Chapter 30: Chapter: 30 New Spell Card

Shadows danced across the room and the wind caressed my skin, drawing me out of unconsciousness. A lamp on the wall sconce flickered in the breeze of a half-opened window. 

The door opened and Ahri dressed in leggings and a tank top entered. Her skin was pale, her eyes surrounded by dark rings and her nipples pressed against the cotton tank top in a way that made me come awake.

I opened my mouth and said, “You are alive.” My voice was raw and hoarse.

Ahri wiped tears from her eyes and threw her arms around me in a tight hug that both excited and hurt me like hell. 

“You idiot,” she said. “You shouldn't have given me the whole ball, you should have saved some for yourself.”

I started to laugh but the twinges from my ribs stopped me short and I said, “I owe you my life.”

“You make it sound like a bad thing,” said Ahri as she placed her hands on her hips in what was meant to be a serious pose but instead made her look even cuter than usual.

I leaned back in the bed and grunted in pain.

“Time will tell.”

“All you have right now is time.” 

She poured me a glass of water which I sipped carefully before my eyes began to droop again.

“Rest up Talasin. I'll wake you later for dinner.”

---

I woke up to the sound of Ahri humming a lullaby. I kept my eyes shut as I felt her fingers gently run along my chest inspecting my bandages. It was ticklish and I resisted laughing as her fingers ran lower down my stomach. A shiver ran down my spine and my lip twitched in a smile. 

Ahri flushed in surprise as my eyes opened and looked up into her wide purple eyes. 

“You’re awake,” said in a high pitched voice.

She backed away from the bed, her face still red and she crossed the room and poured me a glass of water.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You had me worried there for a second.”

“I feel like I could sleep for the rest of my life and still be tired.”

Ahri’s eyes lit up in a smile and she said, “If you have the energy to be dramatic then you are feeling better.”

“Where am I?”

I looked around the room and saw pink cushions, pink curtains and a pink stuffed doll with beady eyes.

“When Ramogos’ magic healed me,” said Ahri. “I woke up and dragged your half dead body to the nearest house. This as you can tell from all the pink is Madam Myrtle’s cottage. Well it was her cottage before… you know.”

Before her throat was slit and her blood offered to summon a demon lord.

Ahri handed me a bowl of earthy green liquid. 

“Eat this,” she said in her most commanding voice. “It will help restore some of the blood you’ve lost.”

I eyed the stew or whatever the hell it was suspiciously and sniffed it. It smelt like a combination of grass and sand. 

Ahri’s brow furrowed in a frown as she watched me.

She just saved my life, the least I can bloody do is eat her food.

I held the bowl to my lips and gulped down all the slimy liquid as fast as I could. I figured I’d get it all over as quickly as possible. 

“If it tastes bad then it must be good for you,” I said as I pulled a sour face. “Then this stuff must be a miracle cure.” 

The sound of Ahri’s laughter made me feel like everything was going to be ok.

“It's the ground caterpillar,” she said. “You luckily only had to drink it. I had to dry the caterpillars and grind them into a powder. Trust me they smell worse than they taste.”

I looked around the room as I realized that someone was missing.

“Where’s Tana?” I asked.

Ahri’s smile faltered and she said, “We are the only ones who made it.”

I didn't think I’d care about people in Umbra. I’d sort of thought of them as characters in a video game but the news hit me harder than I’d expected. These odd people that we had come to know were now dead. How many more deaths would there be before it was all over?

Ahri took my silence for me wanting more details so she said, “I've searched the houses and found all the bodies. I was just waiting for you to recover enough to help me give them a proper sending off.”

---

The next day it began to rain. Huge towering black clouds rolled in from the north quite suddenly and settled over the entire marshland blotting out all traces of sun and sky as they released torrents of shattering rain which swept through the tiny village with unbelievable ferocity. 

We rested that day and the next and then on the following day we woke up and saw the sun in the sky and the sky filled with carrion birds. It was an unseasonably hot day and the air was rank with the smells of fire and rotting flesh. 

We picked our way through demolished houses and fought off carrion birds to retrieve the swollen corpses of the deceased villagers. 

As I lifted each body and placed it gently in the square I couldn't help but remember each one these people who’d been strangers up until a few days ago. Kurt the butcher wanted to be a ballerina. Madam Myrtle and her obsession with pink. Tana Sol who was going to change the world with science. 

The day stretched on as more and more bodies were uncovered, some too disfigured to identify and other's much too identifiable. We soon stopped counting the bodies. I took my mind off what I was doing and just let my body go through the motions. Pick up, carry, put down, reposition the arms and legs, write down their name and repeat.

The sun was setting when the task was finally done. We had placed the villagers in rows with name tags above each of their heads. 

We raised a monument from carved stone with the names of each of the deceased and a brief description of how they had died. I decided to give each person a proper burial. 

I raised my Mold Earth spell card and said, “I didn't know you half as well as I wish I did. But friendship is not measured in how long it was, but in how good it was.”

