The Pleasures of Hell
Copyright© 2023 by Novus Animus
Chapter 59
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 59 - An epic fantasy adventure through Hell, with demons and angels, and a couple humans with targets painted on their back. David and Mia didn’t want to be a part of this, but their unexpected first deaths land them in the middle of events grand and beyond knowing. Why are they in Hell in the first place? Why don’t they have the mark of the Beast, like other souls do? And why does everyone either want them, or want them dead?
Caution: This Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Mult Consensual Reluctant Lesbian Heterosexual Fiction High Fantasy Horror Paranormal Demons DomSub MaleDom FemaleDom Spanking Gang Bang Group Sex Harem Orgy Anal Sex Double Penetration Exhibitionism First Lactation Oral Sex Petting Tit-Fucking Big Breasts Size
~~Day 79~~
~~David~~
They’d be going soon. To a party. And he was nervous.
“I hate parties,” he said.
Daoka giggled and shrugged. She sat between his legs, facing away, and it was his duty to check her back spikes and look for any problems. Yeah right. The girl just wanted a shoulder massage, and she’d taken off her breastplate to get it. Facing away from him meant her huge breasts were out of sight, thank god. He didn’t want to walk into this party with an erection. Or, maybe he did?
He sank his thumbs into her dark red skin, and she sighed bliss. Like Caera, she had some big back spikes, but fewer of them. Unfortunately, they had even less bend than Caera’s, less give, and getting them to bend so he could get his thumb or knuckles into her muscle was borderline impossible. He tried anyway, and Daoka chirped some more.
“She said rub her head,” Jes said. The gargoyle sat next to him, a wing pulled out in front of her so she could examine and stroke the membrane.
He rubbed Daoka’s pure black head. She was bald, which he was cool, but she had four big ram horns that gave her head a hair or crown-like look anyway, almost like Acelina. The four horns curled, two horns sticking up and out from her forehead before curling back toward her head, while two horns higher up stuck up and curled back and out more around her ears. It was strangely pretty. It also meant he had to slip his hands under the curling, hard material to find her scalp, and rub.
Daoka chirped again and tilted her head from side to side, encouraging his fingers to find different places on her skull. He scratched, and the girl melted, chirps turning into coos. Say one thing for humans, they all loved to get a scalp scratch, and demons did, too. Aroused demon skin felt the same as human skin, though right now she wasn’t aroused, so it felt tougher, almost like leather. Which made scratching it hard, combined with trying to not cut his hands on her horns, but he made it work.
Satisfied, Daoka got onto her stomach between his legs, knees bent, hooves up, and she set them on his chest.
“Now check her hooves,” Jes said without looking away from her wings. Like a girl painting her nails, she stared at her wings with complete, total focus, and ran her claws along the membrane. Was she looking for small cuts? Could she not feel them? Maybe wing membranes didn’t have many nerves, or whatever Hell equivalent there was.
He checked Daoka’s hooves. The split was subtle, but each hoof had a tiny split at the front toe, like a deer hoof, just bigger. He ran his finger along the outer walls; sturdy and strong, no cracks. He ran his fingers along the undersides and the strange grooves he didn’t know because he wasn’t a horseshoer; no cracks. He clicked the two hooves together, and Daoka giggled again.
“David,” Laoko said, “check mine.” The giantess smiled at him, gently picked up and set Daoka aside, and lay on her back between David’s feet. Since Laoko was literally ten feet tall, the largest girl in their crew by a large margin, ‘between his feet’ wasn’t exactly accurate. But she made it work, hooked two hands behind her back, set the other two on her stomach, and with bent knees, set both her hooves on his chest.
David gulped and looked at the two huge hooves. Horse hooves, no separate toes, and gigantic. No hair anywhere, demon hooves were smooth, black, and far as he could tell, impervious. All the jumping, fighting, landing on sharp rocks and hard ground, and they never cracked. At this point he was convinced they just enjoyed having him play with their hooves.
He put a hand up against the hoof. Bigger than his spread fingers. Goddamn she was a big lady. He traced the outer edges, the wall, the strange shape underneath the big, soft-ish triangle in the back of the hoof, and found nothing his untrained eye would deem bad.
“I’m sorry, Laoko,” he said. “I see a crack. You’re, uh, lame. We’re going to have to put you down.”
She pushed up on four elbows, eyebrow raised. “What?”
