Despite Callista's dire mutterings, it wasn't demons that caused their first obstacle.
Aren scratched absently at his neck, itchy with sweat and dirt, as he surveyed their morning's work. The sight was disheartening. A dead oak of truly prodigious size lay across the trail, still bristling with twisted branches despite their hours of labor. It was a hoary old thing, scaled with lichen and shelf-like fungus, blocking the overgrown path they followed as thoroughly as if it had been cut and wedged there. Dried leaves hissed mockingly at him as Nathanial and Wynda hacked at its limbs, trying to bare its weathered trunk.
To the left, the ground tumbled down a short ledge, matted with weeds and ill-formed brambles, to a shallow creek. A sickly green mist rose from it, and clotted chunks of something unidentifiable bobbed along its surface. Aren wasn't sure he'd have dared the water even if they hadn't been burdened with the cart.
To the right, the forest pressed in close. What ground wasn't creeping with thorns and noxious mushrooms was a knobbly maze of tree roots. When it fell, the oak had torn up a massive plug of earth, and it still reared overhead like a wood-laced rampart three times Aren's height.
He grimaced. This trail they followed had been largely abandoned once the forest fell to corruption. He knew it was only by the grace of the Light that they hadn't found more trouble, but that didn't stop him from chafing.
He resisted the urge to pace after a few steps, boots sinking through the thin crust of earth into mud still black and sticky beneath. The soaking downpour had finally tapered off around daybreak, but the sky remained grey and lowering. At least the clean rain smell had scoured away the worst of Felwood's sour odor. And despite the damp weather, Aren was still glad to be off the ship. He'd missed this kind of journey: travelling on his own feet, surrendering to wholesome exhaustion at night instead of lying awake and devising new lines for same old litany of concerns. He still had plenty of fodder for doubt, of course, but at least not all of it was unpleasant.
He glanced at Callista where she sat on a moss-furred rock near the creek, turning what looked like a pair of small stones over and over methodically in her fingers.
"What are those?" he asked, walking closer to be heard over the rhythmic thwock of the axes.
She stopped toying with the stones at his approach. The rain had left a humid, stifling heat behind, and she'd unfastened the front of her robes against it, letting the red and black felweave hang open over her tunic and buff-colored leggings. Aren couldn't help but notice that her neckline had fallen slightly askew, revealing a lighter crescent of untanned skin above the smooth curve of her breast. Memories of the night before raised a pleasant warmth in his belly and he tore his gaze away with effort, choosing the worn pebble she held up for his inspection as a safer focus.
He took it from her, less out of real interest and more as an excuse to grasp lightly at her fingers. The pebble was a small, irregular, round thing; so badly scuffed he barely tell its original color had been an amethyst-like purple.
"It's a soul shard," she explained to his puzzled face.
Aren was familiar with the shards, but all the others he'd seen her use had been jagged brilliant crystals. His gaze fell on the coarse chunk of river sandstone still in her other hand - she'd been using it to grind down the shard's edges. "Why?" he asked, bemused.
She laughed. "Don't worry about it."
He drew his brows together, still curious, but knew better than to press the issue. Callista rarely answered a question she didn't want to, though often her evasion was so skillful he didn't notice until much later. Instead, he dropped the soul shard back into her palm and then reached out, brushing away a mouldering piece of leaf that had landed on her hair.
Despite all the things that worried him - her fel magic, how she'd come to be in his company, her odd reticences - he hadn't wanted a woman this much since the one he thought he'd marry. And that had been years ago, though not so long that he'd stopped looking back. He'd been fresh from the wrack of Lordaeron, then. Battered and bone-weary, but determined not to let the Scourge blight the rest of his life the way it had its first half. With all the hopefulness of youth and the newly devout, he'd painted a thin lacquer of normalcy over his broken places and called himself whole. He'd truly believed he could fold away the past with his Stratholme tabard; still imagined himself capable of living the slow domestic life he feared he might never stop wanting, even now.
His betrothal had failed for a number of reasons. Most of them his fault. He'd tried so hard to forget - cast away those terrible months of fear and helplessness and striking down friends grown hollow and ravenous with undeath - but the war he'd fled was more than memory.
He'd lost his head for trivialities, he'd found. Little things - birthdays, names of acquaintances, whose turn it was to wash up after dinner - no longer had a hold on him, slipping like dust through the cracks in his thoughts. No one would die because of them, after all. No cities would fall. He'd re-learned too late that a typical life is almost entirely "trivialities." Elle had left, by then.
