The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 364: Desert Stories

Chapter 364: Desert Stories

Anko, Ferrovia, and Malzkael made an improvised camp by prying some boxes aside before ducking under the canvas.

"Guess we should have that talk now," Malz said, feeling more energized than she had in ages. Ayther dates may not have been mana-enriched, but after two years of gruel, they were the best food she’d ever tasted.

She’d also grabbed herself a pair of pants and cut a hole for her wing into one of the thin uniform tunics. Deciding to keep the robe from her brief interview with the Duke of Heresy was more a matter of practicality than need, since it seemed of high enough quality to sell or barter.

The catkin - whose variety Malz had yet to guess, but he seemed like an adult even if he was child-sized - clutched his compass with his palm as he regarded her. "I’d very much appreciate it," he said, his tails flowing with curiosity.

Malz turned to Anko, who was experimenting with four swords - one in each hand - and not really paying attention. "Anko?"

"Go for it," she said, before awkwardly managing to parry herself as she dropped three of her newly acquired weapons. "Might as well stick to knives..." she muttered.

"Guess I’ll start..." Malz sighed.

It took hours for the three of them to tell their tales, with Anko interjecting at will to ask questions or add her two coppers before falling asleep. At the end of it, Malz was left with far more questions than answers.

"So... the creator god... and three Eykos -"

"Aikos," Ferro corrected, emphasizing the slight pronunciation difference.

"- Aikos," Malz resisted the urge to roll her eyes, "Sent you on a mission to save your sister."

"They said that continuing to try should put me in touch with someone they want to speak to. But they, I mean Aideaeb, was a little... evasive when it came to specifics. Something about everything happening everywhere, all at once, but passing through a filter or something to be real. It was very hard to follow, and they kept getting weirdly distracted."

"Sounds like it," Malz said. "I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you... And at the same time, I’m kind of jealous. I’ve never met a god, even though a few are supposed to live in Araqlun."

"I honestly can’t say I’d recommend it... leastwise not with Aideaeb. The Aikos though..."

"Are they really going to just... end?" Malz asked.

"It seems like it," Ferro brushed his fingers along the necklace.

Malz felt like there was something he wasn’t quite telling them, but he’d already told them a lot without necessarily trying to convince them to do anything except not sell him to the nearest slaver, which Malz personally found abhorrent.

"But I can’t imagine what you must have gone through," Ferro said. "The, um, torture..."

"I’m compartmentalizing hard right now just to have talked about it. But yeah... I don’t recommend sleeping near me once I get my strength back."

Anko, lying on top of two crates she’d piled uniforms on to make a bed, snored.

The both looked at her as she started to mumble something about "big hands."

"So, uh, what do you think happened to your companions... after they got their wishes?" Malz asked, searching for something to distract her from Anko’s clearly "personal" dreams.

"I don’t know. But Lawre stayed behind," he let out a puff of air through his nostrils, "Might even be older than me by now."

"The time compression, right?"

"I didn’t know it was called that, but yeah. I’m exaggerating a bit though. Things don’t move that fast down there compared to up here."

"And I guess we both know what happened to Santina," Malz took a sip of water from one of the wooden canteens, noting that her body felt sluggish and shocked after hours of eating and talking.

"I really thought he’d choose happiness when Aidaeb offered it... After Santina left, they were pretty sure that he was as good as dead. They said ’Some people just can’t recognize good possibilities for themselves’."

Malz loved dark and wicked things, and amongst them were tales where the darkness won sometimes. And sometimes that was good and necessary, but in the case of Santina, it just seemed... sad. Petty, even...

But as soon as she thought this, Malz compartmentalized the thought. She didn’t want to toss away revenge as something she wanted. Especially if Maledict was designated by the Creator to come out on top of the duel she’d barely escaped.

"Yeah, well, if Aidaeb turns out to be wrong then I won’t shed any tears over a dead Maledict." Malz drank to that, then did her best to lay on her side, having piled some uniforms onto the sand.

Ferro, as he preferred to be called, smiled at her lightly before reaching into his satchel and extracting what looked like the most worn-out book in the universe. Malz felt sorry the moment she saw it, but it was clear he cared for it, judging by all the repairs. She caught a peek at a pair of somewhat newer-looking books as well before he closed his satchel.

Now that the conversation was over, Malz felt she could really check in with her body and figure out what the damage was.

But without the buoying effect of conversation, it wasn’t long until checking in was followed by sleep.

*

Where her conscious mind wandered, Malz’s unconscious placed the traps of memory and imagination. Her dreams became a troubled mix of remembered tortures, both physical and psychic, and the imaginings of Ferro’s adventure mixed with the cold gaze of uncaring gods looming above her.

She woke in a cold sweat, to find Ferro asleep and cross-legged, his book in his lap.

The sound of the wind in the middle of the night came with undertones of scattering sand.

Anko had rolled onto her stomach, and Malz briefly observed that she didn’t snore in that position before she’d mastered herself enough to stop the panic from setting in.

We’re far from... there. I’m safe. These people are... probably safe... She thought as loudly and as often as it took for her to come to focus. She’d spent a month working Anko in the runup to their escape; enough to understand the girl was practically an open book. And Ferro, while he seemed a bit worn down and tense, wouldn’t be much of a threat to her once she got her magic back properly... assuming she could.

As a lesser seraph, she would be quite powerful compared to most mortals on Ayther - at least that was how the story went. But she’d lost one of her physical wings, and that had more than once left her wondering if she’d lost only one of her seraphic ones or two, given her magiform had form.

In any case, she needed to find a Heavenly outpost and warn them about the demons in Heaven’s basement...

And that meant finding out where the Hell they were so she could reach civilization.

Pushing herself off the ground, and feeling every joint in her body thanks to the cold, she tried to crawl out from under their shelter only to get blasted by a faceful of sand the moment she stuck her head out from under the tarp.

After a few moments of coughing and spitting, she returned to her makeshift bed to wait, contemplating her situation.

Magically, she still felt pretty weak.

She had more energy than ever compared to the last two years, but it was still just a fraction of the potential she remembered.

And with her wing not even itching yet with the promise of new feathers, it was going to be a long time until her inflow grew to match the reservoir she’d carefully - and sometimes not so carefully - cultivated.

But lifting a hand, she was able to clean half her face with magic before bottoming out and experiencing the nausea of mana deprivation.

A pitiful performance... but it was a start.

After a few more tries, she sighed at her insufficient performance. That was when she finally noticed the book in Ferro’s lap.

Curiosity drew her to it on hands and knees. Ferro had fallen asleep with it open, so she was able to see it in the light of both moons filtering through their shelter.

What she saw was confusing at first, notably because there seemed to be at least two writers and three kinds of script in play.

Wide, hand-copied text in Common was surrounded by what looked like the rantings of someone who found the author very pedantic. The original author seemed to be somebody named Auric, who laced anecdotes from his life with instructions on the use of basic magics. The name was familiar to her as the guy who’d won Prime designation for the Expedition she’d passed up to give Cassiel a chance at, but she doubted he was the author, given it was written in common instead of Angelic.

But the note-taker - Was it Ferro? - had crossed out many sentences and even an entire paragraph. Adding their own observations in neat, tiny script to maximize their available space.

The third kind of script made her eyes widen as she reached forward, trying to get a better look because it was written in a language she couldn’t read upside down and backward. But one that looked intensely familiar.

The moment she plucked the book off of Ferro’s legs, he started to murmur, "Don’t touch me..."

Though she froze at first, Malz was finally able to retreat with her prize, grateful to have something to do while they waited for the dawn.

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