They barged through the door of Master Paramonos’ house; nobody was home. The breeze blew in the drizzle and cold from outside.

Nannade turned to Korinna. “Stay here and keep the cage close!” She pointed to the bundle Korinna held in her hand. Korinna merely nodded, then Nannade opened the door to Paramonos’ study, revealed the portage behind the tapestry and descended the stairs. “I hope this works.” She said to herself, hoping Korinna would not hear it; she was not allowed to doubt this endeavour.

Nannade could again feel the presence behind the door. She opened it without hesitation. The man with the white hair already awaited her.

“I didn’t think you’d be back so soon, my child.”

“Oh as if! You knew this attempt by Paramonos would fail when you told me about it. You know why I am here.”

He smiled. Genuinely happy. “Heh, I guess I do.”

Nannade took the staff in her hand and tapped the crystal bars of the cage. “I supposed I should take a closer look at these then.” She felt the surface. The runes were carved in deep, over and over again. She assumed the crystal was pure quartz, grown, accelerated, but not shaped with magic.

She inspected all of the bars and found them to all have the same runes. She could decipher a few of them, but many were so old and foreign she had no hope of uncovering their meaning; at least not before graduating in linguistics.

She eventually guessed that there was only one way to find out how they could be broken: try. Damaging or even destroying a magical item of unknown properties could have dire repercussions. She could be unleashing sealed power, apart from her Godfather. She went ahead with it nonetheless.

She sat down at the writing desk and constructed a simple spell on paper, under the curious and observant eyes of her godfather. When she was done, she used her staff to press the piece of paper against the sandstone of the room’s walls and signalled to the Serpent to ignite the spell.

Sandstone flowed from the wall, gathering and compacting around the tip of the staff. When the ball of rock was finally done, Nannade let it fall to the ground with a loud WHOMP. She dragged her new hammer into a suitable position to the crystal bars, checked her form one last time, and finally put all her strength into bringing the hammer around into a pivoting spin.

With a KLERR, the crystal bars and the sandstone weight broke apart. A stale wind went through the room as if a repository of ancient air had been opened.

The white-haired man grinned with glee. “WELL DONE, CHILD! I can finally feel the world again, oh what wonderful feeling!” He twirled with joy. “Now quickly, undo the last bind!” he pointed to the large stone with his bound physical form. “Kill him!”

Nannade stepped through the gap in the bars and close to the bound man. She looked on his eternally pained face. His eyes were still darting around in panic, like the first time she had come into this room, and even longer before that. She caressed his sweaty forehead. “I am so sorry for the pain.” Then she turned around to her godfather. “You must understand, the serpent won’t allow something like you to go out there and continue that gruesome work immediately.” She flashed her fangs.

Terror shot onto her godfather’s face. “What do you intend, my child?”

“I said I'd free you, but I never said how.” She opened her maw wide and sank her fangs into the bound man’s neck. Deep she pressed her venom, the feeling of it shooting out of her fangs was ecstasy. Nannade tried to not drink deeply from that feeling. Her sustenance came purely from the punishment of the wicked, not the satisfaction of her own desires.

Almost immediately, her godfather broke down, holding his head. “NO! WHY?”

Nannade ignored the man writhing in pain on the ground, instead she caressed the bound man’s head, cradled it between her breasts. His pained grunts became horrible to witness as the pain of mundane venom was added to his unending torment. “I told you. If I simply free you, you will just go back to messing things up. I want at least a little head start, so I will weaken you. Don’t worry. With all the sin in this city, you shall soon be fed back up to your former strength in short time.”

So they remained, Nannade trying her best to ease the bound man’s suffering just a tiny bit. She hoped he recognized the feeling of a woman’s chest and liked it, too. She kissed his sweat away and sang sweet lullabies, not knowing whether it actually did what she intended it to, but she would not forego such a simple gesture to someone in this much pain. Her godfather, however, was not eased in his pain the least. His screams and curses threatened to burst the rock of the underground at any moment.

It took the venom quite a while to kill the bound man. Every time he let out a scream or grunt of pain, an ethereal wind seemed to tear at the godfather’s shape, ripping off a bit of his corporeal body and revealing black and red smoke beneath, pouring out of the wounds and making the true shape clear. His eyes turned to embers of wrath, his hands to claws of greed, his skin to a barrier of vanity. When the bound man had finally drawn his last breath, what stood before Nannade was no longer the gallant, white-haired man, but an apparition of smoke and embers. Its shape resembled that of a man, all men in fact, and around its head it wore a crown of red, in cruel and crude strokes with only a single spike, bare of any gems.

It stood up from its cramps of pain. “Thank you, my child.” It spoke to a place deep within her.

“I held my promise, I said I will see you walk out of this room free.”

“You did, yes.” The apparition waved its hand and Nannade felt as if a burden had been lifted off her, her thoughts clearer and entirely her own; the Serpent stretched and wriggled in relief.

The apparition left through the door, still oddly bound to human shape. Soon it would fade through the veil and be merely a dark thought in the backs of the heads of men. Or that’s what the apparition thought would happen.

Nannade exhaled. She no longer had to keep up the masque she had been putting on this entire time. Then she heard a whistle, like a nightingale greeting the first dark of night. Horrible curses reverberated through ethereal airs all the way down to the secret study. Nannade went up the stairs. There stood Korinna, a wide smile on her face, gilded cage in hand, and in it a black bird with eyes of blazing red, angrily chirping and cheeping.