Jes laughed and hit David with her wing. “On the surface, it means your leg doesn’t work, or something. If a horse can’t walk and there’s no way to fix it, a human would kill the horse. And eat it.”
Laoko reached for her hoof, eyes wide, stopped herself, blinked at David, and laughed. She lay back again, got comfortable on her back, and instead of gently pressing her hooves to his chest, she planted the hooves against his chest and pinned him to the floor.
“Ow! Help!” He squirmed, tried to lift her ankles, failed, and squirmed some more. “Can’t ... breathe...” Was this how he was to die? On his back, Laoko on her back between his legs, her hooves crushing him to the ground?
The Las stood around him, blinking.
“Laoko kill David?” Lasca asked.
“Laoko kill David,” Laria said, nodding.
“Laoko can’t kill David,” Latia said. She grabbed Laoko’s leg and tried to lift. Nothing.
Laara shook her head. “Laoko strong. She can lead. Laoko fifth La. Strongest La.” Nodding, she stood over David and saluted. “Burial at sea!”
The other Las immediately stood at attention, saluted, and stared off at nothing, as if a song was being played on a trumpet while a body was being lowered into the sea.
Moriah joined them, looked down at David, and unless he was going crazy, that was a tiny smile. “Caera, your boyfriend is near death.”
Caera shrugged, prowled over, and lay beside him. “What’s the word, dibs? I get dibs on his heart.”
He froze. Much as he didn’t think the girls would hurt him, there was always that chance their hunger would get the better of them. And if Caera admitted to having fantasies about eating him, that probably meant they all had those kinds of fantasies. Strangely hot, in a dangerous kinda way.
Laoko chuckled, stood up, and put him on his feet.
“So, how do you plan to seduce the volas?”
“I ... don’t know?”
The girls rolled their eyes, and the four-armed giantess poked him in the chest, with all four hands. He stumbled back.
“You have never been to a Scar party, David. You must be prepared.”
“I mean, I’ve seen Blade. Should be similar, right?” He didn’t wait for their confused looks. “A bunch of people jumping around to music, all in close proximity to each other. Too close.”
Jes laughed. “I’ve never been to a Scar party, but I’m pretty sure a lot more goes on than just bad dancing.”
Laoko nodded. “Indeed.” She lifted David up by the arms and let him dangle in front of her. Ten feet versus five six. “The clothes will do. Volas dress similarly, silk hanging off their bodies.” She fiddled with the black bracelets on his wrists and two black rings. All subtle, nothing that stood out. “Perhaps more glamorous jewelry. Nipple piercings would be nice.” She gestured to Acelina. Everyone except Daoka still had their armor on, but they all knew about Acelina’s love of black jewelry, nipple piercings included.
“I could pierce him,” the spire mother said. “Attach a nipple chain.” She reached behind her neck and undid a necklace.
David squirmed, still dangling. “I’m good! I’m good, thank you very much.”
Complete with her usual evil smile, Laoko lowered him to the ground and held out a hand to Acelina. The spire mother gave her a necklace.
“Uh, no? No no, I don’t want nipple piercings. I—”
“A necklace, you child.” Laughing, Laoko put the black chain around his neck. It dangled down to his stomach. She laughed again, a fun and sultry sound, and she double-wrapped the necklace. “Just make sure it does not choke you.”
He fiddled with the chain so the two loops hung at the same level. “I’ll try.”
“But I am serious, David. Zabulon can be a powerful ally. If you convince him things will be better under your rule than Tarkissa’s, he will help you. He does not want that man running the Scar, and if you prove both powerful and delightful, you will appeal to any volas’s desires.”
“So this is an audition to see if I’d make a good king?”
Moriah gave her wings a flap. “King is a strong word. If you want to push through the Scar with my and Tsila’s help, it will be impossible for you to do it through stealth. We could fly you, but we’d risk an encounter with angels who do not agree with us.”
Caera snorted. “And you’d have to leave us behind. We’re not doing that.”
David smiled at Caera and sat back down with her. She set her head on his lap and pressed her cheek into his stomach.
“So we stick together,” Moriah said. “And sticking together means we will come into direct confrontation with Tarkissa and his bailiffs eventually. We need troops.”
“But we’re under a time limit,” David said. “We have to get through this province quickly.”
The angel shook her head. “We can sneak through the Red Pits and Navameere Fields. Sneaking through the Scar is simply too difficult. The shape, the tunnels, all come to the center line. The Scar itself.”
