The guard reached Down to his belt. He unhooked his lantern and held it up in front of himself. The lantern was perforated seemingly at random, giving the impression of a small, handheld starscape. The guard's face was still in shadow. Clearly, the perforations didn't run around the entire cylinder.

"Okay, really don't do anything stupid this time." Cel Instructed

I could use more specific instructions Cel Don complained.

"Just hold on and wait to see what this guy does for now. This could be our chance."

Considering that Don couldn't move under his own power, he was pretty happy to get a task he could still accomplish, but that didn't mean he was fine with getting stabbed again. He grew more and more nervous as the figure continued looming in the entryway.

'Can you fly over there?' Don asked 'I want to see what that person is doing'

Don half expected Cel to object but she floated across the room without responding. As she drew close the guard was illuminated. He was wearing heavy cloth, dark with water, slowly dripping more into the puddle at his feet. His hands were knobbly and calloused. The lantern they held was scratched, dented, and black streaks of soot ran upwards from each perforation. The man's face looked squashed, like he spent his infancy smushing it against any hard surface he could find and it got stuck. His nose crooked to the left and sprouted copious amounts of hair effectively covering his mouth. His jaw and scalp were likewise covered in Keratin. A shine in the Guards free hand brought don's attention to the sharp length of iron clenched there. It was a crude looking tool.

Cel went a bit further and the guard's face sank back into shadow. When Cel got to the entrance, she bobbed excitedly and came zooming back to Don like a meteor.

"This is it!" She practically squealed with excitement "The other guard is out cold! I can only assume this guy plans to steal you!"

'He's going to steal me? What does that mean?' Don asked, not even trying to mask the panic he was beginning to feel. Don squirmed weakly trying to get into a less vulnerable position.

"Don't you move!" Instructed the guard in a quavering voice. Don obligingly went back to lying prone and unmoving on the uncomfortable floor.

"Don't try and fight him!" Cel advised Don. "He's definitely too much for you to handle, especially on consecrated ground." Don kept his eyes on the guard and his now trembling lantern.

"Stealing means he's going to take you away from here and bring you somewhere else. If I'm right, this is exactly what we want so don't scare him too much or he might just kill you instead. That would be really inconvenient."

'Me, scare him?' Don thought incredulously 'I'm not even moving!'

"You don't have to. It's one of the quirks of being a Demon, any neutral or good aligned creatures will instinctually fear you. It's probably why they are keeping you here. The crypt should dampen that effect."

The Guard finally mastered the fear undermining his resolve and stepped deeper into the crypt. When Don didn't react he became visibly bolder. His shoulders rose an inch and pulled back from their previously hunched position. He took a few more steps into the dark and started giving Don more instructions as he did so.

"Don't move." He repeated "Don't even think about moving" Don emptied his mind "Stay right bleeding, THERE!" He finished the last instruction with a sudden leap forward, landing with one foot firmly on Don's neck.

Though Don was trying to remain as still as possible, the sudden pressure caused him to flail. His attempts to free himself were in vain. The guard expertly wrenched don's hands behind his back and bound them securely with coarse ropes. Don's shoulder screamed in protest and a short yelp escaped him. The guard immediately jumped back, then looked over his shoulder. He went back to the entrance and pulled the wall shut again. Then he came back, more confidently this time and plunged his sharpened bit of metal into Don's already injured shoulder. Don screamed, The guard flinched, but then he twisted the tool, producing even more pain. Don was left whimpering for a minute before he could quiet himself again.

"Didn't like that did you?" The guard asked. Don shook his head. The guard jumped back before closing the distance between them again. The fear in his face was now tinged with curiosity. There was also a gleam Don was unfamiliar with.

"Do you understand me?"

"Say yes!" Cel prompted.

