. After I finished the exchange with Dilorè, I asked Lucy, who still seemed to be worried about demons, “Can you protect yourself if you have enough Healing mana, Lucy?” She seemed to be struggling a little to understand, so I handed it off to Durandal. “Old man, can you explain what I’m asking to her?” Absolutely, My Lady, he …

. The cavern floor, all the way to its end, a mile and some fraction in the distance, was completely awash.  With the Dark mana as thin as it was, my Cloak was becoming difficult to maintain. I dropped it as I turned and flew into the diagonal extension. Ahead, I saw more water. Nearly a mile and a half …

. Unlike the undead, the Huadean version of zombies, which are just gidim that can reanimate and control corpses with demonic power, larvae are fully bound to their skeletal bodies to the point of repairing themselves when injured, albeit with the use of demonic magic rather than Healing. They also move just as fast as humans. Undead aren’t as slow …

. The mouth of the entrance tunnel into the cavern looked like somebody had excavated it after time had buried it. The path leading out of it ran through a long trench cut into the sloping terrain that had covered the entrance somewhere during that last ten thousand years. It went for about five paces, out to where the terrain …

. In a landing roughly six hundred paces below the surface, I halted and turned to Brigitte. We had been walking for many hours at this point, but we were a long way from the end. The nearest beings should have been another hundred paces below us and far to our east, but I expanded my vampire sense anyhow, just …

. For months, up until the encounter with Jurmat in the cavern near Cara Ita, the Hero’s Party chased the shadows of demons from the Dragonsbacks to the North, looking for an explanation for the demonic attacks happening across the kingdom. It was surely a job for the intelligence forces of the Royal Knights, but the leadership of the Knights …

. Both of my companions’ hands went straight to the hilts of their weapons as the imps passed us, turning toward the stairs we had just descended. I tightened my grip on their waists, which they fortunately understood to mean I didn’t want them attacking. We watched them in silence as they disappeared, and I didn’t let go until I …

. Our location was excellent for Brigitte’s stealth. The Greater Moon would still be up, if I flew out of the valley, but here it was deep darkness, and a bit of fog hung in the gorge, obliterating any starlight that might have come to this spot. Even though the guards at the mine’s mouth, all from beast-kin tribes with …

. With the mortals and the horses having worn themselves out, traveling far into the wee hours of morning, we made the decision to accept Melis’s proposal to stay in the village’s empty barn through the daylight hours so we could rest. While it was still dark, I slipped outside and used my vampire sense to verify the lack of …

. As I’ve already said, we had set aside the search for the mine, the request that the Arelians believed we were working on. But the fact was, Amelia was apparently underground. If we were near a mine entrance that might in fact be the entrance to Ilim Below, we wanted to know its location. The  ancient wolf-kin mage looked …