As we stared at the old woman, I noticed Emily instead walking around trying to study the magic in the room. She was touching the walls as she chanted her cantrip, marveling at the flow of magic throughout the room. It’s interesting watching a child see things they’ve never seen before.
As she did so, Burin walked over to help up Baba Yaga, helping her rest on what remained of a bench. We’d all just been staring at her – well, all but Emily – until he did so. “At least someone remembers his manners,” the old woman said, allowing the dwarf to help him up.
“I’m sorry,” Terry said. “It’s just, we weren’t expecting to find you until after we faced your son, is all.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that. He got what was coming to him.”
“That’s great to hear. So, I was wondering, since we came all this way for you…” I was worried where this was going. “So, my daughter and this dwarf are entangled by some kind of magic and can’t go too far from each other. Do you think you can untangle their existence? I will personally be in your debt and will gladly spend my life repaying you after I slay my dragon. Unless you want to help me with that to speed it up, of course.” He flashed a smile and a thumbs up at Persephone.
As he talked, Gregor slid up next to me. “If this is the past, just how long could she have been here? Shouldn’t we have been able to get here just after she did?”
Daddy had once given me a three hour lecture on time travel. But I really don’t understand it, even then. “I’m not sure. The hut may have weird limitations where the time has passed as long here as it has in our time since the hut was last here. There’s no way to tell without getting information on when it last left and what day it is now. I think Cortana can figure out the latter for me based on the movement of the stars, but we have no data from the former.”
Gregor nodded, satisfied. “I see.”
Persephone saw Terry’s gesture and spoke up. “Don’t forget to ask about Toby,” she said.
“Oh, right, and if you could revive my dead son, that would be great too,” Terry said to Baba Yaga.
The witch laughed acerbically. “I believe we can come to an arrangement. But I will first need to get to the hut to heal my injuries and get supplies to work on it. Once I have determined the difficulty of what you ask, then will negotiations begin. Now, take me to the hut.”
“I want to see the body of Sergei’s killer first,” Gregor said.
“Do you not believe my word?” the old witch asked.
“Honor dictates that I see the corpse of the man who killed Sergei, so I may visit Sergei’s grave and tell him that he has been avenged, even if not by my hand.”
Baba Yaga sighed. “I can see that I will not dissuade you. Dwarf, be a dear and help me walk,” she said. Burin got under her arm and helped her stand. She rested her weight on him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Such a good boy,” she said. “Obedience to your elders is a virtue.” Few humans could say that to an adult dwarf, but she was definitely one of them.
“We also have this special gun which might help with your wounds,” Terry said. “It’s really effective at healing injuries. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it has something to do with tiny machines.”
She seemed intrigued. “We can give it a try,” she said, beckoning him over.
Terry approached with the nanite gun in hand, ready to treat her wounds. As he prepared to inject her, there was a motion. It was nigh imperceptible and super-fast, but thankfully Terry caught it and managed to dodge back before Baba Yaga snatched the tool from his hand.
The movement betrayed the lie. She was neither old nor injured. In a simultaneous motion, Terry holstered the nanite gun and drew his rifle. He took aim and squeezed the trigger, but missed as the “old woman” bit his arm. “Dammit!” Terry cursed. “All old people are evil! You hear that Emily?”
“Yes, sir,” Emily said.
The old woman cast a spell, hitting Terry with necromantic energy and sapping his strength and simultaneously unleashed a spell that filled me with a sense of overwhelming despair. And I wasn’t the only one. “Her magic is too strong,” Burin wailed. “We’re all doomed since no one has the power to stop her.”
Persephone transformed into a manticore and moved in to help and Emily cast a spell to try to enflame our foe’s emotions and prevent her from focusing enough to cast, but it was resisted. I had to push pretty hard to overcome it with the force bolts I’d unleashed, so it was clear that the woman had resistance to magic.
And I knew why. As she’d cast, the glamour around the woman faded, revealing a terrible creature. She was an Erodaemon, a creature of Abaddon who personify death by heartbreak. And Gregor was definitely feeling heartbroken at the moment. “I knew he couldn’t be dead,” he said, half-heartedly striking at her with tears in his eyes.
