Demon of the Black Gate

The air pulled at the demon. He was caught up in the confluence of winds. They whispered to each other in words the demon could not understand, though the mood was clear. The tempest was being called and the ethers were angry with the intrusion.

The exhalations gathered over the great basin of the Lower Stands. Months had passed since the destruction of the Gate and those that now remarked on the skies drew comparisons to that baleful night. The demon was pinned and buffeted until he let the river of the ethers carry him. The fury of the winds drew in the storms of heavy towering clouds where the moistures and dusts were buffeted beyond endurance and roiled into massive thunderous hulks. The demon absorbed the particulant and electricities, growing more powerful and feeling the reckless energies that shocked through him. The demon became part of the march of thunderheads that marched over the barren, snowcapped peaks of the Camelbacks.

Rovinkar stood on his marks, stilled in his concentration. The distant crackling of thunder fluttered his eyelids open. In the distance, white bolts could be seen illuminating the distant jagged horizon. Long pauses stretched the silence before the muted rumble of the strikes reached his ears. He watched and waited as the storm approached, the angry pulses of lightning shook within the swollen bellies of the clouds. Bolts of energy shot to the desert floor in sporadic splendor, the storm feeling its way along the sands. Although it wavered at the fringes, the tempest bore down in a direct path to the lone mesa where Rovinkar waited.

He began his chants. The calling was in effect and now the gate had to be opened. Rovinkar stood behind the mandala on which the black obsidian was centered. Two tendrils of light emerged. They held three strands each, braiding a path in a long arc out over the edges of the mandala and up into the sky while making a half turn before they joined. The tendrils continued past the join staying in a constant weave while following the path of the last chord. The gate to the void stood: a frame of gossamer light caught in mobius. From where he stood, Rovinkar would not attempt to see or sense the void lest he be drawn in.

The storm loomed, lightning strikes more fervent and reports of the strikes returning even as they struck. Rovinkar searched for sign of the demon, the winds beginning to race along the flat surface of the mesa and whipping at his robes. He wondered for a moment at what power he had unleashed as a snare, it clawed with malevolence at the edges of his control. He squelched that notion quickly. That the demon was among the turmoil that neared he was certain, for the weaving arch that framed the gateway guttered with greater effervescence at each weave.

The demon felt himself pulled along, soldiered between two towering, buffeting clouds. The turmoil caught at him, leaving his thoughts as churned as the airs around him. The awareness of his speed and movement made him cast his sight forward. He was being drawn, slipping along on the streams of thicker airs. A thought came to him that he could walk on the heavens like firmament. It was a random inkling, pulled out of the very air that buffetted him. The shape of a man pulled at his logics as the boiling thunderheads in front of him parted. A ring of light lay in his path, blazing with luminous life: a halo hanging in the black of night. Except the midst of the ring was not black. It was a darker color, an inkier brand of darkness. The beckoning embrace pulled at the demons edges as he approached. Pulled at the vague human shape. The creator. The woman. The passage of notions were as ephemeral as the airs, but the last image burned past with a cry, a plea: “Don’t Go!”, hands reaching out. His own hand outstretched.

The demon broke from the entrancement of the coiling, enflamed circle. The void yawned before him, comforting, succoring and terrifying. He shook his awareness. Patterns glazed the grounds surrounding the gate. His thought was one of desperation: the notion of fuel. The patterns sustain the gates and he must destroy the fires. Even as the thought formed his extremities reached out, gathered the fires of his churning storm and cast them down to the earth below. The earth of the mesa crackled and shook with the impact. The lightning of the demon’s strike broke the pattern Rovinkar had made with such pains, shattering the living miasma that wormed into the towering ring.

The ring unwove like a shoddy kirt, the void collapsing. The demon felt a wrenching pull as the emptiness winked away. Past the shattered gases of the ring that fled quickly into the dark stood a man … and the visage was a stark awakening for the demon. A tower in an age ago. At that moment, between his lightning detonations, the demon knew who his captor was. He gathered his ethereal energies, the airs and frictions, and crashed them to earth.

Rovinkar saw the boiling clouds part as they approached the mesa. One of the dangerous thunderheads in the midst continued unabated towards the towering gate. The moment approached and he could already feel the exhilaration of success. But as the airs of the cloud were being pulled in the radii of the gate Rovinkar saw burning eyes in the fulsom cloud as it broke the atmospheres with a rending flash that tore at his mandala. His concentration was shattered as he saw the gate unravel. The demon cloud loomed over him, and the grazing of the hairs of his neck signaled another attack.

He raised his hands invoking the full power of his shields. The motifs of his robes flared, his own groundwork as yet untouched. The bolt that struck scoured a bubble around the wizard and left him untouched. The demon felt the recoil as his energies stung with force on their return. He had already loosed another bolt that crashed and also rebounded, shattering into him. He wanted to strike again in fury, but the notion that he might even destroy himself with a more ferocious attack stopped him.

