Being adored and catered to apparently exhausted a person, and after only a bit more prodding, Damien relented to The Brotherhood’s offer of accommodations. Amma didn’t like the idea of staying in the place, but when she was given a small, private room, one that didn’t leak or cost her a literal arm and leg and came complete with a cot and even more food, she forgot her own objections.
But when Damien stepped into the room behind her and shut the door, she whipped toward him and backed away. Very little good ever came from men doing that.
“I didn’t say anything about the talisman.” She did her best to keep her voice even, but it cracked with her nerves at being shut in alone with him.
“And you won’t.Sanguinisui, do not leave this room, do not hurt yourself or anyone else, and do not speak to anyone.”
Amma’s chest thumped, and her vision blurred as her body went rigid. When she came back into herself, Damien was already leaving the room. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Apparently he was part of the anyone she couldn’t speak to.
But he stopped on the threshold even without her calling to him, turning slightly over his shoulder. “And do not drink the wine, that was only an ill-humored joke—I don’t require any additional compliance from you.”
When he left and the door latched, she went right to the tray of food, stuffing her mouth without hesitation. As she chewed, she lifted the goblet, taking a sniff of the pungent stuff, then carried it to the chamber pot and dumped it out before returning to finish off the prickly berries and gnaw the cheese down to its rind.
Amma fell onto the cot then, eyes already heavy. Everything was a disaster. She had no scroll, was trapped under the roof of a cult of demon worshipers, and had been cursed to follow the orders of a blood mage. She had tempted fate, it seemed, or rather the god of fate, when she wondered if things could get worse, and somehow they actually had. Perhaps if she’d remembered that god’s name, she would have fared better.
Closing her eyes, images of The Brotherhood’s display and the appearance of that horrible, little imp played behind her lids. She whined and tried to knock them away with thoughts of home, but then guilt and shame and fear and all of those uncomfortable, human feelings flooded her veins until she relented to the visions of the city streets of Aszath Koth, the oozing insides of the Sanctum, the slippery feel of the spell that had bound her when she had been discovered, and then Damien.
Son of a demon, wielder of bloodcraft, and set to fulfill some apparent prophecy with an entire, dark religion behind it. That was no small ask, and the way he looked each time they called him “master,” well, that was actually a little funny. Amma chuckled to herself—if he were one of those jerks who just did whatever he wanted, then he deserved at least a little discomfort. But then again, jerks who did whatever they wanted typicallylikedbeing called “master.”
Before Amma could extrapolate much from that thought, the vision of that fissure slipped into her mind, the way the silvery streams ran over one another so beautifully. It should have been horrifying, but of everything that had happened in the last few hours, that was the vision that calmed her enough to allow sleep to finally take her.
CHAPTER 6
THE ROAD TO THE ABYSS ISN’T PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS OR REALLY ANYTHING, PAVEMENT HASN’T BEEN INVENTED YET
Damien gazed out at the way ahead and into the pass through the Infernal Mountains. They weren’t reallythatinfernal, the mountains, they were of this plane just as much as Ashrein Ridge was, an extension that ran down into Eiren proper, but the entire range didn’t come into being until The Expulsion when some god punched or kicked or slapped some other god so hard that the range just popped up into existence. Damien couldn’t remember if Nontigpechi had been the attacker or the defender, but as the god of night and deception, he had been deemed evil and locked away in the Abyss, and that, of course, had not helped the landscape’s reputation.
The resulting mountains did have infernal energy to them—the strike had been so fierce that it made theslightesttear between earth and the infernal plane—but that only made conducting business with demons and other native creatures a bit easier. It also produced a hazy miasma that turned out to have a purely aesthetic value. It wasnotjust like strolling into another plane of existence though, like so many believed, but stories told by those who’d never even seen the place seemed to hold much more weight than those told firsthand.
The mountain pass serpentined at a slight decline, crumbling cliffside all along it, hemmed in and dark. The miasma of the Infernal Mountains still blotted out the sun though it was morning, he could tell, from the way the light was a slightly different shade of muddy grey. That and The Brotherhood’s horn to welcome the dawn had been blown what felt like only an hour after he’d finally fallen asleep, jolting him back awake.
The night had been restless, like many nights as of late, but this one was especially irritating, and all because ofher. He peered over his shoulder at the blonde thing sitting astride her mount. At the very least, she looked to be settling in on the knoggelvi which was better than her staring at the creature, horrified and like she might be sick—not that he cared about her comfort, things would just be marginally easier if she cooperated. Though, it had been rather amusing to see her reaction to the Abyssally-enchanted beast.
