The Demon Queen Wants To Live.

The sound of the horn split the night in two. I had heard many warhorns in my time, and they had carried a different weight. The weight of ten thousand demons moving as one.

The sound of this horn was different. It carried a single high note, one that seemed to fill the space we were all in. The warhorns of my horde had a rather simple purpose -to announce that we were here, and that all resistance was meaningless. I thought the message of this horn was just as simple. We are already here.

The soldiers moved before the shrill note died. Every man and woman in the column was on his feet and armed within three breaths. Whatever else I thought of these people, their soldiers were drilled. I would give them that much. I hurriedly pressed the egg back into the satchel, feeling its warmth through the cloth. It pulsed once and I pressed it tighter against my side.

“Formation!” The Inker’s voice cracked across the camp. The man had hurried out of his tent, and both of his marks were blazing -the horned shape and the plant. “Men! Form a damned ring around the Consecrated! Nothing touches them! If its between protecting them and death, then I hope you all remember the oaths you took!”

Many of the soldiers surrounded us at that. No soldiers became four soldiers, and then four became six became eight, and they formed a wall of silver armor on every side of us. The firelight from our modest camp caught their weapons and made them gleam. This was a cage, of a kind. One meant to protect us, rather than do anything else.

“Lys.” Ash was beside me, her sword already drawn. Her voice was low and steady. “Stay close.”

“I am not the one who needs protecting,” I said. This was not entirely true. My mana reserves were not what I would have liked. I hadn’t had time to draw it in properly. I had enough to use Ruin or Bloom almost a dozen or so times, little more. I felt the egg pulse again. Perhaps Ash’s unneeded concern was not quite so unneeded.

The first attackers came from the treeline to the west. I saw them before the soldiers did, because I had spent centuries watching things emerge from darkness. They were not what I expected.

They were humans, that was the first thought. But they were strange for humans. They had brightly colored hair in fiery reds or deep blues or forest greens. Even some bright pinks. They had eyes that glowed in the night and skin that was just a shade too bright or dark. No humans I had seen had ever looked like that. Demonbloods, that soldier had muttered. I suspected this was what he meant.

There were two dozen of them, perhaps more, pouring from the trees in a loose formation. They wore mismatched armour made of leathers and scavenged pieces that did not match. Their weapons were similarly varied and similarly shabby looking.

Their marks were far more impressive. The closest fighter was a Demonblood woman with hair the color of ash and the faintest nubs where horns might have been. On her forearms, her two marks went beyond simple Lines. The ink had spread in branching patterns, outward from the central stroke. Many of the soldiers around me had marks like these. They were the next stage from Line -I was sure of it.

More fighters followed her. A Demonblood man with gleaming silver eyes. He was tall and had a glowing red mark that had filled into a solid shape on his left arm. It was in the shape of a flame. His sword was wreathed in a fire that burned deep red, and the fire was not separate from the blade. When he swung, the arc it cut through the air shot forth gouts of fire that traveled in the same arc.

To his left, I saw someone else, a girl, one who couldn't have been much older than Sara, riding a massive green wolf made of light. The wolf darted forward like a thing alive. It dodged attacks from the rear and lunged at unsuspecting men. Its motions were fluid, and the little girl was laughing. I could not help but suspect that she was not controlling this creature. The wolf snarled, and one of the nearest men simply fell to his knees, though there had been no attack that I could see.

Even here, even now, the hunger for knowledge in me was sharp. These people carried power I did not yet understand, arranged in stages the Inker had refused to share with me. The silver soldiers themselves had their own matching powers as they met the line of Demonbloods, in as many varieties. At least two men’s bodies were wreathed in strange blue flame as they charged forward.

“The mana,” Ash whispered next to me. Ash had felt it too then.

“It’s heavier,” I whispered back.

The power these fighters, and all of the soldiers, wielded was denser than what we had been drawing from the air. It was not quite as heavy as the mana of the old world, but it was thicker than anything I had felt in this time. There was a weight to it. No, that was the smallest part of the strangeness. All of the mana around me had a flavor. I did not know mana could have one. The air tasted of fire and wind and lightning and other things besides.

