The little demon wanders for hours. Wanders subsurface river valleys. Wanders ruined temples. Wanders under starry nights side by side with the silent pale-red wraiths of past desert wanderers, who fade in from the darkness, grow almost solid enough to touch for a minute or two, and pass on.

It wanders for weeks, toying now and then with the gifted halberd, and still the other does not return. It throws the halberd down a pit and listens to it splash into unseen water. It strides away a little too quickly, arms stiff by its sides, lips tight, fangs gritted.

It comes back a day later, scrabbling down the walls, and it's been babbling the word "sorry" nonstop for over a minute by the time it plunges under the cool silt-laced waters and flails around until it finds the halberd by stabbing one of its hands on the back-hook.

Only then, in fishing it free and sagging with relief to find that the other's craft hasn't begun to rust or rot, does it realize it was apologizing to the halberd. Its maker is a terrible soul full of everything that can go wrong in a demon's heart, but that isn't its fault.

By the time it’s climbed out with the Carag-crafted polearm tied tight to its back using its own tail-loops, its resolve has broken and it’s done the inevitable. Reversing the comparison. If the halberd can be the creation of terrible creatures, bearing signs of them in its making but blameless for what it bears… couldn’t a similar process have made its maker who she is? Couldn’t she have been blamed for the sins of her makers, thrown away over and over until the only control she can imagine having is how quickly that pain arrives?

Within a few minutes it’s rushing back and forth on the stony crags around the pit, clawing its skull, keening and stamping its feet and wracked with guilt.

The demon quickly comes to understand the madness that overtook its would-be teacher, and in understanding it, understands that throwing itself into thinking about that madness will be fruitless. It’ll go mad too. It’s too close to all this, has its emotions in too many knots, has too many soul-wounds that are healing, yes, but oh so slowly.

It cannot try to think in terms of right or wrong. What it deserves. What the other deserves, or deserved. The simple, cold truth is that neither of these demons can depend upon the other for help.

So when, inevitably, it admits to itself that it has no idea how to fight with a halberd and it still needs a teacher, it reaches out the same way. Its soul filtering out through the astral realms outside the world of sand-matter where its form sits cross-legged. Tendrils full of the feel of sun on its skin. Beckoning with the hope of an answer to its need: for growth, for solidity, for strength it can learn from.

And echoes resonate. They build to a circle of crackling force just in front of the little demon. A burst of splinters fans out in a hemisphere away from the manifestation of a tall demon, with a single jagged black horn cresting her rocky fire-crackled face. She’s built heavy and muscular, bearing a many-spined tail to match, and she's kitted out in black igneous armor with lava suspended in its trim and engravings. Two golden-fire eyes, slitted, brim with merry magma-glows.

She shoulders a massive hammer. “Ho there, little kindred. You called?”

“Yes!” It lifts up the halberd towards the big igneous demon. “I need you to teach me how to use this! Can you?”

The newcomer’s eyes light up briefly with a terrible fire. She leers at the weapon, baring bright orange fangs–then shakes herself violently. She takes two steps back. “Wooo… okay, that fucker has a pull and a half.”

“It does?” the smaller demon asks. "Why don’t I feel it?”

The tall demon shrugs. “Probably because it belongs to you. That’s how it usually goes. The true owner of the thing with the corruptive powers isn’t affected, or at least, they aren’t affected with the same terrible obsession.”

It growls. “That bitch. She cursed me.”

“Hmmm…” the tall demon takes a knee, considering the halberd. “I wouldn’t say that. Not intentionally. I’ve seen stuff like this before. Damned powerful. Forged from the essence that makes the laws of physics. It’s an inevitable side effect of that power. People see something that potent, they’re going to want it for themselves.”

She rises. “I’ll get over it. Mind if I ask who made this for you? I’m wondering if they’ve got any spare pieces they’re willing to part with.”

“I never got her name,” it says, feeling like an absolute fool. It should’ve demanded that before sending her away! “But she had six horns. Her eyes were blue, bright and very blue, slitted, she was whiter than a cloud, black hair–”

“Glowed with this terrible power, a radiance more celestial than infernal?” the big demon interrupts.

It nods. “Yes!”

“Probably Kairlina,” the big one muses. “Which would explain that halberd. Always had a passion for making weapons, that one. Weapons and realms.”

“And hurting people,” it mutters, launching into an explanation. As it speaks the newcomer looks more and more troubled. Things are very quiet for a while after it finishes.

“Look…” the newcomer rubs her brow. “Uh… first things first.” She extends a hand. “Name’s Kordanath. No middle or last. Never felt a need for ‘em, personally.”

