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How long could the mountains wait in the waking world? The shapes of mortals whispered forever and yet when empires fell to ruin and seas drained, turning to an inky fastness in the time it took for a dreamer to wake, there was no forever. Not in the Fade.
Perhaps forever was the ruined Seat, desiccated and destroyed. Forever was the time it would take to reach those charred streets from across the luminal stretches. Forever was wasting away in a journey that would not end even when the ideas keeping a thing’s form together threatened to shatter against the knowledge of what had once been golden. Forever was the fate of the magisters, the fate of the mountains.
But the demon was given to understand that mountains split wide and poured acid and fire into the world, changing everything. Humans lived under those mountains, even when they’d torn open within recent memory. Humans waded through the ash and blood to rebuild, never learning and never remembering.
For they lived under the fire-laced mountains that were the mage Towers. These mountains stood tall and silent and forever, but inside there was acid and there was fire. None knew this better than the demons. It could be said that the Fade was the belly of the earth, of these silent towers with their silent residents.
The Fade was full of flame.
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The demon waited, a mountain. More truthfully, it wished to be acrid ash with a stony hide that would fool any human who saw. There was a way to do that, of course. The storm of mages in the Fade had but to hesitate and it could have its shell. But their fire was hot and their minds hostile.
A mind had almost succumbed to its susurrus. The Fade contorted around the mage when he walked, afraid among the spires and streets he conjured. An elven whelp too afraid of the sun to defend himself.
A dreamer.
The demon had been so close. There was ash and power in its mouth, flesh under its claws riddled with open vessels. Blood like molten rock, like coiled strength--
But then the other came. Riding thick in this new mage's mind was another like itself, but not. Instead of tarry, viscous desire, white lightning raked through the man, filling the holes it cut with itself until there was no distinction between the two. The demon wasn't fool enough to target the abomination, yet it could not evade him. With every jerk of the fabric of the Fade, the boy was followed and the demon remained within the abomination's sights; a tread of thunder chased its heels.
It took out the weakest parties first: the human woman and the dwarf. They could not hope to stand against its ashen tongue and collapsed into their desires. Lost, they posed no threat and indeed, the demon forgot them wholly, for under the electric miasma radiating from the abomination stood a blood mage. He too followed the demon with his mind; a cruel mind with an edge of dragonbone.
There were some blood mages the demons could not hope to touch, paradoxically. They took and broke and ruined, never fulfilling their ends of bargains. And so it was with this one as the idea of blood slashed over the conjured floor and cut into the demon, fueled by the feverish speed of the abomination's spells. Ideas of spells, ideas of pain.
Ideas of death.
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A rolling scatter of rocks down the mountain face was all that remained of the demon when the abomination and his gruesome pet were finished. They had given it a different sort of forever, one that even mortals would understand.