The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 275: The Grey City

Chapter 275: The Grey City

Amarena gripped her sword.

In the time since she’d come to Isegart, she’d adopted a new blade, since her old one was presently lodged in the horn of the massive lake beast, below the frozen ice of Lost Lake, which was hardly lost, since everyone in Isegart knew where it was, but it did tend to disappear at times that weren’t summer... which Isegart would not see for a long, long time thanks to the Eye of Hell’s ash plumes, which were darkening the whole of Ayther.

Beyond the crenellations of the wall upon which they trained, a vast stretch of white spread unbroken - winter, come early because of the Eye. The sky above was clear, with the majority a semi-permanent orange and yellow, the only blue far to the south. Neither the red-black moon of Hell nor the green moon of Heaven were visible, and the darkened blue-purple far to the south indicated that it should have been night, if not for the perpetual day this close to Ayther’s axis.

"Quit cloud-watching and fight!" her instructor, a Warmancer of the Order Justiciam, the giant named Demon Breaker Halie, shouted.

The shout came from below, and Amarena sped into a forward step, throwing a backward kick into the mace-staff that came from below.

Halie popped out of the ground a moment later, or rather out of a portal just above the ground, the strange conjunctions of gravity slightly disorienting her as she landed, the portal closing between her legs.

"You should forgive me for watching for your preferred vectors," Amarena scowled. She was a demon with a smokey voice and a body covered in spines and scutes.

Halie, giant though she was, liked to attack from the air, since as an earthbound demon, Amarena was especially vulnerable from above. Trying to take advantage of the half-second Halie took to orient herself after passing through her portal, Amarena put some rage into her strike, drawing on her mavenry for added speed as she tucked her shoulder in for a tackle...

Only, she missed, as Halie put her legs together and jumped back down into a new portal, one that put her directly behind her pupil, where she laid her mace-staff across Amarena’s back.

"That’s good for today," she said, withdrawing the mace-staff from Amarena’s back and storing it in her dimensional storage.

"You need not be afraid of injuring me," Amarena scoffed.

"We have learned that your mavenry for speed ages you when it accelerates the healing of your wounds or there is low ambient mana. I would be a poor teacher if I crippled my own student at every opportunity-"

"I don’t want your pity!"

"-Besides, you have another fight today. One you are destined for."

Amarena crossed her massive arms. "May I ask how you know that?" Though Halie often had plausible explanations, some of the things she said and did were just damned mysterious. Unlike the rest of the Valrians who protected the city, Amarena was not inclined to leave such mysteries unconfronted.

"Another one of the many things you mysteriously know? Like when you "predicted" Pride would attack Nyandor?"

"I didn’t predict it. I said it was highly likely."

"And yet it came to pass. For as long as you keep hiding things from me, I don’t think I will ever trust you."

"You shouldn’t," Halie said. "You will need to be wary for the years ahead."

"Do you ever plan on telling me how you know so much?"

"Practice. Reading-"

"You know what I mean!"

"-And listening to those who care about me. There will be a time that all is revealed to you, but by then I will be dead."

Amarena scowled. Halie’s mavenry was powerful, allowing her to create portals to any place she could see nearby. In close quarters, Amarena had yet to lay a single blow on her, and had barely drawn her into blocking at times. She always changed up her weapons, but for the last few days, she’d been using a mace-staff exclusively.

Progress was frustratingly slow, which for Amarena - whose mavenry granted her unnatural speed of body and mind - was doubly infuriating.

"If you want to begin the reification of your soul and body, you need to get beyond the wrath Leviathan put in you. Though it is just a guess, I believe she wanted you to figure that out, since I know you have that potential."

"Hmph," Amarena looked away, not wanting to be reminded of her mother, Leviathan, Duke of Wrath, dead at the hands of the Son of Heaven. The strongest demon, laid low by Heaven beneath the glare of a cowardly weapon... one capable of striking Hell without the angels needing to cross the void.

