A twisted flash of nothing, vertigo knotted her stomach and suddenly there was hard cold stone beneath her hands and knees as she blinked in disorientation. She hissed as she realized she was leaning on her injured wrist and sat back on her heels, blinking at the painfully bright sunset-colored sky of the Blade's Edge Mountains.
"You tripped me!"
She turned her head to see Tun looking nearly as woozy as she felt, the red sand of Xoroth still clinging to his robes and the swollen bruise on his face giving him a lopsided air. She felt a sudden surge of affection for him, watching him squint irately at her in the red sunlight.
"Did not!" she lied hazily. The dagger-like spires of stone for which these mountains had been named clawed at a sky the color of hot coals, and she scrunched up her face in discomfort as her eyes struggled to adjust. Gan'arg hurried past her away from the portal, their feet slapping against bare rock charred black by some explosion that seemed to have originated near the gateway and burst outward – Nether, they had really made it.
She looked down at her wounded wrist, examining the sand-caked punctures where Nerothos' claws had gouged her, and noticed that her hand was shaking. Whether it was with relief or exhaustion or something else she couldn't tell. Everything seemed strange and unreal…she watched Tun climb to his feet and dust himself off with a dazed expression she imagined looked very similar to her own. Neither of them was a stranger to magical travel, but to be wrenched from the middle of a blood-soaked demonic battlefield after what seemed like weeks of flight and dropped into a quiet mountain pass was more than her battered mind could handle all at once. She knew she should be elated – they'd escaped, and held up their part of her oath in the bargain, Nerothos would have no choice now but to let them go – but at the moment all she could feel was tired.
A flash of silver and red caught her eye, and she stiffened as she found herself staring up into the scarred, half-mechanical visage of High Mekgineer Charin. His artificial eye bored into her face as he loomed over her. Unease grounded her somewhat, and she sneered defensively, resisting the urge to shrink back from him even further.
"Where's the dreadlord?" he demanded in his rasping growl. She noticed suddenly the mangled corpses behind him – two doomguards and a shivarra, two with their chests carved out and one charred almost beyond recognition except for the unusual number of arms – the former commanders of this outpost, she assumed. Beyond the bodies a cohort of felguards milled about with uncertain snarls.
"Xoroth, I'd expect," she said, too wary of the shreds of gore still dangling from the blades of his idly-spinning drill-arm to be properly snide.
Charin growled in displeasure. "We've got enough troops on this side. Go get him." He bared broken teeth in a nasty grin. "I want a word, and if he's not here in four minutes I'll have to give the Shadow Council my condolences instead." His single natural eye flicked over her shoulder, and she glanced instinctively back to see what he was looking at. Several gan'arg clustered around a massive chunk of fel crystal embedded in some kind of rune-scored machinery – the Draenor-side controls for the portal.
She cursed silently to herself. Wasn't anything ever easy anymore?
"What's the matter?" Tun asked, crossing his arms and staring suspiciously up at Charin's metal-stitched form before shooting a worried glance back at the gateway's rippling surface. Na'rii and Kar'thol still hadn't materialized.
Callista muttered something unintelligible, gazing at the portal with profound loathing. Out of all the distasteful things she'd done since her dreadsteed summoning had gone so horribly awry, being errand girl for demons was one of the most irritating. She had little choice, however. Of all these creatures, only Nerothos was bound to the oath they'd sworn, and she didn't intend to let him slink away until he followed through on it.
Power tingled across her skin; she suddenly found herself on her back with the wind knocked out of her as a heavy form sprawled across her stomach, one of its leather-clad knees crushing the air from her lungs.
"Hey, mon, watch where ya sittin'!" Na'rii said, tilting her head and nearly jabbing Callista in the eye with a tusk.
"Get off of me, you blue-faced witch!" Callista gasped, shoving at her leg and trying to squirm out from beneath her.
"I dunno, mon, you be lookin' pretty blue yaself." Na'rii grinned and shifted her weight in preparation to leap off, inadvertently (or not) grinding her knee into Callista's ribs in the process. "Though if ya got enough breath to howl like that I can't really be crushing ya – "
A sharp metallic whine cut the air, and Na'rii half-sprang, half-tumbled away just in time to avoid the whirling blades of High Mekgineer Charin's drill as he cuffed ill-temperedly at her head. "Hey, mon!" she yelped, scrambling away and falling against Kar'thol's legs.
Callista swore and scuttled backwards several paces on her elbows, only pausing when the staticky wave of power from the gateway raised the hairs on her neck.
Charin growled. He pulled back his pale lips to display a mouthful of cracked yellow fangs, flicking his single natural eye meaningfully from her to the gateway as his drill-arm revved into an irate screech. "Dreadlord. Now!"
"Alright!" Callista said, shifting to pull herself to her feet without putting weight on her injured wrist. Charin was clearly a demon of few words, but they were remarkably convincing ones.
She was spared the effort of standing, however, when a shock of power rolled across her back, and she flinched out of the way just in time to avoid her fingers being crushed beneath a heavy black hoof. "I wish you all would cut that out!" she snarled, feeling rather frazzled.
Nerothos simply inclined his horned head down at her disdainfully, the red light of sunset glinting from the silver inlay of his armor making it appear even more bloodstained than it really was. "Lounging across the entrance of a major dimensional rift is a poor pastime for those who don't wish to be stepped on, warlock."
"I was not loung– !"
He must have given some signal to Charin, or perhaps the mo'arg had simply grown impatient, because her words were cut off by a deafening crackling howl as sparks arced between her fingers and the air boiled with magic. Electric pinpricks raced across her skin, the feeling swelling until it was almost painful and she instinctively twisted around to watch the star-etched void of the portal shatter and twist before winking out like a field of snuffed candles.
She found herself staring at the blank grey rock of a cliff face as the power bled, mercifully, from the air around her and her panicked breathing slowed.
It occurred to her, despite the dreadlord at her side and the ravaged world of Draenor at her back, that they were truly, finally safe.
She swiped a hand through the space between the hulking obsidian gateposts, just to prove she could, then turned her palm to look contemplatively at the black rune still seared into the skin of her palm. Between her fingers she could see tufts of dark fur, matted with blood and sand, sticking haphazardly between the joints of Nerothos' greaves. She wondered irrelevantly if demons itched. "That's really the end, I suppose," she said, hardly believing it herself.
"Is it, now?" Nerothos asked.
