*AI* Whoo... longest one yet. Once again, thanks for the reviews. Please keep 'em coming! */AI*
7- An Illusion?
Raziel saw the smoke rising from the human citadel long before the decimated wreckage of its walls. He could not guess at the length of the Turelim invasion; an hour? A day? The battle had left the walls pockmarked with blast holes. Although he couldn't tell for certain in the darkness, it looked as if no humans manned the walls, and that could not be a good sign.
The former clan lord turned to watch Ishtar follow him. Even when her otherworldly sight failed, she stubbornly pushed on. A glimmer of a strange emotion flickered inside him through his feeling of dread, something he did not know what to make of. It had been absent for too long.
She paused next to him, eye sockets turned toward the city. "It looks grim."
"That it does." Raziel stared at the burning city before turning to his daughter. "Ishtar, will you tell me something?"
"Yes?"
His white eyes returned to the citadel. "This city houses a human woman by the name of Katalina. Do you know if she lives?"
Ishtar's eyebrows furrowed but she did not comment on his request. "Katalina... a girl of ten years, noble birth?"
"No. Perhaps forty years, a simple farmer."
She was silent for several moments. "Three children, a daughter and two sons, once a..." Her eyebrows furrowed more deeply. "...vampire hunter?"
"Yes."
"She is alive."
Raziel's shoulders unconsciously sagged with relief. "Thank you." He gave her a sidelong glance. "Will you wait here until I return?"
"What!" Ishtar said indignantly.
He gave her a look that, at the moment, she chose not to see. "You would stumble half-blindly through a city infested with the Turelim perversions?"
"I am not *helpless*, Raziel."
"My preference is to leave your theory untested. Wait." Raziel hurried toward the city, resisting the urge to curse under his breath. Of course she could defend herself; after the incident on the flaming bridge, he would be surprised if there was something she could not do. But the thought of dragging one of his last children into an embattled city... he had cheated fate enough times that he knew not to tempt it.
Raziel shook his head and focused on the human citadel ahead. Through the holes in the wall, he saw the buildings lit with orange light as if the streets themselves smoldered. Had the fire been set by the Turelim? Was it a last desperate defense by the humans, or simply a hearth fire that got out of hand at the worst possible time? He snapped out of his mental daze to discover he was sprinting like a bloodcrazed wolf after its prey.
It was disgusting, really. There was no need to be so anxious over a mortal who mothered him at every turn. When he had been clan lord, he would not even have remembered her name and if his brothers had ever found out, they would have mocked him for centuries to come.
That time of godhood seemed so distant.
The reaver of souls slowed to a halt as he reached the outer wall of the citadel. A massive hole had been burned into the stone, and the bricks at the hole's rim had the flaking, blackened look of used firewood. Raziel climbed through the hole and into the human citadel, where the carnage was even greater. Bodies and pieces of bodies littered the walkways, lit only by the light of scattered fires. Their fuel, it seemed, was barricades of furniture that had been hastily erected across the streets. Whatever there was to be burned, the humans had burned it. The moats that lay just inside the walls had inexplicably disappeared; the holes in the ground remained, but they held no water. Over all this was the dull roar of raging fire and the echoes of distant voices.
Raziel hesitated before resuming his walk, this time toward the west. The city looked quite different with half its buildings on fire. He could not be sure where Katalina's land lay.
A cloud of smoke hit him full in the face, acrid and sudden, as the door to a nearby building burst open. The terrified human that ran through it stopped abruptly at the sight of Raziel. The man's panic doubled and he veered to the left, fleeing both the soul reaver and whatever was in the building. Raziel spared him a puzzled glance before turning to the open doorway.
He did not recognize the creature that emerged in the small explosion of falling rock. Too large to fit in the doorway, it had the stocky build of a bear or wolverine, but that was difficult to see past its hide of wiry quills. These glowed orange from the flames within the building behind it, and the edges of the quills glinted wetly. The demon's eyes were more like chasms gouged into its body offering a glimpse into a being that seemed composed purely of fire. When it opened its mouth to snarl at its new prey, there was nothing down its throat but an orange glow.
