Chapter 51: Pass

We didn’t stay in the room for long. Whatever was in the pile that had emitted the magic and aura was gone. In its place was simply another indistinct stain on a ruined floor.

The presence was gone. Ironically, we decided to leave the once-cursed place. Fatigue was certainly a factor. Seyari looked a mess and I seriously doubted I was much better. Fatigue from mana depletion wasn’t something I could just regenerate away.

A headache throbbed around the base of my horns. The humanizing sensation was a single part comforting and a dozen parts a bad headache.

The rooms we glanced in were almost entirely burned out. Unless I wanted the sad remains of an ancient chair, there was nothing here for me. Any iconography had been brutally destroyed, as fit the pattern of this place.

I picked up the ancient sword on our way out, and we left the ruin into bright, sunny day outside. From the vantage point of the entrance, I could see bits of stone wall that had cropped up through the fog. They didn’t look nearly so intimidating in the daylight. I could barely see the glassy surface of the tarn glittering through the trees.

We stopped a moment, and I looked back at the statues flanking the entrance to the ruin. Aura sight showed nothing.

I turned to Seyari. “Do you know what that thing did to you?”

Seyari plopped down on the rough stone and looked at one of the statues. “I felt like we were up against some invincible force. I doubted my own abilities.”

I sat down next to her. “Do you know what that might mean?”

She gave me an appraising look, then looked back to the defaced statue. “What do you think it means?”

“I’m not sure.” I shrugged

“Well, I am.”

“Then what was it?”

“Figure it out.”

“Huh?” I tilted my head in confusion.

“I said: figure it out,” Seyari spoke sternly and looked back at me with a half-smile. “You’re a Sovereign Demon. You need to be able to puzzle stuff like this out yourself.”

I almost made a joke about being a Sovereign of Wrath, not a Sovereign of Riddles, but I held my tongue. Seyari was right: this was good practice for me to rely on myself more.

I thought about what she said and what we saw. The ruin’s former ruler was vain and narcissistic. Not unique among demons, but probably not a demon of Wrath or Apathy. I wasn’t certain about Apathy. Seyari had seemed afraid.

Fear?

No. Not quite. She had been afraid, but the reason why was more important. She felt we couldn’t win. Something had drained out her confidence. The answer was simple.

Conceit.

Lilly had called the Sovereign of Conceit, Utraxia, an ‘ice queen’. I only had my gut feeling to go on, but to me the pale blue aura had seemed ‘icy’. The only other wrath demon I’d seen was also a shade of red, so maybe color meant something?

I looked to the statue. “Conceit. It was a demon of conceit that drained your confidence. I think I wasn’t affected because I am a Sovereign Demon.”

Seyari scooched closer and gave me a half-hug. “Good.”

“I wonder who this demon was and what this valley was like during the Lost Era. I wonder if they were once the Sovereign of Conceit.” I made sure not to phrase my thoughts as a question.

“Maybe,” Seyari conceded. “This place was big, but it could be they were just a powerful greater demon.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I took one last look into the darkened chamber, then stood and turned back to the sunlit valley. We started the walk back to the lake, and I took the lead. “Do you think we killed them?”

“They were already long dead,” Seyari answered tiredly. “My spell destroyed the lingering remnants that had gathered.”

“Remnants of what?” I looked the battered old sword over and resisted the urge to test its blade on a forearm.

“Don’t give that thing blood, Renna.” Seyari admonished me. “The remnants of lingering emotion and memories made that thing.”

I moved the blade away from my skin. “Like a spirit of the land? But evil? Or like a demon, but on Varra instead of the void or the demon realm or hell or whatever Isidore talked about?”

Seyari stretched. “I don’t know. One of those probably. Whatever happened there was brutal enough to corrupt the ambient mana. Or something like that. I’m tired and it’s been thirty years since my magical theory classes with the church.”

Immediately, I wondered if she could teach me. “Wait, you had magical theory classes? Could you teach me?”

“Do you use holy magic?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. Well, not entirely. How much do you know?” Seyari walked up beside me.

I gave her a blank look.

She stared back at me, waiting for an answer.

I kept up the blank look.

Seyari caved first. “Oh.”

She gave me a stern stare. I shrugged nervously.

Seyari sighed. “All your use of magic is untrained guessing?”

“Yeah, uh, I have practical experience? And demonic intuition?” I scratched at one of my horns nervously.