Knoggelvi were almost like horses, athletic, fast, and four-legged with a mane and tail of stringy, black hair, but their bodies were covered in a rough hide, their eyes were like fire with roving, red irises nestled into a skeletal head, and of course they breathed out the shadows of terrors past. Another result of The Expulsion, they had once been arcanely adept wild horses that roamed the plains that existed before the Infernal Mountains were thrust into being, and that little tear warped their arcana—for the better, Damien thought.
The woman had to be commanded with the Chthonic word to climb astride one which had also been entertaining since she wasn’t quite tall enough to get up without a boost. One of the cultists eventually stepped in to offer their back. That had ruined Damien’s fun at watching her struggle but relieved the knoggelvi who was marking his displeasure by scuffing a hoof in the dirt and snorting out an inky blackness that sounded faintly like the wailing of burn victims. When she was finally astride, the beast wasn’t much happier, but it wouldn’t defy Damien’s will, and he wasn’t going to have the woman walk—that would be too time consuming and perhaps needlessly cruel.
Damien ground his jaw at the thought of needless cruelty. It shouldn’t bother him, it never really did before. It certainly didn’t when Kaz, the imp who now sat before him atop his knoggelvi’s head, had his “accident” nearly a decade prior, tumbling off the parapet of Bloodthorne Keep before his body was smart enough to grow itself wings. But imps were so terrible it almost seemed a mercy to put them out of their misery. It was certainly a mercy to everyone else. Eternal servitude and groveling and praise just felt like a waste of a life, and even as he looked at the back of the imp’s head now, perched between the knoggelvi’s ears, he considered slitting his throat and freeing him of his renewed existence.
But then Kaz glanced back at him with that weird smile on his crooked jaw, crinkles around his watery, irisless eyes, and Damien shook himself of the plan. It would have been too messy anyway—imp blood was sticky and viscous, and it stained even black clothing—and Damien wasn’t eager to do things that were messy: he carved into himself enough already.
“I am honored to be fulfilling the prophecy with you, Master Bloodthorne,” Kaz groveled in his weathered, rotting voice.
Damien acknowledged him with a slight lift to his chin. That would be the prophecy that he, son of Zagadoth the Tempestuous, would return the demon lord to power. Brother Eternal Crud had attempted to recite it at the onset of their journey that morning in the dinge of the stables behind the temple, but Damien stopped him. He already knew it by heart, he had heard it and read it and dreamed about it since his father had been taken away from him twenty-three years prior. The Denonfy Oracle had been consulted by a constituency of Zagadoth’s best, surviving lieutenants and the leaders of The Brotherhood, on how to free him from his crystalline prison, and were told:
When the day is night, and the corners of the realm have fallen into rot, the hallowed son shall release the Harbinger of Destruction upon earth once again. Only by the spilling of the descendants’ blood may It rise, and by the spilling of the heart of the earth’s blood to beseech the gods may It fall.
The problem was just that it felt a bit…off. Damien had no idea how he was meant to make the corners of the realm rot—he didn’t even know where the corners of an amorphously-shaped landmass were—and when he went on his own as a teen to visit the Denonfy Oracle himself for clarification, they had been just as vague. Vaguery was, of course, how an oracle stayed in business, but it was no less frustrating.
What he did know was that he was meant to be doing this alone, not even with an imp to assist, and certainly not with some human trailing behind him. The prophecy said the hallowed son, not the hallowed son, the Abyss’s most annoying servant, and some girl who got herself in the way, but then again, now was no time to start putting complete stock in the words of a diviner even if everyone else already had. The fervor of the others’ belief was almost contagious, but it was a lot easier to put one’s full faith in a prophecy when one wasn’t meant to be its fulfiller.
Damien had considered, briefly, speaking with his father that morning, but decided there was no point telling Zagadoth he’d fucked up already, not before he gave himself a chance to fix things. He left the occlusion crystal shard safely tied up within the only pouch of shrouding he’d been able to scrounge from the Sanctum. It wasn’t particularly strong, but with the talisman buried inside the woman, the infernal aura of his father’s prison wasn’t as much to hide, and it would weaken once they passed out of the Infernal Mountains anyway. Zagadoth would then only be reachable when Damien chose to expend the arcana and blood to call him forth, and with the most recent turn of events, that certainly wasn’t happening anytime soon.
“So, what’s this prophecy you’re fulfilling?” The woman’s voice was quiet, grazing the back of Damien’s head with the breeze that swept through a break in the mountain pass.
“It’s none of your concern.” Damien did not look back at her.
“I feel like it sort of is,” she said with a pinched quietness he wasn’t sure if he were supposed to hear or not, but then she raised her voice and injected some sweetness into it that made him squirm. “Does it have to do with Eirengaard?”