Terry was clearly unaffected by the emotional manipulation. He was just seething with rage. “You shouldn’t have fucked with my emotions!” he raged as he took aim. “That’s a one way ticket to pain town!” He squeezed the trigger and a bullet shot forth, straight through the daemon’s skull. She collapsed like a ton of bricks. “Machine of death!” Terry shouted before devolving into a fit of coughing from the necromantic attack he’d taken. There was blood on his hand from his injuries.
After the fight, Gregor was sitting with his head in his hands. “We struggled this much against her. How can we possible kill the man who would not die?”
Terry patted his shoulder. “Come now. Would Sergei be acting like a bitch? No. He’d get up and fight. If he wasn’t dead, I mean.”
“Sergei did not get back up,” Gregor said, his head in his hands. Terry had no idea how to deal with that.
It took a few minutes for us to feel better as the magic faded. We were left with only one person feeling sad. “What’s wrong?” I asked Emily, who was pouting in the corner.
“It didn’t work,” she said. “I tried to use magic to make her angry, but it didn’t work!”
I hugged the girl. “Some enemies are resistant to magic. You’re still learning. I’ll teach you more about how to push past that when we have time.”
“Feeling better?” Persephone asked both of us.
Emily nodded. “I just need practice,” she said. “Dad was pretty cool, though.”
Persephone laughed. “He was, but sometimes I don’t know what I see in him. I have trouble telling if he’s a doofus or a psychopath.”
“Maybe he’s a doofopath?” Emily suggested. I had to fight not to laugh, because she looked completely serious.
Instead, I walked over to Burin. “How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m okay now. But I was unable to think about anything but the future of my clan for a bit there,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Without the demon to contain, we’ll lose our position among our people. It will take time, but we’ll likely be destitute if we don’t find a solution.”
I hadn’t considered that. But I knew someone who would know what to do. “When we’re done here, we can talk to Daddy. If anyone can give you some good suggestions on how to keep your family from falling on hard times, it’s him. He’s amazing at making money.”
“That’s a load off of my mind,” Burin said. “We don’t mind hard work. It’s just that I have no idea what we could do. I worried that I might have doomed my entire clan.”
Persephone had snuck into the next room as we had wallowed in our misery. When she returned, she was carrying some kind of book. I didn’t get a great look at it, but it kinda looked like a Russian Orthodox bible. I hope she wasn’t planning on converting. My parents would never let me be friends with one of those heretics.
“So, just to confirm,” Persephone said as she tucked the book into Emily’s bag, “that wasn’t the right old lady, right? What now?”
Gregor cracked his knuckles. “It means that Sergei’s killer is still alive. So we go kill him.”
Terry grinned. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
I saw Persephone roll her eyes, but she said nothing as we made our way through the monastery. It was a bit treacherous considering the fact that it was ancient and in clear need of renovation, but we made it through pretty easily. After all, when you’ve faced an army of dragon riding aliens on a frozen world, it’s not like a few weak boards were that big a deal.
Also, I cheated and flew over everything that looked dangerous. Emily copied me and did the same.
After stopping to let everyone marvel at all the lightbulbs, we reached, at long last, a large set of double doors that no doubt led to the main chapel. We could see flashing blue-white light coming through the doors. “He’s here,” Gregor said. “I can feel it.” He tensed his muscles as he spoke, and immediately shifted into the form of a frost giant. Not necessarily the best idea in this decrepit building, but the floor held.
Terry put away his gun and pulled out his rocket launcher. Persephone became a manticore once more. I cast a defensive spell in case Terry was told to kill me again. And Emily tried a spell we’d worked on, hastening all of our movements. “Now we can be better at killing old people!” the girl said proudly as the spell worked.
Terry beamed with pride. “That’s my girl!”
Persephone just looked annoyed.
Meanwhile… Burin walked over with a completely guileless look on his face, threw open the door, and said hello. That dwarf will be the death of us. I’m sure of it.
Rasputin was floating in the center of the room, surrounded by Tesla coils and all sorts of “mad-science” type stuff all over. Electricity was arcing between him and the coils, and there was a pale green shell around him, like a force field. I recognized it as magic that would prevent living creatures from approaching him. It wouldn’t stop me, with my celestial heritage, nor would it stop an eidolon, but it would prevent the others from walking up to him. It was a smart play.
