She clutched a tree branch, gathering her resolve to do just that, but a voice interrupted her.

"Did I say you could stop?"

Osto glared down at her from farther up the slope. The dark haired soldier stood on alert with his bow half-drawn, ready to shoot down any enemy agents—or any cowardly deserters who knew too much about Elf Country's military operations to be allowed to live. Khiaki swallowed hard. Unless she got unbelievably lucky, fleeing meant death too.

No matter what she did, she was going to die today.

"No, sir." She lowered her head in forced respect. Osto was only a common scout, but he was also a man, which meant women like Khiaki were required to defer to him. She let go of the tree, her legs still numb and tired, and kept hiking after him.

"Well hurry up," Osto snapped. "And pay attention." Although he was doing his best to sound commanding, Khiaki sensed the slightest waver of fear in his voice. He knew as well as she did that this could be a suicide mission. She wondered what he did to piss the commander off so badly.

They continued up the mountain, Khiaki always lagging a few feet behind the scout. It seemed like the slope was getting steeper and more barren by the minute. Soon they were spending more time walking sideways and searching for footholds than they were moving forward. Once they even had to climb up a near-vertical cliff face, leaving Khiaki with arms just as tired as her legs.

At this point, she had been ready to give up a dozen times already; now, only her fear of Osto's wrath kept her going. Just as she was seriously considering if laying down for a second could be worth getting beaten senseless, her bleary eyes wandered to something unusual, which snapped her out of her daze almost instantly. She stumbled forward to catch up with Osto, then tugged on the back of his tunic.

Osto turned around, beads of sweat collected on his tanned forehead. He seemed too tired to be annoyed. "What?"

Khiaki pointed to their left. "Are those stairs?"

He followed her finger, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. Sure enough there were stairs heading up the mountain, made of well-worn stone bricks half submerged in dirt. Although they looked old, they also seemed well-trodden, and there were a few struggling plants growing between the cracks in the bricks that had recently been trampled flat. People had passed through here recently.

Immediately, Osto backed away from the stairway and back into the trees, pushing Khiaki back along with him. His eyes darted, scanning for signs of life or movement.

"It has to be this way," Khiaki said.

"We can't approach in the open like this," Osto replied, in a tone that made him sound like he was scolding a child. "If the enemy is this way, we'll be shot down!"

"I have an idea." She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and focused. "Camouflage," she muttered. A vibration of magic resonated with the word. Green energy crept over the two of them, and when it faded, their skin and clothing took on the colors and textures of everything around them: the speckled stone below them, the dull brown bark of the trees, the grey of the ash-choked sky. As they moved, the colors moved with them, ensuring that they would be difficult to make out from a distance at any angle.

Without another word, the two of them began creeping their way up the path. They both flinched at every slight sound or movement, but it always turned out to be a bird, or a squirrel, or even just leaves stirring in the light wind. They climbed for another half hour.

The slope was beginning to level out. From a distance, Khiaki had seen that the mountain rounded off as it reached higher up, almost to the point of flattening out into a dome, then spiked up into a narrow point at the very top. They would be reaching the summit soon.

Although she should have been paying attention, Khiaki found herself lost in thought, worrying about what horrors must await her at the end of this path. A monstrous fire-breathing dragon? A demon? Agents of the Slane Theocracy, perhaps even the Black Scripture itself? She was so distracted that she jumped and almost screamed when Osto grabbed her by the arm. He dragged her sideways off of the path and forced her into a crouch among some nearby shrubbery. He got onto the ground himself and leaned in close, practically whispering right into her ear.

"I found something," he said. He held out an intricately carved obsidian rod about the length of his forearm. It was a wand, and not like any wand she had even seen or used. "Tell me what it is."

Khiaki took the wand from his hands, carefully, as not to cut herself on any of the sharp edges that ran up its length. Even before casting an identification spell, she could feel vibrations of powerful magic ringing off of it. "Detect Magic," she muttered.

As soon as her spell touched the surface of the wand, she felt as if the ground had fallen out from under her. Inside the wand she sensed a great void, vast and incomprehensible, so deep and dark it seemed like it could swallow all the world with room to spare. She saw blotches of magical energy floating in it, each a ten times more potent than all the magic she herself had to command, yet in this vast emptiness they seemed to be little more than stains left behind by a much greater power. She knew with absolute certainty that this entire space had once been filed with world-shaking magic. One could have told her that a god lived in this wand, and she not only would have believed it but would have sworn herself to that god in an instant, out of fear of what it could do to her if she displeased it.