Callista reminded him a little of her, in some ways. Elle had been an officer in the Stormwind guard and did not suffer fools. There was a way of talking she had... both women could inject a casual suggestion with such iron that even the laziest recruit (or the most recalcitrant demon) would straighten up and take notice. Elle had been gentler, though. Much of her arrogance was an accessory she donned with her armor, and the first time he'd undressed her, she'd been almost shy. She'd stood in the warm strip of afternoon light that shone through the curtains with her hands crossed demurely over her breasts until he'd drawn them away, taking her tenderly in his arms.
If Callista's self-possession had ever begun as a facade, it had sunk beneath her skin long before he met her. She carried herself with the same lazy confidence whether she was clothed or not, and whispered heated suggestions in the same compelling tone with which she laid down her arguments. It was something he found exasperating in conversation, the trick she had of wielding certainty like a switchblade, but it was considerably more fun in bed.
He stood beside her, half watching Nathanial and Wynda hauling cut branches from the great fallen tree, half watching the easy motion of her fingers as she resumed scraping at her shard.
"We camp here tonight, I think," Vorthaal said. He flopped down across from them on a raised hillock of limp weeds, face flushed an even deeper shade of blue from his recent turn at chopping.
Callista casually made to shift away from Aren on the stone, opening a less intimate distance between them, but he touched the back of her arm reassuringly to stop her. Perhaps their relationship - whatever it was - wasn't the most traditional possible course, but he wasn't ashamed of it. Besides, the Light abhorred deception. And anyway, he'd eat his pauldrons if Wynda, at least, hadn't figured out what they were about.
She glanced up at him with an arch look - it's your fraternization tribunal, it said quite clearly - but didn't pull away from his hand. "I still think you should let me burn it," she said.
He shook his head. "The smoke would be visible from here to Astranaar."
"At least it would be quick," she pointed out. "And quiet."
If Vorthaal had noticed their silent exchange, he made no comment. Instead, he scratched the bony ridge of his nose, looking up at the still, sickly forest canopy contemplatively. Occasionally an oily droplet of moisture condensed among the leaves, plopping to the ground with a wet splat. "No wind. The smoke would be visible for some time. And there is something else, yes? Those creatures…" He eyed Callista's felhound, nosing its scaled snout into the litter of rotting leaves nearby. "They sense magic. And burning through a trunk that size would be no small task."
Callista sighed, laying the chunk of sandstone and the soul shard down in her lap. "I know. Still, I don't like this. We've been here too long."
Vorthaal grunted an agreement, took a swig of water from his canteen and made a face. "Bah. Warm as bathwater."
Callista cocked her head, eyeing the offending item. After an odd little pause she smiled, crooking her fingers at him. "Give it here, then."
Vorthaal regarded her with a puzzled, gauging look, briefly hesitating before his expression brightened into a curious smile of his own and he tossed her the canteen.
She caught it one-handed by its leather strap. Her other hand cupped the bottom of the container, and a lacy filigree of frost bloomed from her fingertips, layering the metal with ice. She tossed the now-chilled canteen back to Vorthaal. "I won't tell you how many times I froze my hand to the table as a student," she said wryly. "Fire always suited me better."
"My thanks," Vorthaal said. He took a long drink of water, then pressed the cold metal to the side of his head. "And how old were you when you decided that fire wasn't enough?" There was no judgment in his tone, only genuine curiosity.
Callista laughed. "I was fifteen when I bound my first demon. Though finding new ways to incinerate things had little to do with it. Most of my magic is only arcane even now."
"I know," Vorthaal said amiably. "Otherwise I would not have drunk the water." He shook his head. "So young, to make such choices."
"Why did you do it?" Aren asked. He'd wondered for some time now why a woman with as many advantages as Callista had begun to dabble in fel magic. He'd never quite found a way to broach the topic, though. It amazed him, still, that she'd apparently chosen him, and he wasn't yet convinced that the wrong word wouldn't reveal him for the naive fool he sometimes suspected he was, shatter their fragile intimacy like new ice on a pond.
She shrugged, looking at him with the ghost of a smile. A few strands of fair hair had escaped her knot, clinging to her neck with humidity. "I was young and reckless. Or young and pragmatic. Either way, I never thought I'd get caught."
"But why," he insisted, determined to get an actual answer for once.
She paused for just a sliver of a heartbeat, pleasant expression flickering.
