The godling effortlessly retracted its leg from the hole its attack on the demon created in the brute's arm. The godling's face was an emotionless mask as the creature it had just struck reacted viscerally to the horrendously powerful blow.

The demon reacted to the pain by opening its maw wide and bellowing in pain and fury. The sound was loud, especially up close but it was also harmless to the godling. The godling knew that the sound was supposed to be frightening, but felt nothing as the creature spent several seconds roaring in a mixture of pain and fury. While the demon roared in a vain attempt to use its pain to fuel a psychological attack, the godling looked at its face with a tauntingly neutral expression and waited.

In its mind, the godling could hear Samyaza shouting in terror as a response to the demon's mental attack. If someone asked the godling which sound was worse, the deity would have told them that the sound of Samyaza's voice coupled with the fact that the voice felt like it was coming from within the deity's skull, was the worse noise.

After a few seconds passed, the demon finally began to stop roaring, and as the demon quieted down the godling saw a chance and began to speak.

"To think that my angelic companion is scared of you... I fail to see why you invoke such terror in my strange advisor."

The deity's first words to the demon, a creature whose appearance startled it and frightened its angelic companion, were haughty ones conveyed in a disappointed tone. For reasons, the godling didn't understand, due to how the divine being's divine speech ability worked, the demon stared in shock at the godling. The crimson orbs that were the demon's eyes were filled with surprise and the slightest inkling of fear.

The godling's voice rung in the demon's head. It was distorted and amplified, the words were spoken intelligibly but only barely so. The demon heard the godling's words be spoken a hundred times by seemingly different people at once. This odd phenomenon was frightening and disorienting, a maddening mockery of the demon's language. This alien chorus mentally and emotionally destabilized the demon but was only the first in a series of odd things that occurred concerning the godling.

When the demon looked at the godling after it spoke there was a significant change. Before the air around the godling seemed to be normal and unaffected by its presence, but now it was different.

Now, in the eyes of the demon, there appeared to be hazy smoke flaking off of the deity. It floated around the deity.

Due to its thinness, it was possible for the demon to see the godling from inside of the aura and to see past where the fog-like visuals would have otherwise obstructed its vision if the fog-like aura was darker.

The demon felt its will to fight the otherworldly but outwardly human-looking creature before it quickly fading due to the creature's voice and that disturbing aura. That bloodlust was quickly being washed away and replaced by a seemingly sourceless fear that the creature intellectually understood shouldn't be occurring.

The area just inside the gate where the orcs and humans were moments from clashing was not like the plain and undecorated area just inside the other gate. This was the gate where the people from the other parts of the baron's territory came to visit. This gate was outfitted with a platform for archers and other spotters to oversee the area beyond the gate from within its safety. And it had decorative and controlled vegetation as well that added to its aesthetic value in the eyes of visiting authorities and noble people.

Such decorations had always annoyed the town's authorities who found them distracting and perfect for criminals. Sadly for such reasonably-minded fellows, the shrubbery was maintained at the expense of the baron and happened to be perfect for the nomadic band of belligerents who had invaded the town.

That was where the orcs were hidden when the horses ran through the gate, ran a few more steps unhindered, and then stepped onto the trap laid out by the female rogue named Golorina just minutes ago.

The horses and their riders had just entered the town when the first of the horses fell victim to the primitive but effective trap. Though only the first horse and its rider were critically harmed by the trap.

The horse being ridden by the wannabe knight with a lance stepped hard onto a caltrop, the metal piercing the inexpensive and ineffective horse-shoe the creature wore. The caltrop cut deeply into the horse's foot and sent it sprawling since the creature had been running at full speed when it fell victim to the trap.

That particular horse and its rider sailed painfully through the air. The wannabe knight who had insisted on leading the soldiers hours ago twisted awkwardly in the air in a vain attempt to control how he'd land by using the lance he had in a commendably strong grip to try and orient himself in the air. Instead of controlling how he landed, he only succeeded in reducing how far he flew. He hit the ground hard and rolled for a bit before coming to a stop moments before his horse also stopped crashing.

That might have been a success worth bragging about if it wasn't for the fact that his horse flew less of a distance than he would have if he had allowed himself to fly through the air at the discretion of gravity. If he hadn't attempted to impose his will on physics than he would have landed painfully but relatively safely farther away. Instead, he landed before his horse did, and the weapon he had tightly gripped was pointed outward in front of him.

