A/N: Gah, sorry for the earlier fail, this should be correct now.
Warning: Violence!
Tun yelped and shoved at the demon, catapulted from his uneasy doze straight into alarm by the sudden impact and the round white eyes staring up at him.
The gan'arg seemed no less unhappy, screeching in demonic and scrambling wildly to get away. It flew off of him using one of his knees as a springboard, causing him to yelp again in discomfort and hop clumsily to his feet, whipping his head around to try to get his groggy bearings.
The rampart-top, formerly deserted except for a few gan'arg bustling around the unfinished end, now swarmed with demons. They dashed to and fro over the crushed crystal, and though Tun couldn't understand their words he could hear the tense urgency in their shouts. Many of them carried steel crates nearly as large as they were, and almost all of them went armed.
Woken by the commotion, Callista stumbled to her feet at his side, rubbing blearily at her eyes with her wrist. "What's happening?"
"Use them stubby ears, warlock," Na'rii suggested darkly. She stood next to Kar'thol with her own long pointed ones pricked, gan'arg parting around the ogre's girth like a stream around a boulder planted in its bed.
Callista shot her a glare that was too sleep-muddled to be really effective, regretting her decision to try a pre-battle nap. It couldn't have been much longer than an hour since they'd lain down (the quality of the pinkish moonlight filtering through the canyon walls had hardly changed at all), and she felt even more exhausted now than before she'd slept.
Tun cocked his head and frowned, trying to hear anything beyond the clamor of demonic voices and the crunch of feet on gravel. His own ears were quite as unimpressive as Callista's, but he still thought he could catch the whisper of something on the breeze, the rhythmic clash of metal on metal echoing from the crystal walls beneath the din.
The not-too-distant clink of many sets of armor, all their wearers marching in step.
He shivered, only partially from the chill in the night air, and glanced back over his shoulder towards the portal.
What he saw made his heart sink. Not only did the gateway remain closed (though the mo'arg gathered around it appeared to have made some progress – an eerie purple glow now burned at its center), but the hindmost barricade in their defenses remained little more than a jagged foundation. It lay abandoned now, protruding from the sand like a row of crooked fangs, as demons and fel reavers scurried to defend those ramparts they'd managed to complete in time.
"Do you have any water?" Callista asked, covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she yawned.
Tun nodded and conjured a flask with a spell so often practiced since they'd arrived on Xoroth that it had almost become rote. He handed it to her once he'd finished, flinching as a gan'arg barreled past so close that the edge of its robes whipped across his side. He shuffled back cautiously from the running and cursing crowd of demons until the pointed ends of the crystals in the parapet jabbed into his back.
One of the gan'arg, more officious-looking than the rest (glowing runes adorned its robes, and one of its hands had been replaced with an iron prosthetic much like a mo'arg's), slowed to a halt in front of him, looking him over with narrowed eyes and barking something incomprehensible at him in demonic.
He shrugged helplessly and looked at Callista, who had already stepped forward to intervene. Whatever the demon had said, she looked annoyed. That was hardly surprising – everything annoyed Callista right after she'd woken up; it was only a matter of to what degree.
She snapped something back, and the two proceeded to have a terse and not-very-civil-sounding exchange that ended when the gan'arg's pale eyes flicked uncertainly upwards before it pivoted suddenly and melted back into the crowd.
"What was that about?" Tun wondered. He shifted uncomfortably as he noticed that the clang of armor had become distinctly louder – now impossible to ignore even over the commotion of their own forces readying themselves for battle.
Callista took a swig from the flask, wiping the damp from her lips before answering. "Oh, he wanted us to get to the front lines like good little mortals. I told him to leave us alone or the dreadlord would eat his eyes."
"That, warlock, is a not even remotely convincing lie."
She jumped, sloshing water onto her hand, as Nerothos glided to an efficient landing on the rampart nearby, paying no heed to the gan'arg that scattered at his approach.
Callista straightened and dried her hand on her robes, skewering him with a baleful look. "It is when there's a dreadlord hovering over you like a great steel-plated buzzard."
Nerothos folded his wide dark wings, a sardonic smile playing about his lips. The undirected buzz of annoyance he sensed around the warlock coupled with her red-rimmed eyes told him she'd been recently awakened; her spike in hostility at the sight of him told him she hadn't forgotten their last encounter. As well she shouldn't. But for now, at least, he had no quarrel with her. He would prefer her cooperation in the coming battle, if he could get it – her companions, though powerful combatants relative to the bulk of the creatures at his disposal, regarded him with emotions ranging from disgust to burning hatred. They would follow no command of his.
The warlock, however, very well might. And where she led, the others would follow, if only due to the gnome's misguided loyalty.
"I may be an effective persuasion, but I assure you, your half-contrived attempts at intimidation are not. The wretched creature feared only that I might crush him in my descent."
Callista eyed him with undisguised irritation, mind still fuzzy with sleep and lingering exhaustion. The newly-scabbed scratches on the back of her hand reminded her sharply of their last unpleasant discussion, and the first few retorts that sprang into her head were frankly insulting. Something about his tone gave her pause, however, and the rhythmic clink of demonic armor echoing from the crystal walls fell ominously on her ears. Historically, unprovoked needling (as opposed to contemptuous silence or promises of violence) had been the demon's idea of making an overture. Her eyes flicked warily towards the sound of the approaching army. She hadn't forgotten his threat – but if he was willing to ignore it, she might allow him to. For now.
"Who died and left you lord high arbiter of the universe?" she said, fighting a yawn and choosing a reply with less vitriol than she'd originally intended.
"Billions," Nerothos said smugly.
That was such an unexpectedly apt (and nasty) answer to a question she'd meant as rhetorical that Callista simply shot him a disgruntled look and left it alone. She'd never liked conversation so soon after waking anyway, and discussions with Nerothos were wont to be even more irksome than most.
"What do ya want here, dreadlord?" Na'rii asked, glowering at him with her teeth and tusks bared hatefully.
Nerothos turned his horned head to look at her with distant contempt. He'd never thought much of trolls – they were a pathetically primitive people, obsessed with the worship of their spirits and weak gods, too busy warring amongst themselves to pose any threat to the Legion's designs – and this particular specimen had done little to raise his estimation. He owed no explanations to her. "The battle is almost upon us. Ready yourselves," he said, ignoring her question. His expression hardened suddenly as he injected a silky note of warning into his voice. "And whatever you may see, do not hinder the mo'arg."
