Eredar Training

An impatient, singular demonic claw skewered Sarah’s thoughts for but a moment, capturing all her attention upon its pointed tip. She was held, then, at rapt attention, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, turned inwards to observe the reddish- smooth face, sharp-featured, eyes a fiery green so intense as to actually burn. Little licks of flame rose from them, and yet did not singe, did not so much as touch perfectly sculpted, black eyebrows. The face of her servant, Raxandra – self-styled ‘the Destroyer’ – thus imposed itself upon her mind again. For long seconds.

Someone, an irrelevant, hurrying courier, bumped her shoulder and made her stumble a few steps forward. Through long years of use, Stormwind City’s paved streets had been worn smooth in most places, but those little juts that people fell over became emphasized, and one caught her foot just then. As banal as it was, that physical act, near falling, saved her an endless five, ten, fifteen minute internal staring match with the eredar warrior she had bound but six days past. The creature lurked now in the nether, wherever demons went when they were dismissed by their mistress, a den, a sulfurous hole, a damp grave providing shelter from marauding hordes of Light fanatics, but nevertheless found time to harass her. To prod, and poke, and scratch, and pick at every conceivable scab, every inconvenience. It strained against its bindings. Tested them, at every turn.

With a steeling breath, Sarah straightened her spine. No one seemed to have paid attention to her stumbling, nor the rushing courier whom she, despite his unwitting assistance, offered a silent curse. She was left to trudge the rest of the way to the Slaughtered Lamb on her own, squinting occasionally against the daylight. Not that she was, or had ever been, sensitive to the sunlight, sharp as it was – it was Raxandra. Prying. Looking for weakness. A crack in the ritual framework. Seething. A grand warrior, an independent woman with thousands of years of experience, of conquests past, now straining against the influence of well-woven spellwork. Straining, too, against the idea of her leash being held by a little human, a youngster of barely two decades. A gnat, in comparison. So the demon had made Sarah aware, repeatedly. And yet, it was the eredar that was bound, not Sarah.

She took another breath, closing her eyes with some force. As if she were still half asleep, or very tired, trying to blink the hissing of the fiery-eyed creature from her mind. Had there been anyone of note on the way from the canal bridge to the little raised, paved plateau before the Lamb, someone she should have paid attention to? Certainly, she had put foot in front of foot, made her way, but came to the conclusion that her senses had again been turned inward. Did Raxandra direct them, exert control? Or was it her effort in establishing and maintaining control that drew them in?

A nod to the man behind the counter. Sarah did not so much as pretend to order a drink, nor to settle in the sparsely-populated, smoky bar. The distinctive scent of some dulling herb, some light drug, hung in the air, threatening to gift her the headache that, miraculously, her preoccupation with the eredar’s clawing had yet to produce. Thankfully, the miasma of that smoke disappeared when she went into the back rooms, and then past the heavy curtain which poorly masked the entrance to the basement.

The place where the warlocks of Stormwind gathered. Where, once, they had met in secrecy, practicing frowned-upon, dangerous magics in peace, and where they now still met to do that, save less secretly. Long years of hard-fought battle after catastrophe after yet harder-fought battle wore away old stigmas, ground down ethical limitations and made fools of long-held principles, and so, shadow and fel and void and all other such powers had become no more than tools. Dangerous tools, and so she often reminded herself, but still only tools. A knife could, after all, be used to chop vegetables for a delightful soup, just as it could be used to stab someone in the gut. If one could trust most people with a knife, presumably one could also trust a select few people with harnessing what had once been the domain of the Burning Legion almost exclusively. So she reasoned, at least.

Not a moment passed with her having entered the vestibule of the subterranean and yet well-lit, relatively comfortable basement of the Lamb before the very woman she had hoped to avoid for a little while longer accosted her. Not with a shout, or a slap, or even a magical attack – those would perhaps have been preferable. No, instead, Sarah looked up to meet the icy, blue eyes of her teacher. Former teacher.

For just about a month, she had been, technically, practically, her own woman. A warlock, no longer Valeria von Stesse’s responsibility to teach, necessarily. And yet, the woman did not let Sarah out of her sight. Seemed, always, to know, to sense, when something was amiss. When something that might reflect poorly on her might possibly occur. But Sarah had been given license to be her own master. Ostensibly, she could now participate in the peaceful discussions of colleagues within the Lamb without Valeria’s constant hovering. And yet, there it was. Again. A pale face. Stark, raven-black hair. A sharp nose. Unceasing judgment, weighing magical technique, appraising bearing, always ready with a chastising lesson.

“Something clings to you. Holds on to you. Weighs you down, Sarah,” Valeria said.