Raziel edged backwards warily. This was no Turelim.
Its jaws parted as if to roar but instead, the flame down its throat rushed out in a stream of billowing fire. Raziel skittered to the side and barely dodged the demon's attack. He sprang toward its flank, careful to stop short of its quills. Luckily, the bulk of the demon made it too awkward to whirl in time. With a quick slash, Raziel thrust the Soul Reaver into its flesh.
The wraith blade drew no blood. Instead, it crashed jarringly against the demon's hide and slid off in a spurt of blue sparks.
Raziel swore. The demon, not injured in the least, glared at him with its fiery eyes. Raziel took one look, turned, and raced down the street.
********************************************************
Ishtar flicked the dirt from her claws with a sigh. It hadn't been very long... ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, but she was too aware of every minute for the time to pass quickly. She had drawn an elaborate scene in the dirt involving stick figure vampires and heads with X's for eyes. It had been very amusing to try it without sight. That is, it had been very amusing for about five minutes. The waiting was like sitting through a story you have heard hundreds of times... even the exciting parts got tedious.
She closed her eyelids. And which part were they at now?
The sound of footsteps in the dirt answered her question. Ah, yes, Ishtar thought as she heard the sound of a man clearing his throat. The first step toward the climax of the whole mess. About time.
"I've been waiting," Ishtar said.
The man half-smirked, if she remembered correctly. "You know who I am?"
"How could I not?"
"Well-spoken, my dear. Tell me... how much do you know of this pre-ordained path we are currently traversing?"
Ishtar traced another X-eyed head in the dirt. "Everything."
He chuckled appreciatively. "How convenient. Even the outcome presents itself to your sight?"
"You know it does not. Time changes... I believe it is a good sign."
"So you are willing. You are ready to join the cast of this deliciously malevolent tragedy."
"As I have always been."
"Despite the costs," he pressed.
"Despite the costs."
"Ahhh, you are his daughter after all."
"Yes..." Ishtar shook her head. "I do not think he will understand. I see him, walking with us toward the end, but... I cannot believe it. He did not with you."
"But you are his daughter. You have not had children, Ishtar. You have not felt the unrelenting vise of responsibility, the uncompromising sway they come to hold over your heart."
"Despite the costs."
For a moment, she glimpsed his pained smile. "Despite the costs."
Ishtar drew in a deep breath and let it out again. "Tomorrow night then?"
"Yes. Don't keep me waiting. And now, I believe, that father of yours is in need of some assistance."
"I was thinking the same thing."
She turned toward the city and behind her came the soft buzz of his teleportation spell at work. That had been strange, she reflected, a meeting between two immortals who had foreseen the exchange several times. Every time she saw it, she remembered, it got shorter, as both knew what the other would have said. It was easy to forget that they had only just met.
All to mire themselves in the greatest of messes. But it was too late to suffer a change of heart. For once, there was no more time. For once, she thought distantly as the black power rushed through her, there was only the now.
Ishtar exhaled, the sky opened, and rain fell in thick sheets to the ground. At her feet, the stick figure drawings dissolved as if they had never been.
********************************************************
A dead end. This was not what Raziel needed at the moment. He glared at the flaming barricade as if that would help remove it from his path, but it remained and the sound of the demon's pursuit only drew closer.
The soul reaver turned as the demon rounded the corner, its huge body taking up the entire width of the alleyway. The fire in its eyes had brightened from orange to a blinding yellow-white, he noted with detached interest. The trip to the spectral realm was going to be very unpleasant.
His deliverance fell from the heavens in the form of rain. It fell with no warning and in a sudden downpour that instantly formed tiny streams flowing between the cracks in the stone at his feet. Raziel watched as water found the demon's eyes and, with a dull hiss, turned them into pools of steam. It stumbled backwards, blind and frantic, and reared back on its hind legs, throwing its head back wolf-like for a scream of pain or rage. But the rain plunged into its throat, drowning the fire at its core. The roar came out in a billow of steam and a quiet gurgle. With a crash, it slumped heavily to the street, twitching until the glow in its eyes died to nothing.
