Damien leaned in, hands behind his back. “If you’re also ordering I return, then I will.”
Her blue eyes flashed up at him. “Make sure you do.”
Damien bit back a smile at that, hands falling lax at his sides feeling oddly empty, but before he could figure out what to do with them, Kalani nudged him in the back with her staff and told him it was time to go. He was knocked off balance while the vexation was knocked right back into him.
His party was made up of three witches, Kalani at the head. She moved like wind through the trees, climbing and disappearing as swiftly as her big cat, Soot, did. There was also a man, Fior, the first he’d seen amongst the witches but clearly accepted as one of them. Broad shouldered and stout, he refused Damien’s hand when they met, instead listing off a number of rules for their travel together, none of which Damien committed to memory. Their third was a skinny, young girl called Nell who had little if any concern for much at all, skipping along beside them, sometimes climbing atop the big cat’s back, scurrying off on occasion without a word from the others, and reappearing with fruit or nuts that she handed out to everyone, including Damien. She was the only one not wary of him, and, in turn, the only one Damien thought to be wary of.
Kaz had come along as well, as had his new monkey friend, and for once the imp was not complaining, but chittering and scurrying about playfully. It was an interesting change, and Damien felt the arcane pull of the wildwood himself, but without Amma’s presence, there was a hollowness too that no sunshine could fill.
As Damien walked alongside Fior in the humid jungle, the witches’ camp left behind hours prior, he regretted not saying something more when she had instructed him to come back. Hewouldcome back, even if he were the only survivor of whatever terrible thing they needed someone infernally born to cleanse, but knowing he and Amma were to spend a number of nights so far apart made him wish he’d imparted some sentiment, not that he was entirely sure the things one was supposed to say when they felt however it was he was feeling.
“…do there?”
“Huh?” Damien pulled himself from the cloud of words in his mind, dense and disorienting.
“Where are you from, and what do you do there?” Fior repeated, slower, like Damien couldn’t comprehend simple Key. It was the first time he’d made an effort to converse and not just bark out some command that Damien didn’t intend to follow.
“Oh, I’m the demon lord of Aszath Koth’s son. I’m supposed to oversee the city, but I’ve got people to do that for me while I work on releasing my father from prison.”
Fior had come to stop, features slack likehemight not understand simple Key.
“Too honest?” Damien asked Kaz who still fancied himself a ginger monkey, sitting atop Soot’s back.
“Master always speaks the truth unless deception serves best,” he said, a little squeakier than normal from his fanged mouth.
Fior took a step back from the creature that he was sure shouldn’t be able to speak.
Damien shrugged and continued on. Kalani had disappeared into the trees above them, and the man eventually caught up. “They said you had infernal blood. The planes have been more active lately, and it’s been a problem.”
“Ah, some information,” Damien said wistfully, stepping over a log. “Do tell.”
“It’s too hard to explain. You’ll see.”
With a grunt, Damien looked to Nell, her hair in two long braids flopping about as she scrambled up and over the log. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what we’re doing?”
Her dark eyes only gleamed, and she offered him a berry from her handful of spoils. He chanced that it wasn’t poisonous and swallowed it with a shrug.
It was like that for the next three days, Fior cryptically hinting at a complication from some other plane, the little girl having a fabulous but silent time, Kalani disappearing and reappearing with no warning, and Damien refusing to ask more questions out of sheer spite. The four sat in silence when each evening came, took turns sleeping, and remained unbothered by large, wildwood-dwelling creatures thanks to Soot who eventually warmed to Damien, nuzzling into his hand after a proper apology.
Then they came upon the place they’d set out to find, and Damien did, indeed, see, as he’d been told.
A spire jut up from the earth. It could have been a tree at one time, but Damien wouldn’t call it that now. Blackened, it was as the old woman had said: a thing of rot and corruption and needing absolution, a strange concession for someone infernal, but Damien agreed nonetheless when he saw it towering in the midst of the Innomina Wildwood.
Deadened and gnarled branches reached up leaflessly into a barren patch of the otherwise dense jungle. The twisted bark of this particular species, normally pleasant enough to look at, had turned grotesque and ropy, like a trail of intestines wound up and around the trunk to squeeze its life away. It wasn’t dead, Damien knew just from looking at it, not yet. It certainly smelled of death, of inching closer to a state that was no longer living, but it hung on, perhaps trying to survive the rotting strangle all over it, or perhaps because of it.
When Damien took another step forward, he sank into a black ooze, and when he pulled his boot out, it was covered in a viscous sludge. The rot spread away from the spire, and it had already infected two smaller trees on either side. Each bent away from the source, the far side losing its color while the closer half turned black and gruesome. There had been a third too, he presumed, but it was already crumpled in on itself, the strangest way he’d ever seen a tree fall, inward and into a wet, pulpy pile like it were so full of sludge it had nowhere to go but down.
The similarity to what Damien himself had done a few nights earlier was not lost on him, but that had occurred outside the Innomina Wildwood, and while that had been its own brand of horrific, if he had donethis, he would have expected to have not survived.
“We’re meant to set this right?” Damien asked, unsure if they really could. “Have you tried burning it?”
“It won’t catch,” said Fior. He remained ten paces back with the others, Nell frowning for the first time.
“Let’s try a little infernal fire.” Not entirely convinced himself, he still gestured to Kaz, and the imp hustled over, his form shifting back, the ginger hairs falling away and his leathery skin revealed. Fior made a face—he hadn’t seen Kaz any other way—but it was more one of tired acceptance than horror this time. Kaz’s shift at least brought a little cheer to Nell who clapped.
With a deep breath and intense focus, Kaz whipped his tail hard at the tree from beside Damien. The flames caught, but only for a few seconds, crawling upward and then seeping in. As it fell into the spire and disappeared, only a ghost of the flames was left, and then that too was gone.
Kaz began to whimper out an apology, but Damien waved him away, continuing to circle the thing, hand rubbing his jaw. “How long has it been here?”