"Go rest. Here," she reached into her pocket and held out a few gold coins.

"What is this for?"

"There is a restaurant in town, Slowick’s. I would like for you to bring me one of their mammoth steaks with hawthorn butter, bone broth, and vegetables. Make sure the cook isn’t Taylor, his cooking is bullshit." She dropped the coins in Amarena’s hand. "And get yourself whatever you want."

Amarena grunted and stashed her borrowed sword in one of the holders.

"Rena, are you sure you don’t want to go armed?" Halie asked. Weirdly she only used Amarena’s shorthand name when neither of them had weapons in hand.

"I’m a demon. I’m always armed," Amarena replied, before heading down the wall and into blocky, grey city.

Isegart was a cramped city. Tall, grey towers hid behind the taller outer wall. All of them were near-uniform in being unadorned grey stone, with narrow windows and their own crenelations on their rooftops. It was a city aesthetically worthy of Hell, in Amarena’s eyes, yet learning the origin of Isegart made the style make sense.

Isegart used to be a prison. A city of oath-breakers, murderers, and political prisoners, and thus the only surviving city of the once-vaunted mankin empire of Valria, which collapsed in the wake of a Heavenswar so devastating it displaced most of Ayther’s populations, especially mankin - elves, humans, giants, and orcs - who tended to centralize a lot more compared to beastkin. Only the world tree nations and the undying city of Aaru could claim longer histories, and even those were fragmented by purges and disasters.

What it lacked in color above, Isegart made up for on the streets.

Stretched between each building were colorfully dyed sheets, all of them bearing a single enchantment for warmth that caused snow to melt and slide down to their corners, held in at the edges, where thicker bands of strings guided the water droplets to strings that hung down to just above the open water drains.

Some houses put little metal xylos arranged in a circle beneath the droplet cloths, and the melted drops would hit the angled bits of metal to generate perpetual tinkling tunes whenever it snowed - Amarena doubted this place had ever seen rain. The presence of chairs near these instruments indicated how many Isegartians would sit, listening to pass the time or sharing one of the strong brews whose mix of scents filled the air.

Almost everyone seemed to brew their own beer. The almost uniform cold, dry conditions were perfect for controlling the process. Amarena must have tried fifty unnamed kinds, with a new one brought to her by Halie almost every other day. The woman was a legend, but notoriously private.

It had taken Amarena a few weeks to get the hang of navigating the city, which was most easily done by heading to the Circle, which was the grand plaza at the core of the city, where most of its businesses were, and then heading down one of the eight radians.

Looking over the Circle was Fortress Valrgard, built into the side of a mountain whose sides had been carved into sheer, unclimbable heights. It was the former prison, and had once been named Fortress Isegart before the end of Valria. The city that took its name largely copied its style, with another rule seeming to be that buildings closer to the fortress could not exceed two stories.

Those buildings were older and wider, with large rooftop gardens... and it had taken only a few days after arriving for Amarena to figure out that everything was designed to maximize the damage that the city could do to an invading force. Every house was made of stone, and each was virtually its own tower - from which mages and archers could rain death into the narrow alleys, many of which dead-ended at the sub-walls dividing the city’s eight districts.

And the closer one got to the Fortress Valrgard, the deadlier invading would get.

That fortress hosted the entire leadership of the Valrian order, who alone occupied it with some of the strongest knight mages and mavens in the world.

Amarena could identify her quarters easily since she and Halie roomed above the exit where the fortress met the western wall. Cramped quarters, for a pair of pariahs, which Halie had become the moment she took Amarena, a demon, under her wing.

But walking down the street, she received no challenges as the common folk took one look at her badge and nodded their respects. Maybe they were just convincing themselves she was demonkin, instead of a full demon... The fact that there were no other knights or watchmen around made her wonder exactly what sort of fight Halie thought she was going to have... unless she meant they would spar again.

She heard the shouting well before she spotted the restaurant.