"What that mean?" Kar'thol asked suspiciously, crossing his huge tattooed arms.
Nerothos didn't deign to answer, sinking into a crouch before launching himself airborne with an effortless flap of his wings.
"I don't want to know," Tun muttered, following an iron-patched mo'arg's progress along the rampart with new misgiving.
The flask of conjured water in Callista's hand dissolved into damp mist as she tipped the last drop onto her tongue. She shook the vapor from her hand as she gazed down the moon-drenched canyon over the outermost bulwark, waiting for the first armored figure to march into view. The flood of demons swarming over the barricades had slowed to a trickle by now, most of them having reached their places, and gan'arg armed with long and wicked-looking pikes lined the parapets nearest the front. "I don't care if they're sacrificing orphaned puppies to the blood god if it gets us to Outland," she said crankily.
"I bet ya'd do it ya self if ya thought it would help," Na'rii grumbled, some of the same loathing she'd shown Nerothos still in her eyes as she looked at the warlock.
Callista, used to various kinds of distaste on the features of people who knew what magic she wielded, wasn't much bothered by her criticism. "You mean no one ever told you?" she said, lips curling in a wicked smile. "Puppies make the best soul shards." She paused, cocking her head thoughtfully. "After troll babies, of course."
Tun rolled his eyes. "Callista, do you sit around all day inventing these dreadful stories, or do they just pop into your head?"
"A little of both," she admitted with an impish smirk.
Further conversation was forestalled as the clank of heavy armor and hiss of many boots against sand grew suddenly louder, some trick of the echoes in the canyon making it sound as though the army was marching right above their heads. Tun actually looked around to see if they'd somehow been flanked (impossible; the sheer crystal walls were almost claustrophobically close here, and high enough to cause vertigo if he stared upwards too long), but the noise was unnerving all the same.
It dimmed slightly, and he relaxed – only to tense almost painfully as the first company of felguards strode into view. Moonlight glinted from the wicked spikes of their armor and blades, and, at a bellowed command from a doomguard at the rear of the formation, they raised their weapons and charged forward with a bestial roar.
High above the sandy floor, wings buoyed by the cool night air of Xoroth, Nerothos watched the first line of felguards break rank and sprint forward, scenting easy prey. It had been long since this world had seen any assault from within or without, deep in the heart of the Legion's conquered territories as it was; it had likely been centuries, if not longer, since its defenders had tasted blood. They would be reckless, half mad with battlelust. Or so he was counting on.
The felguards continued to charge, heads lowered as they howled a battlecry meant to chill the blood in their enemies' veins. They had barely closed half the distance to the forward-most barricade, however, when a trio of explosions shattered the night air, drowning their shouts. Three fountains of flame and blood-spattered sand erupted from the ground as the pressure of many feet triggered the blasting charges buried by the gan'arg. The first rank of attackers was shredded or thrown sickeningly against the crystalline walls, and the momentum of the rest broke as the shockwave knocked them to their knees.
Nerothos smiled, pleased with the battle's opening volleys. Felguards were strong and savage – but his own forces were cunning, and they needn't hold forever.
He skimmed the canyon's sheer and shimmering sides, far above the heads of the battalion laid out below and well out of artillery range, though he saw among their ranks neither fel cannons nor any powerful arcanists. He could already make a shrewd guess as to who was commanding this assault – but it was always best to be certain.
His flight was swift, aided by the wind at his back (the scent of blood and fel magic was already on it, and the savage part of his nature reveled in it), and soon he reached the rear of the army gathered to destroy him. The commanders conferred at the very back of the lines. Three doomguards, a shivarra priestess – and the enormous reptilian bulk of the pitlord, Gorgonnoth.
Nerothos nodded to himself and adjusted the angle of his wings, wheeling sharply in the sky towards the sound of battle. Gorgonnoth was a creature known to him – once a mid-level commander in the vanguard of the Legion's rampage through the cosmos, he had disgraced himself by losing a battle with the odds stacked firmly on their side, pressing an attack against the orders of his Eredar superior and annihilating his entire command in the jaws of an obvious trap. Some might mistake Gorgonnoth's continued existence for mercy on the part of his masters, but Nerothos knew better. An eternity spent here, on Xoroth, or some lifeless pacified world like it, with no flesh to tear, no blood to spill, the unending lust for destruction forever searing his veins, unsated, was, to one of the Annihilan, a fate far worse than oblivion. It was an elegant solution, really – torment for a failed lieutenant and added security for one of the Legion's key fortresses all at once.
He plummeted through the sand-flecked air to land on the forward rampart, watching with a clinical eye as felguards tried unsuccessfully to scale the wall built of razor-edged crystal shards. Gorgonnoth's presence here was both boon and terrible danger. On the one hand, he need fear no trickery – the pitlord knew but one strategy, and that was bloody attrition. On the other, this was likely the most carnage Gorgonnoth had seen for a thousand years, and perhaps all he would see for a thousand more – when he thought their forces had been whittled down sufficiently by the felguards' mindless assault, he would come himself. And even Nerothos could not stand against an Annihilan commander in fair and open combat. The gan'arg would scatter like frightened vermin, whether there was anywhere to flee to or not.
A felguard clambered almost three-quarters of the way up the barricade's spiky front, dodging several vicious jabs from the gan'arg's pikes; Nerothos clenched his clawed fist and the felguard erupted into green flame, its seared fingers losing their grip on the crystal face as its tendons shriveled and tightened. He watched dispassionately as the charred corpse tumbled to the sand. They were engaged in a deadly race between the opening of the portal and Gorgonnoth's dwindling patience – they would win, or their severed entrails would adorn the pitlord's blade.
"What's happening?" Tun asked, standing impatiently on tiptoe to try to see what was occurring on the other side of the forward barricade. All he could glimpse between the glistening spikes of their own parapet was the backs of gan'arg and mo'arg jabbing with pikes or throwing unidentifiable flasks of chemicals at something below.
Na'rii, tallest of the four except for Kar'thol, had a slightly better view, but still couldn't see the action on the ground. It didn't much matter; the fact that felguards hadn't yet managed to scale the ramparts told her enough. "We be doin' okay," she said.
Tun didn't miss the way her mouth twisted slightly on the word 'we.' He supposed it must rankle especially for a shaman, servant of nature's balance, to be forced into an alliance with demons. He looked around at the red sand, the wind-strewn dust, the hard crystal sides of the canyon – not that it mattered much in this place. The scales had been tipped on this world many ages ago, and he doubted the Legion's devastation would ever be restored.
