The Longest Road, Part 20
You let Khaytala mull over your answer to her question for a while. Eventually, though, you speak up. "You know..." you say. "With everything that happened after... between putting out the fires and running across the assassin... I don't think I ever properly thanked you for backing me up when I was on the rooftop."
Khaytala glances at you, surprised. "Oh, you don't need to worry about that," she says. "You did most of the work, after all."
"Don't sell yourself short, Khaytala," you say. "I don't think the orcs would have broken the way they did if you hadn't been there to give them the final push." You place a hand on her shoulder, tender and reassuring. "All those villagers are still alive today. And the reason why they'll be able to experience all the pleasures of life—today, and tomorrow, and the day after that—it's because of what you did for them."
Under your insistence, Khaytala finally relents. Still, even if you have convinced her to accept it, she isn't going to let you off the hook either. "Because of what we did for them, then," she corrects.
You give her a warm smile. "Well. If I am going to face down a warband of angry orcs... the best way to do it is together with someone I'd trust with my life."
Khaytala blushes and looks away, fumbling for words. You give her shoulder a squeeze, and then you pull your arm away, judging that to be enough for now. The two of you walk in silence for a while, before she speaks up, her words mumbled but audible. "Me too."
You glance over at her, surprised. "What?"
"I mean..." Khaytala hesitates. "I... trust you too. I'd feel... safe. Knowing you had my back."
Her admission surprises you. You can tell she truly means it, even though she every reason to be suspicious of you. Despite all that, she's still willing to extend her trust to you, just based on what she sees in you. It's more than you expected. More than you deserve, certainly. "Thank you," you say. "That... means a great deal to me."
And to your surprise... it's actually not a lie.
That realization leaves you uncomfortable, so you shift the topic with a sheepish, self-deprecating laugh. "Just... don't feel too safe with me watching your back, at least as far as fighting goes. I might be willing, but my actual combat ability..."
Khaytala scoffs. "Oh, that's nothing a bit of training can't fix." She thinks for a moment, then grins and snaps her fingers. "Come to think of it... you did make an offer back when you were on that rooftop, didn't you? That the two of us could have a duel when it was all over?"
You blanch, slowly holding up your hands in a posture of surrender. "Um. Well, technically, yes. Except for it being... you know. A lie. Something to convince the orcs that I'd last longer than two seconds in a fight like that."
Khaytala's teasing grin only gets wider. "What? You don't think I'd go easy on you?"
What you actually think is that even Khaytala's idea of "going easy" would probably make your old combat instructor Davarial's training regimen look quaint and lackadaisical. As a newly-spawned demon you'd always avoided his lessons, preferring to focus on honing your silver tongue. To your mind, it was far more fitting to talk your way around obstacles than to rely on such crude, brute force.
Admittedly, recent circumstances may have demonstrated the limitations of such a view. Maybe getting some pointers from Khaytala might not be such a bad idea after all...
The caravan continues onward, pushing hard. The guards on Greta don't relax their vigilance, and you still feel the suspicious eyes of the other caravan workers everywhere you go. Then, by the afternoon of the second day out of Eckenburg, you arrive at the edge of the Burn.
It stretches out before you, a blasted, burned-out wasteland with toxic-looking fumes rising up from the cracked earth. You see a few blackened stumps of trees, but otherwise no vegetation is apparent, except for some brown, unhealthy grass that lies on a single path leading through the desolation.
Khaytala shakes her head as she surveys it. "I still remember the night it happened..." she murmurs. "Green flame, flowing out from the Witch Queen's camp to consume everything in its path. Whole villages, just... swallowed up. Even fleeing for all we were worth, the legion I was attached to barely got out of its path in time. The soldiers who were stationed closer... they weren't so lucky."
"The old Witch Queen did this?" you ask. "Some kind of... spellfire ritual?"
Khaytala nods. "It only stopped when it hit the Great Forest," she said. "At the time, we thought we were done for. We'd just taken such horrible losses to a single attack. But in a way, this was actually when things first started to go wrong for the Witch Queen... because this was what first convinced Fallhazel to come out of the forest and fight."
"We'd always known she existed, of course. Everyone made up stories about her, full of rumors and bullshit, calling her 'the Witch of the Wood' or things like that. But until the Burn hit her forest... I don't think anyone realized just how fucking powerful she really was. But we all found out afterward. Especially the Witch Queen's army."
Khaytala sweeps her hand across the devastated terrain. "Since then, she's been working to heal the land," she says. "We convinced her to start by making a path through the middle of the Burn, so the straight route between Vekmar and Nelin could open again. It's passable... but dangerous as hell."
Well. That would depend greatly on which part of Hell she's talking about. But you keep such incriminating corrections to yourself.
Even though there's still plenty of daylight left, you notice that the caravan is setting up camp. Probably because they want to push through the Burn in a single go, without having to set up camp inside it. As a result, that means that you now have a significant window of free time where you're neither traveling nor resting, giving you an opening to try something more involved.
You could spend the time trying to regain access to Greta. One idea that occurs to you is if Greta leads her guards away from the main camp... and then seduces them herself. If she does succeed, you could use that as blackmail to allow you access to her again, perhaps enforced by a Corruptive Boon. She probably wouldn't think of this on her own, however, so you'd have to keep an eye on her until you find a way to slip a message surreptitiously.
Then again, you could just focus on Khaytala instead, trying to get your true target closer to the point where you might be able to feed on her outright. You could take advantage of this free time to take her up on her offer of combat training. It would almost certainly tire you, draining a good chunk of your reserves of strength... but the chance to engage in raw, close-quarters physicality with her might be worth it, considering how you expect you could leverage that for seduction.
Or you could conserve your strength, focusing on talking with her as you have been, taking the slower, more conservative route toward building a connection with her. This won't allow you the same opportunities for temptation as training with her, but it also won't be as taxing either.
Those are the tactics that come immediately to mind, though there may be other possibilities you're not thinking of at the moment. Either way, though, you're going to have to make a decision about what to do with this unexpected windfall of free time.