Raziel's claws automatically reached toward his cowl. He was not fully conscious of this until the demon's soul slammed into him, as fiery as its physical self had been. But ah, it could satisfy an appetite.
"Y-y-you!"
Raziel looked up at the human who had just entered the alleyway. It was the man that the demon had been chasing in the first place. Raziel glanced at the slain beast with an inner wry grin. "M-m-me?" he said mockingly.
Hm, careful with that crossbow. The man's movements were so jerky, Raziel would not be surprised if he shot himself. "Don't *belittle* me, you, you pretender."
The soul reaver's eyes narrowed, as much from the rain as the man's blathering. "Say again?"
The human was too agitated to note the controlled flatness of his tone. "I s-said don't belittle me! We always knew. All of us. Always a vampire."
"So the point of your disjointed rambling is...?"
The man's grimace was most comical. "Leech!" Raziel saw his arm tense and rushed forward with blinding speed. The human's fingers still held the shape of the crossbow after Raziel ripped it from his grasp and dashed it into so many splinters against the alley wall. Even when the soul reaver had him trapped against the wall, his neck bordered on either side by claws imbedded in the stone, the human still had his arms in the same position.
Raziel leaned in and silently chuckled at the human's visible struggle to understand what just happened. "Now," the soul reaver murmured, "I do not appreciate being the target of such a misplaced discourtesy." The human tried to give him a look of hatred, but he must have hit the wall harder than had been intended; the glare was a bit cross-eyed.
Raziel pressed his claws together ever so slightly around the human's throat and his prey's eyes became much rounder.
"Negandee!" the man squeaked.
"Hmm?"
Too late. The man's eyes rolled back in his head and when Raziel released his hold, the human wilted into an undignified heap on the ground.
He watched the rain patter against the man's unconscious form. There was a vague notion in the back of his mind that he was living in a kind of mad-carnival purgatory, where he wronged and was wronged in random interchanges. Perhaps there was something about his appearance that led to instant hatred. For his part, he was an otherworldly creature, truly immortal and thousands of years old. Caring about lives that lasted not even a century required quite a struggle of the imagination.
And now they blamed him for the Turelim mess. Humanity never failed to disgust him.
Raziel left the alley and walked quickly down the abandoned streets. Let the humans live or die, the vampires starve or thrive. He had a daughter... something tugged at his mind, said he had forgotten something about Ishtar. Something... he shook the rain out of his bangs and quickened his pace. She could defend herself and he'd be back soon. It couldn't be something major.
Ten minutes later, Raziel found himself walking through the familiar lanes next to Katalina's fields, eyes swinging back and forth restlessly. The fighting had not touched the fields here, near the outskirts of the city. Some of the fields nearby had been burned down to blackened fringes, but Katalina's were untouched. That is, there were gaping holes at one edge of her land where some plants must have been torn up out of the ground. But the holes were neat and no remnants of the plants had been left behind.
He sighed and scratched at the back of his head with his claws. There was nothing here or nearby but glyph globes, plants, and mud that was slowly accumulating. Would they have left? No, there was nowhere left to go...
Raziel turned with the intent of leaving, but instead came face to face with a man he hadn't known was there.
"Hello!" the stranger said promptly. Raziel blinked more rain out of his eyes and gave him a quick once-over. The human was a peasant, it seemed, quite nondescript on the whole except for his eyes. In the light of the glyph globes, they were pale enough to look gold.
That was significant, he thought suddenly. It should tell him something...
"Ah. A living human. Congratulations." Raziel's wings twitched at his halting words. He couldn't remember being cut off guard by a human.
"You are most gracious," the peasant said with a note of sarcasm.
"Of course. It does not... seem like a common accomplishment." He cast a significant glance at the empty fields around them.
"Well, no. This city has become rather unfriendly. You wouldn't think we'd stay here, would you?"
"Few choices present themselves."
"Which is why we choose the best ones." The man leaned back and swept his wet locks from his forehead.
Raziel's eyebrows furrowed. His intuition was shouting something at him that he could not entirely decipher. This man was... off, surely. But something behind that.