She flicked her eyes up to him, trying to gauge what he meant by that, but the almost imperceptible curl of his lips and the eldritch light of his gaze revealed little. She cocked her head, and might have said something else, but Tun's brightly-robed figure made a sharp motion at the corner of her eye that caught her focus.
"Come away from there, Callista," he said. His eyes slid warily from Nerothos, to the inert black stone of the dimensional gate, to Charin's irate snarl, and she wasn't sure which of them, exactly, he was referring to, but she supposed it was good enough advice applied to any of them.
She stood and rubbed her rune-scored palm absently against the fabric of her robes, glancing over at Nerothos for what she suspected would be, with any luck, the last time. Wherever he was taking his little band of half-pressganged recruits, Callista and her companions would not follow. The idea, somehow, didn't afford her as much relief as she would have expected. Not that she was sorry; her life was a complicated enough shade of grey without keeping that sort of alliance.
"Goodbye, demon," she said as she turned to join Tun, unable to resist a fiendish impulse to get the last word. Charin narrowed his natural eye impatiently at her as paused, and she sidestepped discreetly out of range of his drill. "I never quite regretted letting you out."
Nerothos simply smiled, though the amount of malicious amusement in the expression seemed oddly out of proportion to her words. "You are still a poor liar," he said.
Something about this response nagged at her (though whether it was in his face or his voice she couldn't quite place), but before she could figure it out two meaty hands closed about her midsection and she found herself hoisted into the air, thrashing in startlement.
"Plaguing hells!" she protested, squirming around to scowl at Kar'thol as she pried ineffectually at his fingers. He wasn't actually hurting her, but she was suddenly alarmingly aware of the strength in his huge hands. He could twist her in half if he tried. "Put me down!"
"Warlock too slow," Kar'thol said, unfazed by her glare. He held her firmly at arm's length as he lumbered to where Tun and Na'rii waited, kicking disdainfully at gan'arg too slow at scuttling away. "Kar'thol going home!" He plunked her down in front of Tun with an expectant air.
"Yes, yes, we're all going home," Tun muttered, eyes flicking back and forth across the empty air as though reading sigils in it.
Callista brushed herself off, shooting a disgruntled look at Kar'thol's tattooed bulk. She was well aware that humans weren't among the more physically powerful races of Azeroth, but rarely did she get such a startling reminder. She wondered if that was the way Tun felt all the time.
Turning her head, she accidentally met the snarl of one of a trio of felguards who were staring at them in a most unfriendly fashion. Their armor was detailed with a lurid shade of orange, the same orange she'd noticed on many of the corpses scattered about – the colors of the portal guards, she supposed. A particularly large felguard wearing the same tokens had stalked over to confer with Nerothos and High Mekgineer Charin near the gateway, and, from the way his hand fisted about the hilt of his enormous claymore, he was not particularly pleased with any of them. His troops, however, made no move to renew the attack. She wondered if they simply felt themselves outnumbered, or if Nerothos had managed some "arrangement" with them in the event of his appearance. It wouldn't have surprised her.
She sneered back at the felguard, just so it wouldn't get ideas.
Tun shook his head suddenly, tossing his already mussed shock of green hair into an even wilder configuration. "We have to get away from the portal. It's fouling the gradients around the ley line." He started off purposefully at right angles to the gateway, heading into the forest of claw-like pinnacles of black stone that penned the clearing.
"Not that way," Callista said, hurrying forward and pressing his shoulder to steer him away from the felguards.
Na'rii and Kar'thol loped along at their backs, the troll's eyes catching the light like a cat's in the dark shadows of the stone as she glanced around suspiciously. The fires of sunset had faded and night had fallen, though what she could see of the horizon was still rimmed with a hot red glow. The sky above was velvety black and dusted with stars, streaked with electric blue and green where the veil to the Nether was worn thin, and when she looked back she could see the demons' eyes burning in the dark like pairs of green and white fireflies. At least the nasty fiends wouldn't be sneaking up on them. Something still unsettled her, though.
"That be it then? We just walk away?" she asked quietly.
Callista half-turned, holding up her palm to show her the rune scored into her pale skin. It was too dark to make it out, though Na'rii remembered what it looked like – charcoal black, rimmed with none of the raw redness it would show had it been a real burn.
"They don't have a choice," Callista said.
Her words were sure, but Na'rii's night vision was good enough to read the doubt on her face. "Even you don' believe that."
"Even a dreadlord couldn't tamper with that oath," she said defensively, lowering her hand.
"If you're sure, then I believe you," Tun said with studied patience, trying to head off another argument. Even if she were wrong, there was little they could do about it now besides get off-world as quickly as possible. Bickering wouldn't help that.
Callista narrowed her eyes slightly, but she turned away from Na'rii without making a retort. She was sure about her spell, but the troll had hit on what had been bothering her since her final exchange with Nerothos: this was simply too easy. Perhaps the demon couldn't interfere with them directly, but such complete disinterest ran counter to every other interaction she'd ever had with him. She didn't know exactly what she'd been expecting; some kind of poisonously extravagant offer to join him, perhaps, or at the least some wickedly barbed parting shot. Instead there'd been nothing, and it made her uneasy.
Pebbles rolled beneath her boots as Tun led them to the far side of a spur of rock that jutted upwards like an accusing finger against the stars, and then stopped.
It was possible, of course, that she was simply being arrogant and paranoid. Nerothos had everything he wanted – engineering expertise for Jaedenar, embarrassment for Xoroth, and his own freedom – perhaps he truly no longer cared what happened to pawns who had served out their purpose. The thought that they might actually be beneath notice irked and relieved her simultaneously.
"This is far enough," Tun announced, brushing at the gravel with the sole of his boot to clear a wide circle.
Na'rii tilted her head and eyed him critically, fingers twisting at the string of bear claws around her wrist. His eyes were bright and blue, catching the light of the Nether overhead, but the skin around them was purple and bruised and his movements were sluggish. He was clearly exhausted; they all were. "Ya sure ya wanna do this now, mon?"
He hesitated a moment, looking around and running a hand absently through his tangled knot of hair before straightening with resolve. "I can't sleep here," he muttered.
Na'rii nodded her head, secretly in agreement. The stone spires cast jagged opaque shadows in the light of the Nether, and between the rocks she could see the eerie pinpricks of demon eyes floating in the night. This was an evil place to try to rest.
