“I don’t think Demons made this. It must have been the cultists.”
Dys frowned at the Hero. Tossing her hair out of her eyes, she settled her helmet against her hip while letting her axe head rest on the blood-soaked ground. Working her jaw back and forth, she took a moment to formulate her response.
“So, before you continue that line of thought, I want you to look over there,” she nodded her head to indicate the figures a few dozen feet behind Wilhelm, “and then also take a second to remember the Demons you met back at my compound. You know, like Rune, who got along really well with Tiernan.”
The brown-haired man turned and saw Alex, who was in the middle of a conversation with Aila and Jay. The Demon was touching one of the stone hexagons that made up the large dome, and she was indicating one of the burned-out rune marks while talking with the redheaded mage. Wilhelm’s brow puckered as he turned back to look up at Dys.
“Jadis, I did not mean to imply any insult to Alex,” Wilhelm spoke with an earnest expression on his face. “Nor am I dismissing what your efforts have uncovered about the way Demons behave and think when they are given… alternate ideas to focus on. However, I have been fighting Demons for years, and I have never seen any sign of them crafting enchantments or putting together complicated structures. In all the time that you have battled Demons, have you experienced anything different?”
Dys thinned her lips and narrowed her eyes, but she didn’t respond immediately. She took time to scan her memory, to search for any inkling of Demons performing higher-level magic or crafting where cultists were uninvolved. After a few moments, she was forced to admit to herself that she couldn’t recall any examples.
“Okay, I might be getting ahead of myself here,” Dys allowed. “I’m not so hardheaded that I can’t see that my perspective might be a little skewed when it comes to Demons. But I still think this is more than just some plot by cultists. I mean, look at this thing! What was the plan here, anyway? Does this seem anything like what any of the cultists you have dealt with in the past have done?”
The Hero folded his arms over his chest, helmet clanking against armor at the movement. His expression was serious as he surveyed the scene, and Jadis could tell that he was taking the situation just as seriously as she was.
“I have no idea what this was about,” he admitted with a sigh. “For such a powerful defensive creation, this attack felt purposeless.”
That was a point that she and the Hero were in complete agreement on. The attack force they had quelled had felt anemic compared to previous efforts put forth by the cultists or the Demons. Even with the stone dome, Jadis wasn’t sure that the Demons would have been able to do any real damage to the defensive walls of Cautis Major. The attackers just weren’t packing much of a punch inside their shell.
When Jadis had followed Wilhelm and Rein inside of the stone dome, she had expected to be faced with serious threats. A Greater Demon backed up by multiple dead heads or similarly powerful Demons, or maybe even a Matriarch. Or perhaps some kind of trap that would be set off the moment she or the Hero or whoever got inside the shell. Instead, there had been a relatively small number of enemies, most of which had already been slain by Wilhelm and Rein’s initial assault. A few dozen unrelenting simulacrums had been powering the forward momentum of the shell by using their large bodies to push a basic wheel system that had obviously been cobbled together from a multitude of pre-made sources. There had also been at least fifty scythe wights inside, which would have been a dangerous force to be let loose inside of a city, but again, it wasn’t the threat that Jadis had expected to find considering the obvious effort put into constructing the massive stone shell.
What she had not expected to find were the human corpses.
Positioned in the middle of the dome by a series of gantries, chains, and support beams was a hexagonal stone pillar approximately twelve feet tall and four feet wide on each of its sides. The surface was covered in runes and esoteric symbols, all of which had been burnt and fragmented, almost as though too much power had been forced through the enchantments. In the middle of each face of the pillar was a large circle fifteen inches in diameter. For each circle, a human had been tied to the gray pillar by rough cords and haphazard knots. A metal stake pierced the stomach of each man and woman, pinning them to the stone.
“Four men, two women,” Rein called out grimly as he walked around from the other side of the pillar. “All adult age, but one I would guess only recently unlocked their status sheet, while the oldest looks to be seventy.”
“Do you think these were cultists sacrificing themselves?” Dys asked, though she already knew what the answer would be.
“No,” the elf shook his head. “I do not.”
“I assume they were powering the enchantments on this pillar, somehow,” Wilhelm said as he looked over the closest body with a grim expression. “Eldritch magic, I wager.”