It impaled the horse when the large beast hit the ground and the wannabe knight himself, its thick hide and the considerable force of its flight impaling it deep on the knight's lance and causing its equine body to slam against his smaller frame, pinning him to the ground underneath the horse. Both the soldier and his mount groaned in agonizing pain, and the horse lay dying on top of the rider who had spent a long time caring for it.

No other horse or rider was so dramatically affected by the trap, but it was still effective at rendering the horses almost completely ineffective. Now all of the horses were either injured or gripped with terror by the sight of their fellow horses in pain and in one case dying.

It was at this point that the orcs examined their enemies, only barely mustering the will to turn away from the cruelly amusing sight of the man pinned by his mount. The forces that they had been attacking from a distance and were now finally close too were a force that had spent most of the brief time they were known by the orcs as a distant spot on the horizon slowly approaching but never truly seen until now.

The forces consisted of 7 human soldiers wearing matching armor wielding distinctive weapons counting the faux knight and his dying horse, and a single man atop an also armored horse. The man wearing the strange robes of a court wizard, presumably because he himself was one, had magical support in the form of a small and strange red-skinned creature whose basic shape resembled that of a humanoid perched on his shoulder. Each of the orcs identified the man as a potential wildcard since he was at the center of the formation of horses, and the soldiers refused to separate from him even as they tried their best to distantly assess their current situation.

All 8 of the humans seemed to be collaborating willingly, and more than that they seemed to show a decent amount of concern for their companion who flew through the air before landing where his horse would soon follow. The noise of their crash was impressive as both the soldier and horse were armored. They each weighed far more than they would have had they just been couriers or other common travelers.

The archers zeroed in on the spell-caster and knew that they needed to get rid of him quickly. The other orcs divided up their targets on intuition and with careful glances at each other before they began to move.

Once ready the orcs sprung into coordinated and careful action, a few of them purposefully revealing themselves to their enemies with thrown rocks and taunting noises. Their still hidden peers waited till their enemies were distracted and then moved into positions where they felt they had the most chance at inflicting wounds on their enemies.

The total number of enemies to fight was just 8 counting the strange creature riding the apparent spell-caster's shoulder, given that one soldier was already effectively out of the fight. The knight underneath the horse was strong, but not strong enough to lift a several hundred-kilogram horse equipped with metal armor off of him.

Several moments passed before the court-wizard regained his wits and began to aid his allies even though he could loosely hear the sounds of the approaching orcish enemies. Once he regained his wits and stopped being distracted by the sight of the faux-knight pinned underneath the knight's own treasured mount, the spell-singer was chided by his familiar.

To drown out his own familiar's irate scolding and to support his underlings he began to whistle a quiet tune that he knew would embolden his allies while eliciting fear in his enemies.

The godling wondered what scared the demon. After contemplating what it might have been for a few seconds the godling decided to just ask the whimpering monster directly.

"Why are you scared? You weren't scared before I started talking... why are you scared now and not when I hit you?"

This time its voice came through like how others heard the godling, a normal voice for a human that was deceptively high pitched despite the creature's outwardly masculine appearance and in this case, spoke the innately cruel language of demon-kind not the guttural language of orcs. Even the softest and most neutral words in other languages came out cruelly when spoken in the language of demons.

The sudden shock of this linguistic turn stupefied the demon, whose eyes retained a hint of its past fear, but now mostly showed confusion. When it spoke, its voice was soft and mewling.

"Your voice... when you first spoke, it came across like a hundred voices at once, It was terrifying. The power of our tongue, the demon tongue, amplifies when spoken by multiple people at once. I've never heard so many voices speaking in unison."

The godling looked at the demon, listening to its explanation with rapt attention. When the monster was finished speaking the god wondered about a specific part of its explanation.

"Just now... did you say 'our tongue'?"

When the god quoted the demon its voice once again took on the quality of an otherworldly chorus and caused the suffering demon to reel back in fright. It took it a few seconds to be brave enough to speak again.

"Y, yes. Our tongue. You are speaking the language of demons perfectly. It's odd. But sometimes your words twist and they take on this chorus-like quality like there are multiple people speaking in unison."

After speaking, the demon quietly lowered its head, seemingly in an act of submission. Due to the creature's height, even with its head lowered it was still physically looking down on the being it spoke too but only in a literal sense.

The godling looked at it with curiosity. As it looked at the demon it felt a strange and vaguely alien sense of paternal affection towards its scared foe.

