Runelords 15.1 - In on the Secret

It was a long walk back to the townhouse, made all the longer by the lack of conversation between the weary adventurers. Though they had magically mended their clothes and, for the most part, their bodies, their fatigue and generally poor moods were clear on their faces and postures, excepting possibly Khyrralien, who as usual seemed particularly difficult to faze.
When they entered, everyone made to go their own directions. Virgil called after Luna, asking for the notes they had taken from the lamia’s writing desk, and she disinterestedly shrugged off her bag in response, passing it to him without comment or concern before trailing after Aldern, who had gone directly upstairs. Khyr and Eamon went to their respective rooms on the second floor, and Virgil followed them to peer into the room Luna and Shadliss were sharing. Neither woman was there.
Frowning, Virgil went back to the ground floor, peering into the kitchen and dining room to see if the young woman was there. When he passed by the sitting room, a sharp ‘hist’ noise caught his attention. “Virgil!” Shadliss whispered loudly, and the man could see her peering out over the back of a couch. Walking over, he leaned in and saw her crouching defensively, holding a long knife and using the furniture as cover, Romeo sitting obediently on the floor with his head down. “What’s going on?!” she asked.
Giving a sigh and sitting on the couch, Virgil replied, “Ok, can you put the knife down? No one wants to get stabbed.”
“Romeo said you were all attacking each other!”
“Mind control trick,” he replied easily, as though this was some sort of common occupational hazard and nothing to pay any mind towards. He looked at her beleaguered expression for a moment before explaining, “It was just a spell effect that made us a bit wonky. It’s all done now; no one was hurt. These things happen.”
She eyed him warily, “So...everyone’s fine? No one’s trying to kill everyone?”
“Nope. All good,” he nodded. 
With a bit of hesitation, she frowned, but carefully made her way around the couch and sat cautiously on the other side of it, pointed towards Virgil who sprawled easily on the other corner. “Ok…” she said, still holding the knife. Pointing the tip towards him, she said sharply, “Ok! Then explain what the hell is going on!”
“Woah, ok. Knife down, please,” he said, holding up his hands defensively. “I had a bad enough night in the pain department, I’d rather not get stabbed too.” She tilted it away, but still clutched the handle tightly. “Now, what do you know?”
“Romeo says you have wings, now? And shape-changing and...and what’s going on?! Who are you? Tell me!”
“Well, you see, I’m not supposed to tell people,” Virgil said slowly. “My employer has very strict rules against telling people.”
This, of course, did little to settle Shadliss, “Who’s your employer?! Are you not even an adventurer?!”
With a huff of offense, Virgil replied, “I am certainly an adventurer!” 
“Then what is all this?!”
“I can’t really tell you,” he said, almost flippant, though he added after a pause, “But if someone were to guess, I suppose, that wouldn’t be a violation of my terms of employment.”
“I’m not going to sit and play twenty questions with you!” she said shrilly. “Just tell me!”
Virgil looked at her seriously for a moment before saying slowly, “If I tell you, you’re going to know things that you aren’t going to be able to forget, and it’s going to change things. Are you sure you really want to know? Because there’s really no going back.”
This caught her a bit off-guard, and she blinked and considered this for a second before saying certainly, “Yes. Tell me what’s going on.”
He looked at her for another moment before delivering a spiel with a hint of patronism, “I am a devil. I am here with my compatriots, Eamon and Khyrralien, who are an angel and a fey respectively, on a mission for our common employer whom I cannot name. We were summoned by Mr. Quint, with the vague goal of protecting the local church. It got a bit mixed up, so we are duty-bound to stay here for a year until the church can be properly opened. In the meantime, we are attempting to solve the myriad of problems your town and the surrounding area seems to be suffering from because it’s the right thing to do, even though in all technicality, we could just sit on our hands for twelve months. So here we are.”
Shadliss blinked at him for a long moment before rolling her eyes, “Ok, sure, right. That’s a really bad story, and you should try for something that’s maybe remotely believable.”
“I don’t deal in lies, usually,” Virgil said carelessly.
She gave a snort of laughter, “We both know you tell fish tales. Now try again.”
