There were few corelings so far out in the desert. They tended to congregate where there was prey, and prey was scarce on the barren sands. Arlen walked for hours in the cold moonlight before a demon caught his scent. He heard its cries long before the creature appeared, but he did not flee, for he knew it could track him, nor did he try to hide, for he had much further to go that night. He stood his ground as the sand demon came bounding over the dunes.
When Arlen met the creature’s gaze calmly, the coreling paused, confused. It growled at him, clawing the sand, but Arlen only smiled. It roared a challenge, but Arlen did not react at all. Instead, he focused on his surroundings: the flashes of movement in the periphery of his vision, the whisper of the wind and the scrape of sand, and the scent upon the cold night air.
Sand demons hunted in packs. Arlen had never seen one of them alone before, and he doubted this one was now. Sure enough, while his attention had been fixed upon the snarling, shrieking creature before him, two more demons, as silent as death, had circled around to either side, nearly invisible in the darkness. Arlen pretended not to notice them, keeping eye contact with the coreling in front of him as it drew closer and closer.
The attack came, as expected, not from the posturing sand demon before him, but from those off to the sides. Arlen was impressed with the cunning the corelings showed. Out on the sands, he supposed, where one could see far in every direction and the slightest sound could carry miles on the wind, it was necessary to develop instincts for misdirection when on the hunt.
But while Arlen had not yet become the hunter, neither was he easy prey. As the two sand demons leapt at him from either side, fore-talons reaching, he darted forward, towards the demon that had been serving as the distraction.
The two attacking demons veered off, barely avoiding a collision, while the other backed away in surprise. It was fast, but not as fast as Arlen’s left hook. The wards on his knuckles flared, a sizzling blow that rocked the demon back on its heels, but Arlen did not stop there. He snapped his right hand onto the coreling’s face, pressing the ward tattooed on his palm against its eyes. The ward activated, burning, and the creature shrieked and lashed out blindly.
Anticipating the move, Arlen threw himself backward. He hit the ground in a roll and came back up a few feet away from the blinded creature, facing the other two corelings as they launched themselves his way.
Again, Arlen was impressed. Not to be fooled twice, the corelings did not attack in unison, staggering their strikes so he could not play them against one another.
The tactic worked against the demons, though, for it allowed Arlen to focus upon them one at a time. As the first reached for him, he stepped right up, inside its grasp, and boxed its ears. The explosion of magic collapsed the demon to the sand, where it shrieked and writhed in agony, clutching at its head.
The second demon was close behind the first, and Arlen had no time to dodge or strike. Instead, remembering another trick from the last encounter, he caught the creature’s wrists and threw himself onto his back, kicking upwards. The sharp scales of the sand demon’s abdomen cut through the wrappings on his feet and into the flesh beneath, but it did not prevent Arlen from using the creature’s own momentum to hurl it away. The one he had blinded continued to flail about, but it was little threat.
Before the thrown demon could recover, Arlen pounced on the one writhing on the ground, digging his knees into its back and ignoring the pain as its scales cut into him. He caught the coreling about the throat with one hand, and pressed the other hard into the back of its head. He felt the magic beginning to build, but was forced to relinquish his hold too soon in order to roll out of the way as the coreling he had thrown renewed its assault.
Arlen came back to his feet, and he and the sand demon circled one another warily. It charged, and Arlen bent his knees, ready to sidestep the slashing claws, but the demon stopped short, snapping its stout, powerful frame about like a whip. Its thick tail collided with Arlen’s side, sending him sprawling.
He hit the ground and rolled to the side just in time as the heavy, ridged end of the tail thudded into the sand where his head had been. He rolled back, narrowly avoiding the next blow. As the sand demon retracted its tail for another strike, Arlen managed to grasp it. He squeezed, feeling the ward tingle in his palm. It grew warm as the magic gathered. The demon howled and thrashed, but Arlen held fast, locking his other hand just below the first. He quickstepped to keep out of reach as the magic intensified, finally burning right through the tail, popping the ridged end off in an ichorous splatter.
Arlen was thrown by the severance, and the coreling, free again, whirled on him and attacked. Arlen caught one of its wrists in his left hand and jabbed his right elbow into the creature’s throat, but the unwarded blow had little effect. The demon flexed its sinewy arms, and Arlen again found himself flying through the air.
As the creature pounced, Arlen called upon his last reserves of strength and met it head on, locking his hands around its throat and bearing it backwards. The coreling’s talons ripped at his arms, but Arlen’s limbs were longer, and it could not reach his body. They struck the ground hard, and Arlen brought his knees up to the coreling’s arm joints, pinning the limbs with his weight as he continued to choke, feeling the magic swell with every passing second.
The coreling thrashed about, but Arlen only squeezed harder, burning through its scales and into the vulnerable flesh beneath. Bones cracked, and his fists closed.
He rose from the now-headless demon, and looked to the others. The one whose ears he had boxed was crawling weakly away, its will for the fight gone. The blind demon had vanished, but Arlen was untroubled by that fact. He didn’t envy the crippled creature its trip back to the Core. Most likely, its fellows would tear it to pieces.
He finished off the demon limping pathetically in the sand, bandaged his wounds, and then, after a short rest, picked up his roll of provisions and headed on towards Anoch Sun.
Arlen travelled night and day, taking his sleep in the shadow of the dunes when the sun was highest. On only two other nights was he forced to fight; once against another pack of sand demons, and once against a lone wind demon. The others he passed unmolested.
Without the weight of the sun upon him, he covered more distance by night than by day. He was wind-burned and raw by his seventh day out of the oasis, his feet blistered and bleeding and his water gone, but new strength flowed into him as Anoch Sun came into view.
Arlen refilled his skins at one of the few working wells, drinking deeply, and then set to warding the building that led into the catacombs where he had found the spear. In some of the nearby collapsed buildings, wooden support beams were left exposed, and in the dryness of the desert, they remained intact. Arlen harvested these, along with the sparse scrub brush, for fires. The three torches left at the oasis and the handful of candles in his warding kit would not last long, and there was no natural light below.
He rationed his dwindling supply of food carefully. The edge of the desert, and the nearest hope of more, was at least five days from Anoch Sun on foot, perhaps three if he travelled at night as well as day. That didn’t give him much time, and there was a lot to do.
For the next week, Arlen explored the catacombs, carefully copying new wards wherever he found them. He found more of the stone coffins, but none contained weapons like the first one he’d found. Still, there was an abundance of wards etched upon the coffins and pillars, and more were painted into stories upon the walls. Arlen could not read the pictograms, but he understood much from the body language and expressions on the sequential images. The works were so intricate that he could make out some of the wards on the weapons the warriors carried.
There were new breeds of corelings in the pictures, as well. A series of images showed men killed by demons that looked human, save for their teeth and claws. One central image showed a thin coreling with spindly limbs and a scrawny chest, its head enormous for its body, standing before a host of demons. The coreling faced off against a robed man who stood before a like number of human warriors.