The shift in the sentinel demon's attitude was brought on by a few different things. The primary motivator of the rapid shift in its attitude was how uncharacteristically high, at least for its kind, its level of intelligent was. Its intelligence made it keenly aware of how odd its foe was. Its intelligence made it feel each emotion more sharply than others of its kind often could and that accentuated two powerful emotions: fear and desire.

It was afraid of the strange and seemingly clueless but also powerful creature that it was talking to. It was afraid of the creature's undeniable strength. The thought that its randomly located heart might be burst by this being who was so much smaller than it filled it with fear as well. And of course, there was the god's ability to speak in the demon's native tongue, using some odd natural power that the demon had never observed in all of its life. That filled it with paralyzing fear.

But fear wasn't the only emotion it felt. Even now in a despair-inducing situation against a foe with unknown but terrifying power, it felt the pangs of desire. Sentinel demons were characterized by their pride, but in actuality, it was a powerful sense of desire that drove them forward. And what the sentinel demon desired was to live. It desired to survive this situation, and eventually escape it. But it also desired power.

Ever since the godling had spoken to the demon in its haunting and chorus-like voice the demon noticed that power slowly radiated off of the creature. It was the same sort of power that sentinels felt radiating out of the dark corners of their home plane. And the demon wasn't alone in noticing that. But it was alone in wanting that strange radiant power.

The demon's animal brain unconsciously connected the image of the godling with the sort of power the demon wanted, and thus quickly decided to seek out the power within the godling.

Samyaza noticed it as well. When the godling spoke in what felt like the divine language all gods biologically had the capability to speak in, something had changed. And that change wasn't in some isolated metaphysical sense.

The angel felt the odd and vaguely alien sense of affection the godling now seemed to almost artificially have towards the demon who had mere moments ago, lunged at it seeking bloodshed. It was a disturbing and odd change for the godling, even though the godling was extraordinarily young and seemingly prone to mood swings.

The godling itself noticed that the demon had lost the will to fight. It felt satisfied at this development, which was both due to its own natural feelings about fighting and pain, and due to the eerie sense of paternal affection, it felt towards the demon. It was aware that this feeling was odd, and it did mentally question the source of this feeling. After it thought for a few moments it capriciously decided, much like how it was fickle in the forest and didn't investigate the lifeforms lurking in the woods, not to pursue this for a long time.

Once it waited to ensure the demon wasn't going to attack it, it spoke to the creature.

"Want to join me? I've noticed that you've given up your past aggression. If you join and serve me, I'll reward you."

The emotions that made up the demon's current emotional and mental state flared up in equal measure when it heard that statement and the creature looked the godling in the face, a fearful smile warping its malformed features and nodded eagerly. The godling innately played on the emotions that drove the demon forward and the godling enjoyed it.

The god rose its hand over the thick hole in the demon's right arm and a small orb of darkness left its hand and went into the hole that was a leftover from their fight moments ago. The orb began to expand inside of the hole and then seemed to begin to stitch together the wound.

The demon quietly let loose a soft and delighted growl as the pain the godling had caused was healing at the godling's own hand. The godling smiled softly, and the two began to take a leisurely walk towards the other battlefield even as the demon's hand began to heal.

Golorina's trap not only helped the orcish raiders gain an advantage in the mental battle between themselves and the raiders, but she was also the first person to score a kill in the battle.

The orcish rogue aimed to start off the battle by assassinating the faux-knight pinned beneath his own horse. She had tried to stealthily lunge at him, hoping to evade detection by the soldiers who were close to him, but failed. Instead of starting off the battle by beheading the first victim of her trap, she instead found herself attacked by the mounted soldier who used a shield to provide cover for the wannabe knight and had a short mace as his weapon.

The soldier detected her while she was a good distance away from her target and the soldier himself. He noticed her because he was infuriated at the trap that had stumped them and only looked away for a second, but in that second noticing her ruthless gaze which was aimed at his friend. His fury came from the realization that he hadn't thought such a simple trap would be used by warriors strong enough to overrun a town, even a small and backward one like the town they were fighting to the death in.

The soldier urged his horse to charge at her and instinctually readied his mace to bash her skull in while shouting at her, spooking the orc. They were quick and had almost reached her in the instant it took for her to recover her wits.