A glassy screech interrupted his thoughts, and he glanced to the side to see Callista scratching something with her dagger into one of the large flat crystalline facets protruding from the parapet.
"Noise annoy Kar'thol," the ogre growled, looking at her and rubbing at one of his large ears.
Callista scraped another line, drawing another protesting squeal from the crystal. "Well, usually I'd use parchment or dirt, but the Legion doesn't seem very keen on either."
Tun leaned over and squinted at the runes she'd scratched out, but couldn't interpret the pattern. Demonic magic was really just another school of the arcane, but since its casters so often performed their spells in Eredun he could never make as much sense of it as he thought he should be able to. Probably for the best. "What will that do?" he asked.
Another screech; there was some foul enchantment on the dagger Callista wielded, and it lit the sigils with a sickly glow. "Nothing I'd do on Azeroth," she said, the humorlessness of her smile tempered just a little by something that might have been self-mockery.
Tun frowned, unsure what magic could be so nasty that even Callista might balk at it and not particularly thrilled at the prospect of finding out. He opened his mouth to speak a warning, but shut it again, wincing, as another blast from a buried mine rocked the canyon, spattering them with sand and dark droplets of what he hoped was only blood. A chorus of enraged roars rose in response, and he took a deep breath to steady himself. This was no time to be squeamish.
"As long as you know what you're doing," he muttered, shooting her a look that contained as much concern as misgiving.
"Cross my heart," she said with a lopsided smile. She made one final mark on her runed circle and sheathed her dagger, blowing across the design to clear the dust of its making. It wasn't finished – but that was as much as she could do before she meant to use it.
She heard the crunch of small feet on gravel close behind her, and turned to see Darmog's eerily-pale eyes peering over Tun's shoulder at her markings. He looked even more nervous than he normally did, and flinched every time a particularly blood-curdling howl floated over the ramparts. "That for the pitlord?" he asked, cocking his cowled head.
Callista stared. Her mind whirred in futile circles, trying to process that statement in any way that didn't lead to a hideous blood-crazed demon the size of a herd of elekks rampaging in her direction. "Is that for the…there's a pitlord?!"
"Oh. Thought you knew," Darmog said, blinking callously at her distress. He didn't look nearly as frantic as she might've expected him to under the circumstances. Then again, the gan'arg had made up his mind days ago that they were all going to die here; maybe he'd gotten used to the idea. He shuffled back from her a few steps, just in case, then looked back at her sigils. "So, that's not for the pitlord?"
Callista rubbed at the bridge of her nose. "No!"
"What's the matter?" Tun asked, glancing warily at the gan'arg. The creature looked edgy, ducking away a little farther as he noticed his stare, but then again, he'd never seen the gan'arg not look edgy.
"There's a pitlord," Callista said dryly, removing her hand from her face.
"Oh," Tun said, rather inadequately. He knew what a pitlord was, of course, but he wasn't sure what, exactly, they were meant to do about one. He paused. "Where is it?"
"Kar'thol smash pit-thing," the ogre said contemptuously. There was a spike-studded steel mace resting against the parapet near his right hand (he'd lifted it from a crate carried by a pair of indignant but cowed-looking gan'arg who hadn't dared protest); he hefted it easily and gave a demonstrative swing, causing Callista to jump backwards in alarm.
She lifted one side of her mouth skeptically once she'd steadied herself, but refrained from pointing out that even Kar'thol, large as he was, was unlikely to be able to smash much on a "pit-thing" other than its toes. "Where is it?" she asked, turning back over her shoulder to relay Tun's question to Darmog, who had leapt behind her at the ogre's sudden movement.
Darmog hunched his thin shoulders in a non-committal shrug. "Dunno. Heard the dreadlord telling one of the mo'arg about it."
Callista translated this information for the rest, and a cautious look of hope stole across Tun's face. "Then maybe it isn't actually here after all?"
Na'rii, who had been staring off towards the battle with an expression that, if it hadn't been quite so hard, Callista might have called grieved, laughed bitterly. "'Course it be here, mon. That be our luck. Fate got no love in this place for anyone but the fiends."
Callista followed her gaze. The air was thick with dust and sand and poisonous-colored clouds of smoke from alchemical weapons, but she could still see their allies on the other barricade hacking at grappling hooks or locked in deadly combat with those felguards who had, by now, managed to scale the wall. "Maybe. But some of those fiends are ours."
Na'rii's face was even bitterer than her laugh. "Believe me, mon, I know."
Waiting for a battle was, in Tun's opinion, almost worse than actually fighting one.
He paced restlessly from one dagger-tipped parapet to the other, alternately watching the struggle for the other rampart and the mo'arg conducting their complicated ritual about the closed gateway, unsure which sight was more disheartening. They were losing the fight, that was for certain. They'd slain felguards in droves at first, but one of their fel reavers had already been hacked down, and the gan'arg were running short of the chemicals and explosives they'd used to such great effect in the beginning. More and more felguards were gaining the top of the walls, and the gan'arg were no match for them in equal combat. It was only a matter of time.
He looked back to the heavy black bulk of the portal, unchanged for far too long now. It still glowed at its center with an unwholesome violet light, but the glow seemed neither to brighten nor expand. The mo'arg, from what he could see, might as well be doing nothing.
"Wall fall soon," Kar'thol said, tightening his meaty fingers around the handle of his mace.
No one answered, though Callista nodded grimly. She had summoned her felhunter, and she kept a fist clenched in the long spines that guarded its neck as it uttered the sustained, almost inaudible growl it had been making ever since bursting forth from the Nether. It smelled the bloodshed, and wanted it.
Tun shivered and wrapped his arms around himself as a memory leapt into his head unbidden – Nerothos' tale of the native people of this world, driven into this crystal cage and slaughtered. Looking out over the smoke-shrouded violence playing out ahead of him – the green and purple licks of felfire, the cruel snarls of delight on the faces of the felguards as they swung their axes in glittering arcs – he wondered if this was the last thing they had seen before their world was consumed.
It was an unpleasant thought and he pushed it away quickly, grimacing and shaking his head to clear it.
He opened them again just in time to see the explosion.
A column of red flame burst from the middle of the other barricade with a roar loud enough to leave a tinny ringing in his ears, and he had just enough presence of mind to throw himself to the ground before sharp slivers of crystal sheared the air where he'd been standing, breaking against the parapet with vicious little shattering noises.