Aren exhaled softly through his nose, not quite a sigh. He'd noticed that hesitation in her before. A pause coupled with a swift, almost imperceptible piercing look, as though she were trying to work out how he might react to what she was about to say. She kept things from him, he knew. He found it maddening; not the omissions themselves, so much as the air she often had when she did it, as though she were shielding him from some knowledge she didn't trust he could handle.
There were scars on her skin, ragged marks like claws above her collarbone, and she wouldn't tell him where they came from.
"Do you know why warlocks bind demons?" she asked finally, switching her gaze to Vorthaal to include him.
The draenei settled his tail more comfortably among the high grass and then shrugged, watching her intently.
"They're useful servants," Aren hazarded.
"Sometimes," Callista agreed. "More often, they're horrible little balls of malice and dubious loyalty. And I can't exactly send my succubus out for groceries in Stormwind City."
He supposed that was true enough. Aren had never thought much about what Callista actually did with her demons. He was still coming to grips with the idea that she had them at all. "Why bother, then?"
She leaned back a little on her hands so she could view him and Vorthaal at once more easily. To his surprise, she didn't try to dodge the question, answering with a disarming one-shouldered shrug. "For most warlocks, the demon's actual services are a side benefit. What really matters is that the bond itself holds power. A lot of it, actually. Enough that not all demons enter their servitude unwillingly, though you'll want to be careful with that."
Aren frowned. "So it was about power."
She tugged her lips into a smile. "More or less. Why play from a position of disadvantage, if you have the choice? In a contest between two equally skilled arcanists, the one with the demon will always win."
Not for the first time, Aren wondered if she really meant everything that she said. "But most mages do not have demons," he protested. "Or fel magic."
She laughed. "You be surprised how many "mages" dabble."
"I would not," Vorthaal said, unexpectedly. He'd smudged a mark through the frost that rimed his canteen, and now he rubbed the cold pensively between the pads of his fingers as he spoke. "The lines between arcane categories are not nearly as clear as your Academy likes to advertise."
Callista's gaze sharpened thoughtfully on his face. "Is that why I don't offend you more?"
"No." He studied her for a moment, eyes glowing like clear white stars among the shadows of the trees. "You take an awful risk of corruption, but you know this, yes? You wield a terrible power, but it wears an ugly face." He paused. "There are many terrible powers in the world. Many more beautiful, but still a danger to the soul. I remember Argus. It was not warlocks that brought my people to ruin."
Callista, for once, had no retort. Instead she only watched him, the glib amusement that had played at the corners of her mouth fading into a look of intense interest.
"I do not condone consorting with demons. But the Naaru teach us that all things can be turned to the good. Perhaps even this. You do not seem evil to me, and for now that is enough."
She regarded the draenei with silent reflectiveness for another long moment.
Aren's fingers drifted to the back of her arm, stroking her lightly above the elbow, but he let the quiet linger. The little creek murmured restlessly behind them, a gentler counterpoint to the sharp axe blows echoing through the forest. Pale mist rose in ghostly ribbons from the trees.
Finally, some wordless accord seemed to settle between them. Callista shook her head, features slipping back into their usual faintly-amused expression. "That's the nicest thing a paladin has ever said to me," she said, slanting a look at Aren.
Vorthaal chuckled. "I very much doubt that that is true."
Aren only smiled, giving her shoulder an affectionate squeeze.
Callista had never been fond of physical labor.
The impact juddered through her arms as she swung the axe into a branch, hacking a thick wedge out of the top. She'd already shrugged off her heavy outer robes, but sweat still trickled down the nape of her neck, moistening her collar. Ugh. What was the point of having demonic servants if you needed to chop through your own trees? Normally, this was the sort of task she'd set her voidwalker to (or even Azlia, though the succubus hated this kind of work as much as she did), but Jhormug was too useful a sentry to dismiss.
She could feel the demon at the edge of her thoughts, restless and hungry. The felhunter sensed nothing, but if this wasn't the prelude to some sort of ambush, then Callista was the Grand Crusader. This fallen tree was much too convenient, and she wasn't as certain as the paladins that this part of Felwood was wholly deserted.
Dropping her axe, she leaned all her weight on the branch she'd gouged, pushing until it snapped with a dry crack.
At least they were making progress. She put the ball of her thumb to her mouth and bit out a splinter, surveying the massive shaggy trunk. Only a few more branches, and they'd have cleared enough to try lifting the cart over it. She glanced at her own shadow, stretched long in the fitful afternoon light that shone through the hole in the canopy. Not before nightfall, though. The thought of camping here unsettled her.