Worst of all, when she listened close, she swore that she heard a trickle echoing through void, heat and crackling power rising up like steam. The magic was regenerating. Soon, it could shake the world again.

A sharp pain slammed through her gut, yanking her back to reality. She doubled over and barely held back a cry. Osto looked down at her with startling intensity, and kept his fist pressed against her belly, as if to remind her to stay quiet. "Get a hold of yourself, girl," he growled. By the look on his face, he must have suspected that the wand was possessing her. Normally he would have slapped her across the face to bring her down to earth, but that would have made too much noise, so a punch in the stomach would have to do.

Measuring herself against Osto's steady hand, Khiaki realized that she was shaking violently, like a leaf in a storm. The handle of the wand she held was slick with her sweat—and her blood. She must have cut her palm on the dark glass while in the depths of that horrific vision.

"What is this thing?" Osto demanded. His scowl was stern, but his eyes were terrified.

It took her a long moment to find words again. When she did, she choked out the first thing that came to mind. "God."

"What?"

Realizing she was speaking nonsense, she shook her static-filled head and took a shaky breath. "A tool of a dark god," she clarified. "Nothing else could be this powerful."

"Is it…" He looked out over the forest, towards the scorched circle of earth that was once the village. "Did it do this?"

"Yes." She said it with absolute certainty. Ever since the firestorm, she had wondered what could possibly be capable of triggering such a catastrophe. Now, she knew. This wand could.

Osto turned away from her, staring at the ground, pensively. She almost wanted to drop the Camouflage spell so that she could better see and decipher the look on his face. He stayed like that, in solemn silence, for a long while; when he finally met her eyes again, there was sorrow in his gaze, as if he had given up on something. As if he knew it no longer mattered if he acted like the soldier he was supposed to be, because all of this was fruitless in the end.

He stopped pressing his hand into her stomach, and placed it on her shoulder instead. "You have to take this to the commander," he said. "Hurry, don't stop for anything, don't look back. I'll keep searching."

Normally she would have obeyed without question, happily taking any excuse to leave this accursed mountain, but the look on his face was almost like that of a vulnerable child trying his best to act more mature than he should ever have to. She feared for him. "But, sir—"

"A wand cannot use itself," he said simply. "Whoever used it could still be nearby. I can't return without answers."

"Sir, you don't understand." She gripped the hand that rested on her shoulder, tightly, as if she were ready to drag him away. "Whatever is at the top of this mountain could kill you in an instant!" Her panicked voice threatened to rise above a whisper.

He hushed her, then forced a wavering smile. "The gods are on our side, remember? If this is as important as it seems, they will protect me."

The logic of his statement brought Khiaki some small comfort. It was true that the elves lived far more holy lives than their enemies. Both Elf Country and the Slane Theocracy were home to God-kin, the divine progeny of the Six Grade Gods themselves. The elves had the piety and humility to revere their local God-kin, the Elf King, as their absolute unquestioned ruler. Meanwhile, the Slane Theocracy had the gall to put flawed mortals in charge of political affairs, and forced their God-kin to be tools of the military for the degenerate human "cardinals" to lord over. The gods would never stand for such disgrace against their beloved children.

Even though the elves had smaller numbers and inferior equipment compared to the Slane Theocracy, their defenses had lasted this long because the gods supported them in this war. Khiaki had no doubt that the gods were at play here; therefore, as long as Osto kept faith, he would have the advantage. Still, she could not calm her nerves.

"I can't keep you camouflaged if you go too far away from me," she said, in one last weak attempt to talk him out of it.

"I know," he said. They both also knew that stealth would do him no good, not against a foe like this. "I will face his head on, like a true warrior."

There really was no dissuading him. After mulling it over for a moment, she nodded. "Be careful, okay? Keep faith."

Osto nodded. He stood and returned to the stairs, climbing the final steps towards the top.

Khiaki watched him go, all to aware of the heaviness of the wand in her hands. It was hard to keep faith, knowing that something like this wand could exist, but what choice did she have? She took a moment to wrap the wand in a spare shirt from her pack, both to keep it safe and keep it out of her own sight, then set off down the mountain as quick as she could.

Tachel woke up to warmth.

Her breath caught in her throat. Warmth. It would turn to heat, heat turns to fire—

She shot up, throwing the thick blanket on top of her aside as if it were burning her. Cool air hit her bare skin. The sensation calmed her, almost enough to make her feel safe, but not quite. A knot of uneasiness still quivered inside of her.