However, he wasn't expecting her to get angry and shout at the horse while reaching an empty hand into her breast-pocket to pull out a tiny and difficult to make out object. She quickly hurled a loose caltrop at the horse, the aforementioned tiny and difficult to make out object flying towards the horse's face. The violent flick of her wrist, coupled with the sight of the tiny object terrified the mentally frazzled horse, causing the beast to rear up and toss the soldier off of its back.

The rogue didn't hesitate and swiftly jumped onto the soldier while he was trying to get on his feet. She threw her weight onto him and in a single motion swiftly plunged her blade into the human's unarmored and exposed jugular vein. She had to angle the blade just right since her weapon was curved but due to countless hours of training and past assassinations she was able to automatically aim her strikes in her mind with a nearly nonexistent margin of error.

She smoothly pulled her blade out of the man's neck and threw herself back, while straightening herself out in mid-air. She was surrounded by the sounds of fighting and the spell-singer's annoying whistling which she was able to resist due to an impressive combination of patience and anger. She resolved herself to finish the grisly task she had given herself and started sneaking in the direction of the horse and wannabe knight.

She did notice that the damn court wizard's whistle had stopped and was replaced with a louder and more annoying song. She didn't know much about magic so to her he was just singing. It was really annoying though, and she hoped that someone would shut him up soon.

The godling and the demon were walking towards the gate where Althos's allies were joined by other orcs. In the meantime, before they arrived at their destination, the godling made idle conversation with its questionable new compatriot.

The godling asked a question to its new companion that to humans would have been simple enough to answer.

"What's your name?"

The demon hesitated and seemed kind of shocked that the godling asked that question. When it spoke it seemed to stumble over itself.

"Uh... Call me Raverangos."

Before the godling could respond, the orb angel who was mostly still muttering scared thoughts seemed to break from its fear for a second to inform the godling of the reason for the demon's sheepish response.

[Althos, demons don't give out their true names. Power can be exerted over them by people who know their true names. "Raverangos" might be scared of you, but that'll give it even more reasons not to give you its name.]

The godling listened along to the angel's explanation and then mentally nodded its understanding of what was said. After thinking it over, the godling decided to tell the demon its name as a sign of good faith among violent kindred spirits.

"My name is Althos."

The demon heard the godling's name in the many-voiced chorus and nodded in response to the creature's name. It quietly whispered it to itself, like the name itself had power.

"Althos..."

The godling looked at the demon with a quizzical expression, and then just rolled its eyes. The two could now see the fighting between the orcs and the humans in the distance. The demon stared longingly at the battle, and the godling could detect out of the corner of its eye the gentle swaying of the thick demon's hands as if to signal excitement for what it knew would come next.

The godling looked at the demon and thought about its next decision. On one hand, it knew that unleashing a demon on their human enemies would ingratiate itself to the orcs very effectively and dramatically. But on the other hand, it also knew that the demon was a dumb brute who liked murder and might go wild.

The godling weighed the apparent pros and cons for a few seconds before deciding to just see what would happen. The godling jumped and waved its hand in the demon's face to get its attention. Once Althos was sure it had the creature's undivided attention the godling spoke.

"The orcs are on our side. Hurt them and I hurt you. But the humans? You can kill them."

The godling thought for a second and then made an additional statement, a clarifying one.

"The orcs don't look like me. Humans do. Attack the ones that look like me."

That clarifying statement was a smart one because the demon didn't see race.

The first person to notice the demon that was loudly stomping in the direction of the battle wasn't a person. It wasn't an orc either. It was the imp.

The imp had been doing its best to subtly boost its human allies, and stay out of sight of any of the archers who had quietly been undermining the efforts by the humans to resist their foes. It was casting chantless magic and using its magical reserves to bolster the humans and their horses. It had even succeeded in helping one of the specialists, a warrior with a soul-trident, in bringing down one of the rogues subtly boosting his speed with magic when he went in for the kill against the orcish rogue who was trying to fight him.

The imp was out in the open, but due to its small size and quiet nature it was difficult for the orc warriors to spot as they clashed with its allies. This was a useful talent in the heat of battle, and it gave the side of the humans two sorcerous supports instead of one.

That was when imp heard a rumbling sound begin to become louder than the fighting that surrounded it. It looked in the direction of the rumbling noise and saw a nightmarish sentinel demon running in its direction. The creature's impressive and bloody maw was open as it laughed wildly.

Compared to the tiny devil the demon was a mountain of a creature, and if it approached the devil it'd notice the tiny creature. And that was bad. Modred couldn't do permanent harm to the imp, but the demon could. The demon could kill the imp.