Kar'thol, too large to be shielded fully by their defenses, gave an aggravated howl as the shards sliced into the skin of his back.
Tun barely heard it, half deafened as he was, and only realized the explosion had run its course when red sand began pattering down from the sky in a cruel parody of rain. He climbed woozily to his feet, immediately looking around to see if the others were alright.
Callista and Na'rii appeared fine but dazed as they hauled themselves up from the ground, squinting through the slackening fall of sand.
"Can't you blow this mess away?" Callista asked, turning to Na'rii. She appeared to be shouting, but to Tun her voice seemed to come from very far away.
Na'rii pretended not to hear, jerking her head away with a hard expression. Her feigned distraction became real, however, when her gaze fell upon Kar'thol. Bright runnels of blood flowed down his back from dozens of scratches and gouges as he swatted at the pieces of crystal embedded in his flesh. Ogre skin was thick; the wounds weren't serious, but they were ugly to look at.
"Be still, mon!" Na'rii said, reaching up a hand to stop his rough efforts at brushing away the splinters from making the wounds worse. Her words sounded as strangely distant as Callista's had to Tun's abused ears, but at least the ringing was starting to fade.
"Na'rii fix?" Kar'thol asked hopefully, craning his head over one of his massive shoulders to watch her carefully pick the crystal shards from his skin.
She seemed to flinch at the question, even her long ears drooping as her face twisted bitterly and she answered something Tun couldn't make out.
"What mean, 'can't?'" Kar'thol said, large brow lowering in suspicious puzzlement. He turned to better face her, twisting his injured back from her reach.
Even Callista, engaged in sweeping the fallen sand and chunks of crystal from the sigils she'd drawn earlier, snapped her head around at that. Nerothos' words echoed in her mind – the folly of begging for power, indeed.
"They asked for somethin' I couldn't give," she said, and though there was weary grief written on her features, beneath it was defiance. "And the elements be honorin' no friend of demons."
"But you're not," Tun said, heart aching for the pain he sensed in her voice. She hated the creatures more than any of them; he'd seen the loathing in her eyes often enough when she looked at them.
Na'rii laughed humorlessly. "I kept the storm from killin' them all. That be friend enough."
Tun just looked at her, wanting to offer some comfort but not knowing what to say. He knew that nature was often cruel, and far be it from him to cast judgment on a power he hardly understood, but there seemed to him to be an unnecessary vindictiveness in this abandonment. Was it possible that after so many eons of the Legion's torment, even the spirits of this world had become corrupt?
"Watch yourselves!" Callista snapped tersely. Elemental spirits and shamanic powers held little interest for her – but the felguards who'd begun charging through the ragged gap in their defenses as soon as the debris had stopped flying did.
Tun heeded the urgency in her tone, pivoting to watch the demonic forces boiling into the space between the barricades. The spike-bottomed trench slowed them, but only for a moment – the felguards could jump, and it was by far the minority who plummeted into the pit.
He took a deep breath and looked away, trying to center himself for a spell and block out the unholy glow of the demons' eyes in the moonlight.
A soft murmur in a guttural tongue interrupted his efforts, and he lifted his gaze to watch Callista place a small purple stone in the center of her circle of runes. Oily black flames, not quite fire and not quite shadow, immediately blazed from the scratches she'd gouged, forming an intricate design. It might almost have been beautiful, if it didn't make his eyes sting to look at it.
"Can I borrow your knife?" she asked, calmly as if she'd been asking to borrow a stick of butter back in Stormwind.
Tun started to ask her why – she had a perfectly good dagger of her own, he'd seen her use it to draw her sigils – but swallowed the words as he realized the foolishness of the question. Callista's own blade was fel-tainted, and the flesh she meant to cut was her own. His misgiving was plain on his face, but still he drew the blade and turned it into her palm, hilt first.
He had to avert his eyes as she rolled up her sleeve and drew the edge across the skin of her arm. Instead he watched the felguards below, weapons glittering with a hard light as they snarled and bellowed, hacking down anything unfortunate enough to cross their blades. The gan'arg on the other barricade were beset on all sides now; the shattered crystal of its construction ran slick with dark blood and worse things as a slaughter raged on its top. Tun swallowed, trying hard not to be sick at the sight. Many of the gan'arg were abandoning the doomed structure, leaping from the top and fleeing across the blood-streaked sand, but nearly all of them were cut down as they ran. Too many felguards had already pushed their way through the hole in the barricade, and the gan'arg were trapped by their own pits and defenses, less able to navigate them than the enemies they'd built them to stop.
A harsh flare of purple light – or maybe it was darkness – seared his eyes, and Tun's gaze snapped instinctively to the source. Oily, foul-looking flames leapt from the sand below: Callista's runed circle writ huge and sinister across the ground.
The black fire didn't actually appear to burn, but the felguards caught within its boundaries, no fools despite their bloodlust, knew that no good ever came of arcane sigils on the battlefield. They gave up chasing the frightened gan'arg in favor of shoving and scrambling to escape its borders but found themselves caught, the rubble-strewn hole in the barricade through which they'd entered transformed into a bottleneck to ensnare them.
The words grated sibilantly on Tun's ears as Callista muttered in the demon-tongue, blood draining from the cut in her arm in a red stream, far faster than a natural wound should have bled. She ended her spell on a snarl, and the bleeding stopped abruptly as the dark flames before her winked out.
The shadowy fire on the ground continued to burn, but now there was a strange pressure in his ears, like the coming of an unnatural storm, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose at the wrongness of it. He couldn't tear his eyes away as the runed circle flared high and then died completely, a dark roar filling his ears as air or something like it rushed to fill the space it had abandoned, and for a moment the former bounds of the circle were obscured with roiling iridescent mist.
It dissipated so quickly he wondered if he'd really seen it, and when the air was clear again, everything it had hidden was dead.
"Light, Callista," Tun murmured, half in amazement and half in disgust. The bodies lay where they had fallen in an almost perfect circle, unwounded and unmarred except for the unlit sightlessness of their eyes. A few unlucky felguards had been only partially within the spell's reach when the mist had come; they crawled or staggered about as though mortally wounded, though no mark was on them.