This had to be what the Inker had called Essence. The power he had refused to explain on the road. Whatever it was, everyone but the two of us had it.

The battle was not kind to the warriors who came from the forest. For all their different powers, the fighters were both outnumbered and outcoordinated. The silver soldiers fought in groups of three. One man would charge forward, one man would cover him from the rear with long range attacks. One man would stand between the two, offering support to whichever needed it.

The fire-swordsman cut down one soldier and a second closed the gap before the blood had hit the ground. The first soldier was already healed, his entire body glowing with brilliant green light.

The girl with the green wolf was driven back by two men working in concert, lightning arcing from their outstretched fingers. Another one was covering both of them, keeping the wolf from flanking either. The girl had to pull back, lest she get surrounded. Everywhere I looked, the outcome was the same. These Demonbloods had impressive powers, and yet they weren’t nearly impressive enough. It was a rather pitiful attack.

The soldier standing directly in front of me buckled backward. A sharp spear of rock had pierced his silver breastplate, lifting him off his feet and pinning him in the air. Blood sprayed in a hot, messy arc, dotting the dirt inches from my shoes. The spear retreated. He hit the ground and did not rise.

For a fraction of a second, the ring around us broke. A Demonblood man with wild blue hair met my eyes through the gap, raising a rusted axe. The axe was glowing blue. I could hear the crackle of lightning from the steel. Damn it. I raised my right hand.

Before he could swing or before I could use Ruin, Ash stepped into the breach, her sword parrying the blow with a screech of steel. She was pushed back, but she’d bought time. A heartbeat later, two silver soldiers stepped up, ran the attacker through, and the wall closed again.

I stepped back, my heart beating faster than it should have. “You alright?” Ash asked, having to shout to be heard.

“Yes,” I said. I did not need her help…but I did not mind it. I watched past the perimeter again.

More of these attackers died. I watched them die, until their two dozen had been cut down by a fourth.

Something in my chest tightened that had no business tightening. These were strangers. I owed them nothing. They had attacked our escort, which made them my enemies by any reasonable measure. They were also Demonbloods. The name alone meant one thing. That these people had at least a shred of the blood that ran through my own veins. I did not need to know what they were called to see the remnants of my kind in them. And now they were being killed by-

I stopped the train of thought before it finished. I pressed the satchel closer. These people were fools. To attack greater numbers with seemingly no plan at all was to sign one’s own death warrant. I would not feel a thing for f-

Something in the air shifted. It was a pressure in the air that was heavier even than the strange Essence being flung about all around us. I was not the only one. All around me, the soldiers tensed, their marks flared as they looked everywhere at once. My marks pulsed -the Requiem and the Cradle both. Power ever calls to power.

She came from the north. I saw her before any of the others seemed to, and every step she took made the pressure deepen. Her skin was the purest silver, as if someone had poured molten metal over flesh and let it cool into something alive. Three horns jutted from her skull, each one almost as long and thick as my own. Her eyes were violet and they bled that color, until I could almost see it trailing in the air behind her.

It was her mark I noticed first. The mark on her right arm was neither a Line, nor the branching patterns of the others. It was not even a full shape -that seemed to be rarer than both of the first two. Her mark was a dense knot of silver ink in the shape of a mirror that seemed to twist and rotate when I looked at it. Even from this distance, even through the ring of soldiers around me, I could feel the gap. The gap between her mark and everyone else’s was the gap between a campfire and the sun.

She raised her left hand. The air in front of her rippled, and from nothing shapes began to form.

They were constructs, clearly, and different from the single green wolf that the small girl had been directing. These shapes were black, vaguely humanoid, each one the size of the woman herself. Even as I watched, the black faded, and each shape gained features. Hair, skin, limbs. In only moments, they resembled the half-demon herself. The number of these strange copies rose. There were three of them. Then five and then eight. They kept multiplying, until there were two dozen of them, perhaps more.