"-Which is, in this case, Avernus."
"Hmm?"
The man stared at him with his almost-golden eyes. "Avernus," he repeated. "The safest place to flee." The intense stare broke off as he turned to gaze across the empty fields. "Rebuilding is in order. And those who think you set the Turelim on the citadel-" He smirked contemptuously. "Stupidity beyond definition. There are many of us that you will find more reasonable."
Raziel looked at the man silently until he turned and their eyes met. "Interesting," the soul reaver said, "how I have never heard the clan's proper name uttered by human lips."
The peasant before him smiled, pleased. "Avernus," he said again. His eyes gleamed pure gold as the illusion melted away. "Avernus Cathedral, Raziel. I trust you remember the way."
Raziel lunged, but his claws passed through empty air. The 'human' had already launched the teleportation spell and, for the third time, the Emperor of Nosgoth eluded him.
********************************************************
"Raziel."
The soul reaver did not respond. He merely glared straight ahead, toward the crops he had destroyed in his rage, but not at them.
"Raziel, we need to go."
He made a low grunting noise in his ruined throat.
"Raziel. We'll find him. You and I."
Ishtar smiled as he slowly rose to a standing position. She patted him awkwardly, on what she hoped was his shoulder.
"Yes..." Raziel said. Inflection gradually returned to his words. "I know of a quick passage from this place."
"Alright. Let's be off then." She turned, keeping her claws on his back to ensure she walked in the correct direction. Summoning the rainstorm had taken too much out of her, her and the gift.
"Your sight has left you?"
"'Tis why I don't use the power overmuch," Ishtar said. "Calling the rain was quite exhausting."
The cowl under her claws shifted as if he was nodding to himself. "I inferred as much." His steps abruptly stopped and she looked toward him in puzzlement.
"You called the rain?" he said. "And..." She felt his claws hesitantly brush against her mane, which hung down in wet tendrils.
"Indeed!" Ishtar laughed as they resumed their walk toward the warp gate. "I have always admired Rahab's gift." He couldn't keep himself from laughing with her.
7- An Illusion?
Raziel saw the smoke rising from the human citadel long before the decimated wreckage of its walls. He could not guess at the length of the Turelim invasion; an hour? A day? The battle had left the walls pockmarked with blast holes. Although he couldn't tell for certain in the darkness, it looked as if no humans manned the walls, and that could not be a good sign.
The former clan lord turned to watch Ishtar follow him. Even when her otherworldly sight failed, she stubbornly pushed on. A glimmer of a strange emotion flickered inside him through his feeling of dread, something he did not know what to make of. It had been absent for too long.
She paused next to him, eye sockets turned toward the city. "It looks grim."
"That it does." Raziel stared at the burning city before turning to his daughter. "Ishtar, will you tell me something?"
"Yes?"
His white eyes returned to the citadel. "This city houses a human woman by the name of Katalina. Do you know if she lives?"
Ishtar's eyebrows furrowed but she did not comment on his request. "Katalina... a girl of ten years, noble birth?"
"No. Perhaps forty years, a simple farmer."
She was silent for several moments. "Three children, a daughter and two sons, once a..." Her eyebrows furrowed more deeply. "...vampire hunter?"
"Yes."
"She is alive."
Raziel's shoulders unconsciously sagged with relief. "Thank you." He gave her a sidelong glance. "Will you wait here until I return?"
"What!" Ishtar said indignantly.
He gave her a look that, at the moment, she chose not to see. "You would stumble half-blindly through a city infested with the Turelim perversions?"
"I am not *helpless*, Raziel."
"My preference is to leave your theory untested. Wait." Raziel hurried toward the city, resisting the urge to curse under his breath. Of course she could defend herself; after the incident on the flaming bridge, he would be surprised if there was something she could not do. But the thought of dragging one of his last children into an embattled city... he had cheated fate enough times that he knew not to tempt it.