"It even taints the ground – not that it matters here," Callista said, looking just the tiniest bit disturbed herself and feeling sickeningly dizzy from the exertion. She'd memorized the ritual for that spell and drawn the circle many times, but never had she carried it to conclusion. A mistake, perhaps – but the warlocks of Stormwind, aware of their tenuous political position and the value it placed on discretion, generally avoided using spells that had permanent wide-scale effects.
"That be a fiend's work," Na'rii muttered, sensing the corruption even from where she stood. The spirits no longer spoke to her, but it didn't take much to imagine the agonized wail of the earth. All to save a few nasty little demons. The surviving gan'arg used the distraction to gain the safety of the other barricade, gingerly scaling its front or letting their fellows hoist them up on the ends of their pikes.
"Most assuredly," Nerothos said. He had paused his ceaseless stalking along the battlements to observe Callista's spell, and was the only one of their company who looked wholly pleased with the result, satisfaction cruel upon his features. "That spell bears repetition, warlock."
It was a command, not an observation.
"Not with my blood it doesn't," Callista said, narrowing her eyes and pulling her sleeve back down to her wrist. She leaned a hand woozily against the parapet for support, lightheaded and weakly nauseous, though she knew she hadn't bled that much. She managed a vicious smile anyway (perhaps one more wan than she would've liked), cocking her head up at him. "Unless you're volunteering yours…"
"I think not," Nerothos said contemptuously. He could sense the weakness the warlock had inadvertently inflicted on herself, but even if concern had been in his nature he would've felt none for her. She knew the spells to cure herself of that, and if she intended to survive this battle she would use them. He matched her smile cruelly, the effect made even more alarming by the gore that already spattered the black metal of his armor. "But perhaps I may…negotiate the use of another's."
Callista rubbed absently at the thin white scar on her forearm, still half-sick with dizziness. She didn't care what Nerothos negotiated; she had no intention of using that spell again, with her own blood or anyone else's, for quite some time. Not that there would be any point in telling him that. Or in lying, which would amount to the same thing. Instead she lifted one side of her mouth in dark amusement, choosing a reply that was carefully neither. "And they tried to tell me demons can't compromise."
Smiling the way he was, it was disturbingly evident that Nerothos' hard white fangs were nearly the only part of him not flecked with blood. "Align your interests with ours, and I think you'll find us most accommodating."
"Once you've put everything we ever cared about to the flame," Tun muttered. He looked out nervously over the parapet – the felguards had already begun to regroup, the seemingly endless stream of reinforcements bolstering their surviving troops. Having determined that the effects of Callista's spell weren't lingering, they began again their relentless advance, stepping callously over or even on their wounded and dead.
"A niggling price for immortal power," Nerothos said. Looking the way he did, all horn and wing and sinewy muscle, with the blood of his enemies damp on his hands and an arrogant sneer on his face, it was almost possible to believe he had really achieved such a thing and found it worthwhile.
A volley of spears arced through the dust-choked air towards their position; the mortals threw themselves behind the parapet while the dreadlord simply sprang effortlessly into the air. The iron weapons clattered noisily on the crushed crystal behind them as the guttural voices of felguards echoed off the canyon walls.
Tun stood cautiously and peered over the parapet. His eyes met the twisted snarl of a felguard, its eyes shining unnaturally and fangs glinting in the moonlight.
A sudden scraping crash startled him as a long steel beam, a mess of wires protruding from its end, toppled over onto the top of the ramparts – he recognized it as an arm from one of the fel reavers dispatched earlier. Felguards swarmed up its length, boots and armored gloves clanging against the metal, as gan'arg struggled to bring their long pikes to bear.
The first one leapt to the top of the barricade, landing in a feral crouch and jerking the double-bladed axe slung over its back into a ready stance.
Tun reacted on alarmed instinct, blue bolts of magic lancing from his hands; the felguard crumpled to the ground with its head and shoulders encased in a glistening block of ice, thrashing and flailing from want of air.
Four of its companions landed in its place, whirling immediately to face the mortals with vengeance in the mad burn of their eyes, and in later years Tun would try very hard never to remember what happened next. Even when the memories forced themselves into his dreams, he could only ever see it in glimpses and flashes of violence that turned his stomach and drenched him in frigid sweat.
Vials, bursting into neon clouds of poison as they shattered, felguards choking and clutching at their bleeding eyes as they fell.
A gan'arg, its entrails slick and glistening against the crystal floor as an axe cleaved it from shoulder to waist.
Callista – too slow to dodge a blow from a demon's rune-etched broadsword, her arm almost severed as she cried out in pain, blood and tendon and shockingly white bone exposed to the night air – a writhing snake of green light crackled from her hand, and suddenly her arm was whole and the felguard was on its knees as her felhunter wrenched off its head.
Na'rii and Kar'thol, horror of a different kind, almost more brutal for its lack of magic – the ogre snapped a demon's arm in his huge hands, a brittle sound like a cracking twig, and Na'rii twisted her sword through the creature's neck with a look of savage hatred that was almost more frightening than the violence.
Nerothos was there too, deigning, for once, to participate in the slaughter, more effortlessly savage than any mortal could hope to be – he gouged his claws through the breastplate and lung of a doomguard with a casualness that was terrifying, laying open its throat with his other hand and flicking the stringy cords of veins and flesh contemptuously away. Dark blood poured out in a torrent as he carelessly dropped the still-twitching corpse, and ragged scraps of darkness lifted from the skeletal bodies of two felguards, scoured clean of flesh and muscle by his spell, to wheel around his head like a macabre swarm of flies.
Worst of all, of course – the things that crept into his nightmares, seared into his memory like brands – were the things Tun did himself. Felguards thrashed wildly as they choked with their heads smothered in ice or writhed impaled on frozen spires erupting from the ground; glittering darts of ice whirled through the air, shredding muscle and bone until a fine red mist rose up and he held his breath until his lungs burned so as not to breathe it in. His boots slid on crystal fragments made slick with spilled blood, and if the assault had let up for more than a moment he might have vomited.
Then, amid the killing and the dying and the agonized howls of the wounded, a sound smote his heart even through the protective numbness that had taken him – the high, frightened wail of a child.
Impossible.
His next spell failed on nerveless fingers as he snapped his head around towards the source, sure it must be a trick of the uncanny echoes but fearing queasily that it was not. His eyes swept the carnage around him until they lit on the dark, ominous bulk of the dimensional gate, still glowing at its core with that unearthly purple light. The mo'arg manning it clustered around a crudely-wrought iron cage, and within it Tun could just make out two tiny emaciated figures.
