Chapter 924: An Old Trick of the Demons
The animal skins lay across the table. Roland looked at them.
His face gave nothing away. His voice, when he spoke, came out flat and measured. “What are these supposed to mean?”
He already knew what they meant. He was asking the officials, and the officials knew he knew, and so the room was very quiet.
No one wanted to be the one to say it aloud. Not in front of a king whose mood they couldn’t yet read.
The images were crude — quick strokes, no artistry — but simple enough that a child could follow the story. A large wolf. Common people on their knees. A witch with her hands bound. A city wall consumed by fire. A cityscape reduced to ruins and corpses.
The wolf was Lorgar. No one in the room had any doubt about that.
The sequence read like a demand: surrender the Wolf Girl, lay down your arms, submit — or face total destruction.
Roland exhaled slowly and let his eyes move around the room. Several officials had lost color. One or two looked away when his gaze reached them. None of them suggested compliance.
He appreciated that, at least.
A pulse of light appeared near the far wall, expanding outward, and Pasha’s presence filled the space between them. “Your Majesty.” Her voice arrived directly in his mind, urgent. “Sylvie has told me everything. Do not make any decision based on what those drawings say. This is one of their oldest tricks.”
He composed himself before answering. “Did something like this happen during the first Battle of Divine Will?”
“To a lord of the common people,” Pasha said. Carefully. “The demons used this method to drive a wedge between the common people and the witches. It’s how they swallowed the Land of Dawn — piece by piece, city by city.”
She explained the mechanism without hurrying.
During the first Battle of Divine Will, the demons had worked the battlefield and the politics simultaneously. They would approach a city lord — especially one whose witches were few and whose walls were thin — and make an offer: surrender the witches within your walls and we will delay our attack on your city. In that era, witches had lived openly, their abilities visible to any observer. They were easy to identify, easy to hand over.
Many lords took the offer. The witches who came back from the front lines expecting shelter were arrested or executed by the same people they’d been defending. The estrangement that followed was not a slow drift — it was a fracture. Witches and common people pulled apart, each convinced the other was the greater enemy.
In the middle of that war, two coalition forces had formed in the central cities of the Land of Dawn. One was made up of witches. The other consisted of common people. They had fought side by side until the day they didn’t. The common people’s army capitulated to the demons and then turned on the witches — using God’s Stones of Retaliation as weapons, targeting their former allies with the one tool that could suppress magic.
The witches were exhausted. They’d lost more than half their number in the fighting that preceded the betrayal. They resisted. They lost.
Their leaders were publicly beheaded.
The Witch Union had given this event a name: the Red Betrayal.
“It became the fault line everything else broke along,” Pasha said. “From that point forward, witches and common people could not trust each other. The wound never closed — it just became the shape of things.”
“What happened to the cities that surrendered?”
“They outlasted the witches by months, not years. The demons’ offer was never a peace — it was a protocol. The lord who began the Red Betrayal spent his remaining years building mist storage towers for the demons, running intelligence for them, helping them consolidate their positions. It is said that in the end the demons imprisoned him in his own castle and let him starve. Others say vengeful witches caught him before that happened. No one reliable enough to know for certain survived to confirm which version is true.” A pause. “But the pattern held for every city that chose surrender. There are no exceptions.”
Roland had followed the logic to its end before she finished. He was already thinking past it.
Then Pasha added something that only Roland could hear.
“There is a rumor. Among the witches in the upper levels of the Union, those who were old enough to remember the first Battle in living memory. The rumor says that the demons did not develop this strategy on their own. That before the demons were what they are now — before they were enemies — someone taught them.”
Roland held himself very still. “What did you say?”
The officials looked up, startled. He had spoken aloud without meaning to.
“Someone taught them,” Pasha repeated, her voice barely audible in his mind. “The rumor says that back when the demons were nothing more than beasts — before their current form, before their intelligence — contact was made. Knowledge was passed to them. Some people believe this explains why the Senior Demons resemble human beings. The Three Chiefs of the Union considered the rumor absolute nonsense and forbade discussion of it. Only the witches at the highest levels still carry it.”
Do you believe it?
“I am not sure,” she said, and the uncertainty in her voice was more unsettling than conviction would have been. “If it is true, then everything we assume about the demons as an external enemy must be reconsidered.”
He thought about it. He thought about the demons’ strategy — the surrender ultimatum, the wedge between humans and witches, the patience of it — and how familiar the shape of it was. How human the shape of it was.
Was the person in the story a witch or a common person?
Pasha’s sigh was barely perceptible. “Some said one. Some said the other.”
What an unreliable rumor.
But unreliable rumors were not the same as false ones. He agreed with the Three Chiefs that suppressing it had been the right call — it could do no useful work, and significant destructive work, left in circulation. The task in front of them remained the same regardless of origin: fight the demons and survive.
He surfaced.
“If a lord held firm?” he asked aloud, for the room. “If he refused the offer entirely — what did the demons do?”
