Challenge #00669 - A304: Methods of Madness

When the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit, we will not kill it. We will ride it.

Jorgi the Page remembered when the Sorcerer’s summoned demon began pulling out its hair. The beast was still chafing at its magical bit and had managed to get into Kragdar’s knapsack.

Jorgi caught her looking into a crystal sphere, late one night.

“What are you doing?” Jorgi whispered. “The master forbade you from interfering with our things.”

“Na, he forbade me from wreckin’ ‘em. Nowt about looking’. Nowt about touchin’.” She was a strange demon. Were it not for her too-large, glowing eyes, Jorgi could easily mistake her for human. Though the combination of shadow-dark skin and smoke-white hair was usually only found in the elderly.

And no human had fangs or talons like this thing.

The creature who called herself Shayde carefully rolled the sphere back into Kragdar the Sorcerer’s knapsack and put it back the way Jorgi had left it.

“See? No harm done.” She reached up to her head, and pulled out three strands of hair. One by one.

Ever after that day, Shayde was perpetually braiding, or piercing herself to add her blood to the impossibly thin twine she was making of her own hair. She muttered spells in some foreign tongue she called ‘Welsh’. They were not counter to their quest, though they did alarm Yrg the Barbarian.

It became normal, over their months of travel. If Shayde’s fingers weren’t busy with her hair-and-blood twine, then she was unconscious or doing the bidding of Kragdar. Helping them fight the forces of evil.

But when they came to Nemyss, the ultimate evil they had been sent to vanquish… that was when the cord Shayde had been weaving came into play. Nemyss summoned her own demon. A much more… demon-y demon. A giant serpent made of fangs and tentacles and leathery embellishments that resembled bats’ wings.

Jorgi almost wet herself.

Shayde tied off her hair braid and, with a complicated movement, turned it into a lasso. She caught the beast and the thin thread held. The beast dragged her off the ground, and the thread held. She looped it further around its maw and turned it into a bridle.

And the great serpent bucked and writhed but Shayde would not let it go. It struggled and bit and howled… and the thin web of hair and blood held fast.

She tamed it. Wore it down. Soothed it into domesticity. Leaving the others free to defeat Nemyss on his own turf.

“It’s no big trick,” said Shayde as she scratched one of the serpent’s phalanges. It rumbled an earthquake of a purr. “Hair and blood of a virgin. Words of purpose in an ancient tongue. Any ancient tongue will do.”

“That’s…” Kragdar boggled. “That’s almost mud-magic.”

“It’s life magic. Ye could’a explained. I’d have done it wi’out the manacles.”

“Life magic? No demon can wield life magic.”

Sigh. “I been tellin’ ye all year. I ain’t a demon.”

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