Raziel shook his head and focused on the human citadel ahead. Through the holes in the wall, he saw the buildings lit with orange light as if the streets themselves smoldered. Had the fire been set by the Turelim? Was it a last desperate defense by the humans, or simply a hearth fire that got out of hand at the worst possible time? He snapped out of his mental daze to discover he was sprinting like a bloodcrazed wolf after its prey.
It was disgusting, really. There was no need to be so anxious over a mortal who mothered him at every turn. When he had been clan lord, he would not even have remembered her name and if his brothers had ever found out, they would have mocked him for centuries to come.
That time of godhood seemed so distant.
The reaver of souls slowed to a halt as he reached the outer wall of the citadel. A massive hole had been burned into the stone, and the bricks at the hole's rim had the flaking, blackened look of used firewood. Raziel climbed through the hole and into the human citadel, where the carnage was even greater. Bodies and pieces of bodies littered the walkways, lit only by the light of scattered fires. Their fuel, it seemed, was barricades of furniture that had been hastily erected across the streets. Whatever there was to be burned, the humans had burned it. The moats that lay just inside the walls had inexplicably disappeared; the holes in the ground remained, but they held no water. Over all this was the dull roar of raging fire and the echoes of distant voices.
Raziel hesitated before resuming his walk, this time toward the west. The city looked quite different with half its buildings on fire. He could not be sure where Katalina's land lay.
A cloud of smoke hit him full in the face, acrid and sudden, as the door to a nearby building burst open. The terrified human that ran through it stopped abruptly at the sight of Raziel. The man's panic doubled and he veered to the left, fleeing both the soul reaver and whatever was in the building. Raziel spared him a puzzled glance before turning to the open doorway.
He did not recognize the creature that emerged in the small explosion of falling rock. Too large to fit in the doorway, it had the stocky build of a bear or wolverine, but that was difficult to see past its hide of wiry quills. These glowed orange from the flames within the building behind it, and the edges of the quills glinted wetly. The demon's eyes were more like chasms gouged into its body offering a glimpse into a being that seemed composed purely of fire. When it opened its mouth to snarl at its new prey, there was nothing down its throat but an orange glow.
Raziel edged backwards warily. This was no Turelim.
Its jaws parted as if to roar but instead, the flame down its throat rushed out in a stream of billowing fire. Raziel skittered to the side and barely dodged the demon's attack. He sprang toward its flank, careful to stop short of its quills. Luckily, the bulk of the demon made it too awkward to whirl in time. With a quick slash, Raziel thrust the Soul Reaver into its flesh.
The wraith blade drew no blood. Instead, it crashed jarringly against the demon's hide and slid off in a spurt of blue sparks.
Raziel swore. The demon, not injured in the least, glared at him with its fiery eyes. Raziel took one look, turned, and raced down the street.
********************************************************
Ishtar flicked the dirt from her claws with a sigh. It hadn't been very long... ten or fifteen minutes, perhaps, but she was too aware of every minute for the time to pass quickly. She had drawn an elaborate scene in the dirt involving stick figure vampires and heads with X's for eyes. It had been very amusing to try it without sight. That is, it had been very amusing for about five minutes. The waiting was like sitting through a story you have heard hundreds of times... even the exciting parts got tedious.
She closed her eyelids. And which part were they at now?
The sound of footsteps in the dirt answered her question. Ah, yes, Ishtar thought as she heard the sound of a man clearing his throat. The first step toward the climax of the whole mess. About time.
"I've been waiting," Ishtar said.
The man half-smirked, if she remembered correctly. "You know who I am?"
"How could I not?"
"Well-spoken, my dear. Tell me... how much do you know of this pre-ordained path we are currently traversing?"
Ishtar traced another X-eyed head in the dirt. "Everything."
He chuckled appreciatively. "How convenient. Even the outcome presents itself to your sight?"
"You know it does not. Time changes... I believe it is a good sign."
"So you are willing. You are ready to join the cast of this deliciously malevolent tragedy."
"As I have always been."
"Despite the costs," he pressed.
"Despite the costs."
"Ahhh, you are his daughter after all."
"Yes..." Ishtar shook her head. "I do not think he will understand. I see him, walking with us toward the end, but... I cannot believe it. He did not with you."