“I’ll admit your magic isn’t totally incoherent.” Seyari hefted her pack and resumed walking. “But even I can teach you some things. Let’s stay in this valley tonight, and I’ll spend the rest of the day teaching you.”

“Thanks!” I smiled and walked after her. “Also, what was that about giving the sword blood?”

“If it’s a demonic enchantment, there’s all sorts of nasty things it could do with blood. Or not. It depends, and I don’t know enough to tell you what it is at a glance.”

“What if it’s demon blood?”

“Maybe that’d be different. Maybe not. Again, I don’t know.”

I looked the blade over. A geometric pattern covered the hilt. “Hmm. Do enchantments fade over time? What if we tried to charge it? I’m a bigshot demon and you’re half or more of an angel, so I doubt it’d be dangerous.”

“We’ll look at the sword tonight,” Seyari said tiredly. “Do you want magic lessons or not?”

I pouted. “I’ll take the magic lessons. But if this thing’s some kind of evil blade, I don’t want to go to sleep near it without figuring out what it does.”

Seyari gave me a quizzical look, and then laughed. “We’ll look it over.”

I tilted my head at her laugh, but she brushed me off. We made it back to our campsite easily and set up for another night.

By the time the shadows of the peaks had started to deepen into twilight, I’d learned more about magic than I had in either of my lives. Seyari was not a particularly kind or insightful teacher, but she gave me the basic foundation that I was missing.

Before, I had pulled on my mana, pushed it out, then forced my magic into a crude spell. From Seyari, I learned to reorder the steps, setting up a form for the magic to take, and then pulling only enough to fill that mold.

I took quickly to Seyari’s basic instruction. I was too drained to practice much, but the experience I had from forcing things the hard and inefficient way did give me some proficiency with visualizing basic spell forms. My small uses of magic wouldn’t change much, but if, or rather, when I needed something more, I wouldn’t exhaust myself as quickly.

Seated next to each other by the fire, Seyari and I inspected the enchanted sword from the ruins. ‘We’ was a generous word. I watched with aura sight active as Seyari studied it closely.

The result?

A simple enchanted sword with a broken handguard and a chipped blade. The enchantment was why it was even still around and potentially usable. As a magic weapon, it would cut a demon like me with the same ease a normal blade would a human.

The sword’s length was just shorter than a longsword relative to Seyari’s height and reach. At least that was what it looked like to me. I knew something of the types of swords, but was far from an expert.

Seyari intended to sharpen and use it. After Baetnal, she’d carried no weapons beyond a mundane knife and her magic. The iconography on the hilt was not overtly demonic, so we’d not draw too much unwanted attention. If we had a proper whetstone, I would have offered to take a crack at sharpening it.

***

The night passed uneventfully, as did our return trip out of the valley, back through the cave, and to the spot where Hammer left us two days prior. I remembered to shift my tail away to exit the narrow cave opening. I didn’t even have to get stuck first.

Beyond the cave, we followed animal paths toward the gap in the mountains which we hoped would have a usable pass. The terrain was rugged and rocky. I surprised Seyari by removing my rapidly degrading boots in favor of bare feet. I’d spent the entire time on my island barefoot, and I felt more comfortable with the extra grip in terrain like this. Progress was slow but steady, and by evening, the mountains had surrounded us.

There was greenery up here; sparse, wind-battered pines and thorny shrubs I would have avoided as a human. The animal paths grew thinner, so we followed a streambed for a time. Our easy path ended in the large, worn rock face of a dry waterfall. Looking up, the valley leveled out again some thirty meters up.

I was no expert climber, and Seyari wasn’t in the mood to heal her own injuries even if a fall probably wouldn’t kill her, so we backtracked a way and found a small animal path leading steeply up onto a ridge.

Beyond the waterfall, the valley climbed and became significantly more difficult. We made camp under a rocky outcropping for the night, and took turns on watch.

Like on the island, animals stayed away from me. The land around us was eerily quiet during the day, but far off animal calls in the night reminded me we weren’t alone in these mountains.

We continued on this pace for another few days. Our progress was slow, but our rations were holding out and we’d ventured deep into the mountains. We passed the base of one of the giants of rock, and approached another.

Then, the pass ended.

Ahead of us stretched a rocky incline so steep it wouldn’t be disingenuous to call it a cliff. The temperature had been dropping rapidly during the day. The landscape was harsh. The few trees that remained were stunted, twisted things no taller than I was.

