The Demon Lord Is An Angel-Chapter 401: Beneath The Sundered Sky

Three days after the Heavenfall, all across Ayther the sky was rent open to a shimmering, ominous darkness. A second sky, roiling with the storms of Hell.

From it fell motes of blue and green, like dying fireflies drifting through the air slowly, barely visible to those without manasight. Where they fell, magic unraveled. Not by much, but enough that the most complex spellforms would begin to break under the unending wounds in their construction.

During the day, the sky-on-sky of the Grand Perdition dumped the ashfalls of Hell all across the world. And during the night, the storms of the shrouded, nigh-uninhabitable moon thundered in perpetuity.

But this was not the only sign of what was to come.

*

At the Norneau Academy of Magic, Keiya stared out over the waters of the Grand Lake, her familiar Nimfi, a blue spirit that chose the shape of an otter, on her shoulder. Here, the sky had been clear until its sundering, and the angry slash of grey waved and throbbed in the sky as it tapered off to the west.

Classes had been canceled until further notice as the staff and professors worked around the clock to shore up and repair the city’s defenses. But that didn’t stop the students from engaging in self-study. Special-status students like her had taken up the call and were doing everything they could to train the rest of the school for combat or defense.

But even if her powers had grown significantly since completing her bond with Nimfi, Keiya’s specialty had been potions, and so she made potions.

"That’s it for the noraes malt," Ann, Keiya’s human girlfriend, wiped her forehead and looked over from where she’d been working. "Hey? Keiya!"

"Hmm?" Keiya turned away from the window. "Sugar!" she swore as she realized she’d been overmixing her batch of rejuvenation potion in its cauldron. She quickly moved her hands, forcing the mixture to halt as she pulled her mana away from it. Instead of being liquid, it now had the consistency of jelly.

Grabbing a towel, Ann took the small cauldron after wrapping the towel around its handle. She placed it in a receptacle and added a bowl for the mix to drain into. After letting it cool for a moment, she took a small pinch and tasted it.

"I think it’s still good. But we’re going to have to do a bit of testing to figure out how to dose it out," Ann reported.

"I’m sorry..." Keiya’s elven ears drooped along with her shoulders.

"It’s fine," Ann said. "I’ll send word for my brother to scour the markets."

A window had been left open, and through it drifted a pale blue mote that Nimfi ate with a "mewp!" sound.

"How does she do that?" Ann wondered.

"She’s a spirit. I guess that means she can just eat all kinds of mana," Keiya shrugged Nimfi off her shoulder to hold her. Looking into her familiar’s, she shared a wordless communication with the spirit that she spoke out loud for Ann’s sake. "What do you mean it tastes like the ocean? You’re a freshwater otter spirit."

The spirit squeaked, making a few emphatic huffs as the back and forth with Keiya intensified, with the latter forgetting to translate.

"Uhh, Keiya..." Ann finally interjected.

"Sorry! Nimfi’s being weird... she says that the mote she ate was also in the ocean, even though it clearly fell here from the sky."

"Does she mean it passed through the ocean?" The motes, by all observation, interacted strangely with matter, passing through or disappearing at random when they encountered something solid.

Keiya’s voice grew more perplexed. "No, she means it was also in the ocean when she ate it. Which doesn’t make sense unless Nimfi has an ocean in her mouth." The spirit otter stuck out her tongue at that. "I can’t understand it."

"Maybe we should take a break..." Ann proposed.

"I’m fine. I can keep working if..." Suddenly Keiya felt it. A calling, from across the waters of the Grand Lake. "... The Lake Spirit needs me."

"What? Now?! What does she want?" Ann’s voice rose with panic.

"She didn’t say... but Ann, she feels angry," Keiya placed Nimfi back on her shoulder, and her familiar rubbed the top of its head against her cheek in comfort.

Ann took a deep breath. "Then there’s only one thing to do." She took her cauldron off its burner and doused the fires beneath with a bit of magic. "I’m going with you."

"But..."

"No buts!" Ann surged forward and wrapped her arms around her girlfriend, burying her face in the taller elf’s chest. "I’m not going to let you just disappear again."

Keiya sighed, gently patting the human girl’s dirty blonde hair. Alright, this will be our adventure then."

Ann withdrew enough to look up at her, sniffling a little. "I’ll get my brother and meet you out front."

