Part 10 of the The World Can’t Wait series
UG had gone back to Blackrock Mountain to finish the job. That was mostly true. It was also true that the tower was quiet in a way that had started to bother him, Blondage still off doing whatever it was she needed to do, Lichmyface still a few days out from Dazar’alor, and a man on his own for long enough starts looking for something to occupy his hands.
He’d been thinking, since Hammerfall, about Darrah. Specifically about the fact that she was his hardest-hitting demon, and he’d gone this long without working out why. Tangkresh he understood — big, slow, built to take a hit and keep standing. Zhaaphom he understood — quiet, precise, there to shut a caster up. Darrah’s advantage, when he’d finally gone looking for it, came down to one move: Whiplash, which cost her nothing to cast, cost her no time to wind up, and scaled directly off however much power UG himself was throwing around that day. Every other demon he owned had to stop and think between hits. Darrah never did.
Working it out satisfied him more than it probably should have, and he immediately wanted to see it do something more interesting than kill Scourge.
Arator did not react well.
UG summoned Darrah about four minutes into their second day at Blackrock, mostly to see what would happen, and what happened was immediate and total. Arator went the colour of his own tabard, found somewhere else to look with real urgency, and asked, in a voice noticeably higher than his usual one, whether that was strictly necessary for the task at hand. UG assured him it absolutely was, on the grounds that a controlled test required proper conditions, and made a private note that he had never seen a paladin move quite that fast without being on fire.
He kept it at making the boy uncomfortable — a demon standing there existing turned out to be more than enough — and stopped well short of actually turning Seduction loose on him. For his own amusement, UG gave Darrah the /flirt command, and a small heart appeared over her head, which she looked faintly smug about in whatever way a succubus looks smug. Arator did not find this funny. UG did, and made no effort to hide it.
Underneath the joke, there was something less funny going on. He missed Blondage more than he was telling anyone, and messing about with Darrah, daft as it was, was at least a way of feeling like he had someone to be silly with while she wasn’t there to be silly with herself. It wasn’t the same. He knew it wasn’t the same. He did it anyway.
The whip never stopped. That was the trouble with Darrah, once the novelty wore off — every hit came with the same sharp crack, over and over, until UG found himself flinching at his own pet rather than anything trying to kill him. By the time they’d finished with her, he’d had enough of the sound to last him a while, and swapped her out for Azkin without much ceremony. Azkin didn’t hit anywhere near as hard. Azkin also didn’t sound like a whip, which by that point felt like the better trade.
Arator went quiet once they were properly inside the mountain, and it took UG a while to work out it wasn’t sulking this time. This was Second War ground, old and heavy with it, the kind of history that didn’t need explaining to land. It didn’t last. By the time they were most of the way out, he was back at it, this time with a specific target: his father, apparently, had never properly explained any of this to him, never sat him down, never bothered, and wasn’t that just typical. UG let him go on for a while, decided the boy could complain about his own family in peace, and privately thought a paladin’s poor communication with his son ranked fairly low on the list of things worth losing sleep over.
They got the artifact eventually, Arator still going, muttering something about his father that UG chose not to press him on.
More in the The World Can’t Wait series
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