I’d kept warm through my magic. Seyari used me as a heater.

Now, though, the rocks ahead of us faded away under patchy coat of old snow. I could see the glint of the ice crystals in the morning sun. Faint memories of partially-melted snow, abrasive and unpleasant, came to mind.

Worse still, what little of the horizon we could see heralded the arrival of dense clouds.

“What now?” I asked to the rocks.

“We look for another way through,” Seyari answered for them.

I thought they would approve. The stone here, untrodden perhaps ever, by people, did not have an inviting look. That the cliff was a hundred meters or more high to where it rounded gradually out of sight didn’t color my perception in the slightest.

Discouraged, we turned around and looked for another way through. We spent the rest of the day chasing valleys we’d seen branch off the largest path. All led to face a mountain, or away from the southern direction we needed to maintain.

In the end, we returned and camped by the base of that same cold cliff. We’d not enough wood for an overnight fire.

The morning saw a thin coat of fresh snow over the landscape. Turning to look the way we came; the sight was beautiful. Or it would have been in better circumstances. As things were, I was tired of rocks.

Still better than sand.

Another look at the cliff in the morning showed that it had not moved or shrunk or acquiesced to our passage in any way. I pondered why the mountain air made me philosophical.

Seyari, for all her life experience, had precious little experience tackling cliffs like this without pitons and rope. Or wings. We had rope, but no pitons. And no wings. I was strong, but not strong enough to reliably carve out hand and foot-holds all the way up.

“How do we do this?” I asked my partner.

She turned from looking up the cliff. “Slowly and carefully. I can survive that kind of fall, and you’d probably hurt the rocks more than yourself.”

I gave a short laugh. “My head’s not that hard. And I’m not that heavy!”

Seyari shrugged and gave a smile that reached her eyes. “Maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe!” I giggled.

Our course of action decided, we packed up and began the ascent. I was happy the packs were lighter than when we set out, if only for the fact it made them smaller. The going was slow.

My claws scratched at the rock, and my four arms gave me a serious edge over Seyari, who was struggling through certain sections.

“Do you think I could carry you?” I asked when we reached a small ledge before a steeper section.

Seyari actually seemed to consider the idea. “Probably. Or maybe it’d tip your mass and we’d both fall.”

The rock ahead of us was nearly sheer, with few places to hold on.

I thought up an idea. “I could climb up with all the packs. I leave them up there, then get you. If the packs don’t send me off, then you probably won’t either.”

Seyari shook her head and made a careful attempt to start up ahead of me. She didn’t make it far before she slid back down and handed me her pack.

I took the bag and attached it to the others on my back. The result was horribly unwieldy. I put one hand in a handhold. Then another. Then another. My long reach allowed me to get to more possible handholds.

I drove my fourth hand into a crevice and chipped it wider with my claws. Carefully, I put two hands in from of the other two, and brought my clawed feet up behind. Using my six limbs, I inched my way up the mountainside.

Reaching the top took an agonizing amount of time. My demonic physique largely prevented exhaustion, but the terrain was testing that, and hard. By the time I reached the top, I was grateful for the cool of the icy snow. I breathed heavily in the thin air.

The snowy hillside crested just above where I could see. I wanted to check if we could truly get over this, so I set the packs down and took the few careful, slick steps to the top.

I could see down the other side. Rocky and snowy for a time, but beyond that, in the distance, I could see the deep green of a forest.

I made sure the packs were secure in a flat-ish area, then made my way carefully back down to Seyari. The return trip was easier without the bags and with the path mapped out already.

“I saw a forest down the other side. We can cross here!” I was smiling from ear to ear.

Seyari’s expression twitched a moment at my teeth, then turned into a smile in return. “Thank fuck.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “Alright, get on. And mind the tail.”

I turned so Seyari could grab onto my back. The base of my tail almost served as a seat, and she hugged around me just under my lower arms.

More carefully than the first time, I ascended the cliff. Thankfully, I made it up without incident.

We grabbed the packs at the top, and began a careful descent. I forgot to put on my boots, and had to deal with cold feet. I preferred that to melting the snow and slipping off down the other side of the mountain.

When we could see the forest, Seyari let out a massive sigh of relief, but her eyes turned hard.

Ordia lay before us, but between here and my homeland were the festering remnants of Seyari’s unburied past.