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In Hells, the things that try to strike a conversation are often worse than those that ambush from above. The blasted thing attacking them manages to be both.
Desiré rushes through the words of an incantation, and bolts of energy fly off her fingers into the demon's wings. It screeches loudly and dives towards them, the sharp beak poised to strike. Before another spell leaves her lips, Ravengard catches the monster on his shield. She hears the deafening clang of bone on metal, and Ulder drops to his knee, shuddering from impact. The vrock's claws scrape against the shield, the stubborn thing looking to tear it from them, and Florrick has just enough time to aim.
"Detono!" she screams, and the sonic boom throws the monster back. She glances at her companion — still here, undamaged, and already rising to strike. Good. She hasn't lost it yet.
She keeps the offense going, falling back on cantrips for now. Rays of frost barely do anything against the flaming creatures of the Hells, but they are enough to distract, to disorient and buy a little time.
As cold magic dissolves around the vrock's eyes, Ulder charges. His sword flashes in the dim red light as he swings, black blood seeps into the cobblestones, and Desiré knows that it's over moments before it actually is.
The vrock dies with a sickening screech, and then for one blissful moment it's quiet. They both breathe heavily. The air smells of blood, on top of almost familiar sulfur.
"You're wounded," Ulder says before she can say anything.
Desiré looks herself over. The sleeve of her dress is torn and soaked in blood, and only now, seeing it, she feels the pain swell in her arm.
"I have a potion still—"
"No," she interrupts him, "Save it for the civillians."
She looks up at him and sees the corner of his mouth lift in a crooked smile.
(Some say the Grand Duke doesn't know how to smile. Those people clearly haven't known Ulder Ravengard as long as she has.)
"Wouldn't be Saer Florrick if you agreed. Let me bandage it at least."
She can't object to that.
They take shelter in an abandoned building marked by fire — the vrock may be dead, but the lightning and the quakes never stop for long — and Ulder tears his tabbard into strips. He presents them to her for a quick prestidigitation, then rests her wounded arm on his knee. It's… comforting. As much as anything can be under the circumstances.
"Just like the old times," Ulder mutters, half to himself, as he rolls up her tattered sleeve.
"I don't remember us battling demons back in the old times," she answers.
"No. Back then we thought werewolves were the greatest horror we would have to defeat."
Now it's her turn to reminisce. An unsuccessful attempt at a coup by a former Grand Duke, backed by a gang of werewolves. They didn't know it would be unsuccessful, of course. Desiré was new to the city she now calls home, new to her Flaming Fist uniform, if not new to combat. She jumped at the chance to prove herself, with her modest arsenal of spells and standard-issue flasks of holy water. Fist Ravengard was her new partner — a youth in ill-fitted chainmail and with grim determination in his eyes.
She'd learn later that he was just as ambitious and brilliant as she was, if not more. In those days he led her through the narrow streets of Lower City where he'd spent his childhood, guided most of all not by ambition, but by the need to protect.
Two tendays of vicious fighting, a hasty remove curse by a shaken cleric and one evening of drinking themselves to oblivion, Fist Florrick and Fist Ravengard were inseparable. Over three decades later, Counsellor Florrick and Grand Duke Ravengard remained so. Still fighting at each other's side, still protecting those in their care.
In the now, Ulder wraps the strips of fabric around her arm, tighter where he needs to stop the blood flow, gentler where he's trying not to cause her undue pain. Field medicine lessons from all these years ago, coming in clutch again and again.
They keep silent in this abandoned building, everything they could say to each other already said years, decades ago. "I'm glad to have you at my side." "I'll keep you safe." "If I am to be stuck in Hell, there's no one else I'd rather be stuck with than you." She knows. From the way his calloused hand lingers on her wrist, he knows too.
"There is a shortcut through the gardens behind the temple," he says instead, "Zevlor showed it to me. We can keep ahead of patrols and make our way to the survivors in the basement."
She nods and rises to her feet. As always, there is a mission and there are people to protect. As always, there's work to do.