Birds fled into the night sky, abandoning their perches in lieu of safer heights as a disturbing presence made his way deeper into the wilderness. Even less skiddish creatures had taken to their underground sanctuary, burrowing down and away from the steel-lined boots crushing twigs and mossy underbrush beneath it. In disjointed steps, creaky and possessed, the man pressed on with his hand clutched to his mouth, and eyes screwed shut in some sort of pain so acute it had become desperation. When the hand came back wet with blood - what should have been as red as rubies was an ominous black -, he took a strangled, searing breath deep into his lungs. The earthy scent of the woods turned to ash in his mouth.
He was dying. Not right now, of course, but soon his human body would no longer be able to support himself and the parasitic demonic energy thriving within him, whose poison was evident even in his blood, and he would die. Within a year, if he was lucky. This he knew, and came to peace with long ago when he first decided to sacrifice himself to darkness, give away his mortal flesh as a host in order to gain more power. Enough power to be a force to reckon with, enough to rattle even the highest mages of Serendipity...
Had he gone too far? He tongued the blood off of the back of his fangs, gained his bearings once against as the episode passed and he could finally just breathe fresh air and smell the woods and taste something other than bile. But that desire for strength was ever stronger, welling up in the remains of his human heart, and he knew his answer: no, he'd hadn't gone far enough. Not until Thanatos was in ruins, until he had Connlaoth in flames! But Rath wasn't stupid. He knew that if he attempted to do all of the fighting with his own body, he wouldn't live long enough to see the ends meet. Which was why he was out here to begin with.
He was going to enslave a demon.
Not that he had anything against demons. Rath was becoming one himself, what with the tips of his ears carving into ivory horns, the fangs sharp enough to puncture a hole through his own lip, and claws attached to fingers far far far too long for any mortal genetics to justify. Even his skin, once just a normal pallor, was now a sickly grey and riddled with veins opaque with his black blood. Indeed, the mageknight was more kindred with demons than anything, but the nature of his magic allowed him to puppeteer shadow magic entities - which were weak, good for maybe two hits and was then no more - and force demons to do his bidding. He didn't know much about it, just what he'd read, but he was curious enough to find out.
Now, this isn't pokemon. Rath did not just rush out into the woods propelled by blind instinct, looking for demons in the high grass. He'd actually spied one walking about in broad daylight, of all things, attempting to court a young girl. The long silver hair, vividly red eyes, unnatural beauty... all dead give-aways even in the presence of diverse Serenian fae hues, as much as a telling clue as the demon's claws had been. An incubus, he supposed, but the fact that it was a demon was of no doubt - Rath could smell the magic on him, even from the safe distance that the mageknight had kept nearly all day. He sniffed the air at the thought, felt the magnetic pull of malevolent energy when he closed his eyes. It would lead him towards the man, and sure enough, as Rath leapt up and into the canopies and used his claws to cross the branches like a spider crossing it's own web, he found the demon just a short distance away... pouting for all he was worth.
It was a risky business, sneaking up on a demon. If Rath encountered such heightened senses at just being exposed for prolonged periods of time to his own demon, he could only imagine the skills that the demon before him possessed. Perhaps that wasn't even his true form, maybe he was doused in illusion to lure in young girls to... eat out their hearts, or something. He lingered in the trees, breathing faintly and willing his own disguise as the wind blew the demon's scent nearer him, but his own further away from the target of his desires. Odds were in his favor - he could easily summon the demon with an enslaving spell, now that he'd seen it, and procure the shackles of it's service with the crystalized souls of once living beings. So he crept back and away, sneaking away from the trail and towards a nearby stream and slight clearing where travelers typically made camp.
Leaping to the ground with a soft thud, Rath dug a hand into the front of his nautical blue mageknight uniform, and withdrew a very small, thin crystal. It shimmered in an otherwordly manner, reflecting light seemingly from within, and scattering it's luminosity like filtered starlight. He pinched the pink crystal between two fingers and began to whisper into it's belly - first soft and lilting, but escalating into a frantic growl of demands until the thing began to shed light in a distinct pattern around him. It seemed to form a seal into the ground, carved with archaic symbols of no meaning to modern Serenians. It flickered in and out, as if the spell would fail, but Rath gripped the shard tighter and willed it to completion.
The shard had withered to nothing, completely dispersed from existence as if it had simply melted and left naught behind. But in it's place, a few paces before Rath's body, a dome of shadow magic stood, crackling and radiating heat. This was where the demon would be housed - quite literally torn from where ever it resided currently, tugged through nether, and materialized in the center of the magic containment- , and immediately upon it's arrival, the enslavement would take hold of it, the dome would dissipate, and the demon would bend to Rath's word. Or, supposedly, anyway. Rath held his breath, hands fisted just before his mouth where the crystal had once existed, waiting to see the results of his work.