"But you are his daughter. You have not had children, Ishtar. You have not felt the unrelenting vise of responsibility, the uncompromising sway they come to hold over your heart."
"Despite the costs."
For a moment, she glimpsed his pained smile. "Despite the costs."
Ishtar drew in a deep breath and let it out again. "Tomorrow night then?"
"Yes. Don't keep me waiting. And now, I believe, that father of yours is in need of some assistance."
"I was thinking the same thing."
She turned toward the city and behind her came the soft buzz of his teleportation spell at work. That had been strange, she reflected, a meeting between two immortals who had foreseen the exchange several times. Every time she saw it, she remembered, it got shorter, as both knew what the other would have said. It was easy to forget that they had only just met.
All to mire themselves in the greatest of messes. But it was too late to suffer a change of heart. For once, there was no more time. For once, she thought distantly as the black power rushed through her, there was only the now.
Ishtar exhaled, the sky opened, and rain fell in thick sheets to the ground. At her feet, the stick figure drawings dissolved as if they had never been.
********************************************************
A dead end. This was not what Raziel needed at the moment. He glared at the flaming barricade as if that would help remove it from his path, but it remained and the sound of the demon's pursuit only drew closer.
The soul reaver turned as the demon rounded the corner, its huge body taking up the entire width of the alleyway. The fire in its eyes had brightened from orange to a blinding yellow-white, he noted with detached interest. The trip to the spectral realm was going to be very unpleasant.
His deliverance fell from the heavens in the form of rain. It fell with no warning and in a sudden downpour that instantly formed tiny streams flowing between the cracks in the stone at his feet. Raziel watched as water found the demon's eyes and, with a dull hiss, turned them into pools of steam. It stumbled backwards, blind and frantic, and reared back on its hind legs, throwing its head back wolf-like for a scream of pain or rage. But the rain plunged into its throat, drowning the fire at its core. The roar came out in a billow of steam and a quiet gurgle. With a crash, it slumped heavily to the street, twitching until the glow in its eyes died to nothing.
Raziel's claws automatically reached toward his cowl. He was not fully conscious of this until the demon's soul slammed into him, as fiery as its physical self had been. But ah, it could satisfy an appetite.
"Y-y-you!"
Raziel looked up at the human who had just entered the alleyway. It was the man that the demon had been chasing in the first place. Raziel glanced at the slain beast with an inner wry grin. "M-m-me?" he said mockingly.
Hm, careful with that crossbow. The man's movements were so jerky, Raziel would not be surprised if he shot himself. "Don't *belittle* me, you, you pretender."
The soul reaver's eyes narrowed, as much from the rain as the man's blathering. "Say again?"
The human was too agitated to note the controlled flatness of his tone. "I s-said don't belittle me! We always knew. All of us. Always a vampire."
"So the point of your disjointed rambling is...?"
The man's grimace was most comical. "Leech!" Raziel saw his arm tense and rushed forward with blinding speed. The human's fingers still held the shape of the crossbow after Raziel ripped it from his grasp and dashed it into so many splinters against the alley wall. Even when the soul reaver had him trapped against the wall, his neck bordered on either side by claws imbedded in the stone, the human still had his arms in the same position.
Raziel leaned in and silently chuckled at the human's visible struggle to understand what just happened. "Now," the soul reaver murmured, "I do not appreciate being the target of such a misplaced discourtesy." The human tried to give him a look of hatred, but he must have hit the wall harder than had been intended; the glare was a bit cross-eyed.
Raziel pressed his claws together ever so slightly around the human's throat and his prey's eyes became much rounder.
"Negandee!" the man squeaked.
"Hmm?"
Too late. The man's eyes rolled back in his head and when Raziel released his hold, the human wilted into an undignified heap on the ground.
He watched the rain patter against the man's unconscious form. There was a vague notion in the back of his mind that he was living in a kind of mad-carnival purgatory, where he wronged and was wronged in random interchanges. Perhaps there was something about his appearance that led to instant hatred. For his part, he was an otherworldly creature, truly immortal and thousands of years old. Caring about lives that lasted not even a century required quite a struggle of the imagination.
