The flame demon of the Ashfall mountains deserved a degree of pity. By all measures, it would have been better had he never arrived in Lumisgard, but Lucius and his cadre did what had to be done. An important lesson for all, but leaders of kingdoms most of all, is that pity does not excuse evil.

Guided by the man of the mountains, their armed company numbered a mere two dozen and this was considered excessive by them(1). It ensured that Felicia would have adequate protection to watch the duels between the wastelanders and the flame demon. They rode with little solemnity, much resembling a troupe of troll hunters off to fight a grendel. The men of the sunless desert bantered and compared braggartly stories while Lucius plied Felicia's mind of all manner of worldly trivia. This wasn't because he hadn't been educated in the workings of Aillesterra, but it had been some years and he needed to continuously turn the knowledge over in his mind akin to the composting of farm waste until rich soil could be spread upon the fields of his plans.

After some days of travel, they came upon the burning man in a field of ash. A trail of cinders lined the shepherd's ways through the valleys, headed away from the village that had been burnt. Those destitute by the flames were left with a small gift of charity before the hunt continued and they confronted the somber warrior. Unlike most invaders, he had not come from the darkness, but from his own world of men and laws, of hatred and love. His was a place of war and fire and the world of Lumisgard overwhelmed him the way a man from a desert can be overwhelmed by the sea.

I reviewed the memories of the flame demon when they were provided to me, but his home world was distant and fractious. It compounded power into men, cultivating them like flowers in a demon's garden, and their might surprised me, but an obsession gripped the warriors of his world for a single imperial throne presided over their world, which all the clans and tribes strived to sit upon. I saw legions of soldiers at the command of their emperor, but even with another thousand years they would not be able to reach Lumisgard in force for they had no god save the emperor, and he was no true god no matter his titles. They were a world of parasites, clutching the great ring of fire as a bulwark against the darkness. Only by the grace of dragons did the small folk survive, and from them there was a ronin, bereft of his liege, too weak to seek vengeance, but strong enough to escape.

He was the flame demon who glutted himself upon charred mutton and ate the tongue of a shepherd to steal his speech.

One of the unnamed wastelanders had won the right to challenge him first. He was of little moral quality, but good humor. Destitute more from fleeting decadence than from his love of gambling, he joined in the jokes about the ornery nature of the ass he rode but none insulted the swiftness of his spear. When he met the flame demon's eyes, he called out, "How kind of you to spare us the day!"

"You must be the enforcers," the flame demon said, his mouth like the embers of a fire, but his speech parochial. "I have broken your laws, have I not?"

"It speaks!" the wastelander exclaimed, and Lucius spurred his horse closer.

"Welcome to Lumisgard. Had I known you were a man, I would have brought a reaper," he said, looking down on the flame demon. There were hints of a man's form, but fire itself had become part of it. The journey to Lumisgard had left him with innumerable wounds, now held together by no more than fire and will. Where his right hand should have been, his arm was grafted directly to an obsidian blade, and where that weapon touched the dirt it smoked and crackled.

The flame demon laughed and rose from the stone he sat on. "I was once called that. Does it mean something different here?"

"Our reapers serve the Shepherd. She returns the dead to life. I imagine yours merely bring death," Lucius answered.

A great longing weighed upon the flame demon and perhaps he might have been cut down at that very moment without issue. "I see now what it means to be the children of gods rather than slaves to one. But war is the same here as everywhere, is it not?" he asked, raising his blade.

"My name is Lucius von Solhart, and I win my wars," he said, and gestured to release the wastelander.

Their first exchange of blows was swift and typical. The wastelander probed the flame demon for slowness of step, or ineptitude of defense and thought he could take first blood by virtue of the ronin's injuries. To much surprise, no drop of blood was lost by the time the flame demon had the spear under his foot, driven into the ashen earth. The wooden shaft of the spear had begun to smoke and smolder from the demon's presence, but all of their weapons had been soaked in water before confronting the wandering godling.

When the flame demon attempted to cleave the shaft, the wastelander ripped it free and nearly gashed open the flame demon's shin with a twirl. This too was unsuccessful, as the burning man seemed to shift freely about the battlefield. The footwork was peculiar, but all present – save Felicia – were well accustomed to the strangeness of fighting warriors with unknown stigmata.

The air shimmered with convective heat when the flame demon lowered his stance, drawing out more of his power. No traditional exchange of blows followed, but as the wastelander recounted it, all of the world around him vanished. There was nothing but an endless expanse of ash, himself, and the flame demon. What Lucius witnessed was merely a sudden streak of fire that extended from where the flame demon had been to a step past the wastelander. The ribbon of light should have cleaved the spearman's head from his body, but only his beaded beard was sliced. He had twisted himself back, arching as a bridge with one hand planted and then his feet came up as the flame demon stood in shock.