Her vision focused. She was no longer in her home's half-collapsed basement; instead, she was in some cramped cottage, surrounded by baskets and jars of every herb she could name plus dozens that she couldn't. There was no houses in the village like this.

She looked down at herself. Now that she had tossed her blanket to the side, she noticed that she was naked—and didn't have a single burn on her. The mind-tearing agony she'd been swallowed by before was completely gone now, as if she had never gotten hurt at all. Had it all been a nightmare? Then where was she?

"You're up!"

Tachel jolted in surprise and whipped her head around to see what made the noise. Sitting at her bedside was a brown-haired elf, no older than she was, with a short, military hairstyle. She recognized that gaunt face immediately, and her stomach dropped.

Oh gods, not him.

She'd always been too intimidated to talk to Deshan, but she'd spotted him around the village many times over the past few years, ever since he was stationed there by the military as a guard. Never in her life had she heard of someone so blindly infatuated with the Elf King. Not a single innocuous "sin" or "blasphemy" escaped his notice, and he never failed to harass anyone who dared imply that the King, Elf Country, or the army were anything but perfect and pure in their holiness. At least, that's what her father had complained about to her.

Her father had impressed another thing onto her about army men—a girl like her being left alone with one never ended well. Women were nothing more than playthings to the King's men. Tachel was suddenly acutely aware of her own nakedness, and Deshan's eyes on her. She hurriedly grabbed at the blanket again and pulled it over her chest.

She expected Deshan to look disappointed at losing the view, but instead he blinked out of a daze and his cheeks turned beet red, as if he only now realized what he had been staring at. "I-I'm sorry," he stammered. "Would you… like some water?"

After bracing herself for the worst, this threw Tachel off balance. She nodded. Deshan was too busy averting his eyes to see her do so, but he was in the process of getting up before she even made the gesture; he probably would have fetched her water even if she said no.

Tachel readjusted the blanket around herself to be more secure, and examined her surroundings again. Where in the world was she? Deshan's presence made her think that she could be in military hands—a terrifying thought—but it was hard to imagine that this cottage was a part of any army encampment. Not that she knew much about armies. Where was her father?

A memory clawed at her from the dark recesses of her mind. When she was in the basement, moments before fire blasted down from upstairs like water from a flash flood, she'd heard a bloodcurdling scream from the floor above. There was only one other person in the house that morning.

When Deshan returned to her, she was shaking again. The memory of the fire had lit something white-hot in her gut, threatening to melt her from the inside out. She grabbed at the glass of water like a man lost in the desert and gulped it down as fast as she could. Physically it was refreshing, but it failed to extinguish the panic inside of her.

"It's alright," Deshan said in a soft voice, sensing her anxiety. "You're safe now. Nothing can hurt you here."

"My father," she said. Her voice was hoarse, but not as bad as she had expected. "Where is my father?"

His face fell, in a way that confirmed all of her worst fears. "I'm so sorry, Tachel," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "The village was destroyed in seconds. We are the only ones that made it."

Those words broke her.

Every misfortune that made up this impossible tragedy crashed down on her at once. She cried a sick, wailing, ugly cry, so powerful that she feared the grief would kill her. She sobbed for her father, for her home, for her few precious friends, for the boy across the street she'd always dreamed of marrying someday, for her lost past and lost future.

A few times she thought of something she cherished, something that could still be around, and she asked about it. Is the church still standing? Are the crops alright? Is there something left to bury? For every question, Deshan had the same answer: "I'm sorry." Every time he said those words, her heart broke all over again.

Deshan stayed at her bedside as she sobbed. At first, he was a steady presence, a rocky outcropping amidst a raging ocean. But after a while his resolve began to erode; he clenched his jaw to keep his lips from trembling and wiped each tear away before it could roll down his cheeks.

After a long while, Tachel ran out of tears, and laid on the bed in silence. Everything she ever loved was gone, and all that was left in its place was a dull ache in her chest.

"It was painless, you know."

Tachel looked up weakly at Deshan. He was staring down at his lap, fiddling with his own fingers.

"The fire came so fast, we barely felt it before our bodies burned away," he said. "No one suffered."

Confusion crossed Tachel's tear-streaked face.

"I died too," he said, answering her unasked question. "I was there with everyone else, when they were crossing over. They were confused, but they took comfort in knowing they had each other."

"Then…" She furrowed her brow. "How are you here? Am I dead too?"

