Mistra and I had been walking in stunned silence for over an hour, her arm protectively wrapped around me helping to bear some of the weight off of my painful legs. Not only had I damaged the muscles in my calves and thighs by pushing myself to run faster than I ever had in my life before, but the flames I had managed to summon from the bowels of the demon realm had lightly singed the back of my body. It was not burned enough to become a problem, though every step moved my clothing just enough to rub over the raw skin and cause pain and discomfort.

“We should be drawing near now,” Feros said cheerfully.

A whistle had been on his lips the whole time he had been leading the way with the ball of light before us. I did not know how he could manage to be so upbeat after the terror we had just experienced, he had been quick to shirk off the fact that we had all nearly escaped a terrible death, myself especially. I had not addressed the fact that he had not lifted a finger to aid me when I was surely dead and had tried to prevent Mistra from saving me, but it would not be something I forgave and forgotten so easily, as soon as the time was right I would make him explain and atone for his actions. The major issue preventing me from causing a huge scene about it was that he was the one who knew the way and without allowing the journey to continue as planned might cause me to miss this window of opportunity.

“You said that half an hour ago,” Mistra said curtly. “I hope you actually know where you are going and not just leading us into something else terrible.”

“Now is not the time to let your faith in me dip, my dear,” the fiend said, turning his head to flash a toothy smile. “Neither of you need to worry about anything like that happening again, there is nothing so dangerous here in the human realm. Even the most terrifying beasts here will turn tail and run at the first threat of magic.”

“My faith in you?” I chuckled darkly.

“Yes, I echo that sentiment,” Mistra sniffed, “you have not done much to kindle our faith in you.”

“Oh you are both just tired and weary from the stressful part of the trip we just weathered. Once we get on the horses and off of your feet your spirits will perk back up.”

“You truly are something vile.” Mistra adjusted her grip on me, pausing our slow gate long enough to be able to take a bit more pressure off my feet.

“Mistra, you have known me for your entire life and I have yet to fail you or let you down, extend your thinking beyond this one unfortunate incident and I think you will come to remember all the times I have been a positive force in your life.”

She let a huff of air out through her nose that served as a sarcastic laugh. “Now is not the time for this, we need the horses soon so that we can get Toria to some place where she can rest.”

“No,” I interjected, “there is no time to rest. I do not want to miss out on this opportunity.”

“Taking back your kingdom surely will not be so simple as walking into the castle front gate and asserting your authority,” Mistra reasoned. “It will be much safer and be more likely to succeed if we can get you healed up a bit before we arrive.”

“The little usurper is barely old enough to walk the gardens without someone looking after him to make sure he does not toddle off so far, I hardly think he will put up much resistance.”

“What about the guards?” Mistra pressed. “I know that there is an issue of who actually holds the power of the kingdom at the moment, but surely they will feel some sort of duty to protect him, and while we three are powerful enough, it is best not to take too much risk when it is unnecessary.”

“The two of you alone could blow through the whole castle guard since the army will have no reason to be on alert and ready to defend,” I countered. “My being there might as well be superfluous if I did not feel like I personally wanted to do some of the dirty work myself. I am confident that no harm will even get close to befalling me by the castle guard either way.”

“The sooner we get there, the better,” Feros added. “Striking while the iron is hot is always the better option. The Church is going to be distracted for a bit with the fae, but that will only be true for as long as the fae stick around in this realm. Eventually they will move on whether that is to try to pursue the girl or return back to their own realm to prepare for their war, either way once they are gone I am completely certain that the Church will be swift in returning their attention to snapping up a vulnerable kingdom. It is imperative that when they return to try, they find a strong, proper monarch at the helm that they cannot manipulate. In fact, this move may avoid a direct war with them all together.”

“It sounds like you had this speech prepared to convince us to continue when something inevitably went wrong along the way.” Mistra laughed dryly and glanced at me with a suspicious look on her face to let me know there was something about his words that she found unsettling. “I decided to be quiet and let Toria make the decision to go without telling my father without me putting up a fuss about it, though I think it was obvious that I am not as sure that it was the correct way to go. However, I know that there is something you are not telling us, probably many things. In fact I would stake my own royal claim that there would be a near endless list of things you have left unspoken that we might find relevant to this situation.”

“Mistra, you have always been the brightest member of your family and I realized before I even proposed this trip that you were going to dig your heels in eventually and want answers.” Swinging the light at the end of his finger around to his right suddenly revealed a small stable at the edge of a small village just big enough to support a tiny, cramped inn. He inclined his head towards the building to indicate that was where our horses were located. “You will have your answers about why I am so focused on getting us progressing forward as fast as we can, I am willing to promise at least that, but not until we are poised to strike inside the kingdom proper. Your family has trusted in me enough with all kinds of deep secrets and hidden plans for over a century, in all that time I have never done anything that has harmed your family or double crossed them.”