“Vaestreth Nastangali,” Vaestreth says, taking that hand and feeling Kordanath’s strength as she pulls it to its feet. “It’s very good to meet you.”

“Likewise, Vaestreth.” Kordanath runs a blackfire tongue over her bright fangs. “So… what you’re describing… that’s about what I’d expect if you caught Kairlina in the middle of a breakdown. Never met her in person, but the legend of the devil in a blue gown is pretty well known in certain circles. Born human. Made herself a demon, hoping to escape the prison of her homeworld.”

“She did say she was finally supposed to be free,” Vaestreth says. "So that's why she hated me? She hated that I got to have help to escape, while she had to make her own way?"

“Maybe.” Kordanath turns. “But she didn't free herself. She stayed stuck in that mortal flesh right up to the day it died, and dying like that, in a form that wasn't hers, not really knowing if her own kind were real... I can't imagine what a death that unnatural did to her mind. What she did was wrong. Awful wrong. But… well, uh…” she shrugs. “Doesn’t help to pretend I’m not torn up over it. A lot of us looked up to that girl. She could’ve been…” She stops herself. “Sorry. That’s not okay to talk about. Not to you.”

“Thank you,” Vaestreth says. 

“And I’ll understand if you’d rather send me off and try summoning someone else,” the big demon adds, voice steady as the stones underfoot.

“That’s okay.” Vaestreth cradles the halberd. “I’m alright with you… feeling things, kind things, towards people I don’t like. It’s not that I like thinking ill of her. She made herself mean pain to me. When she tried to come back and apologize…” it pauses, watching Kordanath for a response. No change. “It terrifies me to think how ready I was to convince myself it was fine, actually. She did save my life, and I am glad of that, but she didn’t have to be cruel about it. She didn’t have to hurt me.”

“No,” Kordanath agrees. “She did not.”

Her voice drops to a mutter, but it’s not quite so quiet as she seems to think. “Fucksakes, Kai. Hellfire fucking take you. Why’d you have to do a thing like this…”

They follow the plan Kairlina first out. Vaestreth learns to close its mind to the eerie, sickening feeling it gets whenever it thinks about that. There is nothing wrong, it reminds itself, with using something another gave to it after that other has left its life.

The halberd exists mostly as a blank space it carries around with it.

It comes to know Kordanath from the way her tail taps the ground when she’s considering the best of several options–squeeze through crevices, climb up a cliff face, or go around? A lift of Kordanath’s head means she’s about to ask for help.

“You know how to open portals?” she asks.

Vaestreth shakes its head. “My mother meant to teach me, but…” it clicks its tongue. "The war took her first.”

“Ah.” Kordanath nods to her. “Sorry about that.”

“Yeah.” Vaestreth shrugs. “It’s an old pain. Or, would be, if I’d ever been able to get distance from it.” It scrunches its nose at the crevices. “I don’t like these. Climbing sounds more fun right now.” Its claws rasp, somehow both jarring and satisfying, at the sandstone face as it begins its ascent. “Anyway… losing my mother just after my growth spurt, yes, of course that hurt. And my father was an incubus who she only laid with because she wanted a daughter, so I never did learn where he went.”

Up it clambers, taking special satisfaction in the long gouges it leaves behind. Kordanath watches, visibly impressed, and then sets to work following on.

Vaestreth’s voice echoes down. “All the lessons my mother never had a chance to teach … I felt them every day when I was at court, every time I remembered her smoothly slipping through some social knot just like the one I’d gotten all tangled up and humiliated in. It was like losing her again, and again, and again, year after year after year. If they’d just given me space, given me time, just a little room to figure out who I wanted to be so I had something to test their ideas against…”

It reaches the top and dusts itself off. “But I think, deep down, that was the point. From the day the queen took an interest in me, everyone was terrified that I might reach any power, terrified of how I’d get there and realize–hey. None of these scum helped.”

A bitter sigh. “Well, they didn’t anyway. They just kept getting in the way. Confusing me. And I bet the worst of them knew that and justified it to themselves. Like they were only slowing me down to stop me from making mistakes… ah, enough.”

It peers over the edge, and is surprised to see Kordanath scarcely more than a third of the way up the cliffside. Her arms and legs are rigid with strain. “Hey. Uh, teacher…”

Kordanath is glaring at the rocks in intense frustration. “Yeah? Little busy!”

“You, um…” Vaestreth grins sheepishly. “You can move things without touching them, yes?”

“Yeah, why?” Kordanath asks, looking up.

“Can you not just make yourself float to the top?” Vaestreth asks.