He shook his head. "No, we're alive. An angel resurrected me, so that I could avenge the village. The same angel healed your wounds and brought you here."

"An angel…?" She vaguely remembered two figures hovering over her when she briefly awoke in the basement. She'd been too scared to really pay attention to them, but didn't one of them have feathery wings?

"Her name is Toffee," Deshan said, a dreamy smile crossing his face. "She lives here, with a few of her friends. There's a kind old dwarf woman, Ethel I think, and another lady…" He frowned. "I do not know her name yet."

Tachel could not pay attention to his words any longer, and let herself float into an empty daze again. There was only one lonely question left inside of her; she needed some solid answer, some bit of hope, to hold onto, and this was her last chance at finding that.

"What am I supposed to do now?"

"I'm not sure. However, it was a miracle that you survived how you did." Deshan smiled warmly. "The gods must have great plans in store for you. For now you should rest, so that you will be ready when they call upon you."

Tachel had never been a particularly religious person, but in her depths of despair, the sentiment was comforting. Maybe she should be more faithful.

A creaking noise caught her attention. She sat up and saw a wrinkled old dwarf woman with thin hair the color of snow emerging from a trap door. In one hand the woman held a burlap sack, and in the other, a bundle of cloth. She smiled when she saw the two of them. "Oh good, you're up."

She approached, and her expression morphed from contentment to concern, then landed on pity. "Oh, you poor thing." She handed Tachel the bundle of cloth, which unfolded into fresh undergarments and a simple cornflower blue dress. "You must be famished. I'll make you something to eat."

She hobbled over to a table and used a stool so she could reach its surface. She pushed a few baskets and bunches of herbs out of the way, pulled over a wooden cutting board and knife, and plunked down the burlap sack beside it. "Deshan, would you be a dear and chop up these vegetables for me while I start the fire?"

Tachel cringed at the word fire, but said nothing, knowing she was being ridiculous.

"Of course." Deshan stood with gusto, seemingly thankful for the distraction. Tachel was jealous and wished she could help, just to get her mind off of things, but she feared that she was too weak to stand.

Once she had changed into the clothes she was given, she watched as the two of them fell into a rhythm. Deshan sliced up the potatoes, onions and carrots with the swiftness and accuracy of a hummingbird bouncing from flower to flower. Ethel boiled a pot of water over a fireplace, then gathered and ground up a diverse collection of spices, which smelled heavenly even from across the room. Despite everything that happened, the scene felt oddly normal, and she found herself relaxing.

That fragile peace shattered when the front door burst open.

A tall, dark-haired elven man, dressed in the uniform of the royal army, stepped inside the cottage as if it were his own. Tachel was no longer alarmed when she saw who entered, but remained tense. Army men were permitted by royal decree to enter any private property they wished without warning, so barging in was expected, but the fact that one was here at all worried her. Deshan locked eyes with the soldier, and for a brief moment they shared a look of mutual understanding. Perhaps he was trying to tell the stranger that they were all friends here, and there was nothing questionable going on.

Ethel, on the other hand, did not respond kindly. Tachel could see her bristling in barely restrained anger at the unannounced visitor.

"Are you two from Maizen Village?" the soldier asked with a flat, serious tone.

"We are," Deshan said. "We're the only—"

"You both need to leave." The soldier stepped further into the room, his hand on his sword. "Now."

Frightened, Tachel started to get out of bed as best she could, but Deshan put out his arm to make her stop. "I'm sorry brother, but we can't. We're bound by honor to stay her until our hosts give us leave."

"And what of your oath to your divine King? Is that not the most important honor?"

He grimaced, as if the insult to his loyalty were a knife plunged into his chest. "These are good people," he insisted, gesturing at Ethel. "The King would readily approve of them. They saved our lives!"

The soldier scoffed, but without humor. "They didn't save your lives, they are the ones who risked it in the first place."

This took Deshan aback. He opened his mouth, but no argument came out.

"You're being awfully rude, young man." Ethel's words had none of the honey-sweetness they had before. Tachel couldn't see the old woman's expression, but she could practically feel dark fury radiating off of her.

"Don't play games with me." The soldier unsheathed his sword and pointed it directly at the old woman, with so much disgust in his scowl one would think he were dealing with a slug.

"Brother, what are you doing!?" Deshan barely stopped himself from jumping on the other man.

"Our troops found a magic wand directly down the mountain from this cabin," the soldier said. He gripped the sword with both hands and assumed a battle stance. "Close enough that it could have rolled from here, easily. It was a wand powerful enough to engulf a village in fire."