"Can I help?" Callista asked, peering curiously over Tun's shoulder as he squatted in the middle of the circle he'd cleared. He chewed his lip in concentration and traced a finger along the stone, silver-blue light following his touch.
"What?" he asked vaguely, question slow to penetrate his focus. "No, I don't think – well, yes, maybe," he corrected, raising his head and turning to meet her eyes. He paused, looking distinctly uncomfortable before continuing. "I hope not, but…I…it will take a lot of power, Callista."
Callista raised her brows in surprise, knowing immediately what he was asking. The siphoning of another's magic was a touchy subject among mages; even those with the best intentions could become overwhelmed by the rush of power and draw beyond what the subject of their spell could bear. It was exactly the kind of uncertain, easily-abused magic that Tun hated. That he would even suggest it showed the seriousness of their position. "If it comes to that, you know I trust you."
"I know you do," Tun said, though if anything her words seemed to make his face even tighter with worry.
She reached out to lay a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, but thought twice and pulled back before touching him. He had already begun muttering to himself, reabsorbed in his spell, and she didn't want to interrupt his concentration again.
Instead she moved away, settling down with her back to a stone spire that gave her some shelter from the wind keening around the rocks. Without the sunlight the mountains were bitter cold; she pressed a hand to the hole in the shoulder of the robes to keep in the warmth and shivered. Between Tun's hunched form and the hard sparks of the demons' eyes in the distance, Na'rii and Kar'thol huddled together, and she found herself vaguely jealous. The ogre, despite being clad in nothing but a coarsely-woven loincloth, seemed impervious to the cold, and Na'rii looked quite cozy tucked in the lee of his bulk. She briefly considered summoning her felhunter, just to put something between her back and the heat-leeching stone, but reluctantly discarded the idea. After losing control of her felsteed earlier, she didn't trust herself to summon anything nastier until she'd had some rest. Her eyelids drooped heavily at the thought, and she rubbed at them in annoyance. Was it cold enough to freeze if she slept? She didn't think so. Maybe she'd just close her eyes for a minute…
"Send me four of your best scouts and any beasts of burden you stable here," High Mekgineer Charin said, turning the burning hole of his false eye on the felguard.
The felguard's lip pulled back a little from his fangs but he made no answer, shifting with a metallic clank of armor and looking more mutinous with every word.
Nerothos flexed his wings idly in the stiff breeze that swept down from the heights, listening with cursory interest as Charin growled orders at the newly-promoted commander of this outpost. Felguards and mo'arg, despite sharing a common (although many thousands of years distant) mortal ancestry, belonged to two separate branches of the Legion hierarchy that very seldom intersected. Partly as a result, the two scions had developed an impressive store of mutual contempt over the ages. Forge-captain Tzargan (for that was the creature's name), clearly seethed under the command of what he felt to be a weak-fisted intellectual.
Poor, ignorant fool.
"Now," Charin growled.
"And if I refuse, mo'arg?" Tzargan asked, shifting his grip meaningfully on the hilt of his claymore and baring fangs in a humorless smile.
The High Mekgineer just laughed, the mechanical screech of his drill-arm as it whirled suddenly to life an alarming counterpoint.
For a moment Tzargan's sneer wavered, as though noticing for the first time the black demon blood that already stained the metal, but he recovered with a fierce bellow and raised his sword to strike.
Felguards were really quite fortunate, Nerothos observed, watching the proceedings with cold disinterest, that arrant brainlessness was an asset in cannon fodder.
A shower of sparks lit the night as the felguard's claymore met the spinning blades of Charin's drill, but only for a moment – with the jagged shriek of abused metal the top third of the sword sheared off and went spinning into the dark, the razer-edged drill tip plunging into the Tzargan's chest with a meaty crack as the felguard gave a bloody gurgle and then went limp.
Charin grunted disdainfully, planting a two-toed foot against the corpse's torn belly and yanking his drill free. "Who's next in line?" he demanded, eyeballing the nearest cluster of felguards.
After a brief hesitation one of them detached himself and swaggered forward, pausing to scoff at the remains of his former commander before halting before Charin, slamming the butt of his poleaxe smartly against the ground. "What do you need…sir?"
Charin nodded contemptuously in approval.
Satisfied that his lieutenant had the surviving garrison of this gateway well in hand, Nerothos turned, stalking in the direction of a group of gan'arg readying what supplies they had managed to salvage from the battle for further transport. While Charin and his forces would continue on to sanctuary in the Shadow Labyrinth, Nerothos would not be accompanying them. He had been detained on Xoroth for far longer than was desirable, and there was much that required his attention elsewhere.
He was most interested, for example, in seeing what Banehollow had made of Jaedenar.
A dozen pairs of glowing eyes swiveled warily in his direction before darting away, their owners quickly engrossing themselves in consolidating crates of tools or making hurried repairs to damaged carts. Despite the fact that many of them sported grotesque wounds (missing arms and hands, blistered skin, glistening grey patches of exposed muscle), the gan'arg worked with ruthless efficiency. Clangs and rusty squeals filled the air as wheels were replaced and axels straightened, boxes of bile-colored potions and cruel-looking machines piling high on the backs of the completed vehicles.
Nerothos' eyes scanned the bustling scene, unimpeded by the dark, as he searched for the one gan'arg familiar to him. Though the wind that shrieked between the twisted pillars of stone was irksomely chill, it did little to dampen his dark good mood. After nearly seven years of tiresome confinement he was finally free, the earth of a mortal world beneath his hooves.
Gan'arg flinched beneath his gaze, and he took a certain perverse pleasure in it. There was a point in his imprisonment, after several years of mind-crushing boredom (he had seldom been tortured – pain, for the Nathrezim, did not carry with it the fear of death that so harrowed the mortal races, making it less a torment than the interminable dullness), that he would have considered the ability to slink back to Jaedenar, even empty-handed, to be a very fortunate thing indeed. To return instead in command of valuable reinforcements, after escaping in a manner that would surely make his rivals apoplectic with rage, was agreeable beyond his expectations.
His stare fell, finally, upon Darmog, and the gan'arg immediately cringed, ducking his head into his cowl with a resentful expression. Nerothos held his gaze deliberately until he divined his purpose and began shuffling reluctantly around his brethren towards the dreadlord.
He was sorry, almost, that he would not be there to see it when Gorgannoth reported his abject failure to his superiors. To lose such a battle was disgraceful enough, but to be half-crippled in the process by a pair of inexperienced mortals, mortals who later fled the battlefield with hardly a scratch…if Hel'nurath only fed the pitlord to his own hounds he should consider it uncommon mercy.
