Chapter 9

The demons were after the Highborne. Ero'then planned accordingly.

"With me, with me!" he called again to his students. It took them a few moments to shake themselves out of their battle-craze and join him. They were all shape-shifted, which he was glad for. They were safer that way. They weren't far enough along for anything else. Even Renarion would have struggled to form more than a shower.

It was their responsibility to learn. It was his to protect them.

He pulled them back to the lip of the ridge and glanced down. No demons from the rear. He turned back to the Highborne and saw that they had formed a circle, their staves pointed outwards. The demons were coming at them from multiple directions. They were generally of the weaker types. The female Highborne with the orange hair - clearly their leader - had destroyed one of the infernals on its way down. The other she had only been able to misdirect into the storm.

They threw spells of a dozen different types at their enemies. One even summoned a fiery golem to do battle with the infernal. They worked their magic, butchering the demons as fast as they came.

Ero'then couldn't help but snort. Fools. If they would have just looked up the hill, they would have seen the night elves watching the battle progress with all serenity. The demons had hardly looked at them.

He felt his students' impatience. He decided to head it off at the pass.

"Have you noticed their eyes?" he asked them.

A couple students exchanged glances. The others were still breathing heavily, expecting to leap back into the fight. When he indicated for them to shift back into their natural forms to speak, it took them a few moments to do so.

He looked them over. They were winded and battered.
In between catching her breath, Sel'uen spoke. "They're green," she said.

Ero'then resisted the urge to sigh. "Thank you, Sel'uen. I myself couldn't tell the pigment. Why are their eyes green? Is this a common trait of the Highborne?"

No one answered. Drex was shivering. He was closest to the lip of the ridge, apparently wanting maximum distance from the action.

"The answer is no," Ero'then said. They knew that, but this was one of their first combats. He knew how difficult it was for the untempered to use their minds after a fight. "The Highborne have never had this feature. But these Highborne," he indicated to the circle of magi, "do."

He let that sink in. The sound of the demons and the shouting quel'dorei punctuated the air. "I'm not asking you to give me an answer as to why this phenomenon exists. But I want you to think on it, and consider it seriously. Soon you will have your answer, whether you want it or not."

"Want do you mean, Shan'do?" Renarion asked. He was the most anxious of all. His eyes could hardly leave the battle. "Are we going to help them? Or are we going to leave them to the demons?"

"No," Ero'then said. "We need them alive." He saw the uncomfortable looks in his students' eyes and decided he'd better be clearer. "What are the Highborne using to defend themselves?" he asked.

"Magic," Yeshaila said.

"The arcane, yes. Where does this power come from?"

Renarion answered. He looked like he had caught up to his master's reasoning. "It is energy," he said. "Demons are attracted to it."

"Yes, demons are drawn to the arcane," Ero'then agreed. "But not all magic. It takes a great deal of power to draw a demon's attention. The Highborne have been reckless with their spellcasting. We are too near the Nether for demons not to notice. What else strikes you about the behavior of the demons?"

They all looked down on the fight. Kel answered.

"They're disorganized," he murmured. "They could be a lot more effective with some tactics. They're just attacking. They're not working together."

"Very good Kel. What does that tell us?"

"They're just demons who happened to be nearby enough to notice the use of magic," Renarion answered. "This isn't a calculated attack. We weren't ambushed." He looked at the Shan'do. "They're going to keep coming for the Highborne. Like you said, Shan'do; this place is too close to the Nether. Until the Highborne stop using their magic, the demons will keep coming."

"So when will the Highborne stop using their magic?" Ero'then asked him.

"When they run out of…" Renarion grappled for the term. "Magic."

"Yes," Ero'then said. "The Highborne will fight, and their fighting will draw more demons, which will cause them to cast more spells, and so on." He directed their gaze down to the fight. "The cycle only ends when the Highborne run out of arcane energy." He didn't tell his students that these Highborne probably had arcane crystals and other things to siphon from that would extend the combat. They didn't understand these things yet and he didn't want to explain everything. He wanted them to make the coming discoveries on their own. He wanted them to see, firsthand, the dangers of the arcane.

To the young night elves, Ero'then's words must have seemed prophetic. Eventually, after minutes of fighting, the Highborne's magic grew less and less spectacular. And, after a bit of a lag, the demons started coming in fewer and fewer numbers. The battle dwindled down until the only magic in use was half-hearted shoves of arcane power. The last of the demons closed in on the Highborne.

"Come," he told his students. They ran down the hill, charging into the fray. They hit the demons from behind. Suddenly, the orange-haired mage gave a shout.

Ero'then realized it too late.

The quel'dorei leader was no fool. At her word, a huge burst of magic disintegrated the last of the demons and knocked his students back, one or two of them on their backs.

The quel'dorei, though clearly exhausted, turned on their new foe and unleashed the last of their wrath.

Ero'then swore, throwing forward a storm to protect his students. The Highborne had clearly expected no mercy from kaldorei and had wanted to draw them into the fight, so that the quel'dorei could bring them down with them.

His students took a couple hits, recovered, then charged, dunked into battle-rage again. Ero'then tried to call them back, but knew it was too late.

Their leader was grinning madly at him. "We die together, wild one!" she called, her hair stuck to her face shiny with sweat. She threw another clumsy, but highly powered spell at him.

Roaring, he charged the girl. Indeed, she looked little more than a girl. But the quel'dorei valued their looks greatly, and she was also a mage, so he couldn't be sure. He could hear the vile folly of youth in her taunt. It enraged him.

The demons came again. The Highborne leader was formidable. She kept drawing power out of some vast well within her and she kept fighting furiously, both keeping him at bay and drawing in more demons.

Finally, he exhausted her. She collapsed onto her staff, then fell on her ass. The green burning in her eyes burned with intense heat now. She was drained.

So too, it seemed, were the other quel'dorei. They fell to fighting demons with cantrips and their staves and blades. They didn't want to die, though Ero'then doubted their leader did either. They had thought the night elves would wait until they had spent themselves, then finish them off themselves. Their frame of mind had turned to revenge, not suicide.

So he cried, "Do not hurt the Highborne!" in Thalassian and his own speech, and turned his attention to the fight with the demons. They came gibbering and shaking, and roaring their unintelligible battle cries, but other than the two infernals that had attacked, they were not what Ero'then considered dangerous demons. That, of course, was entirely his subjective view, as he was certain his students would have disagreed. They were dragging. Despite his best efforts to protect them from the most dangerous foes, he saw more serious wounds start to appear. Above them, the Highborne's magic field was starting to waver. He bolstered it with his own control, keeping the storm at bay.

The battle drew to an end. The corpses of the demons lay in small heaps. Imps. Small void walkers. The occasional miniature felhound. But there were many of them, and they bled their black ichor onto the scarred earth.

Silence - except for the howling wind around them - finally fell.

Ero'then looked around. His students were in various states of collapse. He counted them off, and found that one was missing. Brim. Renarion was the only one standing, and he only barely. His Thero'shan watched the Highborne guardedly.

The high elves had collapsed to a person. The only way he could tell that they were not dead was their breathing. Their chests rose and fell hungrily.

Still, he thought it appropriate to say something. "Do not resist," he told them. His own breathing was labored. "We are not going to kill you."

The Highborn did not respond. Except for their leader, he realized. She had turned her head to look at him.

Her gaze was on him with an intensity he did not expect, nor understand. A smirk stretched the side of her mouth up towards her ear, as if a knife had drawn it.