He buried his face in his palms. “Except the Red Pits is a battlefield.”
“Even in Hell,” Laoko said, “an entire province cannot be a battlefield. The land is vast. Here in the Scar, we are funneled, but in other provinces we are not.”
Acelina raised a wing. “That said, imagine if we walked into the Red Pits with an army of volas with us? They may be nothing compared to a vratorin or devorjin, or gorgala or tregeera, but they can still fight.” Slowly, she exposed her wide shark smile and sharp teeth against her pure black face. “Imagine if they were armed with weapons empowered by a rune.”
David went rigid. “A rune?”
“Yes. The rune the Cainites were using. You say you contain runes in your mind, runes you gained from touching your sister, runes you confirmed came from the ritual site at the base of a spire when Azailia took you in. You know the runes.”
He winced and looked away. “If I had a special anvil, yeah, I could infuse people’s resonance into a weapon. It’d work the same way hellfire does, this destructive force that’s special to Hell.” He looked to the tetrad. “Laoko. You can breathe hellfire. What’s it like?”
She folded two arms across her breastplate and held her chin with a third hand.
“It is difficult to say.”
“How did you learn to breathe it?”
“After hundreds of years of devouring resonance and spending it through my body as essence, I simply ... learned how to feel the difference. It was a matter of time, not skill. And when I learned how the two were different, how to feel the difference, I slowly learned that the two could be combined. It was as if flexing two muscles and crashing them together.”
“Right,” he said. “Resonance is the fuel. Essence is the expenditure, what happens when something converts resonance. Essence is what allows things to move, affect, exist.” He held his chin, too. “But if you smack the two of them together directly, the reaction is destructive. It’s ... almost like the proper way for resonance to behave is it becomes essence through a person: a demon or angel, anyway. But when you short that system, the system breaks and explodes.”
They all looked at him, eyebrow raised. They didn’t know what shorting something meant.
“I guess it’s not really science,” he said. “Hell’s a world of intent, not physics, right?” The demons nodded. “The rune I learned from the Cainites and that Greg asshole—” Sensation sucker-punched him. He stopped, slowly removed his hand from his chin, and looked at his palm. Rock. Bone breaking. Blood splattering. Brains, pink, spilling.
“David?” Caera asked.
He closed his hand and wiped the thoughts away. What the fuck? Why did that blindside him so hard every time?
“That rune, it’ll let me take a soul, and break it, if I have an anvil to work with. Far as I can tell from the runes, doing that will strip the soul of its resonance and essence. The soul goes to Hell to enter the remnant cycle. But the rest is trapped in the weapon. Maybe ... Maybe a little more than just the resonance and essence gets trapped, though.” He shuddered. Hopefully not. Going through hundreds of deaths in Hell as a remnant was rough enough. Being trapped in a weapon for thousands of years would be worse. “With the two energies trapped in the weapon, they react off each other, and create hellfire on the weapon blade.”
It was easy to say the word hellfire. It was a different thing altogether to try and understand that Hell had its own unique brand of destruction: literally smashing the two aspects of existence together so hard they broke everything. Like a god child smashing the primordial forces together. Or a nuclear fission reaction.
“Anvil?” Jes asked. “The anvil the Cainites had broke. Any idea how they got it?”
“No.” He closed his eyes and dug through the runes. The Great Tower. Hell. Heaven. The Material. But there were thousands, tens of thousands of runes for the smaller nuances. The red rivers. The burning bushes. The growing skulls and other bone. The statues Hell grew, its chains, its mausoleums and churches, and a bunch of other things.
Somewhere in the giant web connecting everything, the anvil was there. He dug through the mess, found it lying in a dark little corner where it wanted to be forgotten. An anvil. And the rune was active because of when he’d touched Greg. Would Mia know it? Maybe not. But the anvil was there, and the rune for hellfire binding.
There were a few other runes there, too. Meera metal. Aera metal. Not active, though. Maybe he could find the runes for them, too. If they were active, maybe he could see inside them, understand them, see how they worked, what the materials were. Meera metal was made of demon bone and blackstone, he already knew that.
He didn’t want to know what aera metal was made of.
“I ... I think...” He reached for the anvil rune. It awaited, a quiet thing in the web. “I can see the rune for the anvil.”
“Whatever that means,” Jes said.