For but a moment, the woman’s eyes shifted hue, saturating with verdant, and then painfully pure, green. She saw something, understood something about Sarah in that moment, through some manner of spellwork which she had not shared, and so, the cold eyes froze over entirely. Narrowed, just so.

“What have you done? What have you tied, bound to you?”

A stern voice, and yet, unusually for Sarah’s teacher, just a tinge of something else. Worry? Horror? The suggestion of fear. Valeria saw not exactly what ritual of summoning Sarah had carried out, nor who it had bound, only that someone powerful had latched onto her former pupil, and now at once tore and rent at the bindings, and yet squeezed into them. To be free, one could escape, or kill one’s slaver. Either would do, for someone like the eredar.

“I came to show you, Valeria,” Sarah said. Purposefully using her teacher’s first name. They were equals, now. It was important not to continually fall into the student’s role, now, or she might never escape it. For the same reason, she had decided to come to show Valeria the demon she had bound as a servant, rather than be found out at some later point, coming off as if she were sneaking around like a guilty child for having done something she knew was wrong. The fact that she had bound and kept bound Raxandra for near a week proved that well enough.

The raised eyebrow from Valeria ignited a worried, fizzing sensation, a quiet, steady anxiety, in Sarah’s chest. Before her experienced teacher – former teacher – she would remain a pupil, and so, indeed, as a pupil trying to impress her senior, she had come storming in to demonstrate her ability. Like a child measuring age in days, weeks, months, quarters of years so as to appear more than they were, she had traipsed in and confirmed precisely the thing which she had come to put in the grave. Sarah sighed, though she continued to look into Valeria’s eyes. Refused to shy away from that gaze, no matter how long it lasted.

Why, then, did it not feel like a victory when Valeria swept her gaze away, indicating a free spot on the smooth stone floor?

“Show me, then,” Valeria said.

Summoning up a smile filled with placidity and confidence, neither of which Sarah felt, she assented. Moved towards the indicated spot on her toes, momentarily recalling the movements of a graceful dancer. A skill which she had been pushed into from young age, and only forcefully shed when her family frayed, came apart, and dumped her upon the doorstep of power. Whimsy, which she hoped the fluid and graceful bounding steps portrayed, could be a way to show confidence, too. A lack of concern with the judgment of others, rising above it. Not that such things had ever worked on Valeria, but no longer being a student, Sarah returned slowly to the concept of herself which she fancied, rather than the shape which Valeria had beaten her into. She halted and, one hand full of dust and sand extended, turned around herself.

On its own, such a movement would never have produced the intricate circle-within-a-circle symbol which formed around her. Even less the runes of binding which took form between those circles. Of course, one of the first things Valeria had taught Sarah, taught all of her pupils, indeed, was the manipulation of the physical, sometimes many things at once. To form a circle of power, one needed to know its shape, its constituent parts, its runes, but there was no need to slave away at it for hours, or days, like a craftsman with a chisel. Recall the symbol, and produce it again and again, at will. With but the right ingredients.

The principal part of Sarah’s work in binding her first, most powerful demonic servant, then, had not been locating the eredar, nor fighting with it for control. It had been constructing the ritual circle to call the thing she wanted, and to sufficiently bind it. It had been to imprint the thing on her mind through repetition, through tirelessly drawing it out over, and over again, until she could wake in the middle of the night and draw it from rote memory, before even really being aware of the time, or the place. That work had started before her becoming a warlock, being released from Valeria’s teachings, and it culminated six nights ago, when Raxandra had rather more been heaved and pulled from the nether and into the center of the circle than been beckoned. The demon most certainly did not want to be summoned, and less so to be bound, but by its nature – her nature – it nevertheless was.

Again, then, when Sarah stepped back, over the still-forming lines of sand and dust, moving like a great mass of living gray-brown beetles interlocking their rough, gritty shells, drew a circle in the air with her finger, and infused the symbol with magic, it called. When the call was not answered, it did not wheel or deal, it did not negotiate. Great arms at once metaphorical and yet inescapably, practically real, hauled the massive, winged, red-skinned creature from the floor – solid a moment ago, then opened as a green and purple rift in reality – and held her, for a second, like a puppet. The portal closed, and so Raxandra was deposited on the floor.

