HankTheMoose
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3.21 Pied Piper
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 16:09:36 +0000 UTCAnother one hot off the presses. I caught another (or maybe the same again) strain of toddler sickness, but the chapter's done! And with that, we resume Patreon billing and the regular posting schedule. Happy New Year!
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“Hold on a minute, now,” Uriah said. “You can’t seriously be planning to release a live ogre in the middle of a village. You know they eat people, right?”
“He’s right.” Nirlig chimed in. “Ogres are dangerous. Stealthy, too, for their size. If he starts picking people off in the woods, there’s no guarantee they’d ever manage to put him down. They’re lucky they even managed to find this one’s parents. Maybe it’s because they had a kid with them?”
During his academy days, Bernt had spent a lot of time trying to learn as much as he could about the Beseri wildlands and what came out of them. This was where he’d dreamed of making a name for himself and launching his career as an adventurer, after all. Ogres were near the top of the food chain – below the lesser dragons but above nearly everything else. They weren’t intelligent as humanoids went, but they didn’t need to be. They were fast, tough, and they could blend into their environment thanks to their rock-like skin. This allowed them to hunt by ambush, despite their size.
“I’m not going to disobey Ruzinia just because you aren’t comfortable.” Torvald said, drawing his sword and leaping over the low wall. “Besides. Look at him. He’s clearly terrified of people. I doubt he’ll ever go near civilization again.”
“Stop!” the gnome called out as Torvald swung the weapon down at the massive chain. At best, the swing should have broken the sword. Instead, light flashed and the struck link shattered with a sound like a bell. Paladins acting in the course of their duties didn’t have to worry about silly things like common sense.
Runty flinched at the sound and rose of his feet, his breath condensing in a massive plume in the wintery air. He towered over the group, easily twice as tall as a man and three times as wide, despite his bony frame.
Torvald took a step back and sheathed his weapon before holding out both hands.
“It’s alright, buddy. You can leave. Just let me get the rest of that chain off.”
The creature stared down at the paladin in plain bewilderment. Bernt wasn’t sure if he even had the capacity to understand human language. Torvald took a step toward the ogre and it didn’t react. That was probably a good sign, right?
“Hey! What’s going on here?” A voice called, followed by a few other cries from down the street. Bernt turned to find an angry-looking man approaching, followed by several others. They were carrying hoes and pitchforks – farmers.
“Nils, did you bring these people here? What are they doing with the runt?” he asked the gnome, who had pulled Linnie behind him at the others’ approach.
“They’re Ruzinians.” Nils replied, nodding toward Torvald. “They said they’re here to free him.”
“Idiot! They’re probably adventurers from Earfield, I bet the baron sent them to poach him,” the angry farmer spat, turning toward Torvald. “You, get away from there! This doesn’t have to get ugly, but it will if you don’t mind yourself.”
Bernt gripped his staff nervously. He wasn’t going to let them get in Torvald’s way. Ogres were dangerous monsters and killing them if they threatened your village was just standard procedure – though normally the sort of thing a village would submit to the adventurers guild. But this… whatever this was, was wrong.
Torvald ignored the man, taking another step closer to the ogre and reaching forward to grab the chain that was still threaded through the loops on his manacles. With a clinking noise, he began to pull it free. The farmer made a choking noise and stepped forward, but Nirlig stepped up and blocked his progress with his spear.
Bernt didn’t want to fight these people. They were Beseri citizens who hadn’t actually done anything illegal. Fighting them could carry serious consequences. Maybe he could just scare them a little? Not moving so as not to provoke a response, Bernt visualized the spellform for a torch spell and, trying something new, routed the spell out through the top of his head. The light blazed brightly overhead, drawing everyone's attention and casting shadows away from him.
“He's not an adventurer.” Bernt said. “And you really don’t want to find out what happens if you step in front of a paladin while he’s trying to work.”
They flinched back and backed up, staring fearfully at the flame. It was harmless, of course, but they didn’t know that. Seeing their terrified faces, he suddenly felt like a bully. Still, it beat having to actually harm them. He didn’t have any gentle, non-lethal methods to deal with this.
There was a grunting noise behind him, followed by a loud groaning noise that sounded vaguely like “Noooo.”
Bernt whirled around to see the ogre flailing its long arms from side to side, its eyes rolling around in their sockets in terror. Torvald dove back, crouching against the low wall to avoid an errant blow. Then something extinguished Bernt’s torch spell and water splashed into his ear so hard that he took an involuntary step forward.
“Damnit, no fire!” Uriah shouted.
The villagers screamed and scattered, running for cover. All except Nils and Linnie, who was trying to run toward the ogre as her father tried to hold her back. The low wall of the enclosure shattered and Runty stumbled out into the street. He was clearly distraught, turning in a circle as if trying to keep an eye on everyone at once.
“Runty!” Linnie shouted. “It’s okay, you’re safe!” The ogre’s head whipped around, eyes focusing on the tiny gnome girl.
