Seeing Feros bound to a stake excited me perhaps more than it should considering he was technically under my employ and an important part of my royal arsenal. Ana had been calmly delighted when she pointed to the tall post that had been recently installed and commanded him to lean his back against it. It was an imposing piece of wood, obviously having been taken from a very tall, old hardwood tree and by the level of destruction of the ground around it, she had ordered it buried deep and securely.

“This brings back wonderful memories,” Feros said with a wide, cheeky grin directed at Ana. “Remember that one night we-urgh”

The ropes made of glowing fuchsia magic suddenly tightened around the fiend’s torso, visibly denting in his chest and driving the air from his lungs. Ana then directed her bindings to swirl up his neck, pausing to wrap around his vulnerable throat a few times as if she was considering something, but then continued up to wrap a firm layer of magical rope around his mouth. The ropes were translucent enough to see the annoying smirk had not been driven from his lips. Once his ability to speak was denied, she focused her magic on tightly wrapping the rest of his body to the stake until he was unable to do much more than wiggle his fingers and toes.

“I truly wish I could just leave him like this,” Ana mused. “I feel like perhaps I would be doing all of us a favor, but then there would be no one to deal with the girl.”

“Alice?” I asked. “Surely you could work with her.”

The demon let out a lilting laugh and shook her head vigorously. “I won’t touch fae magic, there’s nothing anyone could say to try to convince me, I’m simply not into the idea of going mad trying to learn. Playing with those kinds of forces if you’re not a fae is asking for your mind to be twisted and malformed.”

I glanced to the fiend strapped to the stake. “Is that why he’s like this?”

“One would think,” she said with a bitter laugh, “but I think he was already mad to start with, so dabbling in the fae has only enhanced his natural tendencies. When he began working with it, it seemed to make him only more like himself, almost as if he had been destined to cross paths with it.” Ana looked distant for a moment, deep in thought. “He was not the only one at the time to dabble, the others did not fare quite as well.”

A muffled groan emanated from Feros and his lips beneath the bindings had morphed into a sad frown, perhaps the only time I had seen a genuine negative emotion from the creature.

“No I have not forgiven,” Ana said quietly to the fiend and the bindings around his body constricted sharply, eliciting a panicked sound from the depths of his throat. “I have dreamed of being able to get my revenge in so many different ways and means, each of them designed to force you into absolute anguish and suffering, but in the end I have never devised anything terrible enough to inflict that would come close enough to being what you deserve. Death is too good for you, torture too light a sentence, you have created a maddening paradox that has kept me up at night scheming.”

Feros’ eyes flitted to me with a look that begged for help, but the sheer emotional energy coming from Ana was more than enough for me to want to stay out of it. She was red hot to the core, pent up anger spilling into her normally controlled magical aura and making the air feel thick around her.

“I had thought I had worked past much of it, my thoughts of revenge had cooled and I had started to move on, but of course fate would bring me back to having to see your smirking face again. Even worse that you've mixed yourself up again in fae matters, you can't stay away even when you know about the unthinkable horrors that come out of it” She let out a growl of disgust. “Had I known your wretched form was anywhere near this place I would have never agreed to this assignment and perhaps I should have turned around and left the moment I knew you were here. Perhaps it’s a testament to how far I’ve come that I didn’t.”

I really wanted to know what had happened between them, but it seemed like a wise choice not to intrude and ask. As a royal I could demand to know anything I wanted, but not only did she laughably out scale my magical might, but she seemed like someone who was better off an an ally from a social and political standpoint as well. It is foolish to antagonize someone who could be at your back before you’re pressed into a proverbial or even perhaps literal wall.

“How do you manage to sleep at night?” Her eyes stared daggers into his soul. “You have done nothing but joke with me since I’ve been here, how can you even begin to find laughter in your life? My heart still aches and burns, joy nothing but a meaningless word and you walk around with a permanent smirk of mirth on your face. I knew you were always a bit monstrous, a touch unhinged, however I truly thought the weight of your mistakes might be great enough to press upon your conscience at least a little.”

An eerie silence fell over the garden interrupted only be the soft hum of the magical bindings. Feros had averted his eyes, no longer wanting to look at Ana whose gaze was still burrowing into him. She had begun this exercise in what I had thought had been relatively good spirits, but it had either been a rouse or something had snapped inside her and an emotional dam had broken. Even someone deaf and blind could have sensed that the demon had some kind of suppressed anger for the fiend, but instead it had been unbridled fury and pain.