At some silent command that I missed, the constructs moved. Each one seemed to choose its own direction. One of them paused and turned its head, regarding a cluster of soldiers the way a great beast regards prey it has already decided to take. Then it moved.

No constructs in my time could behave this way. One of my generals once had the power to control puppets. Golems that she directed on their own. None of them could operate in this way, in this many directions at once. None of them could be made to look like anything but what they were. In my watching, I had lost sight of where the half-demon herself had stood, and now it was impossible to find her, amidst all the copies. Damn it.

Those copies rushed forward, met the soldiers in silver. Each one had a weapon. Greatswords, warhammers, shields, knives. A few hung back with gleaming bows. The tide of the battle reversed in seconds. These constructs had no special powers of their own, but they were fast. Men and women screamed, now outnumbered instead of outnumbering.

The Inker stepped forward then. He must have known the difference in marks that I could only feel. To his credit, or perhaps to his stupidity, the man did not hesitate. Both of his marks blazed. He raised his hands toward the silver woman and something invisible struck one of the clones. The clone did not so much as flinch. Whatever he had thrown at her slid off like rain from stone. The clone’s violet eyes found him, and its eyes caught firelight as it smiled.

“You damned Smears! You would dare besmirch a Rune!” The Inker roared, his hand on a massive brown greatsword I had never seen on him before. His marks blazed brighter still. “I will have your head for this demon!” He charged forward, his entire body glowing with a light-brown aura. Two of the clones stopped to meet him.

Then they clashed and the shockwave of it hit the formation. The soldiers around us staggered. Three of them went to their knees. I braced but there was nothing to brace against.

The second wave came before the first had settled. I felt it in my teeth. My right hand clutched the satchel -the egg, the egg, the egg- and my left hand found the hem of Ash’s dress. The wall in front of me parted, just for a second.

Then something came, caught me across the shoulders. I did not know where it came from, only that in one moment I was standing, and the next my feet left the ground. Cloth tore in my grasp. “Lysanthia!” I heard Ash scream.

For one disorienting moment there was nothing beneath me, and then I was skidding back. I fell down the edge of a small slope, already rolling before I could catch myself. I curled my body around the satchel on the way down. The world became a blur of dark. I hit something -a root, perhaps a stone- and stopped.

From here, the sound of it had dimmed. I could somewhat hear the clash of power, the shouts of men. I could even feel some of the pressure from the place above. Still, the sound was muffled now as if heard through a wall of lava.

I lay still and took stock. I was not particularly injured, at least, not from whatever had hit me. My left shoulder had hit the ground hard enough to leave a throb. My dress was torn at the hem. None of it mattered. The satchel was still pressed against my chest. I opened it with shaking hands.

The egg sat in its nest of cloth, warm and whole. The gold of the shell caught the faintest light of fire filtering through the canopy above. The black lines drank in the night. It pulsed once beneath my fingers. I held it there for three breaths, feeling the rhythm. It was steady.

“You are fine,” I told it. Then, because this was becoming a habit, I told it again. “You are fine.”

I closed the satchel and rose. The slope I had tumbled down was rather steep -perhaps thirty paces of loose earth. At the top, firelight flickered and shadows moved. Ash was up there, somewhere. So was the Inker, not that he particularly mattered. I needed to find Ash, and I needed to find her fast. The blast might not have just caught me, and I suspected she was not as resilient as I. I did not move. Something was wrong.

The air here was still. Too still. It was no trick of mana that made me feel that something was off. No Skill. No innate Trait. It was simply an instinct born from centuries of living. I reached for the Requiem. I did not have enough power to use it for long, but Ruin made that rather moot so far.

The voice came from behind me. “It seems you’re not injured at least. Good.”

The words were quiet and they carried the cadence of someone who had all the time in the world, even as a battle raged on the hill above us. I turned.

She stood ten paces away, between two pale trees. Silver skin caught the faintest trace of moonlight. Three horns rose from her skull, each one dark. Her eyes found mine. Violet eyes met my red ones. The silver woman tilted her head. Then, oddly, she smiled.

“Sit down,” she said. “We have much to discuss, Sister.”