In Chapter 121, Dora performed psychometry on an old, empty, discarded vial that had once contained silver dust, which the party discovered belowdecks on the Bloodwind:
She saw a chamber of dark stone. Shelves lined the walls, covered in tomes. Counters and workspaces as well, covered in remnants. Eyes. Organs. Vials of liquid: red, black, and white. Neatly weighed globs of fatty tissue. Small boxes filled with hair. Small boxes filled with teeth. Hooves. Horns. Hearts.
A girl stood in the corner, barefoot in a wet smear of filth. She was bruised, and splattered with blood… though the blood didn’t appear to be all hers.
Though she answers, now, to Thema, she still thought of herself as Anathema. Anathema was no longer nine years old. Not by a long shot. She’s more adolescent than child.
She was in a period of Transition.
She watched closely as Razanil worked. The middle-aged Wizard carefully—so, so carefully—poured a line of powdered silver from a small glass vial into the shape of a perfect circle on the floor. He seemed pleased with himself.
He always seemed pleased with himself.
His wealth and his magical knowledge afforded him a life of absolute power and absolute control. He took what he wanted. He got what he wanted. He was a living Monument of Hubris and Self-Satisfaction.
And he did not… would not… would not ever teach Anathema what she wanted to learn. She watched the gestures. She listened to the words. And because her memory was near-photographic, she could repeat many of them almost perfectly, but because he refused her access to the books… the precious, precious books… she couldn’t get the complete picture. She couldn’t learn the theories. So she’d never cast a spell as long as she lived. And it’s all she wanted. It was, in fact, the only thing she wanted. She had given up on any hope of freedom. She’d given up on a normal life. She’d given up on finding her family.
All she wanted was the knowledge of magic.
And maybe… finally… today is the day.
You see, Razanil had to re-cast his Dominate spell on her every nineteen days. Every nineteen days, the cycle began anew: he cast the spell and her actions were no longer her own. Her mind was, though. He left that intact so that she could fully experience—and suffer—the degradations and humiliations of her life. But over the preceding years, Anathema’s will had grown stronger and stronger. And as she knew would happen, one day… she resisted.
And that day was this morning.
And it’s such a big day, Razanil had so much on his mind, and Anathema was an expert liar… that, in his hubris, he didn’t notice that the spell hadn’t taken. He gave her some verbal commands (which she followed), but he didn’t try to look through her eyes. He didn’t try to feel what she was feeling. He just trusted that his magic worked… like it ALWAYS works… and went on with his preparations for the ritual at hand.
“A client… has requested a necrocide,” he’d said. “Fetch the onyx, Anathema, while I prepare the ritual.”
And so she collected the small black stones and returned to her spot in the corner.
And now she watched as Razanil finished scribing the circle of silver. When he was done, he opened his hand and released the small glass vial that had once contained the powder, and she scrambled forward to catch it before it shattered on the ground. (She only had to learn that lesson once.)
She tucked the vial into the pocket of her dirty frock and rubbed it once for good luck.
The incantations for the Planar Binding spell took ten minutes for Razanil to complete and then, with a roar of hellfire, the prince-killer, the assassin of souls, the Salikotal Devil appeared inside the Magic Circle.
On lean limbs the color of spilt blood creeped a being of sinister grace. Eyes like embers and a sneer full of needle-thin teeth gleamed from an unrelentingly fiendish visage. A pair of crimson wings sprouted from the back of the hairless humanoid form, fluttering silently like an assassin’s cloak, while in one hand it clutched the twisted, dagger-like horn of some infernal terror.
The devil stared impassively at Razanil. They’d done this so many times. Anathema knew that the creature enjoyed its work, and that it craved the gems it took in payment: rubies for fideicide (the “slaying of faith”), onyx for necrocide (the “slaying of death”), and jacinth for omnicide (the utter slaying, the “slaying eternal”).
But Anathema knew that the creature was just as proud as Razanil and that this forced servitude, this continuous domination, must be eating the creature alive.
Next came Razanil’s favorite part of these rituals. Knowing that it would damn her eternal soul, he forced HER to speak the names and hand over the payment. He forced HER to unleash death upon someone she’d never met. Someone who had done her no wrong.
“Thema. The target’s name is Prokomos Nuberos. Speak it. Pay him!”
And then… proud and careless, fully confident in his Dominate spell, fully confident in his binding magic… Razanil sat back and watched as Anathema stepped forward to the edge of the circle. She extended her left hand with the velvet sack of onyx stones. Her right hand, in her pocket, rubbed the glass vial one last time for luck.
And she did it.
And it was easy this time: killing.
And this time… it was a Choice.
A choice made for Knowledge.
As she tossed the bag of stones through the air to the creature, the toes of her left foot swept forward and scattered the powdered silver across the floor, as she said:
“Razanil.”
The devil clawed the velvet bag out of the air, vanished, and instantaneously appeared across the room, its black horn dagger buried deep in the Wizard’s neck.
Razanil sank slowly to the floor, coughing and sputtering and hacking up blood.
Anathema walked over to join the devil in standing over him. “Now we’re both done with him.”
The Salikotal Devil crouched down over Razanil and stared him deeply in the eyes as it slowly, excruciatingly, drove its dagger into his heart. The light went out of his eyes, and almost instantaneously the Wizard began to rot. His mass shrank. His skin blackened. Patches of it sloughed off. Gobs of hair fell out. Teeth tumbled out of his mouth. His tongue shriveled up into a dry, spongy black nub. His eyeballs collapsed into puddles of goo and leaked sideways down his face.
Anathema whispered, “Give me control.”
The devil smiled. And nodded. It placed its clawed hand on the corpse’s forehead and dim red lights sputtered to life inside its empty eye sockets. The zombie groaned in pain and rage and nearly-mindless (nearly, but not quite mindless) incomprehension of what had happened to it. It sat up and waited for Anathema’s command.
“Fetch me… fetch me whatever book you started learning magic from.”
Groaning and howling, the zombie rose and shambled across the room to one of the shelves. With a clumsiness that was almost painful to watch, it pawed at a collection of books, eventually knocking a swath of them onto the counter below. Awkwardly, it gathered up one particular tome and dragged itself back across the room and extended it to Anathema.
“Now go stand in the corner. I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”
And when Weiralai returned to Razanil’s tower five days later, this was how she found Anathema: sitting cross-legged on the floor, tome of magic open in her lap, muttering to herself, rolling an empty glass vial back and forth in her hand—an unconscious gesture of some sort. Something to keep her hands busy while her brain was working a thousand miles an hour.
Finally, Anathema looked up.
“You did this?” Weiralai asked.
Anathema merely nodded.
And then to her surprise, Weiralai howled a hideous cackle of glee. It lasted an uncomfortably long time. And the sound of her hollow, bitter laughter echoed through the chamber of dark stone…
Until the vision faded.
First Reference: Chapter 121
Other Notable References: —