Don tried to say yes but only produced a wet sounding grunt. Cel winced, realizing her mistake. The guard recoiled and raised his bloody knife. Don looked away, clenched his eyes shut and whimpered. The blow never came. A few seconds later his ankles were being roughly pulled back and bound similarly to his wrists. The guard wasn't delicate and Don gained several new bruises during the process. When the guard stopped fussing over the bindings, Don couldn't move an inch without straining his back painfully. It seemed his wrists and ankles were now linked by the bindings. With all the strain on his back, the coarse bindings scraping at his skin, and the rock floor digging into him, Don hardly noticed when the guard slipped a string around his neck. Thankfully, this rope was much lighter than the ones used on his limbs.

"Say Ahh." The guard prompted

Without moving, Don glanced over at Cel. She prompted him to obey for the time being and Don opened his mouth to make the inane noise, or at least a close approximation. Before he could, a fetid strip of cloth was forced between his jaws and tied so tightly around the back of his neck that his cheeks began to split. Don felt like he was choking and gagged a bit before forcefully stilling himself, not that he could move much anymore.

Don's involuntary licking at the binding revealed that his teeth were far sharper than they had any right to be. They were already cutting the cloth a bit, causing it to fray. Don resisted the urge to chew through the cloth as best he could.

The guard wasted no time now that his prisoner was secured. With a grunt, he lifted the demon, lowered it a bit, reset his grip and then heaved, securing Don's bindings over his shoulder. Don felt he was going to be snapped in half. The stress on his spine was incredible and he tried to cry out but the gag effectively muffled his voice.

Each lurching step the guard took bounced Don but it wasn't as bad as the original lifting so he kept his voice under control. He also noticed the silver token swinging from the loose rope around his neck for the first time. Each time it swung into his chest, it felt like a tiny static shock.

"We are so lucky! This escape is going to be even easier than I expected!" Cel cheered from somewhere nearby. Don wasn't so sure he agreed with her. In fact, he was starting to regret taking her instructions up to this point.

As the guard hauled Don out of the Crypt, he felt small, cold impacts all over his body. At first, he feared more new varieties of pain but the small impacts revealed themselves to be drops of a liquid, falling from somewhere above. It was a refreshing sensation and the cool water soothed a bit of his pain. Then the Guard lurched, losing his footing and jerking Don's bindings, scraping his wrists and ankles and straining Don's back again. There was an unsettling popping and Don forgot all about the rain.

The guard held his lantern out in front of him, the rain pattering off of its conical top. He was squinting, trying to see past the occluding rain. Don could see fairly well by fairy light. The ground was primarily unidentifiable, churned filth. Small, murky puddles formed in bootprints and danced as they were bombarded by the fat droplets from above. Dense vegetation grew to the sides of a path running away from the crypt into the darkness. It threatened to choke off the path entirely at a few points. Don was intrigued by the view despite his current discomfort. He didn't get to enjoy it long before Cell landed on his necklace and dimmed to her minimum setting as a result. She sat above the token like it was a swing. She looked bedraggled and as Don watched, a raindrop the size of her head nearly knocked her off her seat. She swung wildly but managed to hang on. When she recovered she gave Don a beaming smile. Her cheeks even glowed.

Is she actually enjoying herself? Don thought to himself

"This little fashion statement" She bounced her heel against the copper talisman, pushing her now lank hair to the side "Is our ticket out of here."

Before Don could ask what 'fashion' meant, the guard swung Don off his shoulder and dropped him onto a new hard and wet surface. This one wasn't bumpy at least. The guard then dropped a mound of smelly, stringy somethings on him, they itched and tickled Don but he kept quiet and still. He did NOT want to get stabbed again. , the surface he was on lurched, rocked back, then lurched again. It began bouncing and bumping uncomfortably, especially on his injured shoulder but there was the unmistakable sensation of movement.

'What's happening?' Don finally had enough relief from the guard's unkind handling to start thinking clearly again.

"Were escaping, that's what!" Cel said. She was easy to see in the gloom. She sniffed.

"Oh god, this hay reeks, I've got to get out of here" She put a hand to her mouth and used the other to start pushing aside the wet, dead and apparently soiled vegetation trying to open up an escape tunnel.

"I'll keep an eye out and let you know if anything changes." She called just before she passed out of sight.