Kordanath looks at her legs. Looks at the cliff. She releases her grip, floating away from the wall and upward, with her arms folded and her gaze turned down to one side.

She alights beside Vaestreth, and holds her tongue while a breeze stirs their hair.

“We will never speak of this again,” she orders.

Vaestreth grins. “Agreed.”

Over the next few days it learns more of Kordanath. It learns that she’s a rather picky eater, disdaining the grubs and the tender roots it digs out of the moister ravines. Conjured food only, for this one! Which quickly becomes Vaestreth’s task, since as it turns out, Kordanath isn’t able to just manifest foods from thin air the way it can. It learns that she’s widely versed in weapons but a mistress of none. When it describes the spectacular attacks Kairlina used in her first appearance, Kordanath can only sigh.

“Yeah, uh,” she thumps her hammer’s butt on the ground. “Kairlina’s spent her whole life training to do that kind of stuff. She wrote a few books before, uh…” She stops herself. “She wrote a few books. Books maybe she shouldn’t have published, books that got into how and why her techniques work, and I… I couldn’t follow the discussion that spawned.”

“That’s okay.” Vaestreth slugs the big igneous demon’s shoulder. “I don’t need someone to teach me elite fighting techniques. I just need the basics.”

Kordanath grins. “Now that? That, I can do.”

They start putting Vaestreth through its paces the morning after that. Kordanath shows it how to spread its feet to be stable without overextending. How to move from the hip, letting its center of gravity pull the rest of its body through and carry the halberd with it.

“Remember,” Kordanath calls, “with the axhead and the hook, you want your lead arm to be the one that extends. Get all that force built up at the top of the weapon.” She walks a circle around Vaestreth, calling out a cadence. 

“Cut!” Vaestreth sweeps the halberd out and down. The crystal edge glitters in the sun.

“Recover!” Vaestreth swings it back up, the back-hook soaring more or less on a reversal of the line the axhead just cut. 

“Withdraw!” And Vaestreth steps back, her right leg withdrawing past her left to put her left shoulder forward.

“Remind me,” Kordanath calls. “Why do we recover the weapon before withdrawing?”

“For balance,” Vaestreth answers, repeating earlier instructions, “and to get me comfortable with footwork before I try changing guard positions.”

“Good!” her teacher calls, and the little demon swells with pride. “Keep at it!”

“Cut! Recover! Withdraw!” while the sun is high, while the wind is low, while the stones bake under her feet, on and on and on.

“Now, I don’t know any fancy techniques,” Kordanath continues later, once Vaestreth has learned the body mechanics of cuts from each of the seven primary angles–high, middle, and low from the left and right, plus straight down–and begun work on thrusting and lunges. “But I do know this much! It’s said that among supernatural beings, the spirit of the attack matters just as much as its technique! So, don’t think about killing your enemy!”

Vaestreth freezes. “Don’t?”

“Don’t!” Kordanath agrees. “Your enemy’s death is a natural outcome of striking them. Dying is what they will do if you strike them enough. Therefore, you must focus on the strike. Deliver your attacks as though they cannot be resisted.”

“And they’ll be irresistible?” Vaestreth asks.

Kordanath snorts. “Of course not. But they’ll be harder to resist, and that’s the best you’re going to get.”

So they pass their days. In the morning they journey until they find a good place to practice. All through the afternoon Kordanath drills Vaestreth, calling out flaws in its technique as readily as she praises its strengths.

Slowly, the little demon with its Carag-crafted halberd begins to earn more than one piece of praise a day. Of course when it reaches three, Kordanath begins sparring. They use scavenged, filed-down branches in lieu of their weapons. Every match ends in a strike or two when Vaestreth over extends and gets whacked on the head, or Kordanath blows right past its guard and whacks it on the head without giving it a chance to move.

“No matter how well you know technique,” Kordanath explains gently, “knowing is not the same as doing. You can know everything you need to do against every technique someone throws at you, and still lose over and over because they’re just better than you. Ideally, I’d put you against other beginners. Getting stomped on over and over isn’t gonna teach you much.” She waves a claw. “But since it’s just you and me, ‘little’ beats ‘nothing.’”

“Yeah.” Vaestreth perks up. It really likes the sound of that. “Little beats nothing…”

And it does. Day by day Vaestreth gets faster, gets better at pouring the flaming power of its soul into its body to quicken its moves, gets better at anticipating Kordanath. It still doesn’t come close to winning, but it makes her work for her wins. Just a little bit.

Little beats nothing.

