The Awful Mouth

[Deraldith]

The village of Tosling nestled in the pinewood forests east of the Castle. Tosling's residents were tanned and wrinkled, simple farmers who asked nothing but a good harvest and gave nothing short of their life's blood to get it. Drought had been the most of Tosling's worries up until five years ago.

Elget was playing in the rice-paddies when he saw the riders on the horizon. By the time he splashed to Tosling's wooden gates they were upon him, seven demons, their foreheads tattoed with black crescent-moons. It was the mark of the Scythe, fanatic Divine-worshippers.

Elget was about to scream a warning to the other villagers when a spear pierced his tunic and his chest. The riders carried the impaled child into the village sqaure, hoisting him like some obscene banner.

"You know why we're here!" The leader barked, his grey face a wall of fangs. "Every year the great Nilktolypkos demands tribute of your newborn babies! Three days from now we come to collect! If you do not pay tribute then you can expect more of this!"

And then the Scythe were gone, leaving Elget in their dust as a message. Give up your newborn or be butchered.

Elget's father was the first on the scene, washing the boy's face with his tears. Bit by bit the other villagers crept from their hiding places and joined him. Tosling had no warriors. The Scythe had been bleeding them dry for the past five years but there was nothing they could do about it. They didn't know how to fight.

Their only hope lay in hiring mercenaries...

[riverstar]

Perhaps it was a bit more than ironic that Lilith had been passing by the village at the moment the demons had come. She had not actually entered it, deeming it little more than slopwater trying to become a great aged wine, but on the appearance of those who, being demons, might be somewhat related to her ex-lover Satan, she watched the scenario play out and nearly laughed at the irony herself.

When she had still been a demon, she would have rushed to this town long ago. Loved once by first man, another time loved by the Emperor of Hell, she would have come here for a possible few extra points and faster salvation, eager to be on her knees to help birth another babe for the village and get a mother's thanks and gratitude.

Now she hesitated and not necessarily because she was mortal now and had no ties to salvation or kindness, but because she didn't see the need. It was then that she found herself unexplainedly walking towards the village and its meager possibilities with a melancholy resolve.

Upon arriving, the men saw the steel in her eyes of a thousand lives won and lost and regained, and the traces of hatred there, not for them, but for Yahweh and any associated with him whether it be in hatred or love. They saw the flawless beauty she had and one of them said in a hushed voice, "We should offer 'er instead!"

To this she had one reply and one reply only: she turned and smiled.

Normally, this would have meant, 'go on and look, I know you want me.' But this time, it meant simply, 'Go on and look, I'll rip your eyes and hair follicles out for that little suggestion."

Finally a weeping woman came forth and fell to her knees before Lilith. "Please...you are a warrior, yes?" Lilith nodded with amusement. "Then protect us! Protect our children and daughters and sons and husbands. Please! We be naught be poor folk in a tiny town, not used to the places you might be used to like cities and the like but...but we can pay well enough."

Lilith pitied the woman. She remembered her own firstborn demon son and how she had loved it until Satan essentially had a bad day and slaughtered him out of boredom. She had not loved another of her children since but her only daughter Arsinoe. Hearing this woman's plea reminded her of Arsinoe and her only loved son and she felt pity and a protectiveness spurn her heart into another beat.

"Very well," she murmured, passing a slender, graceful yet icy cold hand over the woman's head. "I'll attempt such a thing. But first I shall require a few things....A rope, long and weak. A bind of clean cloth with tears in it. And one of your newborn children. Just one. I can hope it comes to no harm..."

She stared down at the woman and then around her at the accumulated crowd of humanity. "Get me these things and I shall do this job for you." Saying thus, she went into the nearest tavern.

[Deraldith]

Deraldith didn't like Tosling and Tosling didn't like her. From the moment she arrived she felt eyes on her, disdainful eyes.

"Whiskey." She said, slipping into a stool at the local tavern and meeting the bar-tender's empty gaze. "You don't have whiskey? Fine, I'll have a beer." He remained motionless, continuing to stare as Deraldith waited for some kind of acknowledgement, any kind.

"Well what do you have?" She snapped. Maybe it'd been a mistake accepting this job. Tosling's residents were a little too homocentric for her tastes.

[Fiske]

Fiske brooded in the corner, pouring over various charts and diagrams he'd brought to keep him busy while Deraldith played samurai. He liked Tosling even less than Deraldith. Unlike her, he'd never believed human beings to be capable of intelligent life. The best they were good for was the ovens and his stomach.

But here he was, dragged into helping the humans keep their worthless little lives.

While Deraldith cursed at the bar, Fiske pored over his technical sketches, fuming inside.

