227 Commitmen (1/2)
”Enemy?” asked Li, surprised.
”I share the lad's wonder,” commented Old Thane as he put his hand to his beard. ”Of all the many creatures that roam these lands, it is said only three kinds are above all. The dragons, the primordial spirits, and, finally, the demons.”
”That does remind me. A little off the topic at hand, but what of angels? I've yet to see one or hear of them,” said Li. He knew that in the game, angels and demons were, as they traditionally were, diametrically opposed to each other in the same way light and dark were.
”Angels? The spirits of light? Gone,” said Zagan. ”In the beginning, when all magic and beings came crashing upon this world of mortals a millennia ago, there were angels. They fought us, the demons, for supremacy. Yet after the gods drove us west and ascended to their divine plane, the angels left also, and since then, they have never deigned to set their wings upon this plane of existence.”
”I see,” said Li. Strange, considering that even in Valhul, there were no angels. Or perhaps, considering that in game lore angels were essentially automatons fashioned through shards of Helius's life force, Helius no longer had the life force or willpower to maintain them.
”Then continue with the Abyss. I had wavered the idea of creating a spell to call angels, for they, like your kind, have some measure of resistance to eldritch insanity auras. One thing I notice, Zagan, is that you have complete contempt for the Abyss. I can understand your distaste of your kind drawing from its powers, but it seems you have a personal chip on your shoulder against the thing as a whole.”
”All demonkind should. That is why the sacrilege is ever more heretic that the Burning One should now ally with the Abyss.” Zagan continued his explanation.
”Eight centuries ago, merely two centuries after the dawn of the gods and magic, an entity fell from the moon. It crashed within the En Okearkos, the great ocean where a great many of the waterfaring members of this personage's kind lived.
This personage was not alive for this, but still aged enough to remember the tales and the duty invested upon us. The demons of the time had recovered from their routing by the gods. The second Burning One had come to rise in power, and she commanded seven new heralds, ready to bring forth the full might of the Swarm upon the mortal world once more.
But the fall of that entity, that alien, foul thing, presented a far greater threat.
The Burning One saw as the entity's tendrils spread through En Okearkos, corrupting and twisting all demonkin within, and understood that to leave it alone would be to leave the entire world to destruction.
”Demons saving the world? How the taverns would laugh at that tale were I to spread it. And how the Light would try to purge even me if I spoke of it. A mighty shame - all should know of heroics, regardless of where it hails from.” Old Thane nodded slowly, taking in the concept that the race that all mortals feared as evil, chaotic, and predatory above measure, had acted to save the world.
There was no disbelief in his voice, merely some slight surprise, with even that tempered over his years of experience.
Zagan stirred. ”Hm. You mortal races seem to misunderstand. You are all prey. Whether you crawl on fours or stand on twos or fly on wings, in the end, to us, you are all meals. And yet, for balance to remain, both predator and prey must even each other out. Should that entity have emerged from En Okearkos, there would be nothing left.”
”Isn't the whole point of calling the Rite of the Swarm to take over the whole world?” asked Li.
”And mortal life would still continue. Moderated as the humans moderate their cattle.”
”Fair enough,” said Li, because after all, when it came down to it, Zagan was a demon. ”So, if I recall correctly, the second invasion happened much later than the first. Five hundred or so years after, I believe, and yet, there was a Burning One with seven heralds all ready to go just two hundred years in.
I'm assuming something happened to them.”