***Fairytales can come true - it can happen to you.
If you think that you might want a demon. 0_o
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Book of the Forsaken Part 4
In the still-smoldering mountain of rubble and debris that was once the warehouse district of a part of Lozenjellis, there was a pair of beings struggling for survival. For well over a few days, they'd been trapped by both the sheer weight of the mess and the small amount of oxygen which came to them. There wasn't much to begin with and the remnants of the slowly burning fires burned lazily, fuel-rich and oxygen-starved, and leaving noxious fumes billowing.
Where they were, they heard no roar coming from the fires. They heard the dull hissing moans of the flames not far over their heads and little else. There were only a few small openings where a bit of air whistled in and to get much of anything at all one had to have one's face right there.
The predicament slowed the demon's regeneration to a crawl as Monnie strained mightily to keep the ceiling of the room from falling in on them. The best that she could do was to pull a fallen beam to her now and then and get it set against the wall so that she could get her shoulder underneath it and muscle it up so that she could continue to keep them alive. The old demon sat at her feet, straining to even breathe as he tried to regenerate. As he looked down, she looked at him.
He'd shown her what he'd wanted to do and she knew that she could bring the wild and fear-maddened demons to her easily after he'd given her the ability for it. He'd talked a good game, she figured, but she knew that when push came to shove, he'd finish regenerating and would probably leave her here without a thought. No matter what anyone said to her, Monnie knew the lay of the land here.
She saw a chance for herself and she took it, telling him that she was weakening slowly. She said that she needed more of his strength to keep them alive.
But there was nothing that he could do for her in his weakened state and so she carefully asked, with as much fear, respect, and feigned devotion to him as she could put in it. He'd refused her request flatly at first, but as she let a little of the hot and glowing embers fall around them by pretending to be at the limits of her endurance, he'd gotten it.
He could stand the flames far better than she could β if she remained here with him. He was painfully aware that if he gave her no sign that she meant something to him, he knew that she could just rise through it all and leave him to choke under a huge and greedy fire which would leave him nothing to breathe. There was a time once, long ago, when this situation wouldn't have troubled him at all, but she hadn't had the chance to give that back to him yet.
So he agreed and extended his arm toward her. Monnie did her best to look both reluctant and thankful in her desperation to keep him alive as she sucked some of his demonic blood and turned away to hide the way that she got so much power from him.
They'd done this over a dozen times in the days that they were trapped here, Monnie trembling in her phony weakness and him shuddering as the loss of his blood all but stopped his regeneration. He hoped that she'd find enough strength after a while to throw off what lay and burned over their heads and pull him out of there.
Once she'd gotten him clear of this as she'd promised, he planned to take it all back in a second as he regenerated quickly. He liked Monnie, but he found that he liked what she could give him a lot more, and so he planned to keep her in much the same state as Elkingtion had done once they were out of here.
But it didn't go that way.
When Monnie had so much power that there was no way that she could hide it anymore, she smiled her thanks to him and becoming not much more solid than a wisp of smoke herself, she slipped upward right through the roiling flames as the full weight of what she'd been holding up fell in on him. As she rose, she looked around and laughed.
She'd timed this perfectly as she found herself in the smoke over nighttime Lozenjellis, and with a last look down at the place where she knew that he was buried, Monnie waved her arms and heaped the whole mess together over that one spot before she flew away to look for a place to rest and to sort things out in her mind.
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Jonas walked into the stable and made sure that the horses were alright. He noticed that his horse had a shoe which was a bit loose, so that would need to be seen to. He thought about a few things, mostly his friendship with Sully as he looked down at a full trough of cold water. He knew that he needed a bath, but he didn't want to cause any trouble for Randi. He could see that she was busy enough, and though they'd been invited to stay the night, he still felt as though he was intruding.
Well, he thought, here was some water. If the mighty Jonas Bull couldn't handle a little cold, what was the world coming to? He began to struggle slowly with getting his shirt off. Every motion hurt.
Rudhi watched from the doorway behind him knowing how he must feel. She'd had times in her own life when it hurt enough to yell only lifting her arm. "I can help you get that off more easily," he heard in his mind as he froze, knowing that he hadn't actually heard anything.
She walked up from behind him and he stared at her while she smiled and helped him to ease his arms up. When she pulled the sleeves up and began to get the shirt over his head, he felt her body just barely touching his own. She was still smiling when she handed him the shirt.
"I still do not understand why this was done to you," she said as she looked at the welts, scrapes, bruises, and assorted claw marks on his skin, "this was done to you by a lover?"
Jonas shrugged, knowing that he didn't really want to try to explain it in any more detail. Everyone else had seemed to understand it, Narreth aside, since she didn't understand English directly. "I guess you could say that," he smiled a little ruefully.
Rudhi looked at him and liked what she saw, though she saw a little of his thoughts as well.
She sighed as she looked away, "I wish that I had someone who could love me like that. I miss it so much."
He looked up and turned his head, "What do you mean?"
"Well, there is no one left of us anymore but me," she said, "In the place where I come from, life is a struggle. How hard you are in the wars and the conflicts go far to determine how high you will stand.