Darmog slowed to a halt several arms' lengths away, shifting from one stocky leg to another and occasionally stealing a wary glance up at him from beneath his cowl. The resigned terror that wafted off of him would've been gratifying in other circumstances, delighting the predatory parts of his nature, but since Nerothos did not actually intend to destroy the little gan'arg it was merely an irritating distraction. "Follow the mortals, gan'arg," he said, pinning him with his gaze. "Return to me when the mage's portal nears completion."
He didn't bother adding a threat; by the way the demon's normally grey complexion had turned even pastier the moment their eyes had met, he was quite adept enough at inventing them on his own.
Darmog shrank even further, muttering something unintelligible in assent before scurrying away with obvious relief.
Pathetic little creature. It was convenient that the warlock appeared to be fond of him (at least, she had never seemed to mind his perpetual cowering behind her), but the vagaries of mortal affection escaped him even more in that case than they generally did. Not that he ever wasted much time pondering such senselessness. Where the warlock chose to place her foolish attachments was hardly a concern of his.
Attachments of another kind, however…he turned over his hand to view the enchantment seared into his palm, smiling as he felt it tingle and burn warningly beneath his inspection. Nerothos had sworn countless oaths over the millennia, and if he had ever cleaved to any of them, it had been, he was certain, a purely incidental occurrence. It had been a very long time indeed since any creature not of his own brethren had dared try to hold him to his promises, and he found the situation not without charm. Subterfuge against blind and ignorant mortals, who knew the Nathrezim only as sinister rumor, if at all, afforded its own kind of amusement, but it was a rather shallow and elementary one. The warlock, on the other hand, despite her inferior power and almost painful lack of experience, knew very well when a game was being played and was clever enough to seek her own advantage in it. It made her a far more satisfactory opponent, albeit one too untempered to have quite made herself dangerous. He found it thoroughly inconvenient that she was mortal. In a few hundred years, she could be formidable.
Nerothos folded his wings neatly against his armored back, sending gan'arg skittering away from his hooves as he turned.
Under the right instruction, of course.
Tun was so deeply engrossed in his spell, he didn't notice the scuffle behind him until a flash of felfire glare dimmed the runes beneath his fingertips. "Odd," he muttered, sigils and lines of force still swaying behind his eyes. He might have simply become re-engrossed in the magic, but a pair of annoyed shouts shattered his concentration.
"Kar'thol smash demon!"
"Oh, Twisting Nether, it's just Darmog!"
He turned, more than a little frustrated, and blinked at the tableau spread at his back. Kar'thol stood at the center of it, feet planted stubbornly and large nostrils flaring in distaste as he dangled a gan'arg by the cowl of its chemical-splotched robe. The creature's legs windmilled uselessly several feet off the ground as it looked beseechingly at Callista (cranky and sleepy-eyed), babbling gruffly in demonic. Na'rii had drawn her blade and leveled its tip at the squirming demon, the light of a slowly dimming semi-circle of green flame glittering off the steel.
"What you be sneakin' for, hmmm?" she asked with narrowed eyes, prodding him with her sword and causing him to wriggle even more frantically. He only succeeded in spinning in slow circles as his cowl twisted in Kar'thol's fist.
"You know he can't understand you," Callista said, looking more irked than suspicious. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth, shivering as a particularly fierce gust whistled though the rocks. "Put him down and I'll deal with it."
Na'rii let out a sharp laugh, keeping her sword pointed at Darmog's neck. "Sure ya will, mon."
"Kar'thol squish now?" the ogre wondered, shaking the demon by the cowl.
"For Light's sake!" Tun said in exasperation, causing all three other mortals (who had almost forgotten his presence) to look at him in startlement. He wasn't, as a rule, very fond of demons, but after everything he'd seen he'd begun to feel a little sorry for gan'arg in general and Darmog in particular. One of the timid little things was hardly a threat worth interrupting his spell for. "It looks like it's shaking. Just put it down! But don't let it get away 'til we're gone, Callista," he added as an afterthought.
He'd expected more arguing, so was surprised when Kar'thol simply snorted and opened his fist scornfully. Darmog thudded to the ground in a heap, looking bewildered at his sudden good fortune, but before he could make good his escape Callista seized him firmly about the back of the robes. For a moment he looked as though he were considering bolting anyway, but then his gaze flicked warily up to Kar'thol and he seemed to decide that the warlock was a better bet. He followed meekly as she yanked him back to the stone she'd been resting against, folding herself up again with her free arm wrapped around her knees.
Tun crouched back down over the winking runes of his circle, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes as he sank back into the magic. He genuinely liked all three of his companions, but if they kept this up they'd be walking to Azeroth.
Callista wound the coarse fabric of Darmog's cowl around her wrist, keeping a tight hold on the demon. She didn't generally approve of "sneakin'" any more than Na'rii did, but since she'd been the one who'd dragged Darmog into this little defection in the first place she felt an odd kind of responsibility for him. After aiding her, and surviving everything else, he certainly didn't deserve being crushed into jelly by Kar'thol. Of course, that still didn't answer what he was doing here.
He twisted around suddenly, looking up at her with eyes that glowed eerily in the dark left by the fading of her felfire, and headed off her question with one of his own. "Battle over yet?"
Callista snorted and relaxed a hair, gravel rolling beneath her as she shifted into a more comfortable position. Well, that explained it, she supposed. "You've been skulking out here the entire time?"
"Eh," Darmog said with an unrepentant air. He shuffled around as best he could to watch Tun extend his shimmering web of runes, tugging against her wrist. "Where you going?"
"Deserting. Want to come?" she asked, only half jokingly. He couldn't stay on Azeroth, of course, but Shattrath City had been known to shelter demons from time to time. It might not be a bad place for him, given how little he seemed to care for the company of other fiends.
Darmog looked surprised and then alarmed, gaze darting skittishly from side to side as though checking to see if anyone had heard. "Crazy mortal. Gonna kill us all," he muttered, fidgeting unhappily.
"Won't," she said, closing her fist around the rune seared into her palm. "If you're so afraid anyway, why not come?"
He snorted as though she'd said something very funny, tilting his head up at her almost pityingly. The glow of his eyes cast shadows that made his face appear even craggier than it did in daylight. "I might live forever. How long do you think your world will last?"