[csula]

"Don't I know you?" said a voice somewhat East of Deraldith's scowling features, close enough to blow a smoke-ring tainted with the dead-fish stench of chronic bad breath against one scarred cheek. Jones slumped onto the bar with his head propped precariously in one quivering hand, too much like a horny freshman at a school dance for comfort. He met Deraldith's sour gaze and wondered what was pissing her off more, the fact that he'd somehow managed to drink himself into an idiotic stupor in a town as dead and dry as Tosling, or the nagging feeling he'd have just bet was already forming at the back of her skull: that he might be faking it, playing one of his usual loathsome games, some hidden and likely bloody agenda behind the mask of mere employment. Jones wasn't what you'd have called the traditional hired-muscle type - it looked like a decent fart would bowl him for six...

[Deraldith]

"Well." Deraldith said. "If it isn't Jonesy. I didn't know Tosling were hiring plankton."

The bar-fly unnerved her. He looked human but his aura was all wrong. There was still no telling where his allegiances lay. At least Fiske was up-front. He was an evil, calculating pyschopath. They had a relationship based on wholesome values such as exploitation and usury.

When it came to Jones, even thinking of the word 'relationship' made her feel icky, as if there was a toilet in her brain that hadn't been flushed.

[csula]

"Tosling is plankton cutie, and that puts you and I pretty fucking far down the food chain - unless of course they're offering you something extra-special in return, mmm? Maybe a nice make-over for that darling mug of yours" He snapped the cigarette from his gurning lips into two rigid fingers and gestured to the back of the room, throwing stray sparks in her hair and face "And what about the Tin Man, eh?" He couldn't quite gauge the reaction of either to the description. His demeanour suddenly cooled. "Deraldith, my reasons for standing against the Divine are my own, as you well know, and will remain so for as long as I see fit. But if you doubt them even for an instant then you are a greater fool than even I would give credit for. Or have you forgotten, I still have some certain, ah, unfinished business with Thomas Unson - pissing off his slimy cousins is almost as good as the real deal, and fucking with that cancerous worm is better than sex".

He surprised himself - he sounded almost passionate, a placeless patriot in this other space and time. Yet he doubted the generic hero-speech was going to do much to sway Deraldith, and, though she would never know it, that thought was a compliment.

[riverstar]

With calm eyes, Lilith beheld the people in the tavern, straddled a seat with a catlike grace that suggested old age even though the body didn't show it and ordered some honeyed meade. She'd tasted it once when she was a demoness, just before she sucked the life out of a one year old only child of a rich woman.

Woman had money, after all, she could buy a new child if she really wanted it so badly.

The honeyed meade, when she had had it so long ago, had given an extra bite to her senses while being sweet. 'Tastes like sunlight,' she'd thought, after tasting miserably dry things like champange or the precursor of it in Gaul.

So she ordered that then looked with a near bored gaze to Deraldith, Fiske, and Jones. "So, how many of you actually know what you're going to do with these little demons?" she asked, her voice a low purr of one who knew exactly what she was doing and what kind of power she could exercise if she chose.

She was, after all, the mother of demons. There was nothing beyond her though the mortal frame of a human might poise a problem. She held out a soft, lily-white hand and said, "I'm Lilith, may I ask to whom I'm speaking?" She had offered her hand to Deraldith, knowing that men were dead at best but murderable at worst.

[Deraldith]

"I'm Dee Dee." Deraldith lied, taking Lilith's hand. She nodded at Jones and Fiske. "That's Joey and Johnny behind me. As for a plan, mine's simple. It involves punching people in the face a lot."

She'd keep an eye on Jones. Maybe she'd misjudged him. There were a lot of people holding knives for Thomas Unson, herself included. He had a debt to pay for Broken and her face.

The bar was filling up. Tosling's villagers wanted an audience with their would-be saviours. Ugh. Talking. Maybe Jones could whip out his hero schtick and spray them all with it. She had a cylindrical space in her right hand where a glass of whiskey should be.

[riverstar]

"It's a pleasure to meet you all. Now then, concerning your plan, I would like to take a more subtle approach." She began, thinking that it would never ever be wise to tell these people her relationship with demons and the like.

Not wise at all.

"First get a baby, a very small one, practically fresh born but not too fresh. About two months old is actually best. Give it to me, tie me to a post and put me in the centre of town. Have the villagers offer me as a sacrifice of sorts along with my 'baby' and when they get away from the town you three can be waiting in the wood and get them by surprise. They won't be expecting it. Especially if they've been bullying Tosling for so long. And besides once they get what they've come for, I'm sure they will let down their guard."

Especially if their my children. Those several thousands of sons and daughters of Lucifer were never exactly bright. Arrogant, hell yes, but bright? No. I never wanted them to be that especially since I knew what I was going to have to do later. She thought to herself and looked at Deraldith with a casual eye. She was waiting to see what the woman would say or do.

As she waited, she noticed the townspeople joining them and she displaced her meade back on the counter, her hand feeling strangely light now that it was empty of the beverage.

"So will you make the speech to console them or will I?" she looked at the others, thinking of a way already to persuade them to give her one of their children. That is, if her 'companions' agreed to her plan.