The soldier spared one last look at Tachel, and in his gaze was a hint of fear that betrayed his aggressive display. It was if he his eyes were pleading for her to run while he held the danger back. Seeing Ethel's sudden change in demeanor, she was tempted to do just that.

The door slammed behind the soldier on its own accord, as if blown shut by a gust of wind no one could feel. A maniacal cackle rang out. By the way Ethel's shoulders bounced, she seemed to be the one that was laughing, but the sound came from every corner of the room at once. It was as if the cottage itself were laughing at the poor fools inside. The room grew darker, and colder.

"You should of remembered your manners, boy." Her voice rumbled, more like one belonging to a demon than a dwarf. "Hold still now. The more you struggle, the worse it will be."

A vile grin swallowed up half of her face. Her old, yellowed teeth had been replace by rows of fangs as long and sharp as needles. Her skin bubbled, turning from peach to sickly green and growing dozens of unsightly warts. The soldier trembled, but pulled back his sword, preparing a strike.

Ethel lunged. The soldier tried to bat her out of the air, but she was too fast. He barely moved his sword an inch before she barreled into his chest. He flew backwards and slammed into the door with a deafening crack—Tachel couldn't tell if it was the wood of the door or his spine—then crumpled into a heap on the floor.

The dwarf-sized monster wasn't done. She rolled him onto his stomach and splayed out his limbs, so that his torso was only covered by the leather of his armor. The soldier groaned, but he was too winded and dazed to fight back.

She held up a hand, and long claws like knives sprouted from her fingertips. With one hand and almost no effort, she ripped the armor right off of him, exposing his stomach to the air.

"What a shame." A bit of her maternal tone was back, but it was a thin veil over the voice of an inhuman creature. "You're such a handsome young man, I could eat you right up." Her grin grew even wider. "Maybe I will!"

The soldier opened his mouth, perhaps to say something brave, but his words turned into a soul-piercing scream as Ethel drug her claws into his stomach. She raked downward from the bottom of his ribcage to the top of his pelvis. Blood and bits of shredded intestine bubbled out from the wide, deep gashes.

Tachel stumbled back against the wall, every inch of her skin turning ashen and pale. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would have vomited at the sight of the soldier's gushing blood. In that moment, she wished that she had died in that fire.

Ethel breathed in deeply through her bulbous nose, as if savoring the metallic scent of the blood. "Mmmm. Wonderful. You're just the secret ingredient I was waiting for." As she said this, the pot of boiling water was lifted into the air by some invisible force, along with all of the vegetables that Deshan had cut and the herbs Ethel had gathered. The ingredients dropped into the pot with a sizzle. Ethel clawed at the elf's stomach over and over, creating an open cavity where his digestive organs should have been. The soldier's screaming was replaced by gurgling and retching as fluids flooded his lungs.

Ethel stepped back from the soldier's body, her frock soaked crimson, and flicked her wrist. The floating pot of stew tipped and poured its contents into the cavity in his abdomen. His body convulsed as the boiling hot water dragged him through a whole new world of agony. Ethel laughed as the the man's shuddering grew weaker and weaker, and his diluted blood spilled out across the floor, until all the life was drained from his mangled corpse.

"YOU MONSTER!"

Tachel had been so shocked by the massacre before her, she hadn't noticed Deshan sneaking up on Ethel, brandishing his vegetable-cutting knife. He lept toward Ethel and plunged the blade right into her back. Hopeful excitement swelled in Tachel's heart; if Deshan was as good at using a blade in combat as he was using it to cut vegetables, he stood a chance now that he had the element of surprise.

As soon as the blade touched Ethel's skin, it shattered into a thousand pieces.

Deshan froze in place, the de-bladed knife handle in his trembling hand. All of the courage drained from him.

Ethel looked back at him with solid black eyes like dark pools of ink. She sighed and pouted. "Shame. And I had such high hopes for you, too. You seemed like such a polite young man."

She snapped her fingers. Thick vines sprouted from the nearest wall and blasted towards him like lunging vipers. They entangled him, binding his arms and legs, then yanked him back and pinned him to the wall. He kicked and struggled to no avail.

"YOU TRICKED US!" he shouted. "YOU'RE ALL DEMONS! YOU'LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO OUR VILLAGE! THE KING WILL HAVE YOUR HEADS—"

Before he could finish, the vines gagged his mouth tightly, reducing his ranting to muffled howls.