Callista quirked a lip, giving a short reflexive laugh before she could help herself. Now there was an uncomfortable thought. Constantly besieged as Azeroth was, no one with an ounce of logic could be optimistic enough to believe it could survive forever. All it would take was one misstep, one ambitious mortal with more power than conscience and more luck than he deserved…she supposed there were some advantages after all to belonging to a people so short-lived. "Long enough for me," she said.
"You think," Darmog replied darkly.
"Know something I don't?" she asked dryly, more amused than alarmed at his dire tone. She didn't like the thought of her world falling beneath the Legion banner any more than anyone else did, of course, but she also wasn't in the habit of worrying much about things that would happen after she was dead. The Legion was powerful, but its greatest weapon was the unexpectedness of its assaults, and it had lost that on Azeroth. It would last another hundred years.
"Nah," Darmog said dismissively. He accidentally locked eyes with Kar'thol, who was watching their conversation with intense suspicion, and hunched his shoulders a little. "But I bet your dreadlord thinks he does."
Callista wrinkled her nose at his choice of words, not liking the reminder of Nerothos. "I don't care what he thinks. We're through," she said abruptly.
"You think," Darmog muttered again, looking suddenly uneasy.
She jerked lightly at his cowl, unimpressed with his reply. "Oh, cut that out."
He grunted noncommittally, sinking to the uneven stone of the ground and seeming to try to vanish inside the drab folds of his robes. If Callista hadn't already known him, she might've paid more heed to the nervous sideways glances he kept stealing into the night.
As it was, she ignored him. She propped her chin on her knees and tried not to shiver against the frigid bite of the wind, wiggling her toes inside her boots to keep them from going numb and stifling a yawn. To keep herself awake she focused on Tun, watching his brow furrow and lips move wordlessly as he traced his silvery skeins of light against the rock.
For a long, long while, nothing moved.
When Tun stood, finally, brushing dirt from his fingertips and looking weary but resolute, Callista's legs had gone stiff and she'd fallen into a cold half-doze.
"It's time to go," he said, as she blinked blearily at him.
She was roused more effectively by a sudden hard tug at the hand she'd kept clenched around Darmog's cowl, almost yanking her over. "Hey!" she protested, tightening her grip and giving a sharp jerk back.
"Have to go," Darmog said gruffly, grabbing his cowl with both hands as he struggled against her hold. He looked, Callista noticed, as she peered at him more closely, frightened even above and beyond his natural state of nervousness, white-lit eyes flitting wildly from one shadow to the next. Maybe he was just afraid they'd drag him along with them through the portal, but somehow she doubted it.
"If I let you go, the ogre will crush you," Callista said, narrowing her eyes in suspicion and not releasing his robes as she stumbled to her feet.
"What ya be doin' over there?" Na'rii called, and Callista could see the glint of steel in the dark as she worked her sword from its sheath.
Darmog looked wildly from the troll to Callista's hand with a trapped expression she would've found pitiful if it didn't make her so distrustful. Suddenly, as though coming to a decision, he released his cowl and thrust a hand into the pocket of his robes, withdrawing it with a vial clenched tightly in his potion-stained fist. He muttered something under his breath that she almost might have mistaken for "sorry" before splashing the contents liberally over her exposed fingers.
Callista yelped at the sudden burning that blazed across her skin, grip failing as pain seared along her nerves. "You little –!"
She found herself talking to empty night as Darmog sprinted, panic-driven, into the towering forest of stone spires that loomed over them.
"Callista! Are you alright?" Tun cried, hurrying to her side and making a concerned grab for her hand. "Let me see!"
"It's fine," she hissed unconvincingly through gritted teeth, snatching her soaked fingers out of the way. "Don't touch, hurts!"
The agonizing burn felt strangely familiar, and when she dared a glance down at her hand and found it, to sight, whole and unharmed, her suspicions were confirmed. Darmog had splashed her with some of the same solvent they'd used to scrub the binding runes from Nerothos' chest. Painful, then, but not permanently damaging.
Green fire rose reluctantly from her hand, strangely damped by the magic-consuming properties of the potion, and struck deep shadows from the hollows of Tun's face as she tried to burn it off.
"Kar'thol said demon nicer crushed," the ogre said with just a touch of smugness, smacking his mace against the ground in demonstration.
Callista was rather inclined to agree, keeping her sour expression even as the pain faded and her flames leapt higher from her fingertips. She extinguished them abruptly, rubbing her hand vigorously against her other sleeve to clear the lingering memory of the sensation. It was her own fault, she supposed – what always came of treating demons as anything but dangerous adversaries or slaves.
"I don't know what that was about and I don't want to," Tun said, flicking his gaze in the direction of Darmog's flight with his mouth pursed in a worried frown. "Let's go before someone tries to tell us."
"Agreed," Callista said, stamping her feet to force some warmth back into her stiff legs.
"Tell us what ya need, mon," Na'rii said. She crouched watchfully in the shadow of one of the dark stone spires, visible only by the occasional flicker of light from her eyes or the blade of her weapon.
Tun took a deep breath, moving to stand near his circle of runes and extending his hands over them so a soft blue glow lit his palms. "Stand near the circle," he directed. "Callista, put your hand over that anchoring sigil on the far side." He chewed his lip unhappily as he looked up at her. "If I need your help…"
"You're not going to hurt me," she reassured him, feeling the cool glow of spell-light on her outstretched palm. Tun was far too good a mage to lose himself in a spell the way he feared, and even if he hadn't been, it wasn't as though she were totally incapable of defending herself. Wresting away from an enchantment once it had already been cast was a matter of will as much as spellwork, and, though Tun's magic may have been far beyond hers in terms of subtlety or skill, he would never be Callista's match in brute pigheadedness.
Tun still looked unsure, but he shook his head and took another deep breath, flexing his fingers over the runes. "Four people," he muttered mostly to himself, glancing up at their faces etched in silvery-blue light.
"Five, actually."
They all jerked their heads up in surprise, and Na'rii, finding herself standing closest to the demon with her back to him, whirled and clenched her fist about the hilt of her blade, lips pulling back from her tusks in warning. "We be takin' you nowhere, fiend."
Nerothos was nearly invisible in the dark save for the fel glow of his eyes, a blacker patch of winged shadow against the night, but Callista didn't need to see him to hear his satiric expression in his voice. "No? I don't recall requesting a poll of irrelevant opinions, troll."
