Katarina started to speak but held her tongue and glanced to Kari.
“Well, it turns out some of our suspicions are correct,” Kari said at last, rising. Her legs were finally starting to feel normal again, and she paced around a bit to get full feeling back in them. The cool stone floor of the temple helped a little. “Emma and this succubus—Turillia, I guess—are indeed trying to kill each other. I still don’t know exactly why, but I guess that’s not really our concern. Gods, but what we saw in that graveyard…”
“The entire grounds are a mess; what transpired there?” Saracht asked when Kari paused.
“From what we saw, Turillia raised corpses to attack Emma. And then Emma… raised pretty much the entire graveyard at once in answer, including your two slain guards,” Kari explained. She was met by many sets of wide eyes. “That was when the werewolves showed up. They were intent on destroying the undead and the demons, just like Sharyn said, but they weren’t able to lay a claw on either Turillia or Emma.”
“Did Emma or Turillia manage to wound one another?”
“No,” Kari answered, and she shook her head with a sigh. “No, they mostly attacked each other indirectly—with the undead, by provoking the werewolves, and I guess by provoking me and Sharyn, too. Emma kept hitting the werewolves—and us, once—with lightning, but she wasn’t trying to kill them, just aggravate them so they’d tear Turillia apart. She destroyed most of the undead in the process, so I’m not sure why she raised them in the first place. Then she left, expecting the werewolves to kill us and the succubus.”
“Obviously, they didn’t,” Sharyn muttered.
“The werewolves didn’t attack you?” Eli asked.
“No. In fact, they helped Sharyn try to kill Turillia. I guess Sharyn was being modest about how well she knew them; they knew her and trusted her. One even stopped her from charging at Turillia. Another died fighting the succubus, I think, but they drove her off, and smashed the rest of the undead. They started to come for me, but Sharyn… got between us and convinced them to leave. Thank you for that, Sharyn.”
The ranger waved off the comment, but Eli gave her a nod of respect. “Our fight with BlackWing was just as odd,” Eli offered. “I don’t think we need to go into too much detail, but… well, I’ll let Katarina explain what he was.”
Katarina shrugged. “Do you know of any demons that are just shadowy forms?”
“A shadow demon?” Kari thought about it for a minute. Most of her studies at the Academy had revolved around serilian and underworld demons, but there were others. Encounters with shadow demons were few and far between over the history of Citaria. Though the Order knew of them, not much was known about where they came from or what their motivations were, aside from death and destruction. If she remembered correctly, there hadn’t been an encounter with a shadow demon in almost a thousand years. “Yes, they teach about them a little at the Academy, but there hasn’t been a report of one in… a long time.”
“Piotyr drove it out of BlackWing’s body,” Katarina said. The two exchanged a smile. There was a sense of kinship there, no doubt from having shared in such a trial. Thankfully, Katarina’s first adventure having been with many serilian-rir had kept her mind more open than a paladin’s might normally be. “Once it was forced out, BlackWing turned to dust, but the shadow demon hardly seemed to care. It told us all we’d managed to do is delay our own deaths.”
“BlackWing was possessed?” Kari blurted, and she shook her head.
She tried to see the bigger picture after what she’d seen in the graveyard, and now with the revelation about BlackWing. The puzzle was so convoluted, and while her friends had shared details of their respective battles, she’d thought perhaps the entire situation was a set of unrelated coincidences. There was something missing; BlackWing had spoken of a ritual, but had he meant raising the undead in the cemetery? Or was there a portal, or altar, or some other dark magic that was being fed by the murders, the corpse raisings, and the mayhem around the city? And how did a shadow demon fit into all of it?
“…and he had ridiculously potent poison in his fangs,” she overheard Eli say. “I think I felt the same thing when the succubus bit me.”
“Of course,” Kari said, bringing her friends’ conversation to a halt. Kari looked around and reconsidered the events of the past few weeks. She wished Dominick was with them but shrugged it off; she would rather he stayed safe until the situation was dealt with. Kari let out a long but quiet sigh while she went through her theory, and her friends waited for her to explain.
Marshal Saracht was the first to run out of patience. “What are you thinking?”
“BlackWing said the pattern has been right in front of us the whole time, and we just weren’t seeing it,” she began slowly. She met the marshal’s eyes. “What have we been doing all this time? We’ve tried to find connections between the victims, some pattern to the murders, some reason beyond chaos for Turillia to have killed all of these people. We’ve looked into dark portals, altars, sacrifices, all the things a demon might use to break the barriers between worlds. But what if that’s not it at all? What if we’ve been looking for the wrong thing?”
“What do you mean? You think it’s just about death and destruction, and the talk of a ritual is just to throw us off the trail?” Eli asked.
“No, no, much more obvious than even that… or I guess not so obvious to us, but maybe it should’ve been,” Kari returned with a shake of her head. “During our fight in the graveyard, Emma tried to kill Turillia with a torrent of fire, but Turillia shrugged it off and said, ‘If you think arcane power is all I’ve taken from these men, then you’re a terrible fool.’ It’s not a portal, or altar, or dark ceremony; she’s not trying to get Sekassus onto our world. She’s feeding this shadow demon by murdering people, and she’s sucking some of that power out of him in return.”
“Like Sheila Darkstorm…,” said Master Vlad, priest of Ambergaust. Though everyone’s attention was fixed on Kari, she looked to the priest for further explanation. Soon the others followed her stare, and the priest continued, “Sheila was not always a goddess. Indeed, she was not always a demon king. Legend says she was a succubus who amassed enough power to become a noble among the demons, and then a king. And with that power and influence, she began to sway the people of Koryon, enemies of my master Ambergaust and his wife Carsius, to bend knee to her until she became as a goddess to the world of Koryon.”
“You think this is what Turillia attempts? To become a goddess as Sheila did?” Katarina asked.
“This is bad,” Eli said, and he stood up. “I mean, it was bad enough when she was just a sorcerous, necromantic succubus assassin we were up against, but this may be beyond us.”
“Not necessarily,” Kari said, gesturing for everyone to remain calm. “While I could kick myself for not bringing more of my fellow hunters and some of my family, bringing Sherman and Katarina was a wise decision. Even if we can’t kill it, Katarina can hold the shadow demon at bay, which I assume means Lord Garant can as well, and probably Sherman, too.”