Nils squeaked in terror and pulled her back down the street a few more steps, trying to shush her as she continued to try to reassure the gigantic monster. Runty just stared at Linnie, as if trying to make sense of the scene.
Into that moment of almost-quiet, a pure, silvery note cut through the sense of chaos. Bernt suddenly felt safe, somehow. Relaxed, even. Before he knew what was happening, he’d taken a step forward. The movement shook something loose in his mind and he stopped, shaking his head. What the hells was that?
Runty, the gnomes and, surprisingly, Uriah were slowly shuffling toward the source of the music – Elyn. The bard held her flute to her lips and took slow, even steps in time with the music, heading down the street toward and out of the village. A second later, Torvald emerged from the ogre’s enclosure, looking a little bruised. There was a soft halo of light around his head, and he looked totally unaffected. Nirlig, who’d been standing still, shook his head as he fought free of the effect of Elyn’s magic much the same way that Bernt had done moments earlier.
They exchanged a look.
“I guess she’s getting the ogre out of the village?” Bernt said.
Torvald spared a glance back the other way, where most of the villagers had gone. It was deserted. Clearly, nobody wanted to get involved at this point.
“Alright, that’s probably for the best. Let’s go make sure nothing happens to the gnomes when she quits playing.”
They hurried to catch up, which didn’t take long considering their sedate pace. They were barely fifty steps out of the village when Nirlig shook Uriah out of his stupor. Meanwhile, Bernt and Torvald grabbed the gnomes and pulled them back, giving them a little more distance from Elyn. Nils clutched at his daughter in horror when he realized what had happened.
“What are you?” he hissed at them, watching as the huge ogre continued to shuffle after the half-elf. Linnie, meanwhile, still seemed more concerned about Runty than anything else.
“That’s not nice,” she complained. “You shouldn’t do that to him! What if he doesn’t know where he is when he wakes up?”
Torvald smiled at her and crouched down to her level. “He’s going to wake up somewhere without walls, without chains, without fields to plow, and without mean people. How do you think he’s going to feel?”
Linnie’s lip quivered and she sniffed, her eyes watering. “But how will he know how to find me?”
Nils let out a near-hysterical giggle at that. “Linnie, dear. Runty is going to need to stay far away from the farmers, remember? They’ll hurt him if they see him again, or try to put him back to work. Sometimes, doing what’s best for someone means you have to let go, okay? Let’s go home.”
The tiny gnome hung her head, tears running down her face as she sobbed. “Okay, daddy.”
***
Jori kept her nose in the air as she flitted from rock to rock, keeping herself as low to the ground as she could.
Tallash’s stench was strong here – old, rank blood mixed with a light sulfur undertone, as if someone had spiced a week-old corpse.
She was getting close.
They had captured more than twenty imps, so far. Most of them were still spawnlings, having been denied the soul fragments they needed to evolve even once. Four had taken the first step, either by circumventing their obligation to Tallash through some technicality, or by doing something to earn a reward. They were the most important imps to capture, though Jori wanted to get as many away from her enemy as she could before they struck.
The imps would be obligated to defend the fiend when they moved on him, and she didn’t want to kill her cousins in this place. Not if she could help it. In this world – the real world – death was not a simple inconvenience. They needed to isolate him as much as possible before they struck, so they could kill him without having to face anyone else, first.
Unfortunately, she didn’t know how many imps there were in total. Her current prisoners wouldn’t tell her – apparently telling her anything useful would violate their obligations.
“Cowards,” she grumbled quietly to herself as she ducked toward another rock. Remembering their resistance to questioning irked her.
Demonic hierarchies weren’t magically sealed like agreements with warlocks, they were just brutally enforced. They could tell her, if they were brave enough. The truth was that they didn’t really believe that she could kill the demon, even though she had Ed with her and everything. At least, they didn’t want to risk it. Sure, she could have forced them to talk if she’d been prepared to use torture. But she wasn’t.
That would make her exactly like every other demon, and every other demon was doing it wrong. Mortals didn’t have to torture each other to create power structures or to enforce loyalty. They didn’t even always use contracts! Bernt certainly hadn’t ever harmed or threatened her. He’d been nice to her, had given her a safe place to sleep and fed her tasty food.
That’s what this was all about. She had to show them.
A surprisingly loud smacking noise drew Jori out of her thoughts and she ducked down even further, swiveling her ears to try to orient to the sound. A moment later, she had it. Carefully and without making a sound, she shifted around the stone and peeked around the side.
A large blood fiend sat on a rock, no more than ten steps away. Its disgusting, wet-looking skin hung off of it in shapeless, flabby rolls, partially hiding long arms and legs. As she watched, it lifted what looked like an imp’s arm to its oddly protruding maw and tore some of the stringy meat from it.
Jori shuddered and pulled back. She didn’t look too closely at the ground, where the body lay. She didn’t want to know who had become the thing’s dinner today.
Comments
Antony Claughton
That demon needs to die …