She picked up the axe near its head, scraping the blade along the base of a smaller branch before tearing it free in a shower of dead leaves. Her hands would be blistered before the day was out. She inspected a smooth red patch of soreness on her palm and scowled.
"When I made that face, Wynda told me blisters were good for the soul," Ander said, teasing. He sat sprawled on the damp leaves of the path with his canteen in one hand and his poleaxe on the ground within easy reach, black curls still plastered to his forehead with sweat.
"And so they are," Wynda said, stooping to grab the end of one of the branches Callista had severed. She dragged it, rustling, to the pile of firewood and heaved it on top. "Hard hands, soft heart, I always say!"
Callista wrinkled her nose. "Really? You always say that? Outside of the Cathedral of Light? And no one's polymorphed you into a toad yet?"
"It's the best proof I have for the Light protecting its own," Ander said, nodding seriously.
Wynda chuckled. "Aye, go on and laugh, lazy heathens. If sour faces could split wood, you'd both be prize lumberjacks. But they can't, so best get cracking!"
Callista softened her face into its most put-upon expression, lifted the axe, and chopped into another branch with satiric bonelessness.
"Paladins are a cruel lot," Ander said. "Look how they've turned this poor woman's arms into jelly." He gazed at her with limpid earnestness. "Run away with me, and we'll leave this foul tree behind forever. Toss the axe, bring your succubus."
Glancing back at him to make a retort, she instead caught sight of Aren, standing a little behind him assembling their tents. He shook his head with a small smile and turned his eyes briefly up to the heavens.
Callista returned his eyeroll and laughed.
Ander leaned on his elbows, cheerfully heedless of the mud, and tilted his head back to look at Aren. "When a woman laughs at you, it means she will run away with you, right?"
Aren grinned. Between the expression and the blond layer of stubble on his jaw, he looked almost roguish, if that was a word you could properly apply to a man of the Light. "You'd better hope not. Where would you keep them all?"
His gaze brushed across Callista again, and its warmth sent a not unpleasant shiver through her. Desire she was used to, but it had been a long time since anyone had looked at her that way. There was a reason most of her affairs ended at sun-up. Her life (like most warlocks', she suspected), didn't lend itself to consistency, all blurred lines and grey crookedness where most people preferred black and white and sharp edges. Few men could exist comfortably in that kind of tangled landscape; fewer still would want to try. If she were honest, she had little enough reason to believe that Aren was one of them, other than the fact he'd seen her conjure some green fire and still went to bed with her. But even so...
In a blink, her mind shuffled tentatively through a series of images, the way one might probe an old scar with the fingertips to see if it's still there. Dinner with Tun and Nissa at the Gilded Rose, Aren's arm warm around her shoulders...sitting in her study, poring over some old tome, as he pressed a kiss to the back of her neck...introducing him to Azlia, warning him to deflect the succubus's sweetly venomous contempt...Aren patiently waiting in Stormwind, keeping the hearthfire burning as she traipsed off to The Slaughtered Lamb, or Jaedenar, or some other accursed place he could never follow her…
Dissonance won, and the fantasy ended in a discordant shatter so sharp she swore she felt it in her teeth.
She shook her head disgustedly and swung the axe for earnest this time, actually taking pleasure in the solid bite of the blade striking wood.
It wasn't that she never wondered if having a real partner might not be nice. Unfortunately, "nice" often clashed so miserably with all the other qualities in her life. Her conscience needled her uncomfortably. Twisting Nether, what was she doing here?
Absorbed in her musing and the numbing labor of wood cutting, she almost missed the sudden prickle of interest from her felhunter.
She froze, narrowing her eyes and letting the axe dangle. Was it a threat? Or had the demon simply found some kind of tainted animal to chase after?
She turned to Aren, but before she could speak Jhormug's howl split the air, almost eclipsing Luciel's shout from her perch in the branches above them - "Felguards! From the west and south!"
Callista dropped the axe and drew a harsh breath through her teeth, snatching her robes from the branch she'd draped them over and wriggling into them.
"Rally to me!" Aren cried. He pulled on his heavy plate gloves, flexing the fingers and loosening his sword in its scabbard. "Get the axes out of the way."
