Trisfelt sucked in his breath. “It was used to kill a demon prince?” the wizard asked, agape.
“Permanently, forever and ever, amen,” Hilda said, nodding.
Trisfelt slowly shook his head and sat in silence. “So, more to my point,” he eventually continued, “with that much power at his command, with the power of multiple high priests, why did he not turn that magic against the Rod? If he could reverse an artifact of that magnitude, then surely he could have used it against the Rod and priests of Tiernon?”
Hilda froze as Trisfelt pointed this out. She had not thought of that. No one had. Clearly, the demon could have done serious damage to the Rod and its priests. He could have decimated them. A ten percent casualty rate would be minimal under the circumstances. He could have conceivably taken out half or more of them. Particularly given the chaos of the possessed soldiers, the people in shock, distracted — he might have wiped out the entire Rod and the priests! It made no damn sense at all.
The avatars sat in stunned silence, staring at the end of the balling Hilda had just brought them. This was Hilda’s fourth time watching it. She had asked Trisfelt if he could leave it so she could review it again once she was completely sober, promising to return it to him on the morrow. They had set an appointment for brunch and planned to discuss the balling in more detail. In the meantime, she had watched it twice more while Danyel slept and had then taken it with her to the predawn meeting with Moradel and the others.
Having seen it and begun to formulate her own thoughts, Hilda simply sat back and waited for the three avatars to discuss. They all sat silently for some time before Sentir Fallon finally spoke up. “This is disturbing on so many levels, I don’t know where to begin.”
“I have had reports that the Church in Astlan had gotten a bit morally relaxed, and to be fair, I may have even tolerated it,” Moradel began.
“You are not the only one. As I recall, we have discussed this before, and it’s been discussed at higher levels as well. It’s the eternal question of whether the end justifies the means, and it’s never an easy question,” Beragamos said.
“At the least, we can ignore the child-demon malarkey,” Sentir Fallon stated. “At first I found that troubling, but it makes too little sense.”
Moradel looked to the elder avatar. “Are there not half demons?”
Sentir Fallon shrugged. “Of course; that is canonically known. However, such children are either lesser demons or mortals with a few demonic traits. If this child demon is able to change form, it must be a greater demon in its own right. For that to be the case, the sire would, at the least, have to be a demon prince.”
“At the least? What more is there?” Hilda asked, shocked.
Beragamos chuckled. “I think Sentir’s point is that there is no more beyond that, and even then such a thing would be extremely rare; thus, the demon must be lying. The only child demons are half demons, and no half demon can be that powerful.”
“Do demons not breed with each other?” Hilda asked; she was not particularly familiar with demons.
Beragamos shook his head. “Not that I am aware of. For demons and in fact, any immortal being to reproduce, both parents have to sacrifice a bit of their own essence beyond sperm and egg. Which most do not, in fact, have.” He shook his head. “This requires a level of unselfishness that demons do not possess, and it requires a level of love and commitment they cannot meet.”
“Do they not have to do the same with a mortal?” Hilda pursued the question.
“Yes, but not as much is required because a fertile mortal woman needs very little to provide the seeds of life. It is a much smaller sacrifice for the male demon. A female demon would only conceive with a mortal male as part of a grander scheme or reason. Not for love or mere dalliance; it would require a lot of her own resources, particularly for a powerful child,” Beragamos said.
Moradel looked at him closely. “So again, highly unlikely to be a greater demon.”
“Unless maybe the mother is Lilith,” Sentir Fallon chuckled.
Beragamos smiled. “That would be the most likely bet, but seriously doubtful. As would Sammael fathering a child on a mortal woman. As I see it, those are the two most likely possibilities to achieve a greater demon. Remotely, the father could, I suppose, be one of the Triumvirate who literally got lucky. Again, I did say at least a demon prince. Theoretically, it could be any demon prince that somehow managed to get things just right. Perhaps some sort of giant nursery full of mortal broodmares, each one trying to get it right.”
“That would be faster than Lilith bearing lots of children to mortal men,” Sentir Fallon noted.
“Could a mortal woman even survive such a pregnancy?” Hilda asked suddenly.
Beragamos nodded. “An excellent point; that is another extremely good reason I find the half-demon idea to be extremely unlikely.”
“So Occam’s razor? The simplest answer — the demon is lying?” Moradel asked.
“I would say so,” Beragamos said.
“What about the breaking of Talarius’s word and the use of dark rituals?” Hilda asked.
Moradel frowned. “To be honest, Hilda, the questions raised by all of this are not well answered by the senior avatars. Tiernon himself has been pragmatic about it. I personally feel that breaking one’s word to a demon is far less of a sin than the use of the dark rituals. But I think we will have to have further inquiry into this.”
Beragamos sighed. “And before we can even do that, we shall have to come to some decisions internally about how we shall deal with this sort of moral slippage. If it is happening here, it is happening elsewhere. I can only imagine Etterdam. I would hate to have to take this to Tiernon, but if the hierarchy can’t agree, we may need to bother him.”
Hilda gulped. Had she uncovered something worthy of Tiernon’s own attention? That thought made her stomach twist in knots. Old proverbs made it very clear that one did not one to draw a god’s interest; it was never healthy. While that was officially for mortals, she suspected it would not be that much better for a minor saint.
“And so the mana theft? The reversal of Excrathadorus Mortis?” Hilda asked.
“Which brings us to the central question of this demon. I have no idea who it actually is, unless it’s one of the princes in disguise, which I think seems to be most likely,” Beragamos said.
“Not some demon prince who has been hiding in the deep backwaters of the Abyss? That place is so big, there is no telling who or what is hiding in the backwaters,” Moradel said.
Beragamos shrugged. “Certainly a possibility. The only other one, in fact. This being is obviously a demon prince; I cannot imagine an archdemon capable of what we have seen. In fact, I refuse to imagine such a thing due to the sheer terror of all the archdemons learning to do this.”
“There is one other possibility,” Sentir Fallon said softly.
Beragamos looked at him. “What am I missing?”
“The business with reversing Excrathadorus Mortis — that would require considerable knowledge of the blade, millennia of planning, and the sort of power we’ve witnessed. What just happened could only be done with Tiernon’s own power. A demon seeking specifically to destroy this blade might spend centuries or even millennia researching how to do what we’ve seen, should they wish to ensure the blade’s destruction,” Sentir Fallon told the others.
“But who would go to so much trouble to destroy this blade? And then locate it and set this up?” Beragamos asked.
Sentir Fallon sighed. “Someone who had very real reasons to fear it as the one known thing that could stop him.”