"What do we need him for?" Keiya’s ears twitched a little. She didn’t have a terribly good impression of Ann’s brother, but over the last couple of year he’d grown quieter and cooler-headed.

"Well, I’m not rowing the boat."

*

Far to the west, the winding scar in the sky was narrow over the Palace of Flame, but its presence was felt as the motes had grounded the mighty airships of Gra’ Rhuel, halting a significant fraction of Korabodur, the capital city’s, trade.

Fruhe Korabodur’s seven tails flicked in annoyance as she contemplated the report before her before casting it onto the table in front of her, upsetting the tart whose sweetness had turned to ashes in the foxkin woman’s mouth.

"How?" she growled out at her spymaster, a goatkin woman with horns artfully carved with natural imagery inset with zinc.

"My agents are still looking-"

"Where were your agents before they disappeared? Hm?" She snarled, features shifting toward foxlike as her mana roiled within - responding to her emotions. Her desire to attack. "How could we be weeks behind finding out where they went?"

"My Queen, it has been chaos everywhere. We chose to prioritize discretion..."

Fruhe sat back in her seat, her hand balling into a fist around her fan as she contemplated the catastrophe that had just struck her family.

Kassin was gone.

Her son and heir had disappeared like the wind along with Kordia van Mora, the best hope Fruhe had of securing a proper foxkin heiress for her queendom. Fruhe had little love for the Mora girl. She was a means to two ends: securing a foxkin heir and annexing the Laikal Lakes region into her growing empire.

If she had to, Fruhe had contingencies for annexing the Mora clan’s lands by force, but there was no guarantee of her bloodline without Kassin. Her other three children were all bearkin girls, in defiance of the common wisdom that the mother’s clade decided her children’s.

She wouldn’t dare try to bear more children when she was close to refining herself for her eighth tail. Her plan had been to mate Kassin with Kordia and to raise her granddaughter as her successor. A plan for the century she planned on ruling to usher in a golden age of her beastkin nation.

"We need to get ahead of this before the High Clans find out," Fruhe forced aside her contemplations and focused on the present. "And ready our reprisal against Norneau. If we can rally the Mora clan to take the city, I will consider that a just punishment."

Her spymaster gulped. "My Queen, I would advise against military action at this time... we don’t know if Heaven will sanction-"

"Until Heaven magically reappears in the sky, I will do what I want. Until then, I will not ask for permission. I ask for options."

The goatkin nodded. "My recommendation is to claim they eloped together. I can have forgers prepare a letter from the Prince. If we spin this as a romance, we can garner sympathy from the Moras while quietly deploying our most trustworthy nobles to investigate the places they could be. My guess is that if they fled by the lake, they would have gone to Amrita or Montmorency. Princess Kordia was known to have been close with Princess Lapins van Montmorency." ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

Fruhe tapped her claws on the table. "I like this plan. But I want to add an addendum. Hire searchers through the Guilds. Make sure the ones we find to look for my son and the Mora girl are discreet. And put additional bounties on Ghostheart, Professor Kiryu Nasumi, and anyone associated with the Norneau Academy who disappeared that day."

"My queen... there might be a bit of a problem with that," the spymaster grimaced. "The teleportation circles are down, and only Heaven has the knowledge to fix them."

"At the Guild?" Fruhe scowled.

"All of them," her spymaster clarified. "We can still issue orders by scrypen, but we won’t be able to put agents where they need to be as fast."

"Then start now. And make sure to alert our people in the Mora lands to be on the lookout."

Fruhe knew Kordia van Mora was a kind woman. But power tempers even the kindest hearts into what they need to be. The girl had six tails by the last report. The difference between us is still exponential, but If she continues to grow like this...

She wouldn’t have cared if Kordia achieved such heights at such a young age if the girl had remained predictable. As shy and compliant as she’d been when Fruhe first saw her. Now, Kordia was a caring woman who loved her clan and her nation, and who could hold her own in fights. Yet she chose to follow a healing path as a witch aspirant.

The more Fruhe thought about what she was just now learning, the more she realized that she no longer knew what Kordia van Mora wanted.

She had become a puzzle. A mystery... and if Fruhe was being honest with herself, a potential rival. Fruhe would need to step up her own efforts to achieve godhood - the lesser kind, the immortality of the body, which was said to be the prize of a foxkin achieving their ninth tail.

But if it was Kordia who had something to do with Kassin’s disappearance...

And if her son had come to harm because of her...

If she has grown too ambitious, I will put her in her place.