“Most runes have to be ‘awakened’ for me to understand them. A couple angel runes are. The rune for hellfire binding is. The rune for sealing a spire aura is. The rune for the anvil is...” Awake. It was awake. If he wanted to, he could grab it, understand it, and use it.
He pulled his knees up to his chest. “I don’t want to do it.”
Jes squatted beside him. “Do what?”
“Sacrifice souls to make weapons.”
The demons looked at each other, raising eyebrows.
“They are the damned,” Acelina said. “They are hunted down, killed, and eaten by the thousands every day. In the Scar, they are collected and sold as slaves, sold as food, sold as battle fodder, sold as victims. And that is but a few of the horrible fates that await the damned in Hell. They are damned. Why do you care what happens to them?”
Her words cut through him, sliced through his soul, and scalded him. He slowly raised his head and glared up at the spire mother, glared hard, and she took a single slow step back. He got up. She tilted her head, and David took a step toward her, fists at his side. She took another step back.
Moriah got between them. Sighing, she set a hand on his shoulder and blocked off the sight of Acelina with a wing.
“She’ll never understand, David.” She guided him away from the demon, leaned in, and whispered. “And ... it is times like these I am sorry I fought against you as I did.”
He tried to smile for the angel. He failed. Eyes shut, he clenched his fist, but all that did was bring back that feeling. A rock in hand. Bone breaking under the pressure. Thunk. Thunk.
Daoka got up, hugged him snug from behind, set her chin on his shoulder, and chirped gently in his ear. Hands on his chest, she squeezed him tight, rubbed her cheek into his, and rubbed a horn on the top of his head.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Acelina grumbled and hooked her wings over her shoulders, thumb claw hooked around the neck like a cloak’s string. But David could see the other demons’ eyes trade quick glances with each other. They didn’t understand why he’d choose to care about damned souls, either.
The reason was really simple. He didn’t have a fucking choice. He just did.
He gently smacked his cheeks. “Okay, the party. I should be in a good mood for the party.”
“Yes, agreed,” Laoko said. “Las! Quick. Do something.”
Daoka let him go soon enough for him to turn around, only to get surrounded by the Las. The little ladies hugged him, rubbed their faces against his shoulders, chest, and back, and fluttered their wings.
“David!” they chanted. “David. David. David.”
He tried to lift his arms, but they held them, pinned him in their giant bear hug, and squished him. It worked. He laughed.
He took down the wall of their cave, and in five minutes had several hundred incubi and succubi following him, along with at least a hundred betrayers, and a few vrats, brutes, gargoyles, satyrs, and a couple tigers and bat girls. Betrayers were usually naked, but they wore the old, uncolored silks tonight, flimsy fabric that barely covered anything. But it was the rest of the demons that caught his eye.
Everyone wore silks. Some wore red, some wore black. Some wore enough to cover most of their bodies. Some wore cloaks. Some wore flowing capes. Most wore flimsy clothes not unlike David’s, minus his black gladiator sandals. And they wore jewelry, black chains, black necklaces, black piercings, most on the face but not all. Bracelets, anklets, belly chains, and a few nipple chains with said nipples hidden behind silk.
David’s girls, on the other hand, wore armor. Only Tsila and Moriah were actually dressed appropriately, but—
“No no no,” Tacharius said. “That won’t do.” He clapped his hands once. “Natalie!”
Natalie stepped out from behind the crowd. Short red hair, average height, she held a calm expression, but David spotted her suppressing some smiles. In her arms sat a mountain of red silks.
“For your friends,” she said, and she handed Tsila the pile. “We can help them get dressed. You angels are already dressed, though. Maybe you can come with David to the party early, while the others get dressed?”
Jes hissed. “No way you’re getting me out of my armor.”
“And your weapon—”
“And I’m not leaving my weapon.”
Tsila sighed, silks in hand, and she set them in Acelina’s arms before facing the gargoyle.
“Trust angel eyes, Jeskura. We will be safe. You can relax tonight.”
“Relax? We’re—”
Acelina gently hit the gargoyle’s wings with her own. “Come. We can get dressed and join David at the party.”
Caera frowned and looked back and forth with her single eye. “I don’t know...”
“Tsila’s right,” Moriah said. “It serves our plan. I will keep the boy safe.” She stood with David and waved off the demons with a wing. “Though, try as you might, there is no jewelry or clothes you can find that will make you a tenth as attractive as an angel.”