“Most likely,” Rein nodded. “Tiernan will be able to tell us with certainty.”
Dys felt a deep anger rise inside of her chest as she examined the ghastly horror of the demonic enchantment. The six men and women had been mutilated terribly; eyes had been gouged out, limbs had been broken, and bleeding symbols had been carved into naked flesh. What’s more, it was clear to her that these people had been alive for everything that had happened to them. In fact, Jadis suspected that the sacrificed humans had been living right up until the moment Wilhelm and Rein had made it inside the dome. All of the damage done to them was beyond all reason, yet it was the burn of overloaded runes cooking them alive that seemed to be the actual cause of death.
“We should take them down,” Wilhelm shook his head. “They have suffered enough.”
“No,” Dys held up a hand. “We can’t. We have to let Tiernan and Sabina see everything exactly as the bodies have been positioned in relation to the enchantments. It might make a difference for their examination.”
Wilhelm frowned, but after a moment, he sighed and shook his head again.
“You are right, of course. This is simply… I have never gotten used to seeing things like this.”
“I don’t think you want to be the sort of person who sees these sorts of things and doesn’t care,” Dys murmured.
“No, I don’t think I do…”
The group took another half an hour to make sure that the area was secure before Jadis and Alex left. Aila, Severina, Wilhelm, and Rein stayed behind at the site of the demonic dome to make sure that nothing interfered with the inside while Jadis and Alex flew back to Thracina to retrieve Sabina and Tiernan. While she dreaded the idea of asking her half-elf lover to view the horrible scene, she knew that it was what needed to be done. Sabina would agree, she was sure, but that knowledge didn’t make the situation any easier.
As she took off, Jadis saw a troop of cavalry riding out from the city of Cautis Major towards the shell. She hoped that the soldiers would be able to help in securing the area, since the possibility of further attacks was high. Severina had kept a careful watch overhead and had reported that small groups of Demons were roaming around the site at a distance, though none had approached. She had even seen what looked like stymphalia flying further out, though when she approached, the flock had withdrawn to the east.
“I should have captured some of the Demons inside for you to speak with,” Jay said as she flew though the sky with as much speed as she could muster. “I should have told Wilhelm and Rein not to kill everything!”
“The Demons would… Not… Have wanted… To speak… With me…” Alex spoke in Jay’s ear, having wrapped herself close against her. “I am… The Betrayer…”
“You have to have loyalty to something to betray it,” Jay said with brows furrowed. “You never followed Samleos.”
“All the same…” the Demon pressed her cheek against the side of Jay’s helm. “To them… I am the Betrayer… To Samleos… I am a traitor…”
“Like we give two farts what that shit thinks about you,” Jay stated sourly. “Speaking of the primordial asshole, have you had any feelings from him lately? Smug satisfaction? Outrage? A looming sense of defeat, hopefully?”
“Nothing…” Alex said. “He is… Silent… What about… Your gut…?”
“I haven’t had any feelings from D or Lyssandria either,” Jay admitted. “Not since Glanum, I think.”
Jadis wasn’t sure if the gods were just staying out of things for the time being, or something else was at play, but there had been a lack of gut feelings or other prompts of a divine source. While she didn’t like the idea of having her actions or emotions influenced by D or anyone else, there were moments of uncertainty where Jadis did wish for a little bit of guidance from a higher power. While they were only her own instincts, they were screaming at her that something was terribly wrong with the impenetrable shell, more so than just the horror on the surface.
“I don’t think that was a serious attack on the wall,” Jay muttered more to herself than to Alex. “There weren’t enough Demons on the ground. Not enough to take the city, even with that shell. What were they going to do, try to push the thing through the gates? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe… They were not… Going to attack… The city…”
“If not the city, then what were they doing out here? There isn’t anything else to attack.”
While Alex had many insights into Demon behavior, she had no more answers for Jadis than the silent gods did. Their speculations continued without finding answers for the rest of the flight back to Volto’s capital, which took much less time since Jadis was able to go at her top speed. Once in Thracina, she wasted no time giving her companions a short briefing on what had occurred. Alex was able to give both Eir and Jocelyn a top up for their magic while Jadis grabbed Sabina and Tiernan. The two protested the interruption, having both gotten elbows deep into some kind of experimental enchantment, but once Jadis told them about the sacrificial pillar covered in demonic enchantments, they dropped what they were doing without further argument.