And now they blamed him for the Turelim mess. Humanity never failed to disgust him.
Raziel left the alley and walked quickly down the abandoned streets. Let the humans live or die, the vampires starve or thrive. He had a daughter... something tugged at his mind, said he had forgotten something about Ishtar. Something... he shook the rain out of his bangs and quickened his pace. She could defend herself and he'd be back soon. It couldn't be something major.
Ten minutes later, Raziel found himself walking through the familiar lanes next to Katalina's fields, eyes swinging back and forth restlessly. The fighting had not touched the fields here, near the outskirts of the city. Some of the fields nearby had been burned down to blackened fringes, but Katalina's were untouched. That is, there were gaping holes at one edge of her land where some plants must have been torn up out of the ground. But the holes were neat and no remnants of the plants had been left behind.
He sighed and scratched at the back of his head with his claws. There was nothing here or nearby but glyph globes, plants, and mud that was slowly accumulating. Would they have left? No, there was nowhere left to go...
Raziel turned with the intent of leaving, but instead came face to face with a man he hadn't known was there.
"Hello!" the stranger said promptly. Raziel blinked more rain out of his eyes and gave him a quick once-over. The human was a peasant, it seemed, quite nondescript on the whole except for his eyes. In the light of the glyph globes, they were pale enough to look gold.
That was significant, he thought suddenly. It should tell him something...
"Ah. A living human. Congratulations." Raziel's wings twitched at his halting words. He couldn't remember being cut off guard by a human.
"You are most gracious," the peasant said with a note of sarcasm.
"Of course. It does not... seem like a common accomplishment." He cast a significant glance at the empty fields around them.
"Well, no. This city has become rather unfriendly. You wouldn't think we'd stay here, would you?"
"Few choices present themselves."
"Which is why we choose the best ones." The man leaned back and swept his wet locks from his forehead.
Raziel's eyebrows furrowed. His intuition was shouting something at him that he could not entirely decipher. This man was... off, surely. But something behind that.
"-Which is, in this case, Avernus."
"Hmm?"
The man stared at him with his almost-golden eyes. "Avernus," he repeated. "The safest place to flee." The intense stare broke off as he turned to gaze across the empty fields. "Rebuilding is in order. And those who think you set the Turelim on the citadel-" He smirked contemptuously. "Stupidity beyond definition. There are many of us that you will find more reasonable."
Raziel looked at the man silently until he turned and their eyes met. "Interesting," the soul reaver said, "how I have never heard the clan's proper name uttered by human lips."
The peasant before him smiled, pleased. "Avernus," he said again. His eyes gleamed pure gold as the illusion melted away. "Avernus Cathedral, Raziel. I trust you remember the way."
Raziel lunged, but his claws passed through empty air. The 'human' had already launched the teleportation spell and, for the third time, the Emperor of Nosgoth eluded him.
********************************************************
"Raziel."
The soul reaver did not respond. He merely glared straight ahead, toward the crops he had destroyed in his rage, but not at them.
"Raziel, we need to go."
He made a low grunting noise in his ruined throat.
"Raziel. We'll find him. You and I."
Ishtar smiled as he slowly rose to a standing position. She patted him awkwardly, on what she hoped was his shoulder.
"Yes..." Raziel said. Inflection gradually returned to his words. "I know of a quick passage from this place."
"Alright. Let's be off then." She turned, keeping her claws on his back to ensure she walked in the correct direction. Summoning the rainstorm had taken too much out of her, her and the gift.
"Your sight has left you?"
"'Tis why I don't use the power overmuch," Ishtar said. "Calling the rain was quite exhausting."
The cowl under her claws shifted as if he was nodding to himself. "I inferred as much." His steps abruptly stopped and she looked toward him in puzzlement.
"You called the rain?" he said. "And..." She felt his claws hesitantly brush against her mane, which hung down in wet tendrils.
"Indeed!" Ishtar laughed as they resumed their walk toward the warp gate. "I have always admired Rahab's gift." He couldn't keep himself from laughing with her.