The demons snarled. David gulped. Thems was fighting words.
Daoka giggled, clicked up a storm, took some of the red silks, and disappeared back into their cave.
“Jewelry?” Acelina asked Tacharius.
“Natalie?” Tacharius asked Natalie. The betrayer nodded and scampered away. “She’ll be right back.” He leaned in and winked up at the spire mother. “I hope you remember who—”
“Oh shut up, volarin.” Acelina spun, wings swinging out behind her like an evil queen’s cape, and she walked back into the cave. “Come, girls. We should look our best tonight.”
The Las giggled and followed, Daoka too. Jes rolled her eyes, but followed. Laoko smiled, winked at David, and followed. Caera did not.
David knelt beside Caera and pressed his forehead to hers. “Tsila and Moriah will keep me safe. Go have fun.”
“Fun? Do I look like some spoiled princess Karen bitch from the scrying pools?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“That’s what Jes called them.”
He choked on a laugh and kissed her cheek. “Or not. Come with me and—”
“No. No no. If we’re doing this, I’ll dress up like a weak volara bitch and put on a show.” She grumbled and prowled after the other girls.
David almost commented on how the girls were all comfortable going completely naked, so why were clothes and jewelry a problem? He stopped himself. A wise man knew when to say nothing.
Moriah and Tsila gestured for him, and he followed them out of the tunnels onto the terrace steps of the Scar.
It really was nighttime. The ember and fire sky darkened, and while flames still danced in the clouds, the clouds themselves were black. Shadows were everywhere, and David scanned the giant stone steps and their tunnels. He felt very exposed. If Demons had ways to make bows and arrows, he hadn’t seen it yet, so if they wanted to kill him at a distance, they either had to whip a rock at him with great aim, or throw a weapon and hope they got lucky with the spin. And he had two angels with him. Angel eyes, like Tsila said. They’d see someone coming for him before he did, and they’d protect him. And unlike everyone else, they could summon their armor and weapons on the spot and unleash destruction.
And demons knew to give them space. As the two angels guided David to Zab’s cave, hundreds of demons parted for them. No tetrads, but almost every other demon breed David had ever seen was here, watching him. Not watching the angels anymore. Him. Everyone for kilometers in any direction knew who he was on sight.
“Um...” David gestured at the path ahead to Zab’s cave. “What’s all this?”
“Decorations for the party,” Tacharius said. “Though, maybe they went a little overboard, because you’re here.”
Decorations was a word for it. There were black chains everywhere, and skulls dangled from them. They hung from hooks in the walls. They hung from rock outcroppings. They hung from people’s wrists. Silk, too, black and red silks dangled and hung from the terrace walls of the Scar, gently flapping in the soft breeze.
In the dark of night, everything looked different. Amber veins glowed, cast their orange light over metal, and the metal scattered the light over everything. Veins of blackstone in the dark red ground did the same, sent light about that never held still because the fire sky never held still, and it sparkled.
Way too much activity for twilight hours. Demons hid during twilight, and slept at night. And from the snorts, hisses, roars in the distance, hellbeasts in the Dens were getting more active. That was the problem with a place like that. Hellbeasts wanted to hunt during twilight, or at least they usually did; things were weird, lately.
Tacharius led the way. A thousand people followed.
“What’s that sound?” David asked. A lot of bass-heavy thumping.
“Music,” Tacharius said.
Music? Music involved electric guitars or violins, and singing. This wasn’t music!
They stopped in front of the entrance to Zab’s cave. Yeap, that was the so-called ‘music’. Bass-heavy noise. A thousand hanging chains that hadn’t been there yesterday hung from the entrance’s overhang. If they’d been beads, he’d have expected to walk into a drug den or something, and find a bunch of wheat-wearing hippies stoned out of their minds. Nope, it was metal chains, decorated with hundreds of human skulls. And the music stirred them, vibration heavy enough the skulls rattled.
“Follow me,” Tacharius said. “And, uh ... stay close for now. You don’t wanna get caught up in the mess.”
“Mess?”
Tacharius pushed the chains apart and stepped inside. Moriah followed him first, and Tsila stayed at David’s back. He felt better having two angels for personal bodyguards, but they wouldn’t be able to save him from the worst, most heinous, awful villain of his life: social situations.