The imp took a long look at the creature and had a fierce debate with itself. Each millisecond brought the demon closer and closer to it, and each millisecond further imperiled the imp, because eventually, the demon would detect the devil even without sight.

The imp resolved itself to flee back to its terrifying home plane, but it knew that the court wizard knew the spell to summon it back. It decided to give the wizard a reason to call it back if the wizard managed to escape this situation. And the imp knew exactly how to ensure that the wizard called it back. After all, the imp did have a useful and politically important secret it could dangle in front of the wizard.

The scheming imp boldly turned and flew towards the spell-singer, fleeing from the demon and also guaranteeing that if all things went well here it'd soon revisit this world.

All of the human soldiers were skilled, yet with one exception they found themselves being overwhelmed. The one human warrior who was succeeding in this battle was the one human warrior who had at this point willingly gotten off of the horse he rode in on and was fighting on foot.

He was one of the two specialists and he wielded a strange weapon. His weapon of choice was a weapon he always had on him, a soul-trident.

Soul tridents are special weapons that some creatures can generate using their own lifeforce to manifest them. The specialist was an expert in the way of the trident, having used his since birth. He carefully used it to keep an orcish rogue at arm's length. The two circled each other awkwardly until the rogue stumbled.

The specialist took advantage of that moment to impale the rogue. An instant later the soldier pulled his trident back, and the rogue fell back, bleeding onto the ground, his own shock helping him stay conscious but also making him consciously aware of the significant wound he was just dealt.

Right when the specialist thought he might be able to move elsewhere, an enraged combat archer yelled in fury and fired an arrow at the specialist's face. The trident-warrior blocked it using the shaft of his trident so the attack failed to hurt the warrior, but it succeeded in getting his attention. The warrior took off trying to close the distance between the archer who was already firing another arrow at the human.

Modred was singing. He was using a long-lasting but also physically demanding spell to help anesthetize his soldiers to pain, but it wasn't perfect. Fatal wounds still stopped those who received them, and crippling wounds might not hurt in the moment, but that didn't mean they didn't cripple those who received them.

Modred was aware that he owed his life to the unprompted decision of a soldier to stay on the defensive and block incoming arrows aimed at the musician mage as the two tried to slowly retreat backward towards the gate and out of the town.

One of the soldiers who used shields as a weapon in their own right stayed right next to the spell-singer, knowing that the spell-singers power enhanced their side while weakening their enemies. The soldier knew that any success in this situation required staying alive, so he made a calculated decision to not engage the orcs in some hair-brained attempt at revenge for his fallen friends.

But the attempt to escape wasn't easy, nor was it fast. The two knew that if they turned around and ran they'd be fired upon by all of the archers at once. In another situation, with other foes, they might escape that, but facing orcs with orcish bows, who outnumbered them at least two to one, that meant certain death. Their only choice was to quietly back out and then hide until the orcs gave up.

But as their soldiers gradually fell, that got harder. An orcish rogue, the only woman Modred had seen so far in the group, took down the wannabe knight and one of the knight's defenders, while two of the unarmed warriors took down one the other shield focused ally of the spell-singer. The soul-trident user succeeding in knocking out one rogue but was being prevented from moving by a combat-archer who was rapidly firing arrow after arrow at the warrior.

The sword-wielding warrior was far from them, successfully holding his ground, intimidating the rogues who dared to approach him with loud noises and exaggerated slashes. Modred sighed in annoyance at the soldier, knowing that truthfully he was the least skilled soldier in the squad.

The other specialist was an odd soldier who fought using a cruel-looking device known colloquially as a man-catcher. He was a tall soldier who used his long arms and naturally advanced hand-eye-coordination to serve as an annoying obstacle to orcs who wanted to get behind him and advance on Modred.

The man catcher was a cruel device used to capture armored soldiers that consisted of a long metal pole that ended with a hollow crescent-moon shaped metal disk that contained sharp metal prongs that were normally forcibly affixed to metal helmets protecting their wearer's neck from the cruel prongs. It could be manually closed by other soldiers but the specialist also used the malicious machine as a tool to bludgeon people with when the soldier fought by himself.

Modred watched him struggle against a speedy unarmed orc who had used his limbs as a potent weapon against another one of the soldiers in his way.

That was when the imp made it to Modred. The creature flew right up to the spell-singer, floating just within arms reach of Modred and spoke a simple message in the language of Man.