Eredar, like their cousins, the draenei, were quite attractive. Sarah certainly found the demon distracting in a certain way, and a pleased, yet simultaneously mocking exclamation of breath from Valeria indicated that she shared her former pupil’s interest. Raxandra, in spite of surely millennia-long war, in spite of atrocity, destruction, hedonist indulging of every kind, and many more vices and faults, was flawless. A towering, winged creature of over eight feet, eyes burning with fel fire, clean, smooth lines of verdant, luminescent green inset in her skin, starting at the corners of her lips and running sideways to her jawline, following it up to the base of her ears. Dark brown, almost black horns curving backwards a few inches over her scalp, ashen, black and gray hair cut short. It stood in a multitude of little drooping tips, curling just so. Broad of shoulder, strong. Carven, like a statue – no doubt with the aid of fel energy – her body stood out. Perfectly chiseled, hard, muscled, and yet rounded just so. Powerful arms, hands, thighs. Bat-like, claw-tipped wings furled at her back.

If anything remained of eredar society, after so many thousands of years of having been subverted by and absorbed into the Burning Legion, certainly modesty was not something greatly emphasized. Protected by the same kind of magic which had brought her under Sarah’s control, there was little need for Raxandra to wear armor, and so, what little she wore was ceremonial. A statement. Like a gladiator might, one arm, the left, was coated in what seemed to be brass plating from the shoulder to the wrist, leaving the crimson, fel-blackened hand and its fingers free. The breastplate she wore seemed made to distract, rather than absorb and divert blows. Likewise, the tattered breeches might as well have been a sign. Look here. Not that they were needed.

When looking down, one might even forget the hooves, at least, Sarah’s mind centered on something rather different than those things, her eyes instead settling upon the apparently eternally half-hard colossus of a horsecock settled between Raxandra’s legs. Or, rather, controlled. Three leather straps kept the monster tied to one thigh, each one ever on the cusp of ripping, tearing, one heartbeat’s fattening up of that behemoth away from allowing it to be unleashed. So it seemed, at least. A medial ring could be seen, and the flat head seemed to ever, slowly, produce an oddly-colored mixture of seed. Or, rather, what seemed not to mix, and yet co-exist. Little whirls of vibrant green trapped within strong, pearling white. The impetuous part of Sarah’s mind, heedless of the strain that Raxandra’s appearance placed on her will, never could stop itself from labeling that mammoth cock “The Destroyer.” Though, naturally, the proud demon was unlikely to see the funny side of that notion.

“Magnificent,” Valeria breathed.

Sarah, her focus absorbed in maintaining the magical bonds which chained the eredar to her, which limited its physical actions to some extent, nevertheless sensed that her teacher took more than one step away, both back and aside, and yet continued to admire the grand creature. Admirable it was, despite the somewhat comical nature of its arrival. The few times Sarah had summoned Raxandra had always had a moment of transition, the eredar having been yanked across space by an unseen hand, deposited before her like an enormous marionette, and then taken a moment to acquaint herself with her surroundings. With having been drawn away at the behest of a little upstart warlock. That was, inevitably, the point at which the mood switched from levity to seriousness.

Prompted, perhaps, by the presence of someone else, Raxandra stepped over and past the summoning circle with some strain. As if moving through waist-high molasses. Nevertheless, she moved. Theoretically, with someone else present, Raxandra’s occasional, begrudging acceptance of her fate came at a higher cost to her pride, and so, she was entirely as combative, again, as the first time Sarah had brought her forth from the nether. When she slipped the bonds of the circle entirely, her movements were as swift as could be expected of a magically empowered, millennia-old, experienced warrior. Surviving that long, demon or not, meant considerable skill, and natural aptitude, and so, Sarah found heated fingers curled around her throat.

Focused on the magical bonds which still pulled and tugged at Raxandra, kept her from entirely exerting her will physically, left Sarah far too preoccupied to attempt to defend herself. It was all she could do to stay upright, scattering small tables and moving aside chairs as she was pushed backwards by that grip of her throat, until her back thumped against the raw stone of the wall. In a grand effort, displaying her full physical might, wings extending so that they seemed to fill most of the room behind her, Raxandra’s lips peeled back from white, sharp teeth. Her voice was loud, amplified in some way that applied pressure to the skull without actually being some maddening scream. Mentally, the impression was of a voice crawling and skittering with barely-contained power.

“I tire of this, girl. Cease your interference.”

“She means for you to release her, I think,” Valeria said. “Thereby confirming that you desperately cling to some fragment of her leash.”

Too preoccupied with maintaining the ritual of summoning which ostensibly bound the eredar, too occupied with those burning eyes, with the scent of sunbaked stone and dust and some sharp, almost minty, leafy smell, Sarah only heard the smirk in her former teacher’s voice. She knew it by sound, knew the curl of the woman’s lip. Tried to swallow, as if that gesture might purge the smugness at her fate from her system, but found her throat barely working under the pressure of Raxandra’s clawed fingers.

“I will not be a servant to some trifling little creature. Barely more than a pup.”