"Neither do I, demon," Callista said, leaving her uninjured hand suspended over Tun's intricate circle and tilting her head up at him. She wasn't exactly surprised by Nerothos' reappearance, but, not knowing what he thought he could accomplish by it, it still unsettled her more than a little. She rubbed the fingertips of her other hand over the oath seared into her flesh – if he thought she'd let him bluff his way out of his promises, he was very sadly mistaken. "So, what are you doing here?"
"Providing the only opinion of consequence, naturally," Nerothos said, stepping forward towards the circle. Blue light glittered from the embellishments of his armor and the hard points of his incisors, and the creak of leather was audible in the silence as Na'rii shifted defensively. "I suggest you heed it carefully."
"Out of the question," Tun said, drawing back a little from his runes and curling his small hands into fists. "You can't hurt us now, and I'm not going to set you loose on Azeroth where you can hurt anyone else."
Nerothos clicked his tongue in faux sympathy. "A predictably noble sentiment." He turned his gaze to Callista, whose teeth were chattering with cold and was looking more skeptical than hostile, with a sardonic smile. "Care to disabuse him of it, warlock?"
Callista wrinkled her nose balefully, caring to do no such thing. Oh, it was true enough that in the long run it probably didn't matter much if they left him or not – there were plenty of ways to get from Outland to Azeroth, and eventually he'd find one that would bear him – but after Tun had finally seemed to forgive her for her first involvement in Nerothos' plots, she wasn't about to go arguing the demon's case now. The suspicious way Na'rii and Kar'thol's gazes had flicked to her at his familiar address sealed the matter. "Not really," she said.
Nerothos stretched the shadowy expanses of his wings before settling them against his back with a deceptive laziness. "Then perhaps I will."
He lunged with inhuman swiftness.
He seized Na'rii brutally about the neck with one clawed hand and pinned her wrists together with the other, twisting them behind her back. She spat and thrashed like a cornered wildcat, but to no effect. Nerothos far outmatched her in raw physical strength, and she had no powers to call to her aid.
Kar'thol roared in outrage, bounding forward with his spike-studded mace raised high, but froze in place with a distraught howl as Nerothos shifted the hand around Na'rii's throat, denting her blue skin with the razor-tipped points of his talons. "I did attempt to ask nicely," he said, obviously finding cruel amusement in their distress.
Callista eyed him scornfully. Her nose was running, and she was more irritated that he was making her stand out in the frigid night than alarmed. The fact that Na'rii, despite the claws pressed so threateningly to her neck, was totally and completely unharmed only further convinced her that he was bluffing. "I didn't hear you say 'please,'" she observed.
"Callista!" Tun hissed, snapping his head around to glare, appalled. "This isn't a joke!"
"Contestable," Nerothos said. Na'rii jerked her head suddenly, trying to gouge his arm with her tusk, but only succeeded in scraping it painfully against one of his jeweled bracers. He laughed maliciously at the attempt. "I am exceedingly amused."
Callista had been about to deliver a (she thought) rather pithy retort to the effect that, no, it wasn't a joke, it was a farce, but was brought up short by Nerothos' unbelievably inconvenient decision to take her part. She stole a sideways glance at Tun, and the expression on his face (equal parts anger and horror) convinced her that snide remarks should probably be secondary to ending this charade. "'Alive, unharmed, unbound in any way, and immediately,' demon," she reminded him, quoting from the terms of their oath. "Let her go. You can't touch her, and we're not taking you with us."
For a moment she thought he was actually going to obey. He removed his hand from Na'rii's throat, tilting it to inspect the gleaming tips of his claws as he shoved at her captured wrists, forcing her to stumble forward away from him. "Can't I?" he sneered.
Then, he struck.
His claws arced with preternatural speed, and because she didn't believe it was possible it took Callista a moment to register what he'd done. Na'rii let out a strangled cry of pain, and four black thorns seemed to blossom just below her right rib, sprouting from damp dark patches of punctured leather.
"No!" Tun cried, as Callista felt all the blood drain from her own face. Impossible.
Kar'thol let out an inarticulate howl of rage, swinging his mace back to strike, but before he could finish the blow he toppled over mid-stride. Greenish mist clung to his face and neck as he fell to the ground in enchanted sleep, the impact shivering the stone briefly.
"Put her down, or I swear I'll destroy you," Tun said, voice shaking with passion. Blue light blazed jaggedly from the ground around his feet, and there was a ferocity in his usually gentle eyes that startled even Callista.
His look jolted her, and she clenched her own fists in response. She didn't know how Nerothos had breached her enchantment, but if he wasn't bound by it anymore than neither was she. Iridescent shadow licked up her hands like flame as she began her spell, the throb of her punctured wrist slowing her only a little. "I don't want to fight you, demon," she snarled, "but so help me – "
"How fortunate, then, that you cannot," Nerothos interrupted. He cocked his horned head with a smile, accidentally jolting Na'rii's impaled form as he shifted, and Callista noticed with a shock of something like relief that she still struggled slightly against the movement. "Or have you forgotten the terms of our agreement?"
She gave a sharp disbelieving laugh. "Agreement? You mean the one you broke? Oh, I don't think so."
"Flattering as your faith in my talents is, warlock, I have done no such thing," he said, fangs glinting sharply in the wavering light. He flexed his wings casually, continuing on in a conversational tone bizarrely at odds with Na'rii's bleeding form he still held pinioned by her wrists and wounded belly. "I have honored our pact to the letter. If it seems otherwise, perhaps you should examine your own promises more carefully."
From the corner of her eye, she could see Tun inching around the edges of his runed circle, trying to reach an angle where he could strike at Nerothos without hitting Na'rii. She had never found the dreadlord more infuriating than she did at this moment, clearly relishing dangling over her how clever he'd been, but maybe she wasn't in the worst of positions after all. She narrowed her eyes disdainfully. "If you're waiting for me to ask what you did, you can stop fishing. I've never seen someone explode from pent up ego before, and I'd hate to miss my chance."
"As you seem wholly uncombusted, I believe I'm in no danger," he said. His mouth curled just slightly at the edges in mockery. "'Should we, plural, succeed in stalling Gorgannoth'…best learn to gauge the reach of your own powers, warlock, before you accuse me of hubris."
Callista hadn't really believed for a moment that Nerothos hadn't somehow freed himself of her oath. The shadows roiling about her hands became more and more agitated as she slowly fed them with power, but they settled, suddenly, as the second part of his jab stole her attention.