He cried out in alarm and horror, instinctively dashing towards the crooked steps that lead off the barricade (other prisoners, children, he had already seen so much that was monstrous but not like this, never like this), but was arrested by Callista's hand tight around his arm.
"You can't," she said, voice hoarse from shouting spells, as she pulled him back.
"Let me go!" he cried, jerking wildly against her grip. The mo'arg with the false red eye had already yanked a child from the cage by its thin neck, cuffing it across the head to still its weak thrashing before setting it in front of the towering gate. "Callista, they're going to kill them!"
"And if you interfere, they're going to kill you!" she said harshly, tightening her fingers hard against his sleeve. "That's a Legion portal, blood strengthens – ," her voice cracked and she swallowed dryly. "We're running out of time, Nether, they would use yours too. There's nothing you can do."
"Holy Light, help us," he said in anguish, still halfheartedly struggling against her. He wanted so desperately to look away but couldn't wrench his gaze from the poor thin figures, penance for his helplessness (cowardice, the harsher part of his mind hissed).
"The Light isn't watching us here," Callista snapped angrily, fingers painfully tight on his arm, and despite the hardness of her tone there was a bitter hollowness in her eyes that he'd never expected to see, not in hers, faithless cynic that she was –
The bladed drill of the mo'arg's arm came down. The helpless wail ceased, and the memory of it in the silence was even more terrible than the sobs.
He wasn't sure how long they fought after that. The time ran all together in an endless procession of horrors, sometimes with Callista and Na'rii and Kar'thol by his side and sometimes on his own. Even That Demon saved his life once – gutted from behind a felguard about to bring its blade down on his skull. The dreadlord looked at him, smiling that cruel sardonic smile as though the entire world were an elaborate game performed for his sole entertainment, and Tun suspected he had only bothered because the irony amused him.
Then the assault stopped.
On some unseen signal the felguards broke off from their combat with reluctant snarls, retreating from the top of the battered rampart and back across the red sands.
The four companions, sore and bloodied, regrouped at the center of the barricade and watched them go.
"What sort of trick is this?" Tun muttered, as the felguards formed into neat ranks a few hundred yards away across the broken and corpse-strewn defenses. Had this been a mortal army, he might've thought they were about to offer terms of surrender – but demons knew no such things.
"I got a better question," Na'rii said grimly. Of the four of them, she was the least wounded, the oldest and mildest of her hurts already healed. "Where be the pitlord?"
Callista had rather been wondering the same thing. Dreadlords and Eredar led from behind, but pitlords preferred the gore and violence of battle to issuing commands from the back of the ranks. She leaned out over the parapet to take stock of their worn forces, wincing slightly at the pain the motion caused her sore and stiffened muscles. They had taken surprisingly few casualties, actually; more than a third of their number still survived, though almost all of the demons had suffered some wound. Even Jhormug had a grotesque chunk missing from one of his flanks, though the felhunter seemed hardly to notice. Something was off about this.
She looked up as the crunch of heavy hooves on gravel heralded Nerothos' arrival. The dreadlord bore no wounds of his own, though his hands and forearms were crusted with dark blood that had run down from his claws and dried there. His armor was undented, and its silver embellishments still gleamed where they weren't obscured by gore. She ought to have found him terrifying-looking, but a blood-covered Nerothos hardly ranked on the list of terrible things Callista had already seen and done this day. The high, thin wail of a child – she shivered despite herself and stomped on the thought, hard. Now was not the time to be sorry.
She raised her brows at him in a "now what?" expression, though she thought she knew what the answer would be.
"It seems the pitlord, Gorgonnath, has found this struggle tedious," he said with an unpleasant smile. His fel-green eyes seemed to burn in the darkness as he looked down the moon-soaked length of the crystal canyon. "Now he will improve on it himself."
"One of ya nasty friends?" Na'rii asked, noting his use of the demon's name. Her lip curled instinctively back from her tusks in dislike as she looked at him, wiping sweat and blood from her face.
"No," Nerothos sneered. He turned his horned head, looking from the nearly-opened portal to the gathered felguards with an unreadable expression as he weighed his next action. The mo'arg were close to finishing their task, tantalizingly so – should he lend his own not inconsiderable arcane talent to their efforts, they could be done within the half hour. Unfortunately, he did not trust this ragged collection of Vathregyr's former engineers and fragile mortals to last even that long against the pitlord without his assistance.
He stretched his wings contemplatively, feeling the sandy breeze that perpetually worried the air of Xoroth skitter across their undersides. Then again, even if he stayed it was possible that Gorgonnoth would overwhelm them too quickly. He was a strategist and a spy, not an overwhelming juggernaut of devastation to match an Annihilan.
Callista's eyes narrowed in thought as she watched the dreadlord's gaze flick from the portal to their enemies in something that looked suspiciously like indecision. This was not where he wanted to be, clearly, but he feared the utter collapse of their defenses should he leave…she was beginning to think she might have a plan. It was, very likely, a stupid plan – her exhaustion had been replaced by the reckless burn of fel power siphoned from her enemies, and it was difficult to judge properly – but, trapped between the pitlord bearing down on them and Nerothos' threat, even if they did, by some miracle, survive, she had very little to lose.
Her face twisted into a humorless smile. "Go," she said.
Nerothos tilted his head to look at her, his usual sardonic expression becoming even more pronounced. "I had no idea, warlock, that your will to live was so very feeble."
She pushed off from the parapet to move closer, ignoring the shadowy prickle of fel magic that surrounded him to look him over boldly from the new angle. "I had every idea your ego could stopper the Maelstrom, but do you really think you could kill that creature?"
He was silent a moment, and the eldritch glow of his eyes seemed to brighten as he studied her, trying to decide what her angle was. That she was attempting to play him was obvious – not that he minded. Nerothos was most fond of games, and the warlock was clever enough to play an interesting one – though nowhere near wise enough to win. "No," he said, deliberately keeping his answer short to see where she would maneuver.
Callista smiled coldly. "Then what does it matter if you stay? The faster that portal opens, the less chance that fiend will kill us all."
"So there is," Nerothos said. "Unless this frightened rabble flees at the very rumor of Gorgonnoth's approach." The corners of his mouth turned up in cruel amusement as he watched her. "That is, as I understand, the usual response of mortals and cowards."