The demon sought the solidity of the grounds and away from the vagrancies of the air. He let the dust carried in his form drag him down even while drawing up the stones of the mesa. The demon landed, forming in burning clots, a wild and raging simulacrum of the shape the woman had left him. He hazarded another attack, hurling the lavas that he created in his grip. The clinging fire dashed against the shields woven by the sorcerer and caromed wildly. A blazing spit of molten ore crashed into him ... the demon’s own venom volleyed back. The demon felt the fires that clawed at his skin. He let himself flare the dangerous gases. The wizard cast a spell of his own, a destructive blast that Rovinkar hoped would fell the demon on the heels of the recoil. The demon felt the pain of the wizards attack, a knife fashioned by the body of the demon itself as the magic penetrated. The wizard stared at him, and the demon could see the fear in his eyes. At the wizards feet, a powerful sigil glowed, beckoning. The demon knew the mark but it refused purchase in his mind. He lurched in the direction of the wizard, molten rock dripping. He wanted to rend the cage surrounding the mage. Instead, the weave of the sorcerer’s protection flared stronger at the demon’s approach.

A flight of butterflies, disturbed by the wild battle flittered through the glowing weave and disappeared into the darkness beyond, seeking to escape the conflagration. The demon saw them pass through and turned to watch their erratic departure. The demon damped his rage. The curiousity beckoned, a shiny thing that in an instance had meaning. He stared after the fluttering insects whose dancing reflections melded with the crackling remains of the demons fires. The demon turned his attention back on the magician with deliberate intent.

Rovinkar had cringed under the attack, holding on to the power of the shield. The demon had shriven the calling and established a fatal recognition. The beast stood before him shaped into a towering giant, a blazing, moving statue of magmas and steaming fires. The burning eyes had quailed the marrow in his bones. Rovinkar had seen the shape before, the avatar of the demon, in the illustrations of the old romance. The demon was discovering its identity. Rovinkar had not thought of that, and he was seeing the demon’s rebellion by virtue of its own self awareness. His shields held, strengths drawn from the power of his opponents own might. He shuddered to think that it may occur to the demon to destroy the obsidian rock itself, but the black stone sat forgotten in the mandala, dead of energy. The demon watched him intently for a moment, then approached with looming menace. A voice of dark energy rasped from the demonic pyre, the words seemed to drip with the flames of its exhalation.

“I am not yours to command!”

The demon threw down a cascade of fire. It was a statement, driven at the base of the wizards shield. The spray of fire spewed in front, then passed over the wizard who knelt under the weight of his protection, the ground shaking beneath him. The fires left him unconsumed, yet had failed to return the force to the demon, the blow had been so cleverly placed. When the fires exhausted their gases, Rovinkar could not see the demon. It was gone, dissipated as surely as the dying flames around him that found no fuels in the rock and meager grasses.

The mesa was a haze of drifting smoke, black veils lingering from a hellish dance. The umbra of false dawn was just beginning to shed the dark ink of the night sky.

Rovinkar finally moved, and picked up the book at his feet, folding the pages shut over the leaves of bone. He took a wary look around as he walked into the torched remains of the mandala. He keep his shields alive, expecting attack again at any moment, an attack that never came. The rock was scooped up and placed in its satchel. It took a moment for Rovinkar to orient himself on the planar surface of the mesa, seeking the path down. He was drained by the experience and the shields were costing him further. The south side, ‘yes, the south side’ his thoughts comfirmed, was where the scarred gap marked his path of descent. The rock and bulky tome felt a greater burden than they had the day before. Rovinkar knew another attempt to entrap the demon must be made. Had to be made. The connection that gave the demon life still remained, and it was on the life of Rovinkar. If the demon discovered that secret his life was forfeit.

Rovinkar made his way down the precipitous gash in the mesa cliffs, leery of every gust of breeze or trickling of loose stone. It wasn’t until he had gathered his horse and ridden well away that he finally dropped his shield, exhausted. The ride before him, back across the desert, was to be endured in the heat as the sun was ablaze in full by the time he left the shadow of the mesa. Rovinkar didn’t care. The heats of the night had been more intense, and bothered him yet. He rode away, in the numb aftermath of lost energy, heading east to the Vale of the Houri.

The demon waited. Waited until the sense of the man had left the rock, and the marks of his boots no longer held the scent of his passing. Then he rose, gathering the rocks and clays from the mesa. He had let himself sink into the rock itself, a marriage of cooling tempers and long rememberances. The demon watched the distant figure in the barren expanse below. It looked small and insignificant. The demon turned his attention once more to the airs. Capricious, dangerous, but swift. He shed as much as the ground as he dared, keeping the dusts as an anchor to the earth, guarding against him drifting too far. There was only one place the demon could go. Storms and wizards had brought him here. The currents and airs would aid him finding his way back.

Rovinkar rode on, unmindful of the turning winds of the djinn that rose from the mesa far behind him. Rovinkar was deep in thought already plotting his next move. Water was his most powerful ally in this magic, and must be employed. The formulae worked in the back of his mind as he rode. The funnel of the demon danced away to the north unnoticed.