Rolling his eyes, Virgil eschewed words and instead dispelled his shift, revealing his avian devil form. The girl shot backwards, standing up and holding the dagger out threateningly, shock on her face. He held up his hands, “Ok, no stabbing please. It was bad enough scraping my face off of the floor earlier; I’m done getting brutalized for the night.” 
“What...what did you...what…?” she stammered.
“I shifted. I can do that. Back and forth, see?” he changed back to human again, holding up his hands in a demonstrative gesture. 
Shadliss slowly shook her head, stunned by the whole series of affairs. "That's...you're...this whole time..." Her face went a bit pale as she stammered, “I’ve...I’ve been sleeping with…! ...Are you trying to corrupt me?!”
“No,” he replied calmly.
“Are you trying to make me go to Hell?! To take my soul or something?!”
“No,” he said, just as calmly.
She tugged at her bangs, “Oh gods, am I pregnant with your devil babies?!”
This made Virgil sit up, eyes wide, “What, are you pregnant?!”
“No!!” she exclaimed.
“Thank gods,” he exhaled, “I don’t want you pregnant any more than you want to be pregnant.”
“But they would be devils?!”
“Uhhm,” he thought, “No...no, I think I’d have to be in my other form. Maybe they’d be sorcerers? But they wouldn’t be devils…I think...”
She continued to tug on her bangs, mumbling panicked thoughts to herself. It took her a few minutes of muttering before she exclaimed, "This whole time, when you were talking about devils hiding under towns, it was you!" 
He opened his mouth to retort, caught himself, then conceded, "Well, yes and no, I guess. I mean, I am a devil going into towns, yes, but I was referring to things like abandoned summons left trapped in ruins, and things like that. I wasn’t telling self-insert fiction.”
“How many of these things are there?” she asked as she looked about frantically, the question becoming almost rhetorical in her mounting concern. “How many people are actually devils hiding? Are there...are there whole cities of people in disguise?!”
This concept intrigued Virgil, and he tapped his lip thoughtfully as he replied, “Well, I’ve certainly never seen one of those, and never heard of one. But I suppose I couldn’t rule it out? It would be interesting, if nothing else! And, I guess I don’t know how many are hiding. I wouldn’t be able to tell any better than you, or anyone else, if someone was disguising themselves.”
“So you’re...you’re just wearing a disguise. It’s a lie.”
“Well, not really,” Virgil said slowly, justifying himself. “It’s not an illusion, and it’s not a spell like my other magic. I do naturally look like this, I just, also naturally look like my other form. This one,” he gestured at himself, “always looks the same; I can’t make it different. If I do anything to make it different, grow a beard or something, it will just be gone if I shift back and forth again.”
She thought about that for a moment. “So...so you live in Hell. You live in Hell with the fire and brimstone and pitchforks,” she said with a resigned sarcasm.
“Heh,” grinning, he replied, “well, I come from a very cold part of Hell, actually, so it’s more like snow and...granite? Probably some sort of granite. And most people there have katana, not pitchforks.”
Slowly shaking her head, trying to process everything, Shadliss carefully sat back down, muttering softly to herself. “...So...you’re...and they’re…” She paused for a moment before frowning and looking up at him, “I thought angels and devils fight? Like, all the time.”
Virgil shrugged and shook his head, “That’s really overstated. Almost all of heaven is a big, fluffy, endless void of peace and quiet. A good ninety percent of angels wouldn’t even be able to tell you what a fight is. And devils, well, most of them don’t go far from home, so they just fight each other. Not many angels actually fight devils. Some do, like Eamon.”
“If Eamon fights devils, what is he doing here? What’s he doing with you?”
“Same answer: it’s our job,” he replied. “Like I said, we work for the same employer. But like I also said, I’m really, really not allowed to talk about them.”
She made a ‘hmn’ noise, biting her lip. “So, they’re hiding, like you? Eamon and Khyrralien?”
He nodded, “Yeah...though, neither of them can shift like me, and they never got magic disguises or anything. Eamon just has his wings all bunched up, that’s why he looks like a hunchback.”
Shadliss considered this for a moment. Her eyes went wide and she exclaimed, “Oh gods, those are Khyrralien’s actual antlers, aren’t they?!”
He gave a lopsided grin, “Heh, yeah.”
This unsettled the girl, who wrung her hands around the dagger hilt. “...And, this whole time...this whole time, everyone knew but me...”