I cast Mold Earth and the ground swallowed each person and buried them. 

I looked at Ahri giving her a chance to say something. 

She tossed a handful of sand onto Tana’s grave and said, “May your next life bring you more peace, joy and comfort than you could ever find in this life.” 

---

We took the rest of the day off and the following day we woke early to deal with the one remaining body, the Queen of Darkness. 

Her body lay in a crater beside the altar and was the only corpse the carrion birds refused to touch.

“We can't bury it,” said Ahri. “A curse will be on this land.”

I didn't know anything about curses but I could imagine that her body would poison the earth and the nearby water. 

So we tried burning the demon but every flame that touched her body fizzled and died. I tried binding the demon but all I got was a status message saying invalid target.

“Maybe she’s protected by an artifact,” said Ahri. “Check her body for jewelry.”

That was the last thing I wanted to do. Her body was still perfectly preserved and her face still had the serene beauty of the demon lord but her chest was hollow from Pales blow and her blood soaked the remainder of her body. 

She wore no necklace around her neck and no rings on her fingers. So I peeled off the tattered remains of her armor and inspected her tattooed skin. There was nothing that I could see that looked like an artifact. 

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“Try her boots,” said Ahri.

I gave her a frustrated look but I sat down beside the corpse and pulled off its boots one at a time. Sure enough the Queen of Darkness wore four toe rings on her left foot.

I tried to pry one off but the damn thing wouldn't budge and no knife could cut the toe off. After struggling for twenty minutes I got frustrated and drew out another binding card.

“Let's give this another go.”

I placed the card on the demon and poured power into it. 

* Invalid Target

“Shit.”

Ahri bent over and examined the rings, then she said, “Try bind them.” 

I had spent as much time with the dead as I could stand but I knew our work would not be over till this final task was done. So I followed her suggestion and placed the golden binding card on the Queen’s foot.

* Binding

“Holy shit,” I yelled. “It's working.”

* Binding Complete

* Congratulations you have bound: Demon Prison

“What does it do?” Ahri asked with as much excitement as she could muster in a grave.

I studied the card.

* Demon Prison - Plant four beacons to create a zone that the caster can manipulate according to their will.

- A Mobile Sex Dungeon

“Something about a sex dungeon,” I murmured as I reread the card.

“Fucking demons,” hissed Ahri.

I cast Demon Prison and four tiny flames appeared in my hand.

“Holy shit.” 

“What?” asked Ahri.

“The flames.”

Ahri shook her head.

“You can't see these?”

“What?”

I released a flame and it hovered a few inches above the ground. I repeated this three more times in a rectangle.

* Zone Size Invalid

I readjusted three of the flames placing them closer together then I turned to Ahri and said, “It's not doing anything.”

She frowned at me and shook her head. “I still don't know what the hell you are talking about.”

* Butterfly entered Demon Prison

What the hell was that?

Ahri gasped, pointed and said, “Look at the butterfly. It's moving in slow motion.”

I could sense the butterfly as it flew through the Demon Prison. Its wings beat in slow motion, its antennas twitched as they picked up vibrations in the air. I pressed in with my mind and saw the connections between its joints. 

I concentrated on the sockets holding the wings in place. Two wings popped out of the butterfly and with my mind I rotated them in the air.

“Are you doing that?” asked Ahri.

I nodded not wanting to break my concentration. I focused on reattaching the wings into their sockets and I felt them pop back into place. The tiny flames burnt out and my zone of control ended. 

The butterfly’s wings faltered and it sort of flopped out of the sky and landed on a stick. One of its wings fell off and it crawled along the ground.

“You sick bastard,” said Ahri. “You tortured that poor creature.” 

 

I stared down at the one winged butterfly in shock. If I could dismember a butterfly's wings, what else could I do?

I cast the spell again but this time I placed the flames around the Queen of Darkness. I flicked my wrist and with my mind I cut off her legs and arms and they hung above her body trailing droplets of floating blood

“You don't have to look so pleased with yourself,” said Ahri. “This is fucking grim.”

I ignored her comment as I concentrated on cutting the demon’s limbs in half again and repeated this over and over until a rectangular section of the sky was filled with blood and demon body molecules.

As the wind rose I released the prison and watched as the demon’s remnants were scattered on the breeze.

“And that's a demon’s sex dungeon,” said Ahri. “And I thought foot fetishes were weird.”

“You don't find grinding your partner into a fine powder sexy?” I asked with a smile. 

“No, but you could have warned me before you canceled the spell. I think I breathed in a bit of demon ass.”

I laughed. We were both trying to act cheerful but under the fake smiles and forced laughs we were both shattered and full of sorrow.

Pales’ little display had shown us just how powerless we really were. There was no way in hell that I was going to let those fuckers touch Ahri or I ever again. The harbingers might have infinite life but that didn't make them immortal.

How do you kill a god with infinite life? 

With infinite damage of course.

It was time I built a deck to challenge the gods and tear the grins off of those asshole harbingers.

---

Acquired Spell Card: Demon Prison

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