Chương 43: No Turning Back

POV: Evelisse Ardentia - Moments Before Greg's Teleportation to the Afterport I was on my knees, the fatigue and the pain crashing down on me, when the bald man arrived astride the Cerberus. He swung down off her back and strode toward Ywain. Ywain lunged at him, fist ready. The bald man simply raised his palm, and Ywain was blown clean off his feet and onto a tree. As the man closed the distance, he turned that palm toward him, a white magic circle blooming across it, and gestured as though drawing something out.

Pale particles gathered around Ywain, and strands of white light began to pull loose from him, threading into the circle. Ywain writhed against it, but he couldn't seem to do anything more than that; he was pinned by an unseen force, unable to move, only able to struggle. When the last of it had drained away, the man lifted both arms overhead and brought them down. A column of white light hammered out of the sky onto Ywain, and he went limp, his body sagging against the tree.

I couldn't make sense of how fast it had happened. The demon girl, Milo, and I had thrown everything we had at Ywain and barely held our own, yet this man had put him down in seconds, without so much as breaking stride. Just... who is he? He turned toward me. Then he was in the air, and in the space of a blink he was standing right in front of me. I forced myself up. My knee screamed, but I got to my feet and set myself into a stance.

I had nothing left to cast, no strength for anything offensive, but—"Evelisse Ardentia," the man said. How did he know my name? Had Milo told him? He had ridden on the Cerberus, did that make him one of Milo's underlings?

"I apologize that you and the Dark Lord have suffered," he went on.

"Something has occurred, which I'm not able to explain to you at present."

"Who are you?" I said, not letting my eyes off his, "and what do you intend to do?" He considered it a moment, then seemed to decide.

"You may call me Greg. I'm with the Dark Lord." A pause.

"But there's no cause for alarm. I mean no harm here. The situation is grave, as you've no doubt seen. That one over there has done a great many things that should not be possible." He nodded toward Ywain's slumped body. He wasn't wrong. Ywain shouldn't have been able to summon the Lumiere Wings without the Mooncleaver. He shouldn't have been able to sheathe his fists in holy fire, or cast a Holy Flash, or pull a second Mooncleaver out of empty air. None of it was possible. But how did this man know all that?

Did Milo know all of these too? He hadn't seemed to, his shock at the Mooncleaver had looked as genuine as mine.

"Something has happened to make those things possible," Greg said.

"I'll need your cooperation, which is to say, I'll need you not to question what I've done, or what I'm about to do. I have to speak with some of the Dark Lord's people. It won't take long." I turned it over. He could be lying. But he had just defeated Ywain in the space of a breath; if he'd wanted me dead, he wouldn't have wasted a single word doing it. Whatever he was, killing me clearly wasn't on his list. I let the stance drop and nodded.

"Fine." My gaze went to Milo. He was unconscious too, the burns still raw across his body. The demon girl knelt over him, holding him against the ground, and her face was drawn tight with something I hadn't expected to see on it. No tears. But her brow was furrowed, her jaw set hard, her hands gripping him a fraction too tightly, and there was the faintest tremor in them. Real Worry. I would never have guessed she had that expression in her.

And seeing it, the fear I'd been holding down began to climb back up my chest, that same trembling from before. I staggered toward him, and Greg's arm came up across my path.

"He'll live," he said.

"Let me handle it." He crossed to Milo, spread one hand over him, and white sparks drifted down like falling snow. As I edged closer, I watched the burns close and fade. Milo stirred, a low groan escaping him, and the demon girl, as if caught at something, eased him gently back down and simply looked at him instead of holding him. Then his eyes opened. He scanned around for a while, and our eyes met.

I wanted to rush to him and ask him how he's doing, but with so many people around, that was probably not an appropriate thing to do. After a brief exchange with Milo, Greg lifted a hand, and all of them; Milo, the demon girl, the Cerberus, were gone. I looked around. Empty. Somewhere in all of it, Ywain had vanished too; i t was quiet. Peaceful, almost, for all the ruin around me; the frozen trees, the churned and cratered earth.

And still, underneath the quiet, something sat unsettled and heavy in my chest and wouldn't lift. Then, with the knowledge that Milo would be all right, my mind circled back to the thing that had been gnawing at me since Ywain first breathed it into my ear mid-fight, that Milo had cast a love spell on me before. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. The fighting was over now, and once Milo came back, I needed all of it to be made clear.

We stood in front of Milo's place. The hut had grown, enough that it now looked like an actual house rather than a shack. Outside, the Cerberus lay napping, likely worn out from the fight. The signs of battle were everywhere; even more trees splintered and ground torn up than the last time I'd been here. A stray shield and staff lay abandoned in the dirt, though their owners were nowhere in sight. Had Mel come here too? What had happened to her? Milo caught me staring at the equipment and read the worry on my face.