With Sabina and Tiernan carried by her Dys and Syd selves, Jadis made her way back to the southern end of the line that Volto had drawn between their safe lands, and the territory controlled by the demonic horde. The whole round trip only took a couple of hours, though Jadis couldn’t help the small worry that something had gone wrong at the shell in that short time. However, upon her return, she was gratified to see that not only had no harm come to either Aila or Severina, but also that the cavalry she had seen during her departure had set up a perimeter around the shell and were guarding it from any Demons.
Upon arrival, Sabina and Tiernan immediately went to work analyzing what structure and the enchantments within, starting with the tortured bodies of those who had been used as sacrifices. For once, Sabina was completely silent as she worked, uttering not a word as she performed her duty. Tiernan’s countenance was no less grim as he used spells to examine the pillar and the bodies staked to it. In short order, both he and Sabina had cleared the victims for removal, and with Wilhelm and Rein’s help, Jadis took the bodies down and wrapped them in blankets provided by the cavalry soldiers.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to get much out of these marks,” Tiernan said with disgust as he hovered on a disc of magic by one side of the pillar. “The runes here are partially melted. I can’t be certain of the original shape of a third of them, and another third I can’t read at all with how badly they’ve been distorted. The ones that I can read don’t tell me much that we couldn’t guess from the descriptions you’ve given of what this thing was doing.”
“It’s a siphon,” Sabina stated as she ran a finger across one of the less burnt runes. “This part, here. That’s the same sort of siphon rune used by Sestolino the Gold Hand when he made the life-stealing Spear of Ruin.”
“You’re right,” Tiernan said after taking a second look at the rune in question. “It’s a siphon. But look at what it’s attached to. The first half of that sequence is ruined, but the second half looks like a healing enchantment, which doesn’t make any sense for the effect being done.”
“Eldritch magic doesn’t usually have any healing, either,” Sabina murmured with a pensive look on her face. “Except for alchemy and similar arts. But the healing there is coming from the plants and other ingredients; the Eldritch magic is just empowering what the plant reagent is already doing. I don’t understand why healing magic would be used by an Eldritch rune.”
“Unless this pillar had both Eldritch and Divine enchantments on it,” Tiernan mused. “Intermixed together.”
“That would be so unstable!” Sabina gasped with shock. “You’d risk having the whole thing break apart!”
“Not unlike what we are looking at right now, I would say,” the gnome rubbed his chin in thought. “The person who made this was either very skilled, or very much insane. Possibly both. Actually, forget the possibly, definitely both. This is going to take more than a few hours to parse. Can we move this pillar back to Thracina? I’m going to need a lot more time to study it.”
“I’m not sure it’s safe to take within city walls,” Jay frowned. “The last time I brought something weird and powerful looking home with me, it turned out to be trap set by the Playwright. I don’t want to repeat mistakes.”
“We’ll put it somewhere more secure than a dining room table,” Aila interjected. “We’ll show more caution than we did in the past.”
“Besides, if it was a trap, it should have done whatever it was going to do by now,” Wilhelm laughed mirthlessly. “It’s already had hours to try and kill me.”
“You might not be the target,” Jay pointed out. “But you’re right. Considering the Playwright’s behavior in the past, I think he would have set up a trap to take you out specifically. Which reminds me. Maybe don’t go charging directly inside of huge stone domes that could have exploding magic inside of them in the future?”
“That is a far point, I admit,” Wilhelm conceded after a second of hesitation. “It just seemed like the most expedient way to end the threat at the time.”
“Right. Well, I can’t judge,” Jay shrugged. “I went right in after you.”
“You’re both fools,” Tiernan called out from where he was still examining the pillar. “No surprise to anyone who has spent more than an afternoon in either of your presences! The more concerning matter to me is that Rein followed you inside as well!”
When eyes turned to Rein, the elf merely raised one dark eyebrow.
“The fastest way to deal with a trap is to trip it.”
“Imbeciles…” Tiernan muttered with a dark laugh. “Complete imbeciles. I don’t know how I put up with them. How do you manage to deal with your idiotic companions?” the wizard drolly asked Sabina.
“We have a lot of sex, mostly.”
“…of course you do.”
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