Alright, now that was just needlessly insulting. "Flees to…where exactly?" she asked, cocking her head with faux-puzzlement at the unbroken walls of the crystal dome behind him. "Besides," she continued, inspecting her bloodied fingertips smugly before flicking her eyes up to his face to gauge his interest, "I have a plan." She paused. "Under one condition, of course."
"Do you, now?" Nerothos said with a predatory smile. All other things being relatively equal, he was tempted to let her test her little scheme, whatever it was. It hardly mattered. There was no deception in her words, or he would sense it – the salient point was that she truly did have a plan, and if she didn't have a reasonable expectation of it working she wouldn't be betting her own life on it in a contest with a pitlord. The warlock was many things, but a suicidal fool was not among them. Besides, if he allowed her her way, he himself would need risk very little. He would be spared the danger of engaging Gorgonnath himself, and, should her ploy fail, he would have ample time to escape using his wings and invisibility. There were many other ways off Xoroth for one like him, and Nerothos knew them all – escaping with Charin and his minions to present as trophies to Lord Banehollow would be a desirable bonus, but not a necessary one.
"What are your terms?" he asked, only the barest hint of mockery tingeing his smile. For the moment, at least, he was willing to play at indulging her.
Callista smiled in return, sensing he was toying with her but not caring – it didn't matter. "If we slow that pitlord long enough for you to open the portal, you let us return to Azeroth. Alive, unharmed, unbound in any way, and immediately," she said, counting off her points on her bloodstained fingers.
A ripple of motion and eager snarls ran through the felguards gathered just beyond the shattered barricade; they didn't have much time. "Agreed," Nerothos said carelessly, turning and spreading his wings to depart.
"Then swear it."
The warlock's voice rang out from behind him and he folded them again, looking at her. She was pale from blood loss and physical exhaustion, and the skin beneath her eyes was dark and bruised – she looked as frail as any of her pathetic, ephemeral people ever had, except for the challenging glitter in her eyes. Despite her unimposing appearance she was still a warlock, and not an unskilled one at that, a dealer in binding magic – he doubted she was interested in simple promises.
"I hope you didn't think I'd take you at your word," she said with an edged smile, drawing her sickly-glowing blade and scratching a single rune into the nearest standing bit of crystal.
He recognized it – it was an old sigil, one of some power – but one he knew from experience he could break if he chose. He smiled inwardly at her arrogance, stepping forward to the carven crystal. "Be swift, warlock," he purred. He was eager to be gone, but let her bind him with her ineffectual oath. Mortals showed so much more resourcefulness when they thought they had something to fight for.
Callista simply offered him her palm face-up over the crudely-gouged rune, wary of what he might guess if she spoke any more, feeling the uneven pounding of her pulse as her other hand tightened around the pair of soul shards in her pocket. Sharp as demonic senses were, he had to hear it, or feel her unease with that unerring instinct he had for such things, and she could only trust he would attribute it to fear of the monstrosity behind her, or even of himself. That was close to the truth, at least. If he found her out too soon he would either mock her or kill her, and she didn't relish the idea of finding out which he would choose…but she was too far caught in her own idiotic game to pull away now.
It was customary for each party to such an agreement to draw their own blood, but Nerothos, having already witnessed the warlock's reluctance to use her demon-spelled blade on her own flesh, saw nothing amiss when she failed to draw her dagger. He laid a razor-tipped black claw against the crease of her proffered palm, digging it in lightly – it took hardly any pressure at all to slice a red-beaded line across her skin.
He repeated the gesture on his own palm, watching disinterestedly as she clenched her fist over the rune, squeezing a few drops of blood into its center. The symbol began to glow a dull crimson as Nerothos followed suit, his own fel-tainted blood mingling with hers on the crystal.
The sigil's glow brightened into a ruby light, reflecting in the pupils of the warlock's grey eyes as she moved her lips in the words of an inaudible spell, magic-glare pulsing brighter and brighter…
…then winking out as though snuffed.
That wasn't part of the spell!
Nerothos snarled, sensing, finally, the rapid flicker of emotion that unmistakably meant deception and lunging for her hand, guessing immediately what she'd done. His claws sank into her wrist, drawing a harsh curse from Callista just as her fingers smeared across their mixed blood.
A flash of violet light – soul shards – he released her instinctively, claws suddenly nerveless as a fiercely-cold burning spread through his veins, starting in his cut palm and bleeding outwards, and knew from the warlock's agonized yelp that she was suffering it as well.
The pain ebbed quickly and Callista sagged against the parapet in relief, though her wrist throbbed and she could feel warm liquid pattering in slow drops from her fingertips. Nerothos' talons had actually gouged her quite badly. Plaguing hells, she hadn't realized that spell would hurt so much.
A soft snarl sounded above her as a shadow fell across her face.
She hissed in alarm as powerful fingers locked tightly about her throat, the tips of Nerothos' claws pricking her skin like hard little needlepoints as he shoved her roughly against the jagged crystal at her back.
She gasped a deep breath in anticipation of the choking squeeze that would surely come, prying instinctively at his fingers, but she might as well have been pulling at steel bands.
"Get away from her!" she heard Tun shout.
Nerothos ignored him, dark wings spreading to block his view as he fixed the fierce light of his gaze firmly on Callista, lip curling disdainfully back from his pointed teeth. He didn't speak, but the sinister aura of power that always clung to him seemed to suddenly intensify into something that was nearly as physical a weight as his hand around her neck, pressing ominously against her mind, and if he'd released her and there'd been any room at all she'd have stumbled backwards and away from it.
She released her lungful of air, unable to hold it any longer, and panted raggedly to recover. Despite his aggressive posture, his expression wasn't, she noted, half as furious as she'd expected. Somehow she didn't find that comforting.
"It's alright," she called to Tun, and was annoyed at the way her voice wavered. She forced herself to drop her hands from the claws on her neck, meeting his gaze with an unrepentant scowl and trying not to think about the unnatural sharpness of the talons that were still pressing painful little dents into her very much mortal skin.
Nerothos smiled at that, though the sharp glint of his teeth in the half-light gave it more the impression of a snarl, darkly amused by the contrast between her words and the uncertain fear he could feel on her. She had at no point actually lied to him, an effective trick precisely because it wasn't one – but it would all avail her nothing, in the end. "You are fortunate, warlock, that you have not yet quite exhausted my tolerance, despite your unwisely remarkable efforts," he said, squeezing his fingers around her throat.