“I’m sorry, Toria,” she said quietly, taking her eyes off Feros long enough to give me a tired look, “I thought I had it under control, but finally getting him in a position where I could get revenge and him still being so smug… this is not what we came here for. I was going to simply tie him up and then let you try to set him ablaze. He has a strong defense system and if you can work out how to crack through one like his, you’d have a leg up on many opponents. I promise I had other intentions in mind besides revenge.”

“Sounds like you needed to get it off your chest and have a chance to lay into him without him cracking a joke or trying to divert the conversation. Even I have noticed that he is irritatingly difficult to have any sort of serious conversation with, everything is a riddle or a joke only you’re not in on it with him.”

“Yes, I think that’s a good chunk of it. I have never been able to really tell him what I was feeling or thinking, even in the days just after it all happened he slunk off where I couldn’t find him, knowing that I would want to rage at him. When he did return he was all smiles and jokes, like nothing bad had really happened. He has never let me have a chance to articulate anything clearly or fully.”

I nodded, it seemed exactly like what I would expect Feros to do. Whatever the fiend was beneath his human like exterior, he certainly struggled to express any sort of rational emotions. “Now’s your chance I suppose, I won’t stand in your way, though you did say that he would be hard to replace.”

Ana let out a deep sigh and shook her head. “He could get out of this if he really wanted, it would be a struggle, but he could manage. He’s humoring me right now, that annoys me more than anything. He thinks that if I just yell and stamp my feet that I’ll get it out of my system and maybe learn to forgive him. What he doesn’t understand is that if if’s been nearly thirty years and I still feel this strongly, then there is little hope for me to ever forgive and certainly never, ever forget.”

“You know I still love you.” The fiend had managed to part the bindings around his lips. I wasn’t sure how since his hands were still firmly at his sides. “I always have, nothing ever changed, I feel as deeply for you now as I did all those decades ago.”

The demon made a hissing sound like a serpent and clenched her hands into fists, her long, pointed aubergine nails digging into her palms. “Don’t you dare say something like that to me,” she growled. “I’m giving you this one warning, do not test this route.”

“It’s true,” he continued, though struggling to keep the bindings that were desperately trying to re-knit over his lips. “I think deep down you still feel something for me too, we always had chemistry. Bad things happened, yes, but that’s the past and we can’t dwell in the past when there’s a whole future waiting.”

The most inhuman laugh I had ever heard screeched out of Ana and her power flared, expanding wildly and almost knocking me off my feet. I had to rapidly expand my own power to counteract and keep myself steady, though it was like trying to stand up against a humongous boulder threatening to roll right over me. I only lasted perhaps thirty seconds before I had to drop to a knee to ground myself and keep her power from pressing me flat.

“Any positive feelings for you died along with our child,” she cried, the bindings coalescing into a more opaque and physical form. They tightened significantly to where I was sure Feros could no longer breath. “It was all your fault and you know it and yet you still walk around like the world is still full of happiness and joy while my heart is an open wound. I still mourn our son every day! Do you even think of him anymore?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer and instead focused and flared her power directly into her bindings, cinching them tighter and tighter until there was a gross pop of what I’m sure had to be bones being broken. They tightened until there was nothing left but a stomach-churning mass of flesh being extruded through the tiny gaps in the binds, there was no way he could still be alive. “I know you don’t, you don’t care for anyone besides yourself.” Her voice was so quiet, so broken, and so sorrowful. “I wish I had known that before I ever let you in my life or at least realized before I lost the most important part of my soul.”

Ana’s power cut off suddenly and I gulped in air, grateful for my lungs being able to expand fully. The glowing binds dissipated and Feros’ mangled body slumped down from the pole and settled into an uncomfortably liquefied mass. Despite the amount of trauma, there was strangely no blood to be seen, instead it was like his bones had been held together with putty and flesh.

“He’ll be back by dinner,” she said, voice still eerily quiet. “I’m not sure where he disappears to when his shell is killed, but he’ll waltz back in like nothing happened soon enough.”

“Ah.” It was all I could think to say.