Ander scrambled to his feet, grabbing his poleaxe, as Wynda threw down an armful of brush and grimly lifted her hammer. Vorthaal and Nathanial jogged around the side of the cart, weapons at ready. They'd tied their horse up just off the trail, and it gave a muffled whinny into its feedbag, foot stamping in alarm.
"How many?" Vorthaal asked. His voice was calm, but his knuckles had gone white where he gripped the haft of his crystalline warhammer.
Callista nudged the axe back against the fallen trunk with the side of her foot, then joined the rough half-circle they'd formed in the center of the path. She reached out with her magic as another unearthly howl floated through the trees. "Fourteen!" she hissed. "Six down the path, the rest in the woods. They're much too close!"
The warning was hardly necessary. The snap of branches and clank of heavy armor was already audible even to Callista's human ears.
Aren breathed a soft plea to the Light. "Hold," he said quietly.
Guttural voices rumbled in demonic, not quite clear enough to interpret. Jhormug howled again, and she urged him away from them, further into the dense undergrowth. If the ones in the woods chased him far enough, maybe they'd have a chance.
Fear knotted her gut, and she reached into her pocket, fingering the soul shard she'd ground smooth. How had they been caught so flat-footed? Jhormug could track a single imp for miles. And whatever her personal shortcomings, Luciel was a scout with centuries of experience. This shouldn't have been possible.
Possible or not, six felguards loped around the bend in the path. They were clad identically in spiked black plate that covered half the chest and one arm, wielding an assortment of cruel-looking serrated swords. All but one raised his weapon and charged at the sight of them. The last lingered back, raising a twisted horn to his mouth and blowing a long strident note.
The horn blast died in a ragged squawk. Luciel's round glaive whistled through the air, severing the horn and the demon's hand in a dark spray of blood. He bellowed in rage and pain, falling back and clutching at the stump of his arm.
His companions didn't slow.
Aware of her friends bracing themselves around her, Callista thrust out her will and felt the deep exhilarating throb of power almost instantly, the siren rush of arcane energy coursing through her blood. Everything seemed slower, sharper, the venomous red of the giant fungi that lined the path as keen as the felguards' blades, and it was no surprise at all that races had been brought to ruin this way.
She gestured and a wall of green flame roared across the trail, snapping hungrily at the overhanging branches.
The lead felguard, unable to halt in time, careened through the fire with an agonized howl. The cursed flame clung to him like he'd been doused in oil, streaming from his limbs in green pennants as he writhed in the mud, trying ineffectually to smother the flames.
The other demons smashed through the foliage on either side of the path, and she heard a grinding crunch as one collided with Aren's shield. The felguard had lost his momentum, though, and Aren shoved him backward, striking viciously with his sword.
The felguard threw up an arm, catching the blade on a spiked bracer with a shriek of metal, and snarled. He raised a jagged blade in his other hand, but before he could retaliate, Luciel's glaive whistled down from the trees, shredding his throat on its bloody arc back to the elf's hand. The felguard stumbled to one knee, dark blood washing the front of his chest, but did not lose hold of his weapon. He looked up at Aren and spat some curse that came out a liquid gurgle as the paladin's sword thrust through the ruin of his neck and twisted.
Smoke burned Callista's nose, acrid with wet leaves. Felfire coursed around her hand in green ribbons, but she hesitated, frustrated, as Wynda's stocky form barrelled through her line of sight again. She swore. Callista had fought her way out of a number of scrapes, but she wasn't really a warmage, and had little experience in open skirmishes with other mortals. The hard part of battle magic, it turned out, wasn't destroying your enemies; it was leaving your allies alive and un-singed while you did it.
Aggravated, she summoned oily ropes of shadow that burst from the ground under a felguard's boot. They tangled his feet mid-lunge, wrenching a satisfying wet crunch from his jaw as he slammed into the mud.
He didn't get a chance to rise. Vorthaal's hammer glimmered gem-like through the haze as he brought it down on the felguard's head in a crushing blow. He hefted the massive weapon again as if it weighed nothing, stalking towards the pair of demons cornered by Wynda and the two Redbranches.
Callista had just allowed herself a brief flicker of optimism when she heard Jhormug's earsplitting howl. Agonized this time, not warning, and the pathetic noise cut off abruptly as she felt the stinging mental blow of her connection to the felhound severing.
She swore again, coughing in the thickening smoke. "The others - the rest are coming back!" she shouted.
"Cut these down, now!" Aren roared.