Valeria did not seem intent on doing anything, and as throbbing rose in Sarah’s head, as her cheeks warmed both from proximity to the furnace heat of the eredar, and from the lack of air, she shook her head. Could not reply verbally to the hissing demon. Were it any less dignified than it was, she would have had to wipe its spit from her face, upon the ritual’s conclusion. As it was, as nothing more than her throat being squeezed in its terribly warm hands seemed to happen, Sarah raised her right hand. Raxandra sneered, seizing the hand with her own left. Not the fingers, though, which Sarah snapped.

From the ritual symbol, from four of the runes, green light shone. Mist coalesced rapidly into glowing, verdant green links in an ever-lengthening chain. Like a thing alive, it rattled and moved across the ground, curling around the grand demon’s left ankle, calf, knee, thigh. Upwards. Winding around waist, and then chest, and then, finally, neck. The same cosmic force which had brought Raxandra to Azeroth, to Stormwind City, to the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb, then yanked the chain, and with an undignified grunt, she was torn off her feet. Her grip of Sarah’s throat and hand loosened just enough that the young warlock was only dragged off her feet, rather than along with the demon, and with a howl of rage, the eredar disappeared into another rend in reality which closed as fast as it had opened. All that remained was the now smudged circle, and the lingering feeling, even deep beneath the earth, of sunbaked stone. And, for a long moment, silence.

Valeria’s heels against the smooth stone floor broke that silence, the woman coming over to offer Sarah a hand. An arm around the small of her back, guiding her over to a chair. For all Valeria’s appraising, judging, and chastising, she was, at least, able to pick which moments were appropriate to apply that acerbic tongue. Sarah sank not back into the chair, but let her shoulders slump. In her mind, for a little while, the demon’s voice would be just a whisper, though she knew it would return, ever malcontent. Trifling girl, it hissed. Quietly. Trifling girl. Its voice warped to take on the sound of Valeria, perhaps trying to prey upon her insecurities.

Having once more sunken into herself, into the ongoing struggle with Raxandra’s attention, Sarah had not noticed Valeria called for a servant, nor when a cool drink arrived. She would have preferred water, not white wine, but at least the somewhat sour note of it stirred her sluggish mind. Valeria extended a tray with a damp cloth, too, and nodded towards Sarah’s throat. She took it, and held it to the reddening skin. Sighed, settling her eyes upon nothing, in front of her.

“When did you bind it?” Valeria’s tone was, at least, curious. Not judging.

“Six days ago,” Sarah said, after swallowing. After grimacing from that swallow, the movement of her throat making her aware of the ache there.

“I am, in part, impressed, Sarah. A creature like that is no small feat. Was that why you failed to give me your full attention the last two months of our arrangement?”

Sarah nodded. Grimaced after another swallow of white wine.

“What are the terms of the binding?”

“It’s… to serve me, for as long as I maintain our connection. It cannot cause me harm. It must come to me when I call,” Sarah said.

“Wonderfully vague. No loopholes at all,” Valeria said. And yet, the look she gave Sarah was concerned, not haughty, or judging. “Safeguards?”

“You saw it.”

“Yanking it back into the nether whenever you so wish,” Valeria said. “Rudimentary.”

“But it’ll serve well enough,” Sarah said. A surge of emotion made her feel the need to bite back. To defend her competence.

“Clearly not enough to prevent it from touching you,” Valeria said. “Attacking you.”

“It is under control. It cannot stop me from controlling it, as you saw,” Sarah said, infusing as much steel into her voice as she could manage. Sadly, steel had never been very convincing, to Valeria.

“You are skilled, Sarah. I would have expelled you long ago if you were not. But this thing you have bound, claim to have bound, it is something you clearly cannot control.”

“It isn’t here, rampaging right now. I’m in control,” Sarah said.

“What color was the first house on the left you passed when you entered into the Mage District on your way here?”

“...what?”

“Precisely. You do not know. You are struggling with the creature. Even now,” Valeria said. “So much so that you risk letting it loose.”

“It’s under control.”

“We have suffered enough suspicion and shame. You will not be responsible for the downfall of our order – for us being hunted in the streets. Again.”

“Valeria—”

But a raised hand. That was enough to silence Sarah. Enough to silence all about, and summon forth four staff from the corners of the room, each of whom obsequiously but nevertheless insistently urged Sarah to set aside the glass. To stand. And then ascend up to street level, and then to leave the premises. In the past, Valeria might have chastised her. Might have educated her. Might, if all else failed, have punished her. Some kind of interaction would have resulted from a disappointment, whether grand or minor, and though unpleasant, would have ascertained their connection.

It was the utter lack of final acknowledgment which ate at Sarah as she walked home, then. That, and Raxandra’s voice. Trifling girl.

Trifling girl.