"Plaguing, twisting hells," she cried, mixing her curses in anger as the terrible logic of it sank in. "You can't – " She cut herself off mid-sentence, scowling venomously, because quite obviously he could. 'Should we succeed…' That had been exactly what she'd said. Stating, implicitly, that they all would have a hand in stopping the pitlord. It wouldn't have mattered, if Na'rii and Kar'thol hadn't been so ill-equipped for anything but running away…her wording had been just faulty enough for him to twist it. Wretched demon, he hadn't even needed to subvert her spell entirely, and this was almost worse than no pact at all– she and Tun, having fulfilled her oath's stipulations entirely, were almost certainly under its protection. Which meant that she was still bound by it too. "Don't!" she shouted suddenly to Tun, banishing her shadows with clenched fists and gritted teeth. "I can't touch him."
For a moment Tun looked startled, but his face quickly set again into a hard expression. Rings of electric blue runes orbited around both his hands and the air bristled with power as he continued his spell. "That's alright," he said bitterly. "I can."
Nerothos laughed, finally wrenching his claws from the wound in Na'rii's stomach and causing her to grunt in pain and try to twist weakly away. Blood shone wetly on them as he dug the tips into the leather of her armor just below the sternum. "Yes," he said. "And I can tear out her heart. Who is swifter, I wonder?"
Tun's jaw clenched, eyes flicking to the demon's talons as he tried to gauge the distance.
Callista watched, struggling with cold practicality and her own burning ire before spitting her words out harshly. "Twisting Nether, just take him with us!"
Tun's head snapped around at her outburst, brow lowered in disbelief. "Are you mad?! We can't bring the Legion to - !"
"Then what are we going to do," she hissed. "Can you stop him from killing them?"
Behind the anger, a hollowness grew in Tun's eyes at her words, and she hated herself for it. Even so, it was still better than the alternatives. She wasn't even thinking only of Na'rii and Kar'thol, though she didn't relish the idea of harm coming to them, either. When Tun conjured his portal, it would likely take all the power both of them had to stabilize it. While they were distracted, what would keep Nerothos from simply slipping through behind them, with or without their permission? It would all be for nothing.
"Her people have a most remarkable regenerative ability," Nerothos said, rubbing Na'rii's blood idly between his thumb and forefinger. "Reach a healer quickly, and she may even survive this."
Tun squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. He hesitated a long moment, wracked between evils, and Callista was close enough to see the desperate clench of his jaw. "Promise you'll let her go," he said finally. His tone was heavy, but his gaze was still hot with fury and some of his words were strangely clipped. "Swear it, and I'll take you."
"Agreed," Nerothos said. If there was mockery in his smile, it was outweighed almost entirely by satisfaction.
Tun just nodded, averting his gaze from the dreadlord in disgust. "Stand where I told you, Callista," he said in a voice that was brittle despite its calm.
Callista moved around the side of the rune-etched circle, stepping over Kar'thol's outstretched arm (he was snoring at a volume she would've found comical at any other time) and held her open palm over the anchoring sigil. She felt a sudden urge to tell Tun she was sorry, now, when she actually meant it, but she didn't believe it would help anything at all. Instead she simply did as she was told.
A rising tide of magic surged through the air around her as he activated his spell. The interlocking rings of runes at their feet blazed with blue light, chasing shadows back behind the pillars of stone that surrounded them and bathing their faces in its electric glow. Even the uncanny shine of Nerothos' eyes seemed washed out in the sudden illumination, and she squinted her own, dazzled after so long in the dark. Nerothos…she didn't know what part of his treachery made her most furious. That he'd harmed their companions, that he'd spun the tables on her with such ease, or that, despite the fact she'd known exactly how this would end from the first, she still felt the tiniest stab of betrayal anyway. Idiot, she snapped at herself savagely. What else could she possibly have expected? Demons would be demons, always, and warlocks, of all people, should know better.
The air before her eyes began to twist. Power crackled back and forth across her skin, and the strain of the magic was written on Tun's face as the stony landscape she viewed across the runes began to warp and fall in upon itself. Suddenly the air seemed to crack, a terrible sound that she felt rather than heard, the world tearing at a seam. A ragged patch of starry darkness that swallowed up even the spell-light blotted out the wastes of Draenor, slowly expanding as the runes pulsed brighter.
Callista drew a sharp breath through her teeth as she felt the sickening, not-quite-painful jolt of her magic being drawn. It was an unnatural, wrong sensation, even though she trusted Tun completely, and it took a great deal of willpower to resist her instinctual urge to fight it. She felt as though someone had stabbed a great invisible hook just behind her heart and was slowly pulling.
The nascent portal grew faster now, brilliant points and swirls of light swimming in its depths. Beyond its edge she could see Kar'thol, huge back rising and falling evenly in his enchanted sleep, and just beyond him stood Nerothos, watching coolly with Na'rii's bleeding form still dangling by her pinioned wrists. Their eyes locked, and she narrowed hers to grey slits before looking away in contempt.
Nerothos laughed softly, the resonant words of his Eredun edged with sardonic amusement. "Never play a gambit without expecting sacrifice, warlock. You are most singularly indignant, for a creature who is getting what she wants."
Callista thought her level of indignation would fall precipitously if the demon would simply stop talking, but she suspected he knew that. She wasn't sure if he was trying to smooth her down or prod her into snapping at him one last time, but, either way, she wasn't about to humor him. If he wanted conversation, he should've kept his claws a civilized distance away from her companions' entrails.
The portal grew until it was a perfect disk, twice as tall as she was, and then stopped. Light flared around its edges and then faded, and they were no longer ragged but crisp and sharp as though etched by a knife. Stable now, Callista supposed through the lightheadedness that was starting to overtake her.
Evidently, Tun agreed. "Go," he said coldly, leveling his gaze at Nerothos.
Nerothos inclined his head in mock obedience and then moved forward, shoving a weakly stumbling (and snarling) Na'rii before him before losing patience and lifting her roughly by a claw hooked into the nape of her armor. They both vanished through the portal with an echoing ripple of power.
"Get Kar'thol," Tun said.
Callista stared hazily for a moment before the command penetrated her abused mind (the hook was still pulling, somewhere in her chest), then registered what he wanted and aimed a hard kick at Kar'thol's outstretched arm.
He awoke with a howl, groping for his mace as he lumbered groggily to his feet. "Where Na'rii?" he demanded, rubbing at his eyes with one meaty hand as he spun.
