Miri glanced back at Demas as he rounded the corner and took in the scene. He smiled at her, then bent to intone a prayer over the dying man. Miri had all the reassurance she needed. She charged the towering devil, running forward and putting all her strength and momentum into one great swing of her axe.
The blade bit deep into the creature’s side and erupted in blinding white light—the product of Demas’s blessing. The devil howled as it turned to face her, its flesh burning away from the wound as pale green ichor spilled out. As its eyes fell on her, Miri’s confidence faltered. Fear surged in her chest, sending her heart hammering against her ribs and a chill into the pit of her stomach. Some part of her mind tried to assert that the fear was just a trick of the devil’s magic, but the rest screamed at her to flee. One of the devil’s enormous claws came swinging at her and she scrambled backward, just out of its reach. She wanted nothing more than to keep going, to turn around and run as fast as her legs would take her.
Then a column of white flame streamed down from the slategray sky and engulfed the battlefield. The radiant flames danced over the towering devils’ body, licking at its leathery skin, and it howled in rage and agony. The smaller devils shrieked in pain as well, and three of them rolled to the ground in a desperate, futile attempt to stifle the holy fire before it consumed them. To Miri, though, the flames were soft and comforting, banishing her fear. She could feel the warmth of Demas’s smile in the flames.
The three men looked bewildered as the flames washed down around them, searing their foes but leaving them untouched. Miri noticed that they did not seem to draw comfort from the divine power as she did, and she wondered briefly who they were and what business had brought them into the ruins of the tiefling capital.
Then the bony devil’s stinger stabbed into her shoulder, and agony like nothing she had ever known coursed through her body.
Nowhere had dreamed of Bael Turath, especially in his childhood. In his dreams, though, he’d seen stately mansions and soaring towers, the city as he imagined it had stood at the height of its empire—proud, majestic, and deadly. In every dream, he walked unnoticed through bustling streets until he came to a certain manor house, dark and squat in contrast to the towering buildings around it. As soon as he opened the manor’s door, the city fell into ruin and fiends of the Nine Hells assaulted him from every side, waking him from his dream in a surge of terror.
Echoes of that terror shook his resolve as he and his companions strode through the crumbled gates of the city. His eyes darted around, peering into every crevice and shadow, half-expecting some creature out of nightmare to leap out and attack. He could see tension in Brendis’s shoulders and how tightly the paladin gripped his sword, and wondered whether Brendis were also haunted by old nightmares.
Sherinna, though, seemed completely undaunted by the ancient ruins—or completely unaware of them. She’d been holding the cultist’s parchment inches from her nose for most of the journey, as if by sheer force of will she could command it to reveal the secrets hidden behind the words. She somehow managed to glide over the rubble with her customary grace, even with her eyes fixed on the parchment.
“Sherinna,” Nowhere whispered, “what have you learned? Have you figured out what we’re looking for?”
“Cultists,” she said, not looking up from the parchment. “Or a fragment of the Living Gate.”
“I thought maybe after all that reading you had picked up something more than what the big words said.”
Sherinna shot him a withering glance before returning her gaze to the parchment. “You asked two questions. I chose to answer the second.”
“Then you have learned more?”
“Nothing good.” She sighed and lowered the parchment, looking around as if noticing for the first time that they had reached the ruins. “They’re looking for a fragment of the Living Gate so they can use it in a ritual designed to pierce the barrier between worlds. The bulk of this writing is the formulas of the ritual. They intend to pierce the walls of the Elder Elemental Eye’s prison so it can free itself.”
“Will it work?” Brendis asked.
“That’s just it. The ritual seems coherent, from what I can make out. But some of the components and formulas don’t make sense if the place they’re trying to reach is a primordial’s prison somewhere in the Elemental Chaos.”
“So maybe the ritual will work, but not as they plan,” Nowhere said. “Maybe they’ll bring something else through their portal, instead of the primordial they intend.”
“Something else,” Sherinna said. “Something worse.”
“Worse?” Brendis said. “What could be worse than a primordial? The gods themselves joined in bands of three or five to bring down a single primordial in the Dawn War.”
“Most primordials are much weakened since the Dawn War,” Sherinna said. “And some forces are even stronger than the primordials were at the height of their power.”
Nowhere frowned. “Get to the point, Sherinna. What are we facing?”
She glared at him. “The cultists plan to take this fragment of the Living Gate to Pandemonium and perform their ritual there. Pandemonium was the dominion of a god so evil and so powerful that all the other gods banded together to imprison him. I believe that can mean only one thing: These cultists hope to free the Chained God.”
Brendis’s eyes went wide. “That’s madness.”
“Of course it is,” Nowhere said. “Just like the cultists serving the Fire Lord in Nera were mad. It just means we’d better make sure we stop them.”
Miri stared up at the gaunt devil’s leering face as the venom seared through her veins. Darkness closed around her vision until its visage was all she could see. It shifted, reaching one of its enormous claws toward her.
Brilliant light engulfed her and the devil, casting stark shadows across its angular face as it howled in pain. The fire in Miri’s veins became a refreshing warmth washing through her, Demas’s divine power repairing the damage the poison had caused.
She gripped her axe and swung with all her might at the devil’s bony leg. The blade bit deep, spraying green ichor and splintering bone, knocking the creature’s leg out from under it and sending it sprawling to the ground. She stepped clear of its flailing tail, glancing around to get a sense of the field.
Two of the smaller devils were circling around her, either moving in to attack from her flanks or trying to get past her to Demas. The other four lay dead on the ground. She saw no sign of the three men she’d been trying to rescue, and she frowned.
No time to worry about that now, she told herself. She threw herself in the path of one of the smaller devils, lashing out with a mighty swing of her axe. The blade glanced off the creature’s heavy armor, but the force of the blow sent it staggering across the crumbling cobblestones and it crashed into its companion. Demas sent another burst of divine radiance to consume the devils, and they were gone.
The larger one gingerly got to its clawed feet, favoring the leg Miri had struck. Its tail weaved in the air behind it like a snake ready to strike, and it roared in pain and fury.
The devil’s eyes were tiny points of yellow light sunk deep in gaping black sockets, and it fixed them on Demas. “Your god will not protect you where you are going, cleric,” it called.
“Silence!” Demas answered, his voice charged with divine authority. “My god is the weaver of fate and the voice of prophecy. Do not think that your knowledge surpasses my own.” He lifted his staff in both hands over his head, and the pure light of the sun washed out from him.
The devil recoiled, shielding its eyes from the divine light, and Miri rushed forward again. With one swing, she swept the devil’s feet out from under it again. She spun with the momentum of her axe, then brought it down to cleave the monster’s head from its bony neck.