Callista edged closer to where the others had penned the two remaining felguards, grabbing a soul shard from her pouch and rolling it between her fingers. Her fire had died to emerald coals amid the bracken, tinged with the orange of mundane flame at its edges, but she let what was left of it burn. They would shortly be outnumbered, and the cover of the smoke might be useful.
She was scanning the foliage across the creek, waiting for the first felguard to crash down its bank, when a musical cry broke her focus.
Luciel tumbled from the trees overhead in a welter of sticks and dying leaves. The tangled web of the canopy broke her fall, but not well enough. She landed with a sickening splash in the low water of the creek, leg bent unnaturally beneath her body. One edge of a double-headed throwing axe protruded grotesquely from her thigh, and blood welled from the wound to float downstream in tattered streamers. Despite the bone-snapping impact, she struggled grimly to rise.
"Vorthaal, with me!" Aren yelled.
The draenei broke away at his command, lips peeled back from his teeth in rage. The two paladins closed on their injured comrade, but too slowly.
A fresh party of demons burst from the trees on the other side of the creek. They leapt down the bank and bulled through the thigh-deep water without pause, black mud boiling up where they stepped. One of the felguards reached down and seized Luciel by the arm, yanking her viciously upwards to her knees. She snarled something in Darnassian, thrashing the green-tinged water like an eel, but couldn't break the demon's grip.
Their leader, an enormous winged doomguard, appeared last. He thrust aside the bushes that lined the creek, taking two strides forward through the muddy shallows and bellowing out (disorientingly, in Common), "Halt!"
The weapon-clash sounds of the skirmish died as the last two felguards on Callista's side of the water disengaged.
For a moment, silence fell uncannily on her ears, broken only by the sad murmur of the creek and the rough pants of the former combatants.
"Throw down your weapons, mortals, or I gut her." The doomguard's voice was a harsh rumble, thick with the accent of the Legion, but still intelligible.
Callista narrowed her eyes. Despite the misgiving curdling in her gut, she allowed the half-formed shadowbolt in her hand to dissipate, moving forward to stand next to Aren at the water's edge. Twisting Nether, what was this new treachery?
A bandolier of throwing axes hung across the doomguard's armored chest, one loop empty. He thumbed a claw menacingly along the handle of another as he waited. That wasn't what caught her attention, though. Her eyes focused, incongruously, on the bright orange sigil blazoned on his chestpiece beneath the bandolier. A twisted hand on a deep purple field. The purple was right, but that was not the sign of the Shadow Council. Her scowl deepened. She was unaware of any other Legion offshoots in Felwood. What was happening here?
At her side, Aren's pauldrons heaved with his breaths. He was so angry he was almost vibrating, but when he spoke she was proud of the evenness in his tone. "Let her go."
"I will not. Surrender, or you all die."
So, the Burning Legion offered terms now. Somehow, Callista doubted this had anything to do with the rules of honorable combat. But whatever game they'd stumbled into, she had no more interest in playing it fairly than those fiends standing in the river. Her friends were alarmingly outnumbered, but perhaps a little arrogance and invention might serve where swords and felfire failed.
She laid a hand on Aren's arm, hard enough that he'd feel the impact of it through the steel, and stepped forward. Hopefully her companions would have the sense not to interrupt. Arranging her face into her most imperious sneer, she responded to the doomguard's Common with Eredun, voice dark with barely restrained anger. "Have you lost your mind?"
The doomguard's thick features didn't twitch, but one of the felguards snapped his head around to look at her with a quiet grunt.
"No closer, human," the doomguard said.
She stopped, but drew on her magic again, feeling the febrile bleed of power into the air and knowing the demons would sense it as well. It was as much a threat as drawing a sword, the oppressive throb of energy so thick she could almost taste it, a metallic burn on the tongue. The felguards shifted warily, seeking better footing against the lazy pull of the current. The one holding Luciel bared his fangs at Callista and gave the night elf a jerk, drawing a pained hiss. Good. This would only work if they took her seriously. "You have no idea what you've interrupted, do you? Tell me. Does Lord Banehollow know you're blundering around out here?"
That got the doomguard's attention. After a fashion. The big demon seemed curiously distracted, eyes drifting somewhere to the left of her head until she actually spoke. But after a few puzzling heartbeats, her words registered and he let out a low growl at the name. "Insolent little worm. My master sent us here by Banehollow's request. Whom do you serve? Why are you here?"
His stubby wings spread aggressively, but the fact he'd asked questions at all showed uncertainty. Promising. Callista renewed her sneer. "Don't be a fool, if you can help it. Telling you that is more than both our hides are worth. I answer only to the Council."
