Chapter 188: Holy Flames
While Ashlynn enjoyed the remainder of the masquerade ball with Nyrielle and her new thorny protector, a very different ceremony was taking place on the site of what had once been a village belonging to the Heartwood Clan.
Thick woodsmoke filled the air along with the stench of burning flesh. Heaps of logs had been piled into grand funeral pyres that stood as tall as any of the men responsible for constructing them.
It had taken days to retrieve all of the bodies of the fallen after the demons shattered their own dam and unleashed a flood of mud and water on Owain’s hunting party. Some men had been buried so deep in the mud that they were only found with the use of hunting dogs.
Left to his own devices, Owain wouldn’t have spent the time to retrieve every lost member of their party but in the presence of Inquisitor Diarmuid and the other men from the Church, there was little he could do but spend the time to see that each and every person was found, no matter how far the flood carried them from the site of the ambush.
While the hunt for the missing dragged on, Owain vented his rage by tracking and hunting as many fleeing demons as he could. When he reached the village after the flood it was immediately obvious that most of its occupants had fled at least one if not two days in advance.
A few aged demons, likely too old and frail to make the trip to the Vale of Mists, had remained behind. Even the elderly flat tailed demons had proved themselves to be a dangerous threat. Some propped bows on stumps or branches in order to draw them like an improvised ballista. Others had rigged traps of their own, ready to drop sharpened stakes or heavy logs on anyone who came close enough to them to claim their lives.
Every single demon who remained seemed to burn with a desire to take down at least one human with them when they died. The only real satisfaction Owain had found in exterminating them came when he barged into one of their underground burrows and found a heavily pregnant woman guarded by a young warrior that Owain assumed to be her husband.
A man fighting to save his wife in child was a force to be reckoned with and Owain had taken great delight in dismembering the demon before his wife’s horrified gaze. Owain ordered the pregnant demon to be hauled away in chains. If she survived to give birth, perhaps her children could be trained as infiltrators and spies or at least raised into vicious attack dogs.
No one had ever succeeded in raising captive demons before. But, after the difficulty of digging just one village of flat-tailed demons out of the hillside, Owain was willing to consider more insidious methods even if it would take more than a decade to bear fruit. If he failed, it wouldn’t be too late to slaughter them a few years from now and wash his hands of any problems they caused.