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The toe of the wastelander's boot took him across the temple and then the wastelander was back on his feet and the fight resumed. The smell of burning hair carried across the wind as the spearman's beard immolated. Ash caught in his sweat and in his eyes as the intensity of their fight increased. For a moment, the flame demon had the upper hand when he succeeded in cleave the spear's shaft, but the wastelander had a trick blade hidden at his wrist. It was a horrid thing of barbed iron upon a string that he managed to loop about the flame demon's arm and gouge open a spiral of bleeding flames.

One of the other wastelanders whooped and tossed in a second spear as the flame demon retreated out of the spearman's range. A tremendous work of magic flowed out from his upraised blade. Like spilling water, fire itself poured across him and across the burnt ground. Horses panicked and reared away, but the wastelander lunged and threw his new spear. While a dozen blades of magic formed in an array about the flame demon, the steel tip of the spear struck him upon the sternum and ran him through. It was a glancing blow, but all the more deadly for it as the weapon deflected up through his throat and ripped his jugular in half.

The entire fight took but five minutes, and left an uncontrolled mass of living fire that galloped across the valley. It leapt and cavorted between the exposed winter bushes. It steamed the snow and turned hills to mud. The air was soon stained with ash as the next season's flowers cracked in their seed pods. Freed from the intent of the spell, the fire simply consumed and could continue to consume for several days more. A great hydromancer, the likes of which only existed in my own time, might have extinguished the flames, but they could only watch the destruction.

The spearman, who would take for himself the name Ronin(2), was exultant. His whoops and laughter did more to unsettle Felicia than the death itself. She was transfixed by the spearman's face, tongue spread out as his face singed and smoldered. Lucius had to grab her shoulder and arrest her attention. "That is the problem," he said, gesturing to the still living flames. They were like frolicking fae creatures, descending on every scrap of foliage in the valley and continuing to burn with only the slowest dissipation beneath the sun. "The protections of the world grow weaker every year, every incursion."

"But, you killed him," she said, watching as Lupa wetted a handkerchief with her tongue and slapped Ronin with it, extinguishing the blaze eating pores into his cheeks.

"And how many people died before we got here? What if word didn't reach us that it was here? Acheliah was the one who detected these creatures and she's gone now."

"You don't know that!" she snapped back, but recoiled at her own tone.

His knuckles turned white upon his reins. "I do. She failed to kill Amurabi. Now, he's the only one who can protect Vassermark while we're away. Come, you don't need to watch the ritual," he said as he gestured to the other wastelanders. He took Felicia back down the hills as the demon corps dismounted and set upon the flame demon's corpse with steel. The heat proved difficult, but eventually they gave the wanderer from another world the same treatment he had given the shepherd of the ashfall mountains.

They rode in silence, returning south to await the newly empowered soldiers. When the village came into sight, she pulled her horse closer to Lucius and asked, "Those wastelanders can change their stigmata, yes? That's why you took them?"

He wavered his head. "It's more like they can gain a stigmata more easily. Once they have a power, it can't be changed. I would have given that body to Lupa if it were so easy."

"Can regular people do that too? By… eating the dead?"

"No, not like that."

"But it can be done?"

With a sigh, he admitted, "Leomund changed his. You wouldn't want to do it yourself though. He had to die in the process. It changes you, Felicia, to change your power. There is hardly a difference between who you are, and what you can do."

"Oh?" she asked, narrowing her eyes at him. "And pray tell, what is the correlation between your inability to die and your brazen attitude? I dare say the attitude came after the immortality."

He laughed loud and she gently joined him. "People are more complicated than that, Felicia. Keep an eye on Ronin these coming weeks. You'll see how he changes, for better or worse. To plead the world for a stigmata is not a small thing, and they are but one of many ways to power."

"Like the behemoths of Aillesterra?"

He nodded. "Like them, and like politics. Just ask Feugard if you ever have the misfortune of being alone with him," he said as they arrived at what passed for a stables in the mountain village. The demon hunt had been swift and without much cost. He tried to enjoy a goblet of wine and to let the demon corps revel before their return south, but his mind was rightly imagining what might be going wrong back in Rackvidd. He should have considered who else would be having the same thoughts as Felicia. It wasn't someone unknown to him, and she in fact had the means of procuring herself a power, for a price.

In the worst case scenario, Lucius alone could have fought the demon. There was a chance the eternal incineration might adhere its magic to him, but that would pose no more than a moment of agony for him. His gift from the south, Lupa, was more than capable of destroying such a spell and allowing his stigmata to reform him.

There is a certain delay to the assimilation of memories. This is because the body has to strip out remnants of the previous soul. Which is to say that Ronin soon regretted taking the name he did. It wasn't until a few days later that he realized he had basically named himself Swordsman.

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