“That we know about,” she replied. “I shudder to think of all the time you have spent setting up things to precisely point all of us towards what you exactly want to happen. I am certain at this point that every single thing that has happened this whole time has been carefully calculated by you and none of this has been happenstance, both the fortuitous and the terrible.”

The fiend stopped walking and turned to face us, allowing a long sigh to escape his lips. “Neither of you can come close to being able to understand the reality of the existence around you. How could you? Your lives are fleeting, mere specks in time like a flash of a lit match in the darkness, there for a mere, insignificant moment, then gone and forgotten. I have learned and forgotten many more things than you will ever have to the chance to experience in your lifetime and I understand that fact alone makes me something terrifying and esoteric to most people, but I need you both to understand that for the moment I need you to pull together what little trust in me you might still have and go along for just a little while more.”

“What trust I might still have?” Mistra said with a quiet laugh.

“Then evoke your self-preservation,” Feros pleaded, “we need to keep moving to keep all of us safe. If you need me to throw my own peril into the conversation to give you my own selfish reasons to convince you, so be it. My own well being is very much at the forefront of my mind as well, does that help convince you that the desire to move on is indeed driven by danger? I could just leave you both and disappear to safety, it would be far from the first time I have abandoned someone to the wolves to save myself, the fact I am not should be evidence enough that I have some desire to see you both live and succeed.”

“Then wolves nip at our heels.” I was beginning to understand just how far over my head the situation at hand may have been. It was beginning to fall into place in my mind, of course it was not just a lucky break for me that I needed to rush to go fulfill a lifelong dream, Feros needed us to leave and swiftly. “Let us get going then, I do not want to see the kind of wolves that make someone like you afraid, in the flesh.”

Feros nodded his head with a small smile. “Very astute conclusion. Mistra?”

“Everything,” she demanded. “You will explain everything at the first opportune moment. I am tired feeling like I am dealing with only a tiny fraction of the information I should.”

“You will not like what I have to tell you,” Feros warned as he quietly pulled open a side door to the stable and glanced inside.

“I do not expect to, but I think we both deserve some clarity after the blind trust we have put in you thus far, especially since most things connected to you have been less than positive.”

The warm light of a lantern illuminated the doorway and a very sleepy young man blinked in surprise. He immediately began to fumble with his free hand at his side from what I assume was a hidden knife to defend himself.

“Calm yourself,” Feros said, voice notably more even and syrupy than his normal timber. “We mean no harm, just travelers needing horses.”

“Then why did you not go to the inn first?” the man said.

He went to hold up the lantern to better view our faces, but Feros snapped his own hand forward and clamped down on the lantern, keeping our faces in the shadows. Eyes widening, the man began to tremble, his hand resting over the knife lay in his pocket and his face gave away that he was considering what might happen if he took the risk and drew the blade against three people.

“Three horses is all we require and we will be gone without any trouble,” Feros insisted, his hand not releasing its tight grip on the light. "No ill needs to happen to either of us, just hand over the horses and go on with your night like you never saw us."

“All the horses belong to patrons, I cannot just give away the horse of someone staying in the inn.”

“Resistance is not worth your death.”

“There are only three of you,” the man whispered, afraid but apparently still more afraid of the wrath of the innkeeper, “if I yell for help right now I will wake the two others and then it will be an even match.”

“I will not allow the words to leave your lips before you are struck down,” Feros warned, voice morphing from something calm and soothing to dark and foreboding. “This is your last warning, you are standing in the way and I will remove you if you do not choose to remove yourself.”

The man drew in a breath and opened his mouth to yell for assistance and magical might trickled out from the fiend. Even though the stream of power was tiny, it caused me to feel dizzy from the sheer potential it contained. He had never performed any sort of magic around me, at least not without a significant amount of distance between us and now I understood why, whatever type of magic he possessed felt wrong. A kind of wrong that made me feel uneasy to the very core of my body, like I would never be able to scrape away the imprint of it on my very soul. There was something terrible and twisted with his magic, something that caused a very visceral repulsion in me and it took every bit of my will power not to give in to my instincts to turn and flee as far away from him as I could get. The stream of milky white magic wrapped around the man’s chest and did not hesitate in constricting, collapsing his chest cavity on itself, and replacing the yell with a quiet, wet gurgle as blood poured from the man’s mouth. He dropped to his knees, the lantern staying in Feros’ grasp, his eyes looking up pleadingly, but even if Mistra or I had wanted to help, there would have been nothing either of us could have done to heal his shattered torso. Mercifully, Feros snaked the magic farther up and quickly strangled it around his neck, snapping it in one quick movement. The light of life left his eyes and he slumped forward, face down into the doorway. With a flick of his magic, Feros slid the body away from the door and held the light aloft in front of him and stepped into the stable to acquire our horses. Mistra and I stood in shock, neither of us wanting to move to follow him. I could only imagine how much worse feeling his magic must have been for her with her higher magical sensitivity, even in the darkness I could see her face was a mask of disgust.

“He is truly something abhorrent,” she whispered to herself.