"Oh, don't worry, I didn't kill them. Ywain brought two people along, and if you're worried about your mage friend, she didn't come. We fought for a bit, I knocked them out. Nyx probably dragged them inside." He'd suggested we talk here, somewhere more fitting for the things he wanted to explain properly. So here we were. He pushed the door open, and the interior surprised me. A wooden table sat at the center with chairs drawn up around it, a fireplace across the room, a rug laid out on the floor.

Set against the bare, half-wrecked place I'd seen before, it was a startling improvement. Milo glanced around like he was hunting for something.

"Um, okay, let's just head in. Don't worry about your boots, it's fine." He led me in, caught the back of one of the chairs and pulled it out.

"Have a seat. And, oh, let me get you something." He disappeared into one of the rooms, and I heard him rummaging around inside. I sat. Faint voices carried from the other room. Beside the one Milo had gone into was a second door, closed, and, oddly, marked with a small drawing of the demon girl's face. Before long Milo emerged with two waterskins. He handed me one, dropped into a chair, and started on his own.

"Is this... from Milly?" He nearly choked, then recovered.

"Um, yeah. They still send food and drink every day. It's how we get by, honestly. There's barely anything edible in this forest." I turned the waterskin over in my hands. It felt strange, drinking from something extorted out of a village. But I supposed I'd been turning that over too much in my head. I let out a breath and drank, and it was cold and clean, better than I'd expected, and I hadn't realized how dry my throat had gone until I was most of the way through it. I lowered it with a small, involuntary sigh.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and caught Milo staring at me. He looked away the instant our eyes met. He scratched at the back of his head.

"S-so. What I was thinking was—" The door with the drawing swung open, and the demon girl stepped out, hair damp with sweat at the temples. She fixed me with a hard look for a beat, then snapped her attention to Milo. I turned to him too, he had gone slightly rigid. She squinted, crossed the floor on bare feet, pulled out a chair, and dropped into it between us, one leg crossed over the other.

"Go on," she said to Milo.

"Continue." Milo's eyes widened a fraction. He glanced at me, then back at her, and took a breath.

"Okay. Proper discussion. Great." He cleared his throat.

"So, Evelisse. I need you to understand that this isn't over. I don't know where Ywain is, but he's almost certainly coming back. After talking with the bald guy, I know now that there's no urgent need to keep terrorizing people." Something in my chest lifted, unexpectedly.

"You mean, you can stop? The terrorizing?" Milo's eyes flicked toward Nyx. She looked away.

"Er. Technically, yes. But—""But?"

"I can't stop completely. I still need to get stronger. So that when Ywain, or whoever else comes for me, I can actually stand a chance." I didn't know what I felt in that moment. For a breath I'd thought Milo had been freed of it, and now it turned out he hadn't. It was the same as before, really. He still had to spread fear to grow strong enough to survive the next attack. Before I could find anything to say, the demon girl leaned toward me across the table.

"Listen, former Hero. I know what happened out there. You saved Milo, and I'm—" She stopped." He's grateful for that." Something in the way she caught herself struck me as strange. Then she cleared her throat and pressed on.

"But by doing it, you stood against the Hero, and believe me, Lord Luminaryn knows. You can't go back to Astrea now. Or maybe you can, but there'll be a bounty on your head by tomorrow morning." I didn't know how she came by so much, or how she said all of it with such certainty, but it held together. I had chosen my path. Whether or not I'd thought it through, I had burned the bridges behind me.

"So this is not the time to sit around agonizing over whether what we do, terrorizing or not, is right. Whether it squares with the Church's teachings, or your sense of justice, or whatever crap you have been taught, you already saved the Dark Lord." Her gaze didn't waver.

"So why are you still clutching those moral codes now?" I opened my mouth, and found I didn't have a ready answer.

"You helped us. The least we owe you is a real conversation, honesty, all of it. But if you're expecting us to stop the terrorizing because Milo's gone soft over you—" Milo made a strangled noise; she ignored it, "—then you're badly mistaken. He might drag his feet about it. I won't. I'll be there to make sure we do what has to be done." She held my eyes.

"So I'd suggest you put that supposedly sharp mind of yours toward figuring out how we move forward, instead of clinging to an ideal you no longer have the right to hold."

"Okay, Nyx, that's a little—" She turned on him, one sharp look, and he shut his mouth. Then she exhaled, and stood.

"I've said my piece." She started back toward her room.

"The rest is yours. Do what you want with it." She walked to her room and shut the door behind her.

"Evelisse." Milo's voice pulled my attention back. When I turned, he was leaning forward in his chair, watching me with a raw, unguarded sort of hope, the look of someone bracing for an answer he wants badly and doesn't dare assume he'll get.

"There's a great deal I can't tell you yet. Not while you're not on our side." He drew a breath.

"You remember the Fear Consultant thing I brought up before? I think we need to take that seriously now. For real. Once you've decided, then I might be able to tell you the rest. Just know that this whole business isn't what it looks like from the outside." And there it was. Another crossroads. Except this time I didn't have the luxury of standing at it. I had to choose, and quickly.