Seventeen days together see them lounging in a subterranean cavern. Golden sand contrasts black walls with ancient white paint, takeing peculiar shades in the light of their fire. They’ve gathered all kinds of branches from a dried-out riverbed and made a big, merry bonfire–the largest Vaestreth’s seen since the Festival of Queen Elkadrin’s Peace.

Last year. That was only last year.

“What’s on your mind, little kindred?” Kordanath asks.

“Hm.” Vaestreth draws its knees up under its chin. “Queen Vestuv. The court. Some demon she was. She ruined my life by hiding in her supposed kindness to me. She did it to make herself feel better, that’s all. To ease her guilt about getting my mother killed.”

It snorts. “She should’ve studied battle tactics. The charge on the day I might Kairlina, and came out here to the desert… anyone could’ve seen we’d get outflanked.” It tosses a new branch on the fire. “And once that happened there was a panic. I don’t know what Vestuv thought would happen. It didn’t matter that she could defeat any one human in single combat. They just charged her, wave after wave of knights, until she had too many lances stuck in her stupid tits and she fell over dead.”

It wraps its arms and its tail around its legs. “And where did that leave me? Helpless. Stupid woman got me to trust her, got me to fall in love with her and pin all my hopes on her and forget how to do anything for myself. Forget how to live without her.”

“And then she died,” Kordanath mutters. “Yeah. Sorry about that, kid. It’s what people like her do. They only think things that make them feel nice, and make decisions based on those nice feelings, and they figure, well, since it came from a nice feeling it must be good.”

“Yeah.” Vaestreth spits into the fire. “So much for that.”

Quiet settles for a while. It lowers a hand to its halberd, stroking the emerald haft.

“I get it, I guess,” it continues. “How Kairlina became that angry. I’m angry at myself when I think about it. Look at how much I’ve grown in just over a month! And she was harsh, but…” It puffs air through its lips. “I don’t know. Lots of others hinted, or told me outright, that my fawning over the Queen wasn’t healthy. It exhausts me to think of how spiteful I was towards them, how happy I was to use their concern to hurt them.”

“Understanding her doesn’t mean you have to forgive her,” Kordanath says. “Just to be clear. Since I, uh… still feel bad about how quick I was to speak for her the day we met.”

“It’s okay. We all have those moments.” Vaestreth shifts. “My mother used to say that remorse and forgiveness are things we feel.” It stokes the fire further, staring, and finally crawls into it to make a nest among the coals. Its mother had the art of making the fire burn so hot and clean, getting the ashes so fine and soft and warm. As sweet for sleeping as the finest silk. It curls its tail around itself and pines for childhood. 

Still, it speaks.

“When we feel them, we speak them. It’s as bad to say we don’t feel forgiveness when we do, as it is to say we do feel it when we don’t. Regret, too.” It closes its eyes, letting the fire’s many-tongued kisses soothe the sorrow from it. “So I forgive her, yes. But I don’t trust her. I can’t trust her. She’s powerful, way stronger than Queen Vestuv ever was, and she’s incredibly unstable. I know that’s because she’s been through awful things. I understand that. Really, I do! I pity her, I want things to turn out better for her, but…”

“... but you can’t keep spending time around people you don’t trust to try and make them feel better?” Kordanath suggests.

Vaestreth hugs itself. “Yeah.”

Its teacher picks her fangs with a bit of obsidian. “Might’ve been okay to tell her that much. What I’ve heard, her whole problem is that people try to be kind to her when she’s asking how she can do better, and keep pushing her to do better when she needs them to be kind. And admittedly… I dunno. I’ve noticed, the stronger I get, the more I see the same behavior towards me.”

She flicks the obsidian into the fire. “I get it. Power’s scary, so it's terrifying pushing back on someone powerful when they’re standing strong. But saving it 'til they’re at their weakest and then dumping it all on 'em, everything you stored up in meantime at once? That’s fucked. Keeping alert all the time, on the one hand to be responsible with my power when I’m strong enough to wield it, and on the other to resist people who demand more from me right when I’ve run out of more to give… it’s driving me a little crazy too.” 

She leans back, propping her head off the cavern sands with her big clawed hands. “What Kairlina did to you was still beyond the pale. But I can’t hate her for it. It gets real fucking tiring. Showing compassion for other people's weakness, when they all treat your weakness as a chance to push you to give 'em what they want. Y’know?”

“Hm.” Vaestreth’s tail draws spirals in the sand. “So she, and the people most like her, are the most likely to hurt each other. Kinship itself is poisoned.” It pulls flames from the fire, transmuting them to its own pink. “I agree. I can’t hate her for that. But the fact remains that I don’t trust her.”

Kordanath shrugs. “Fair enough.”

That’s the end of the night’s talk.