'Are you sure we're better off here than back in the crypt?' Don asked.

There was no response. For the first time since Cel appeared, for the first time Don could remember, He was alone. Without anything better to do, he practiced more some calculations, plotting out an orbital insertion maneuver. When he was done with that basic exercise, he started adding in obstacles, traffic and eventually a small moon. He was still struggling with that last one when Cel's muffled voice came through the hay.

"We're passing by the village now, I'm going to try something."

Don tried to ask for more information about her plan but again, with the line of sight between them broken, his message didn't get through. It wasn't long before he felt a tickling at the back of his neck as hay shifted, then he felt a couple of small hands pulling at the cord around his neck.

'What are you doing?' Don asked

"I'm -mffh- trying to get the attention of the -hmff- other guards."

Don was not fond of the guards' attention so far. He would rather avoid them and their sharp metal if he could.

'Why the void are you trying to do that?'

"Well, -hurrgh- if the guards start chasing us, -Grr, stupid rope!- it should mess with this traitor's plans, He might make a mistake, and then we can -Got it!-" Cel ended her explanation with a triumphant shout as the rope slipped from don's neck.

Almost immediately, the pommel of a dagger found Don's head. With a loud clunk, Don fell into unconsciousness. Some indeterminate time later, Don was rocked and bumped back to wakefulness, a new throbbing bruise, and an accompanying headache were the prizes he won from Cel's plan.

The bumping and jostling had intensified and some of the hay actually sloughed off the side of Don's platform, giving him a view. Don closed his eyes at first because the rain kept hitting them, but he eventually got them open. There wasn't much to see. The silvery streaks of rain passing through the feeble light cast by the Guards lantern faded into darkness just beyond. There was no hint of a ceiling, just darkness, and water stretching out above him. Don spotted Cel sitting miserably under the guard's upturned collar. The guard kept glancing over his shoulder. Don followed his gaze. It took him a while but Don was eventually able to make out several bobbing lights in the distance. He refocused on Cel.

What happened? He asked groggily. Cel perked up and zipped over to Don.

"You took that hit like a champ is what happened!."

No, I mean, why did he hit me? Is he going to do it again?

"Ohh," Cel shrugged "I guess he hit you because I took off the Talisman and released your aura. Maybe he thought you were trying to escape or something. Maybe he was just scared of you. Doesn't really matter." She seemed pretty nonchalant about it but Don's aching skull seemed to think it mattered a lot.

Abruptly, the rain stopped falling as Don was wheeled under a crudely built overhang. Before Don could take a closer look, the guard hefted Don back onto his shoulder with a grunt.

"Why the abyss are you so damned heavy?" He complained as he wrenched Don's back yet again.

"So here's the deal" Cel explained from the talisman once again "It looks like my plan worked and the other guards caught wind of this traitor's little caper. Our host is definitely feeling the pressure. He's ditched his wheelbarrow and is making for the woods. All we have to do is keep vigilant for our opportunity. With all this stress he's going to make a mistake soon and then we can use that chance to slip away."

Don wasn't interested in Cel's plans at the moment. He just wanted the pain to stop. He didn't bother replying to Cel this time. He just kept gritting his teeth over the increasingly frayed gag.

It felt like hours passed but it was only minutes before the Guard started breathing heavily. A short while later, the sound of the rain changed. Instead of soft impacts below him, there were now many louder impacts from above and ahead. A little while later, Don was unceremoniously dumped onto the soggy ground. Soggy didn't mean soft. There were irregular, hard shapes embedded into the ground all around him. The rain had slowed considerably but now the drops hitting him were much heavier. Don basked in the relative comfort as the knots in his back relaxed fractionally.

That was when the labored breathing of the guard was replaced by a sudden shriek. Before Don could register what the change meant, multiple sharp sets of claws dug into his skin and hoisted him off the ground. The guard was screaming obscenities but Don was now fully preoccupied with the claw digging into his cheek just a centimeter from his right eye.

"Here we go!" Cel called out with glee.