“Well, actually, Foxglove only found out tonight, and he just sort of...saw everything. I’m guessing Luna’s explained things by now.” Virgil’s expression turned sombre as he had a thought. A moment later, he continued, “...I’m going to tell you something else. It’s probably not my place to say, but if I don’t, then you’re just going to find out later and be upset that I didn’t come entirely clean in the first place. So, I’m just going to tell you.”
This did nothing to make Shadliss feel better, as she looked back up from the ground to look wearily at him. “What?” she asked, obviously not wanting to hear the answer.
“So…” he dragged out the word, “Luna and Foxglove aren’t human either. They’re both undead.”
Her eyes widened in shock once more, “They eat people?!”
“No! No no, nothing like that,” he replied quickly. “They eat animals, not people.”
“But...! But they’re…!” she exclaimed before burying her face in her hands. “Auugh, the only person here who isn’t going to kill me is Eamon, and he’s a prick!”
Virgil snickered at the sentiment, but said seriously, “None of us are going to hurt you at all. We didn’t before, we didn’t when we were on the road, we certainly aren’t going to now.”
This sobered her a bit, “...Maybe…” She sat for a few minutes, considering everything. Finally, she spoke again, quietly as though to herself, “...Luna doesn’t sleep. Ever. What was she doing, when we were on the wagon, and stopped for the night?”
“She waited. We all did. It’s no big deal.”
Looking up to him again, she frowned, “You...none of you sleep?”
He shook his head, grinning like nothing was at all was wrong, “Nope. We, the three of us, don’t have to, but we can nap if we feel like it. Luna and Foxglove can’t though.”
“So, it was just for me then…” she said quietly, turning back to the floor. 
Rolling his eyes, he said, “Well, at the time, we were faking it for Foxglove too. And the horse had to rest besides.”
“I...I’m the only one here…” she muttered. “Who’s going to protect me? How am I going to protect myself?” 
“I will,” he replied, a look of concern flitting across his face. “We all will. Nothing’s changed; we’re all the same people.”
Shadliss muttered sadly, “I’m the only one who’s just a normal human…”
“Hey now,” Virgil said with a hint of reproach, “You’re more than just that!” She glared at him like he was stupid. He retorted, “Well, you have a very smart bird. If Romeo wasn’t there tonight, I would have died. Or, gotten sent back home until I was resummoned.” Shadliss raised an eyebrow, demanding explanation that Virgil went on to give, “I fell off of a staircase and landed very painfully. Nearly broke my neck, but instead just broke my face. There was a golem there, and if Romeo hadn’t very bravely come to my aid, the golem would have finished me off. But he distracted it, and gave me time to escape. So I owe him one.”
“...Huh...well...that’s good…” she muttered. 
“He’s only gotten so smart and helpful because of you,” he said, “because you’re special.”
After another moment of contemplation, she placed the knife down on the floor and brought her knees up, hugging them. Virgil looked at her, for the first time considering that she might be overwhelmed by this. After a few minutes of silence, she opened her arms in a gesture, and Virgil happily sidled over to scoop her into a hug. 
As he held her, he muttered into her hair, “I’m sorry.”
She frowned into his shirt and said dryly, “I don’t think you are.”
“Well,” he grinned sheepishly, “I’m not sorry for being what I am…” He trailed off, and didn’t explain himself any further. 
A few minutes later, she asked, “Why me? Why did you pick me?”
He smiled a bit crudely, “Well, not to put it too flatly, but you kind of propositioned me in the street, and we’ve been going from there.” She pulled her face out of his collar and gave him a disapproving look that was only somewhat in jest before wrapping her arms around him and revealing her neck invitingly. He took her offer, tracing his way from her shoulder to her ear with a line of gentle kisses. 
As he nibbled on her earlobe, she smiled and asked, “Am I your favourite woman? The favourite of everyone you’ve been with?”
He paused for a second before whispering into her neck, “That’s not a very fair question.”
“Am I the prettiest?”
He gave a small snort of laughter, “Of course you’re the prettiest.”
“But am I your favourite?” she pressed.
 
She could feel his smile on her skin, “You’re my favourite right now.” She didn’t ask any more questions; her lips were otherwise occupied.
Category:Rise of the Runelords