"We need to go," Louis said, his voice quiet but rough.
Maeva looked at him with disbelief, her face red and streaked with tears. "Fuck you. I'm not leaving her here. Not in this damn cave."
Theo looked at Louis with confusion. The blonde man looked terrified, and Theo raised an eyebrow before carefully pulling him aside. "What's the matter with you? One of us can carry her out easily." The elf didn't weigh very much at all, and she only looked lighter in death.
"I know it sounds strange, but something about what she said… I just… I don't know. I feel like we should leave her."
Theo started to shake his head when a new voice spoke. At least, Theo thought he heard it speaking. The voice seemed to reverberate through his mind, echoing through his skull and putting an itch in his teeth. "Leave me?"
Maeva drew in a sharp breath when Adara's eyes opened. The warm brown of the elf's eyes was gone, even the very whites of her eyes replaced by black. Louis cursed and grabbed the dwarf by the arm, roughly pulling her away from the corpse of her friend that was now smiling at them.
"What the fuck?" Maeva asked hoarsely.
Adara pushed herself to her knees, hands wrapping around the sword that had run her through. Even Theo let out a choked gasp when he saw that the bones of her fingers had spurted beyond the flesh to form terrible claws that clacked against the metal hilt as she drew it slowly from her chest. Something cracked as the once-elf tilted her head at them, bloody lips spread into an eldritch grin.
"I wanted this body to be in better shape than this," she tsked, running a bony hand over the seeping wound in her chest. "Stupid girl fought me so hard, and now neither of us has gotten what we wanted."
Louis tried to nudge Maeva behind him, drawing his sword and wincing at the pain of his broken ribs as he did. Theo was already brandishing the Avvar sword. The demon wearing their friend advanced a step, grinning a little wider—Maker, impossibly wide—as everyone stepped back in response.
"I could have given you the power to take back your pathetic backwater of a bannorn. Adara knew it. We could have made you our toy, Theodore, and you would not have known or complained. You would have been a king, and we would have been your queen."
Theo shook his head. "I should have cut you—her—down as soon as I knew what she was."
Adara's face twisted into a mockery of sympathy. "But we all know you aren't strong enough to do it on your own. That's why you came on this foolish journey for a dead man's sword, isn't it? Tell me, Theodore Foote, do you think your sister cursed your name before she died? How many of Stafford's men had her before they stuck her head on a pike?"
Louis reached out to grab Theo's arm firmly. "It's baiting you. We need to run."
A blood-covered finger bone tapped her chin thoughtfully. "You took your brother's place at Ostagar in search of glory like a foolish child, and you lost everything for it. What was your sister's name? No matter. No one will remember it."
"No!" Louis cried as Theo jerked out of his grasp and charged at the demon.
The demon did not react to his charge at first, tilting her neck with an unsettling smile. Then her mouth opened, jaw spreading wider than it should have been able to, and an ear-rending scream tore through the crypt. Theo stopped and stumbled, the sword clattering from his fingers to the ground as he tried in vain to cover his ears.
Maeva tried to plug her ears, but it made no difference. The scream was in her head. It felt as though her brains were going to shake right out of her skull, and she screwed her eyes shut. "Stop it!" she cried out, her shriek echoing off the walls before she realized what she was saying.
To her surprise, the demon obliged her, cracking her jaw back into place with a snapping sound that raised the hairs on Maeva's arms. "Just tell us what you want," Maeva asked. Maybe if she kept her talking…
"I want to leave. I want to walk in the sunlight as I was promised until this body rots around me." Nauseated, Maeva looked away as the demon stuck an exploratory hand into the hole in Adara's chest. "It won't be long at this rate. How much harm could I cause, really?"
Theo's hands groped for his dropped blade. "I won't allow a demon to walk freely."
"Take me with you, then," she suggested. "Imagine how easy it would be to kill Bann Stafford with my help." The demon's voice dropped low, lips forming a smile that would have been sweet on Adara's living face. "I'll tear him to pieces, and he will die knowing that you are the stronger man."
The air seemed to thicken in the crypt, and Maeva felt a pressure in her head. The dwarf shook it and blinked, but Theo hesitated. Sensing a crack she could exploit, the demon pressed further: "Think of how far you've already come, the things you've done already. You killed for that map. You ignored your Chantry's laws to find my little mage. It seems so very silly to turn away my help now."
Maeva watched as Theo seemed to consider it, and she scowled. "You better fucking not. I'm not going to let you do that," she spat at him. "That thing is… that's my friend she's running around inside. Adara deserves better."
"Did she?" the demon mused. "It doesn't matter. She is gone. The little blood mage made a fair deal. To save your life, I might add. Was it worth it? Losing her soul to save a vagrant like you?" Louis's hand tightened on her shoulder, but Maeva couldn't feel it.
There was a cloyingly sweet scent in the air, and there was a sense of heaviness in the crypt. It was hard to breathe and harder to think. There was a gravity to the hunch in Theo's shoulders, as though a very great weight was pressing down on him. The demon stepped closer, her voice eager and warm. "Vengeance for your family. Peace for their ghosts. Isn't that all you want? For your sisters and parents? The woman you loved?"
The crypt was silent except for the click of the demon's twisted finger bones tapping against each other as she watched.
"I…" Theo sounded choked. "I have no choice." He turned to Maeva and Louis with a dark and distant look in his eyes.
"Ted…" Louis said, shaking his head.
"I've come too far. I need her help."
"Ted, please, please. Don't do this. It's a demon messing with your head. You can't listen to it."
The demon wrapped one arm around Theo's shoulders, her lips leaving blood on his ear as she leaned close to whisper: "If they aren't with us…"
It felt as though ages passed in the crypt. The nobleman swallowed hard, and then Theo shifted his grip on his sword, his face twisted with sorrow and self-loathing. "I… am sorry," he said, the words forced past gritted teeth. Then he raised his blade.