It was both exactly what he’d expected, and nothing like he’d expected. People were dancing, he’d expected that. Demons, gyrating, rubbing against each other, with silks doing a bad job keeping skin from touching skin. It was almost entirely demons, with betrayers on the edges of the huge cavern, naked. Probably to get pulled in later by any demons who wanted to enjoy them.
There were a few brutes, standing, enormous cocks hanging between their legs while succubi and incubi danced in front of them. Vrats, too. Gargoyles and tigers, satyrs, bat girls, a single minotaur, everyone was in the party, but it was the sex demons doing all the leading. They took the hands — or cocks — of the other demons and guided them into the dance. Though dance was a strong word, considering all they were doing was jumping up and down to the beat.
And damn, it was a beat. David didn’t listen to rave music, but much as he wanted to hate it, it was pretty easy to get into the groove of a bass-heavy rave song. It was borderline fight music, but if you were the active sort, it could definitely be fuck music, too.
And people were fucking to it. Some leaned against the stone walls, some leaned against each other, some sat and piled on each other. Breasts spread with weight as women lay on their backs. Tongues pushed between spread legs. Claws wrapped necks. Cocks found skin, and painted with touch and hunger.
While the non-volas weren’t using their auras, the volas were. They drowned the cavern with their sin auras, and unlike his auras, a demon’s sin aura was direct. It didn’t vibrate through the world. It stabbed. You could block it though, and he did, but it wasn’t easy blocking a thousand knives at once. And big as the cave was, a thousand demons crammed into it meant it was full. And yet, somehow, the demons following him came into the cave, too.
Moriah followed Tacharius, and Tacharius pushed through to the scrying pool. Before they reached it, the shining lights drew David’s eyes up, and he stared, hypnotized by the flowing light. The heavy music poured out of the pool, shook it, shook the cave, shook everything within, but the light show was what drew David in.
It wasn’t amber. It was blue, and green, colors he hadn’t seen in ages. The lights shot up, literal lasers launched by the scrying pool, and they divided against the shining blackstone in the ceiling. The colors scattered like a dozen disco balls, pulsed and danced, flashed. He wasn’t epileptic, but if he had been, he’d be dead.
In the pulsing color show, everything looked stop motion, momentary glimpses of dancing and sex between the black and colors.
A succubus reached out to him, ran her fingers along his chest as he walked by, and smiled at him. Moriah pushed her aside with her wing. Another succubus came at him from the other side, naked, and she ran her fingers down his arm. Moriah pushed her away, too, gently, with feathers. A tiger approached, but before she got within a few meters, Moriah shot the creature a glare, and the tiger found a new target. Sex demons weren’t a big deal, but other demons were too dangerous to let get close in this environment.
He kept walking. Tacharius passed the scrying pool, heading toward the back and its balconies and terraces, and Moriah followed. The sex demons weren’t just interested in David. They wanted a piece of the angels, too, and they got in their way wearing wicked smiles. Moriah pushed through, but the volas reached out and touched her as she passed. Like David, she got touched in a million places, hands reaching out in the pulsing light and dragging gently along her wings, her clothes, her bare arms and legs, and more than a few leaned in a little too close. She shoved them back, but she played nice, and no one got knocked over.
The volas chatted, called out to them, tried to dance with them, but Tacharius kept walking. Talking would be impossible with how loud the music was in the center of the cavern, but the demons tried anyway.
“Come!” a succubus yelled into David’s ear. He turned long enough to see the woman pull her silks from her body, expose her heavy, hanging breasts, and curl her fingers toward him.
Tsila nudged him along.
“Come!” said another succubus. Tall, thin, she took his hand and set it on her stomach. She would have guided it lower, if Tsila hadn’t nudged him along again.
Some incubi tried to approach Moriah and get her attention, and with everyone swimming in sex auras, their huge cocks were out, swaying. A brave incubus got in her path, tall, muscular, with more than a few scars on his body, and chains dangling from his neck and wrist.
Moriah nudged the man aside with a wing. Surprising she didn’t just deck him.
When they passed the scrying pool, David took a peek inside. It was an indoor concert. He had no idea who the band was, or what subgenre of electronic music it was, or if you could even call someone behind a DJ table a ‘band’, but whoever they were, they had hundreds of people in the crowd, jumping to the beat. And somehow, the scrying pool knew where to put the view so it captured the lighting, while also capturing the music. There were no volume dials. How did it know how loud to be?