Chapter 354: The Magic Stone
Agatha went still.
She had not anticipated this. That Tilly would have a Stone of Flight — that she’d not only found one but figured out how to use it — had not entered her calculations. She looked at the blue crystal on Tilly’s finger for a moment, the way one looks at something familiar from the wrong angle: recognizable in its parts, disorienting as a whole.
“We understood the relationship between magical power and the Stones,” she said finally. “But we couldn’t produce them.”
“You couldn’t produce them?” Tilly frowned. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“The Magic Stones were made by demons.” Agatha heard the flatness in her own voice. “If we’d had a reliable source of them, we could have transformed auxiliary witches into combat witches whenever we needed to. The God’s Punishment Army would never have needed to exist.”
The silence that followed had a different quality from ordinary silence. The witches in the room absorbed the information visibly — something shifting in each face as the implication registered. Roland’s expression didn’t change so much as darken, the way a sky changes a quarter-hour before rain.
“How much do you know about the production process?” he asked. “How were the Stones made?”
The questions came out flat — clipped in a way that felt like impatience rather than urgency. Agatha’s first instinct was to withhold, to let him understand that she was not simply a resource to be extracted. But the demons were the real enemy. This information would surface eventually regardless of her cooperation. She swallowed her remark about his manners.
“There was a creature among the demons that we called the Chaos Beast. Imagine a large flower bud, the height of three or four people, moving on tentacles. When fed a God’s Stone of Retaliation, it transformed the Stone into a Magic Stone. The time required depended on the type of Stone being produced.”
“Have you actually witnessed this?”
“We captured a live Chaos Beast.” The skepticism in his voice was irritating in a very specific way — the skepticism of someone who had not been there and was performing the rigor of someone who had. “The Bliss Army launched a surprise attack on a remote Devil’s Town that housed a Chaos Beast producing Stones of Light. They brought it back to Taquila alive. This particular class of demon has almost no intelligence — it processes whatever it’s fed automatically. We put it to work for the Holy City.” She paused. “Unfortunately, we never learned how to produce more powerful Stones from it, or how to sustain it. Six months later it yellowed and died like a plant torn from the soil.”
“The Quest Society sent teams to investigate other Devil’s Towns afterward. All reports reached the same conclusion: Chaos Beasts were the only source of Magic Stones, and more powerful Stones required proportionally more time to produce. Most demons used Magic Stones in battle — the Mad Demon, for example, embedded one in its arm that could instantly excite its body’s energy and grant it powerful long-range attacking abilities. Every Magic Stone we possessed had been seized from an enemy’s body or from an overrun demon battalion.”
“So that Stone of Flight used to belong to a demon?” Tilly asked.
“A powerful demon leader — only that rank would have possessed such a Stone.” Agatha exhaled slowly. “It was almost certainly battle spoils from a Transcendent.”
Roland was frowning at the table. “What about the variety of Stone types? Did the demons always have access to every type?”
“Of course not. If they had, humanity would have been destroyed long ago.” She kept her voice level. “In the First Battle of Divine Will, most demons had no Magic Stones at all. They fought with their bodies — immense builds, armor that conventional weapons couldn’t penetrate, metal spears. Pure physical force. This is thoroughly documented in the historical records. Over hundreds of years of grinding attrition, human territory was taken piece by piece, city by city, until the survivors were compressed into the Fertile Plains.” She let the memory sit for a moment. “That was when we were closest. If we’d had a witch as commander, and a trained platoon of combat witches properly organized, the demons might never have entered the Dawn Region at all.”
“And then they acquired access to different Stone types?”
“It appears so. In the Second Battle of Divine Will, their attacks became far more varied and sophisticated.” Agatha’s voice dropped. “We were crushed in thirty-five years. The elite Bliss Army was a match for the Lords of Avernus, but we were outnumbered catastrophically. The elders said that in the first ten years, witches actually held the upper hand — a single Transcendent could slaughter an entire demon platoon. But once we began suffering serious losses we were forced into the defensive, and after that it was only a matter of time.”
Roland was quiet. Not the quiet of someone digesting what he’d heard, but the specific quiet of someone in the middle of a calculation — the kind that happens behind the eyes rather than on the face.
He has finally grasped it, Agatha thought. Not just the numbers. The logic. The demons’ numbers are immense — and beyond that, their evolution is deliberate, purposeful, and patient. Whatever army emerges in the third Battle will not look like what came before.
“The designations — Mad Demon, Fearsome Demon, Lord of Avernus.” Tilly spoke while Roland was still thinking. “Are those categories you created?”
“They became standard naming in the Second Battle. Before the Stones appeared, there wasn’t much functional difference between demon types beyond appearance — the Stone acquisition is what differentiated them.”
“How do they reproduce?”
“I don’t know.” Agatha hesitated — not from reluctance to answer, but because the gap in the record had always frustrated her. “It was never successfully documented. Captives couldn’t survive long outside the Red Mist, which left too little time to develop communication. And the demons that could survive without the Red Mist were all low-level beasts — no capacity for language.”
“Beasts?”
“Yes. Demons consisted of multiple distinct species, but two main categories.” She set this out carefully, the way she’d set out classifications in the Quest Society’s meeting rooms. “One type possessed magical power and required the Red Mist to survive. The other didn’t need the Mist, but their appearance and intelligence were indistinguishable from regular animals. These beasts served logistical roles — Eight-footed Reptiles carried supplies, for example. Winged Devilbeasts could carry demons through the air.”
Roland set down his cup. He reached into a desk drawer and spread a painting across the table in front of her.
“Did the Devilbeasts look like this?”
The painting was precise — whoever had made it had worked from direct observation. The winged form, the bone structure of the wings, the proportions. “Yes. That’s a Devilbeast.” She looked up. “You’ve seen one?”
“Not far from here.” He sipped his tea — a gesture so ordinary it took her a moment to reconcile it with what he’d just said. “I assumed it was a demonic beast that demons had tamed. So these aren’t the same category?”
“Not at all. Low-level demonic beasts were food for demons. Powerful mutant demonic beasts were actual threats to demons. When the Months of Demons arrived and demonic beast attacks intensified, the demons’ own offensive activity typically slowed — it gave us time to recover.” Agatha paused, and what she’d just been told caught up with her properly. A Devilbeast. Near here. “If there are Devilbeasts in the area, a Devil’s Town cannot be far.” She looked at him steadily. “Where exactly are they?”
“West of the Mist Forest. Behind a large snow mountain.” He gave her the shape of what his scouts had found. “The area is completely covered in Red Mist.”
“Not completely.” She sat forward. “Those short stone towers are Red Mist generators — they evaporate a stored liquid to maintain the coverage, and they require periodic refilling. That’s why demons typically shelter underground: to reduce consumption. If the towers need maintenance cycles, there are gaps.” Her mind was already moving ahead of her voice. “We could try to take that battalion.”
The room went quiet in a different way — the held-breath quiet of people who had just heard something they didn’t want to have heard.
“Attack the demons?” someone said.
“The Multi-eyed Demons serving as sentries suggest a high-level demon stationed there — which means there’s almost certainly a Chaos Beast in that battalion.” Agatha bit her lip. “A Chaos Beast always preserves its ability to produce at least one final Stone. Even a low-grade Stone would be significant for the Quest Society’s research — it could bring us closer to understanding the transformation process itself. If we could learn how to convert God’s Stones of Retaliation on our own terms—”
She stopped herself. She was thinking the way she’d always thought, in the terminology of a civilization that no longer existed, toward goals that would take years to matter.
But the Stone. The Chaos Beast. The research.
Existence is truth, she thought. And this exists, just west of the mountain.