"Through. Go!" Tun urged, gesturing wildly at the inky-black night of the portal.
For a moment Kar'thol looked confused, then lowered his head and charged into it with a roar.
In the spell-lit stillness left by his passing, she could hear the labored rasp of Tun's breathing. When he spoke, however, his voice was steady, though deeply exhausted. "You next, Callista. You can't hold it by yourself."
Can you? she wondered blearily, before giving herself a violent mental shake. What kind of useless thought was that? One of them had to go first, and he was right, she didn't know the first thing about portal-making…
"Callista!" he snapped, startling her. "I'm fine! Stop being an idiot and go!"
She wrinkled up her nose reproachfully at him but snatched her hand away from the rune she'd been powering (a wave of relief struck her as the awful draining feeling vanished), and tried not to dwell on his strained gasp as the full force of the portal spell fell back on him.
She dove into the star-etched void, already woozy before the terrible vertigo struck, and when she emerged on the other side she could never decide if she vomited or not.
Water sluiced up from the ground and drenched her as she landed on her knees in a puddle of sloppy mud. It was night; rain poured from the sky in driving gusts, and she squinted and blinked as she tried to see through the opaque blackness. Drops pummeled the back of her head like soaking pebbles. Nerothos – where had he gone? He couldn't touch her now, but after Tun –
Something landed hard with a yelp in the puddle behind her, and if there was a single scrap of her clothing that had been dry, it wasn't now. A painful burning tingle began in the palm of her left hand, and when she looked at it, beneath its coating of mud and congealed blood the black sigil was gone. The terms of her pact with Nerothos, futile as it had been, were fulfilled.
"Where's Na'rii?" Tun gasped, splashing though the wet and leaning hard on her shoulder to support himself.
Callista held a hand to her dripping forehead to block the downpour, narrowing her eyes as she tried a spell. For a moment her pupils shone green, then she cursed as the magic slipped from her concentration. She was still too drained to perform the spell properly, but in the brief moment she'd been able to hold it she hadn't seen anything. "I don't know," she said. "But I think Nerothos is gone."
"Small mercies," Tun muttered, pushing off from her shoulder to slog through the muck. "Na'rii! Kar'thol! Where are you?" he cried.
"Kar'thol here!" the ogre responded miserably, somewhere in the darkness to their right.
Raindrops burst against Callista's face, clinging to her eyelashes and sticking her robes to her body in a chilly mass as she stumbled and slid towards the sound. Branches creaked overhead, worried by the wind, and the downpour lessened slightly as she found herself beneath the branches of a small copse.
Na'rii lay on her side on a slightly higher patch of grass, tusks bared in a grimace of pain as Kar'thol squeezed her wounded torso between his two enormous hands. She was clearly still alive, and Callista noticed no new injuries; Nerothos must have simply dropped her before taking flight.
"Hey, mon," she said, trying a weak grin that was more a twitch of her lips.
Tun cried out when he saw her, shrugging off his outer robes in favor of the tunic and trousers he wore underneath and dropping to his knees, balling up the fabric to place under her head. It was no less sodden than the ground, but at least it was softer. "We have to find help," he said, turning to Callista. "The Cathedral –"
"Will call the guards and arrest us all on sight," Callista finished irritably, peeling off her own outer clothes and wringing out as much of the moisture as she could. "They're Horde, remember?" She thrust the crumpled fabric at Tun. "Here, bandages."
Tun took them from her even as he protested, drawing his knife to cut the cloth angrily into strips. "She needs a healer, Callista, not our fumbling! That disgusting fiend put his claws right– " He swallowed, unable to finish the thought.
"Human shaman help?" Kar'thol tried, blunt features twisted with worry. "Kar'thol promise not to crush!"
Callista pressed her knuckles to the bridge of her nose, trying to think but still hazy from the magic Tun had siphoned from her. Her friends at the Slaughtered Lamb would be no help, they were all like her, not healers. But maybe…she took her hand from her face and dropped to her knees in a puddle, splashing the muddy water up her arms and scrubbing. Better to dash through the streets of Stormwind filthy than covered in demon blood. "I think I know someone," she said, rubbing briefly at her face before jumping to her feet. "A priest – he owes me a favor. Though I doubt he imagined this," she added under her breath.
Tun looked briefly as though he were going to ask a question, then thought better of it, shaking his head. "No, I don't want to know. Good. Hurry!"
"I am," she said, wiping the mud from her eyes. "Where are we, exactly?"
Tun looked vaguely chagrined, still kneeling in the grass near Na'rii's head as he shredded Callista's robes. Water plastered his usually bushy hair to his head and ran down his face in streams. "Just outside the walls behind the Mage Quarter. It was the only place I knew well enough…"
"That's good. Fine," she assured him, suddenly thankful for the downpour that would hide them from sight of the guards. "I'll be back soon!"
She turned and skidded from the shelter of the trees, the full force of the storm bursting again on her head and water soaking through her boots as she dashed through the night. She flicked her sodden hair behind her ears, squinting uselessly against a watery gust – but when the dark curtains of rain finally parted for the grey granite walls of Stormwind City, high and steadfast and home, despite the chill and the wet and the sobering reason for her haste, she actually laughed in delight.
Tun knelt near Na'rii's head, one of her hands pressed in both of his small ones as Kar'thol applied wads of Callista's torn-up robes to the wounds in her belly and back. Drops of rain, softened by the leaves above, pattered off the leather of her armor. "If you die, I won't forgive you," he said, squeezing her fingers.
Na'rii laughed sharply, but it came out more like a cough. Mud speckled the blue skin of her face and the length of her tusks as she bared them viciously. "Don' worry, mon. Not gonna die, 'cause then I can't kill him."
There was no doubt in Tun's mind who "him" was, and frankly, he'd much rather none of them ever saw the demon again. For the purposes of murder or anything else. "Maybe he'll try to fly over the Maelstrom and get sucked in," he muttered, mostly to himself.
"Stupid demon better not," Kar'thol said, eyes glittering like black beads in the darkness. "Kar'thol not good at swimming and crushing." He paused and seemed to consider that for a moment, nodding his stocky-tusked head sagely. "Why Kar'thol not eat fishes."
Tun stared for a moment, and then gave a choked laugh, rubbing rainwater out of his eyes with his fist.
This wasn't exactly the homecoming he'd imagined, but, for the moment, he'd take it.