"I know what happened to baron's son. If you survive this, resummon me and I'll tell you. If not... I'll see you at home."

The imp grinned upon saying the last word it spoke. Its grin was well... impish for a lack of a better word.

Modred realized what the imp was saying, and tried to catch the creature only for his hand to pass harmlessly through his devious familiar. The creature's physical form had already turned into a spectral echo, as it had silently undone the spell that bound it to the world in a physical shell as soon as it uttered the word "home".

Through all of this Modred never stopped singing. It was his expressive face that communicated his thoughts to his allies and his enemies alike. That was about to come back and kick him in the ass in a very real way.

At that moment, the stocky sentinel demon exploded onto the battlefield and roared what it had spent the last few moments thinking.

"WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THAT ANNOYING SINGING? I'LL SHUT YOU THE FUCK UP MYSELF!"

The demon didn't know a lot of words in the language of humanity, but it sure as hell knew the swears.

Far away from the fighting, there was a lone office deep in a lively fortress. This office was one of the few rooms in the fortress that was both guarded by trusted soldiers and kept locked when not in use.

Inside of this office, there was a thick wooden desk. This desk was made of the finest wood, wood that came from trees deep in the forest that lined the outskirts of the baron's territory. At this moment that desk was covered in papers. Those papers were sorted into two general categories.

One of those categories was in immediate danger and the baron, who was the lord of this fortress and the owner of the office, had spent hours learning what he could about it. That immediate danger was the ongoing situation in the town of Golden-Gate, the town dozens of kilometers away wherein a demon was about to murder his court wizard.

The other category was one of a far more personal nature to the baron. It was to this category that he was currently devoting the most attention. This category was his missing son. Many papers on the ornate desk were about his son containing every bit of information the baron had his progeny. Like a good father, he sought to aid those he had charged with locating the young man.

He loved his son. Like many fathers, including his father before him, his son was his closest friend and most loyal confidante. He was wracked with concern about the whereabouts of his boy. It was actually that concern that distracted him and prevented him from hearing the sounds of combat that were happening outside of his office.

Though calling it "combat" implies it was more of a fair fight than it actually was. A more accurate term would be a "massacre". The invader slaughtered the guards who sought to protect the baron.

The invader had simply walked up to the door and used her feral claws to amputate those who stood in her way. She hadn't asked to be let inside, or even said hello. She just walked to the door and committed murder, before beginning to tease the baron.

First with a soft knock.

He didn't even hear the first soft knock on his door after the area right beyond the door went sinisterly silent. It was the second, more forceful knock that he did hear. Yet he stood still in response to the sound and waited. The waiting was weird and he wasn't a patient man, but his instincts told him to stay still.

The baron felt a chill fall upon the room and noted with displeasure that he felt goosebumps emerge on his skin underneath his majestic clothing.

The baron was distracted and scatter-brained but he wasn't foolish. He kept his door unlocked only when he was in the office, and only when his most skillful guards protected it. Whatever was doing this, this taunting display was putting on a show. And they weren't friendly.

The invader knocked a third time, spending several seconds rhythmically hitting the door. It was like she was playing on the drums for a few moments.

The fourth time whatever was beyond the door knocked it started off quiet, and then grew in volume over the course of several seconds until it was like whatever lurked beyond the door slammed it with several battering rams at once.

The baron was spooked by this display of power and cat-like cruelty. It pushed his heart onward and caused him to experience a surge of adrenaline that temporarily heightened his senses. He heard the soft sound of a hand touching the door that led into the office from the outside. Then he heard the jiggle of the doorknob of that same door. And at last, the door opened. And the baron's heart began to break before he even heard what she had to say.

The invader sauntered into the private office of the baron, a confident smile on her grotesque pierced lips. Her bruised-colored and wrinkled face wore an easy-going expression that promised the baron that whatever she was there to tell him would be emotionally devastating. Not to mention she was covered in fresh blood.

When he looked behind her and out the open door, the baron could see blood pooling on the floor. He also saw a bit of moist hair that he knew was the hair of one of the two men posted outside to protect him from any invaders or assassins. Like the mystical hermit who just killed the guard.

The invader was a resident of the forest the wood for the desk had come from. The woman stood a towering two and a half meters tall, had skin the color of rust, and wore a custom made dress that was the result of sewing together many shorter dresses into a longer and less fashionable insult to tailors worldwide.

The baron didn't want her to speak, but the mystical monster in the shape of a tall elderly woman began to speak anyway.