The doomguard growled again. His large nostrils flared, and for a moment he simply pierced her with his stare, as though he could rip the truth from her merely by glaring. Doomguards were unnerving enough simply by nature of what they were, but his look would have been more intimidating if he'd kept a more controlled expression. He couldn't seem to suppress the sudden wander of his eyes or upward tug of his lip over his fangs, as though unable to divide his face from the churn of his own thoughts.
Clearly, this was not one of the Legion's best and brightest. Callista returned the doomguard's gaze with placid contempt, feeling a tentative prick of triumph at his confusion. This creature had no idea what to do with her. Maybe she could still salvage this.
Then the demon's eyes slid sideways, taking in Aren, Vorthaal and all the rest, and he scowled and snorted, unconvinced. "You say you serve the Legion. Then why do you travel with elves and Light-humpers?"
Callista narrowed her eyes, cold fingers of unease clutching at her. "I told you once why I can't answer that. Did I stutter?"
The doomguard snarled, face shifting through another of those odd sequences of expression, but then he smiled slowly. It was an unpleasant look, bristling with far too many sharp teeth. "I do not think I believe you, little mortal. Seize them!"
Well, she'd tried.
She skipped backwards, sliding on earth already churned to black mud, as the felguards leapt. Her friends hadn't understood the conversation, but its conclusion was obvious enough. They met the demons' charge at the water's edge with a punishing crash of metal.
One of the felguards slipped, footing spoiled by the muck, and Vorthaal shattered his temple with a crushing warhammer blow. The advantage was short-lived, though. There were simply too many.
A felguard took a wild swing at her with his sword and Callista skidded back again with a snarl. Shadows twisted around her hands and her spell hit him full in the side of his face, drawing a strangled roar as oily corrosion obliterated his eye and part of his jaw. It took more than that to destroy a demon, though. He'd retained his grip on his weapon, somehow, and managed one lurching step towards her before Wynda drove into him with her armored shoulder and knocked him back.
Seizing the brief respite, Callista grabbed a soul shard from her pouch and focused a predatory glare on the doomguard. He stood with the water lapping around his hooves behind Luciel's crumpled form, watching the fray with dull indifference. Strangely passive, for a demon. The creature had not overly impressed her with his intelligence. This would be easy.
She'd backed almost to where they'd left their cart in the center of the path, and she ducked against it now, hoping to remain unharried during her spell. Taking a deep breath, she squeezed the shard in her palm and lashed out at the doomguard with the full brunt of her will.
He staggered and slipped in the murky water, dazed by the sudden mental blow. Callista drew a measured breath, bracing herself for the frenzied explosion of resistance...that didn't come. The ease with which he yielded caused her a deep twinge of suspicion, but halfway through a binding spell was no time for second thoughts. In another moment, it wouldn't matter anyway.
The soul shard dissolved in her hand, sublimating in a rush of hot energy and cinching invisible chains tighter around the doomguard's mind. She should have been able to feel him by now, the familiar barrage of foul outrage and desperation before the final shackle closed, but instead he was blank, an empty cipher, nothing but -
Void.
She stumbled against the side of the cart, air ripped from her lungs in a choked gasp. Darkness seared her vision until there was nothing but the vast black, ancient and eyeless but not empty, no, the darkness writhed -
She thrashed with her will, struggling futilely to turn her mind's eye from the vision, and then there was pain - shattering, annihilating, crushing the world to a small blind point of agony - as the binding spell twisted in her grip and she tasted the thick metallic warmth of her own blood. Chains of fire across her mind, scalding, acid on the raw wound of her will, but her thoughts seized on them anyway in desperate recoil from that suppurating void, and she realized with a strangled sob that the chains were hers. The binding had turned, he was not what she thought - she clawed at the Nether with all of her strength and the wildness of panic, and the answering torrent of magic was not exhilarating this time but terrible, almost as agonizing as the chains (but not the darkness, no, never that), and the spell shattered in a scorching whipcrack of power.
She thought she must have screamed. Her vision returned in a mad tumble of images - dead leaves plastered into the mud, a demon's spiked iron boot, a dirt-caked wooden wagon wheel - and she found herself on her hands and knees beside the cart, breathing in strangled gasps and spitting out mouthfuls of her own blood.