He wasn't gripping her quite tightly enough to stop her breath, but the ball of his thumb was pressed firmly enough against her throat to make swallowing difficult. She eyed him suspiciously, not fooled by his condescension, and ran her thumb across the palm of her bloodied hand to feel the raised, blackened rune seared there. A binding spell, more dangerous than the one she'd scratched into the crystal - tolerance on either of their parts had little to do with anything anymore.
"You did agree to swear," she said, daring a transparently insincere smile that was second cousin to a sneer and trying to shift beneath his grip so the parapet's crystals weren't jabbing her so uncomfortably in the back. It was no use – one part of the structure was as spiky as another. Giving up, she lifted her still-bleeding wrist instead, squeezing her blood-sodden sleeve around it tightly and trying not to wince as the fabric ground painfully against the wound. "Maybe next time you should be more specific."
Before he could answer, a sudden deafening roar rose from the gathered felguards, reverberating from the crystal walls and causing Callista to startle. She reflexively tried to jerk her head around to see, but Nerothos' clawed fingers squeezed against the back of her neck like a vice, pinning her in place. It hurt, but that wasn't what made her grip her wrist until her knuckles went bloodless and the hair on her arms rose in alarm. For all she knew there was a pitlord approaching her vulnerable and unguarded back, ready to spit her on a blade longer than she was tall (the space between her shoulder blades prickled alarmingly at the thought), and her gaze was pinioned helplessly to the sardonic glow of Nerothos' eyes, the last thing she might ever see. She narrowed her own, but there was nothing she could do – the binding spell cut both ways, and any magic she might use to break his grip would almost certainly be harmful enough to trigger its safeguards.
Nerothos laughed softly, a resonant, discomforting sound. He found the warlock far more amusing when she was furious and cornered, and he pressed his talons a little harder against her neck, savoring the anger boiling off of her and the erratic flutter of her pulse beneath his palm. Her machinations might be devious enough to ensnare another of her own naïve kind, but she kept company with him now, and she was farther out of her backwater mortal league than she could ever begin to imagine. "If there is a lesson in precision to be learned here, warlock, I assure you it is not for me."
His hand was hot against her neck and she could smell the metallic scent of blood on it (some of it likely hers), but she sneered at him anyway, not caring at all for his ominous words and acutely aware of the tumult building behind her. She spread the fingers of her wounded hand to better display the sigil blazoned there, letting her gaze linger on the matching mark branded into his skin in a way she hoped would gall him before flicking her eyes back up to his. "Better go behave yourself, demon."
"Perhaps I will," he purred, satire in the answering curl of his lip. He turned his free hand to inspect the black rune burned into the pale, blood-streaked flesh of his palm before clenching it into a fist, sliding the pad of his other thumb down her throat in what might almost have been a caress, if his wicked claw hadn't grazed so precisely the fragile skin above the artery. He deliberately left the gesture ambiguous, knowing she would take it as an attempt at manipulation and find it infuriating - he felt a flicker of confusion among the other more violent emotions he sensed from her, the dissonance only making her bristle more in the end.
"Should you survive..."
He left the words to hang on air clamorous with the felguard's shouts as he released her and sprang powerfully into the air, blinking from sight as he did so.
"What's the matter with you?!" Tun exploded as soon as he had gone, stamping his foot furiously against the blood-spattered ground. She still could barely hear him over the demons' noise. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?!"
"He wouldn't dare," she said, shouting to be heard over the din. The night air was cold against her throat after the heat of his hand, and she rubbed sharply at it in irritation as she turned, one eye on Tun and one on the howling assembly of felguards she'd been unable to see before. They clashed their armored gauntlets against their blades to add further to the pandemonium as the demons at the back of the crowd began to part ranks, though she couldn't yet see for what.
"Ya really think that oath will hold him?" Na'rii asked, cool skepticism in her eyes as she looked up from wiping her blade clean on the body of a felguard. The dreadlord hadn't seemed exactly pleased with whatever trick the warlock had pulled, but Na'rii had no illusions as to who wielded the greater power. And even blood oaths could be broken, or at least twisted to uselessness, if its parties were of too unequal skill.
"He has no choice," Callista said with a grim smile, still clutching her sleeve to her wounded wrist. "If either of us breaks our word, or tries to tamper with the magic, we both die. It's the nature of the spell." Granted, she wasn't entirely sure what death even meant to a creature like Nerothos, but she was banking on it being unpleasant enough that he wouldn't willingly suffer it on behalf of a few uppity mortals. If nothing else, it would be beneath his dignity.
"I guess we be seein,'" Na'rii said, flicking one of her beaded braids (matted with blood now, not all of it hers) out of her face with an unconvinced air.
Tun had snapped his head around at the words "we both die," but settled for an exhausted shake of his head rather than another attempt to scold Callista for her rashness. What was done was done, and he doubted she'd listen even if it hadn't been. Did she ever even think anymore before she did these things? Callista's problem, he sometimes thought, was that she had always been so terribly lucky. No matter what foolish thing she did she never quite seemed to lose enough to hurt, and the more she won, the more she gambled. One day she would risk too much, and what would be left when she lost?
"Pit-thing!" Kar'thol growled, jolting him from his moment of brooding.
He looked up as he whirled to see, catching a glimpse of the ogre adjusting his grip eagerly on the haft of his pike, the stony set of Na'rii's jaw, the flicker of uncertainty on Callista's face, before he laid eyes at last on the monstrous fiend himself, the gargantuan lizard-like bulk of the pitlord, Gorgonnoth.
Not far away, Nerothos coasted to a landing in the shadow of the enormous obsidian-hewn portal. One of the mo'arg eyed him curiously, but it shrank away quickly under the force of his gaze, sensing how unwise it would be to question him now.
He raised a hand, a fiercely-glowing circle of fel runes rotating around his claws and a sudden surge of power burning through him as he joined the spell to open the demon gate. The warlock's sigil lay strangely black against the skin of his lifted palm, seeming to repulse the light of the new magic, and he curled a lip at it in malicious amusement. It was a thorough, dangerous spell she had chosen, one volatile enough that even he might hesitate to interfere with it – not an entirely bad effort, for a mortal.
A pity it was also a wasted one.
He stretched his wings, feeling the pleasant thrum of fel magic radiated by the half-opened portal. The warlock's duplicitous little bait and switch, though cannier than he had credited her for, disrupted his plans not at all. Nerothos had intended to honor his word anyway – to the letter.