“Welcome fools! You are too late! I have sucked out almost all of my mother’s power! Soon, I will take her throne and will conquer this and all other worlds!”
Terry sneered. “Sucked out her power? How? With your lips on her saggy, old-lady teet?”
Rasputin unleashed a spell without a word, striking us with unholy energy. After the instant of pain subsided, I felt ill, and Emily didn’t look any better, but the rest were minimally affected. Then he instantly unleashed another, commanding Terry to attack me. Called it.
What I didn’t see coming was that Terry actually resisted the command. He fired a rocket at Rasputin, but missed due to a magical field of distorted probability, and the rocket went past the mad monk before exploding. Of course, it was a rocket, so the explosion still clipped Rasputin, causing him to wince in pain.
As the explosion cleared, Emily teleported Persephone into the fray, behind Rasputin – I guess she hadn’t figured out that Persephone could fly right through. With the distraction, Gregor charged straight at the green shell, the teleported at the last second, appearing within. He then began punching the hell out of the floating Rasputin.
Rasputin could cast quickly, I’ll give him that. But two could play that game. I drew on the power of the storm surging within and began hitting him with fireball after fireball. As I did so, I watched as first Terry, then Burin, wandered off, following a bunch of shielded cables through a door into the next room. In a moment, I heard an explosion as Terry began trying to wreck whatever machine was inside, then casting as Burin joined him.
After unleashing a blast of lightning and healing the wounds he’d received, the mad monk began preparing another spell. Gregor punched Rasputin with all his might, and the monk’s neck snapped to an odd angle. He looked dead.
It didn’t last. In a mere few seconds, the monk snapped back to life and unleashed more spells, he cast a powerful spell, but Gregor shrugged it off and kept fighting. “I will kill you as many times as I have to,” Gregor growled.
“I only need to kill you once,” Rasputin quipped back, healing himself again and unleashing another blast of energy at Gregor. I kept weaving fireballs, but Emily ran off after Terry and Burin.
Gregor struck Rasputin again, once more killing him, but the monk came back with a laugh. “I will kill you once for every one of my brothers!” Gregor shouted as he continued fighting. It was clear that the deaths were taking their toll, but we had to end this soon. I was running out of magic.
So I tried something I’d never tried before. This time, instead of pulling on the magic of the inner storm to cast faster, I tried pushing the magic into the fireball itself. The fire burst forth from my hand, white hot and struck Rasputin. For the first time, he cried out in pain.
Once more, his wounds healed due to his magic, but Rasputin now saw that Persephone – who had been constantly clawing at his back – and I could not be ignored. So he unleashed a spell upon Gregor. “KILL HER!” he commanded. Not sure which of us he meant.
“Oh, I’m killing someone,” Gregor said. His hand shot out, his fingers pointed like a knife. His hand tore through Rasputin’s chest and he ripped out the monk’s still-beating heart.
Terry and Burin came running out of the room just in time to watch as Gregor roared in fury with his foe’s heart in his hand. The monk’s body crumpled and the electricity in the room faded. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that Emily had been standing there next to Rasputin. She’d probably tried to teleport Burin over to the monk, but the stubborn dwarf had refused. She later told me that the room was dangerous and she was trying to get him out, but he’d insisted on staying and continuing to smash the machines.
It was over. We healed up and began dismantling the machine, piece by piece, and feeding it into the box. There were some really valuable things in there. As we worked, I heard Terry asking Gregor about how he felt, but Gregor said little.
Eventually, the machines led us to a bunch of small matroshka dolls. The way they were set up, they almost looked like batteries. Gregor eyed the one in the center. “I have seen this before,” he said quietly. “He took it from the monastery. This thing is why Sergei was killed.”
He reached out and picked up the doll. A voice rang out in my head, and from the reaction, Terry, Gregor and Burin heard it too. “So my Black Rider is dead, and he sent you in his place. No wonder it took so long. Now, take me to the Hut. Once there, I will give you instructions on how to free me.”
Terry snatched the doll out of Gregor’s hand and pulled out his gun. Persephone, perplexed but knowing her husband, grabbed it from him. “Hey! I was going to threaten that egg!” he said.
Persephone then gave it to me and I looked at the doll carefully. It was filled with an INSANE amount of magic. “Baba Yaga, I presume?” I said.