Her nose was bleeding. She put a hand to it dazedly and stared at the red dripping from her fingers. Twisting Nether. That…he... Her limbs shook and she leaned against the sturdy wood of the cart wheel, trying to gather her shattered thoughts. The doomguard...no. She did not know what he was, but he wasn't just that. She'd failed bindings before, knew how it felt, and if she'd tried to grab hold of Kil'jaeden himself she didn't believe she'd see...that. She flinched at the memory, drew a shuddering breath. It had almost killed her. The thought drifted across her mind with flat, unprocessed composure. It had seized her, and it had almost...
Her head ached fiercely. The pain was heavy, almost cloying, smearing the shouts and sword clashes like oils, meaningless noise. She didn't know how long she might have knelt there - breathing numbly through her mouth, watching the slowing red patter of her blood on the fallen leaves - but a sudden close cry jolted her.
"I yield!"
Dread pierced her muddled fog. She sat up, saw Nathanial throw his twin swords to the ground, and a sickening tide of horror crashed over her. There was a battle. Yes. She'd abandoned it.
Her gaze jerked across the path, looking for the others. Ander hung limply between two felguards, head lolling back with one of the demons' blades dimpling the skin beneath his jaw.
"I yield," Nathanial said again with ragged despair, holding up his empty hands. "Please, don't hurt him."
Luciel lay crumpled where the felguards had dragged her, half-in and half-out of the greasy water. A flash of silver caught her eye, and her stomach dropped. Aren. He was still standing at least, but blood caked the left side of his face. He stumbled as one of his captors gave his back a rough shove.
It was over.
"Bind his hands," the doomguard commanded.
There was no sign of Vorthaal or Wynda. Had they run? She hoped so.
They'd come for her, next. She fumbled in her pocket, hands clumsy and barely her own. A blistering knife of panic, then her fingers brushed something small and hard, and she clenched it numbly, turning away from the sight of the felguards shoving Nathanial to his knees and yanking his wrists behind him.
A soul shard - barely the size of her thumbnail, the one whose edges she'd worried down with a rough stone. Praying to whatever powers would listen that no one was watching, she fumbled it into her mouth and held it under her tongue.
She worked it to the back of her throat, but fear dried her mouth. If only, she thought, fighting back a wild laugh, she'd bothered to try this before she'd spit out all that blood.
"Get the last one," a demon snarled.
Plaguing hells. The hard stone tore at her throat, but she urged her muscles to work despite the blunt pain and the frantic instinct to choke it up. She swallowed it amid a hot rush of relief just as a large clawed hand closed on the collar of her robes.
It yanked her back away from the cart as another pair of hands dug into her elbows, wrenching them behind her. She let out a harsh hiss in protest.
"No tricks, warlock."
Her cheek exploded in pain as he cuffed her, a sharp backhanded strike. Her head rocked to the side, and she tasted blood again as her teeth cut the inside of her mouth. Dazed from the blow and her failed spell, she didn't struggle as cold iron weighted her wrists, trapping her hands against her back, and she was dragged to her feet.
"Walk," her captor snarled, and so she did.
Her feet seemed to float, caught in a surreal dream. The clouds had broken, finally, and dazzling bars of sunlight striped the path, piercing her throbbing head like darts. Nathanial stumbled before her with his head down. She tasted metal again, licked her lip and realized her nose was still oozing blood. Had the felguard hit her so hard? Or had it simply never stopped bleeding?
It didn't really matter.
The felguard wrenched her arm again, propelling her off the path into the trees. He half-dragged her as she stumbled over woody mushroom stems and brambles, and then a black hole yawned before her.
She flinched back from it - not that hellish shadow, not ever again - but the felguard growled and hauled her after him into the dark.
She tripped on the first crumbling dirt step, and her panic slowly ebbed as she was prodded downwards. The air was noisome with damp and earth and rot. A tunnel? No wonder they'd never noticed the demons' approach.
She blinked, suddenly blind as the door thudded shut above them.
"This one's a warlock. Put her under," a felguard said.
Before she could react, head still cottony with pain, a foul-smelling cloth smothered her nose and mouth and darkness swallowed her.
A/N: Once again, buckets of thanks to anyone still hanging in with my glacially slow updates! This is actually half of a much longer chunk of writing that I split in two when it got over 15K words, which I thought was too unmanageable for one chapter. So, the good news is that the first draft of chapter 14 is actually entirely written. No promises, but I'm hoping to get it cleaned up enough to post in the next few weeks. Next stop, Jaedenar!