Nannade laughed as she saw her godfather so helplessly. “I told you, the Serpent wouldn’t allow you to go back out there. Even if I would banish you and your influence, your power would return. So, there is only one way to dispose of you; and it just so happens you yet have something that the Serpent is missing, Lu-Nam-Tagga.” She opened the cage and reached inside, making sure to hold the little birdie tight. She turned her head to Korinna. “Watch closely now, Korinna. You are about to witness the only way to ensure the utter and complete destruction of a daemon.”

Nannade opened her maw wide. It had been so long since the serpent had swallowed prey alive and whole.

The red was blazing through her, like molten gold through her veins, leaking out her eyes, rising up her gullet, into her muscles. Her entire body cramped and she fell down on all four, then keeled over completely, writhing in spasms. The pain was deep and good. Her head wanted to burst with thoughts, thoughts of all the wrongness, knowledge of all that is to be called evil. She felt the brand searing on her forehead, like during the battle, but this time, there was more. Not just a jewel. A crown.

She stood back up. Korinna looked at her with disbelief in her eyes.

“You’re...”

“I know what I am, Korinna. No more shall this lord of sin walk about and drive men to their worst deeds just so that it could feed on them. No, this lord will convert followers no longer, the shepherd’s dog is a wolf now.”

Korinna swallowed, clenched her hand on the cage’s handle, and then nodded. “I guess the candle shines on in the darkness.”

“You no longer need to feign a truce, Korinna. Your servitude is over. You will get off this time, don’t push Us a second time.”

Korinna merely stepped aside.

“I will have to see my Teacher. You might wake up without a master tomorrow.” She stepped outside. The winds had still not died down, blowing into Nannade’s face, as if to hinder her, even if just by one heartbeat. She had already lost much time; the pact with her godfather had forced her to free him, but her union with the Serpent had forced her to do it slowly. Now she was dashing down the roads as fast as she could, she even ran right past the still gathered crowd at the plaza. They seemed to have picked Timaeus out of the barrel, still unconscious.

She knew that Paramonos had lured Teacher to the craftsman's terrace, some dirty back alley, but she did not know where exactly. She reached the edge of the merchant’s terrace and looked over the craftsman’s. She could see flashes of light and small crowds of people gathering outside darker alleyways, that’s where Teacher had to be.

She hurried down the ramp and soon arrived where she intended to. From up on the roofs, she could see Red Spike and Teacher fighting. He looked a lot younger than she expected, with him being supposedly older than Teacher and all. Paramonos was nowhere to be seen; must have already been taken away. Teacher was wearing heavy plates on his fists and arms, hurling lightning and punches Red Spike’s way. It was a drawn-out fight, that much she could tell; several houses’ walls were battered in, transmuted, reshaped or simply missing; shards of stone, loam, wood and metal were strewn across the ground and many of the barrels or crates in the alleys had scorch marks on them.

“TELL ME!” Teacher screamed at his opponent, obviously impatient and angered.

Spike, already covered in bruises but still holding up rather well, answered. “Oh no, I’d rather see you angry some more!”

Teacher grabbed spike by the collar and slammed him to the wall, not unlike what he had done with Nannade herself some time back, instead this time, he immediately started hammering Spike’s face.

A barrier flinched alight every time Teacher hit. It was getting weaker with every strike, probably at the brink of breaking by now. One strike after the other, Spike wasn’t even trying to fight back, merely grinning as he was literally punched through the wall.

Nannade decided to drop down from her perch. “Teacher!”

Garetas whirled around. “Claw, you’re here! Good, we need to get this guy to talk!”

Nannade stepped closer to the man now resting in a shallow indentation in the wall, exhausted but not too badly hurt. “That’s Red Spike of Kalonoitz? He seems like a small fish why are you still wasting time with him?”

As Garetas spoke, Nannade could hear something tremble in his voice. “He has vital information, he captured Phi-… our trusted contract, I can’t leave him... I can’t leave him hanging, you know!” And the trembling got worse. Garetas looked away as if he was checking something behind him. “And he won’t tell me where he holds him!” He started to blink frequently, his voice became panicked.

Nannade put a hand on her teacher’s shoulder. “It’s all fine, Teacher. I know. Elissa told me. It’s all fine!”

Garetas blinked once, twice, seemingly to make sure he heard right. For a moment he seemed as if he wanted to protest, but then he exhaled. “Thank you.”

She hugged him tightly, making sure to squeeze him harder than she ever had before. He squeezed back. “We’ll get Philander back, be at ease!” She tried her best to encircle his huge chest with her arms, feeling him breathe as he tried to keep his composure. After Nannade had finally dared to detach from him, she turned to Red Spike. He smirked the ugliest smirk Nannade had ever seen. “Isn’t that cute, the degenerate hadn’t even entrusted how disgusting he truly was to his pet abomination! Let me give you two a hu-” Nannade smacked her fist across his face to shut him up. Although the shield still held up, it worked.

“Let’s get him to a quieter place. Nobody needs to hear him cry.” Nannade took her staff and asked the Serpent to help her in this. Black chains fell from the staff’s tip and entangled Red Spike, safe for transport to the basement. “Don’t worry, Teacher. You’ll see Philander before noon.”