Ethel strolled over to him, arms folded behind her back. "Sadly I need to keep you alive, as my lady ordered." She made a soft, indignant huff to herself. "But I've got a feeling in my bones that she won't be showing you much mercy, once she learns that you tried to betray us."

Hearing that Ethel wasn't about to eviscerate Deshan wasn't enough to calm Tachel down, but it did clear her thoughts for a brief moment. She had no idea if she had to be kept alive to, but either way, that monster's attention was completely focused on Deshan at the moment. This was the perfect time to make her escape.

But how was she supposed to get out of here? The corpse of the soldier blocked the door, and considering it didn't smash open when he slammed into it, there was probably some magical force holding it closed. Her gaze drifted to a nearby window. It was small, but so was she; she was fairly sure she could climb out of it once the glass was out of the way.

She grabbed a pestle from a nearby table, crept over to the window, and knocked the pestle against the window pane. Although she tried to strike a balance between force and subtlety, the sound of stone against glass was too loud not to catch the others' attention. Immediately thrown back into a panic, she smashed at the window with wild abandon, shattering it into an open maw of glass-shard teeth.

She could feel the monster's eyes on her now. There was no time to clear out the sharp bits of glass around the edges of the window, but if she had to choose between getting cut up by glass or by that thing's claws, she chose the glass.

As soon as she reached her hand through the opening, she felt something serpentine wrapping around her waist. More vines. She scrambled, fighting with everything she had to throw herself through the window before she could be constricted, but it was no use. The vines tied her down to the wall by every limb. Her cheek was held a fraction of an inch away from a large, jagged shard of glass; if she dared move her head even a little, she would slice open her cheek, or even poke out her eye.

"Hmmph. You too?" Ethel gave Tachel a disappointed look. "At least you're not screaming."

She wanted to scream, desperately, but now all she could do was bite her lip and whimper.

Ethel's monstrous traits were beginning to fade away. Her eyes lightened, her skin turned back to a normal color, and her teeth flattened out. She was not completely normal again, however—she pushed off the ground and started floating a few feet in the air, like a possessed doll. "If you excuse me, I'm going to have some tea on the porch." She floated nonchalantly over the bubbling corpse to the door, but stopped before she exited. She glanced back at Tachel and Deshan one last time.

"Don't bother praying," she said to them. "Your paltry gods can't help you here. You're better off thinking about how you're going to apologize to the Supreme One for your insolence." She grinned, a cruel mockery of the kind smile she had worn before. "You'll wait here until the Supreme One decides what to do with you."

With that, she phased right through the door like a ghost, leaving the two restrained elves alone in the cottage.

Hours passed. It felt like days, but from the window Tachel could see the sun moving across the sky, and was able to track time that way. Her neck ached from craning her head away from the glass and the vines around her chest made it hard to breathe. Sometimes she would hear Deshan struggling and screaming into the vines, but often he was silent. The scent of the cooking herbs and fresh mountain air was turned acrid by the stench of boiling blood.

Many times she was tempted to drive the glass shard through her temple, end it all here and rejoin her father in heaven, but the fear of pain kept her paralyzed.

About an hour after noon passed, Ethel phased through the door again back into the cottage. Tachel didn't even dare to breathe.

The old woman's clothing was clean now, as if the bloodbath had never touched her. She hovered over the corpse, then fanned the air towards her nose as she inhaled deeply, as if she couldn't get enough of the aroma. She dipped a single finger into the bloody bowl of flesh that was once the soldier's stomach, the licked it clean. She hummed in contentment.

"Delicious," she cooed. "The secret to a good stew is always to let it cook long and slow." She muttered a quick incantation and the fleshy concoction began to steam again. "What a wonderful dinner I'll have tonight."

Finally, she turned her attention towards the two elves pinned to her cottage's walls. "Hang in there, you two," she said in an inappropriately chipper voice. "The Supreme One just called me to a meeting, so I'll tell her about what happened up here. It won't be much longer until your judgement." Her grin turned wicket. "I'm sure you're dying to find out what will become of out."

Deshan didn't bellow and thrash again—he'd long since run out of energy—but he glared death at Ethel, his whole body trembling with rage. She paid him no mind.

Ethel chuckled to herself, then floated down to the ground once she was out of the way of the blood puddle. She hummed a quaint little tune as she lifted the trap door open and crawled down to the lower level.

Tachel's dry lips parted, about to move in silent prayer, but then she remembered the woman's warnings. No god could help her now. Instead, she thought of how she would beg this Supreme One for forgiveness, and hoped that Deshan was doing the same.