“Kept harassing him,” Pasha said, in the shared register now. “Or besieged the city outright until he broke. The trick had an excellent record against small towns. It required only that the lord’s nerve fail before his walls.”
Roland looked at Barov.
“Barov.”
“Your Majesty.” The man was already standing.
“Stabilize the city first. Hold a memorial ceremony for the soldiers who died on the wall today. Make it meaningful — the public needs to see that we honor them.” He let his voice harden slightly. “As for the demons, I intend to show them that this is not the first Battle of Divine Will. The rules they learned do not apply here.”
Chapter 924: An Old Trick of the Demons
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
“What’s the meaning of these things?” Roland asked in a deep voice while looking at the animal skins on the table. His face was expressionless.
The demons had launched a surprise attack on the city wall and had left behind a provocative message. However, now was not the time for him to react to this provocation. Furious as he was, he still tried his best to keep control of himself.
The officials nervously glanced at each other, but none of them dared to answer the king’s question.
No one wanted to further irritate the enraged king by vocalizing the meaning of the self-explanatory pictures.
Undoubtedly, the big wolf was Lorgar.
The other pictures depicted common people who were down on their knees, a witch who was tied up, a city wall that was on fire, and the ruins of a city littered with corpses respectively.
They looked like quick, crude drawings, but they were still easy to understand.
This series of pictures was a threatening ultimatum.
The demons wanted Neverwinter to hand the Wolf Girl over to them, and they asked the common people to lay down their weapons and surrender. Otherwise, they would totally annihilate the defenders and burn down the city.
Roland glanced around and exhaled deeply, trying to calm himself down. He found that the officials had lost a lot of their fighting spirit, and some of them even looked terrified. Fortunately, none of them tried to advise him to give the witch to the demons.
“Your Majesty, this isn’t just a threatening letter from the demons. It’s a trap!” In the middle of this stressful atmosphere, a beam of light suddenly appeared and expanded next to a wall and then Pasha’s voice rang in his head. “Sylvie has told me what happened. Never believe anything the demons say. It’s another one of their old tricks.”
She sounded anxious as if she was worried that the king might make a hasty decision.
Roland immediately comprehended the implications of her statement.
“Did something similar happen to you before?”
“To be exact, it happened to a lord of the common people,” Pasha said seriously. “During the first Battle of Divine Will, the demons used this trick to create a divide between the common people and the witches. That was how they nibbled the Land of Dawn away step by step.”
The ancient witch continued to explain the “trap”.
“During the first Battle of Divine Will, the demons not only acted aggressively on the battleground but also plotted against the withes. They often lured a lord of a city to hand over the witches to them in exchange for postponing the attack on that city. Back then, the common people and the witches lived together peacefully. Though the witches were only a minority, they did not have to hide their abilities. As a result, they could be recognized easily.”
“Hoping to survive the war, the cities where the witches were in a weak position usually chose to make a deal with the demons. As a result, many witches who had just returned from the battlefield were caught or executed by people of their own cities. In such a situation, the estrangement between the witches and the common people was gradually aggravated, and then, after
a complete betrayal, the witches broke irretrievably with the common people.”
“In the middle of the first Battle of Divine Will, two major cities located in the central part of the Land of Dawn built two coalition forces to fight against the demons. One of the coalition forces was controlled by the witches, and the other one was led by and consisted of the common people. During a fierce battle, the common people’s army surrendered to the demons all of a sudden. The witches’ army withdrew but was besieged by their former ally. The common people even used weapons made of God’s Stones of Retaliation to fight them.” “The witches were exhausted and had lost more than half of their warriors during the previous battle against the demons. They resisted strongly but still lost. After that, the leaders of the witches were beheaded in public, and the common people sent some of the remaining witches to the demons while enslaving the rest of them.”
“The Union named this incident the ‘Red Betrayal’. We consider it a profound lesson for us. From that day on, the witches and the common people have grown apart.”
“The cities that surrendered to the demons did not survive as long as they had hoped. Forcing the common people to betray the witches was just the first step of the demons’ plans. If the demons’ outposts were close enough to the cities, they would never hesitate to conquer them. The Lord who initiated the ‘Red Betrayal’ was no exception. He followed the demons’ orders and helped them in building mist storage towers and outposts. He even provided them with intelligence services. However, in the end, he couldn’t enjoy his old age in peace. It’s said that he was imprisoned in his castle by the demons and was starved to death. There were also some rumors that said that he was killed by a group of vengeful witches when he fled his domain after finding out that the demons planned to eliminate all of humanity. After the first Battle of Divine Will, human beings lost the Land of Dawn and most of our domains became uninhabitable. Since then, the sight of the Red Mist on the horizon had become a lingering nightmare.”
“The Witch Union rose from the ashes of this defeat and became the ruler of the Fertile Plains for next few hundred years.”
At the end of the story, Roland heard a shocking rumor from Pasha.
“There was also hearsay among the witches in the upper levels of the Union, according to which the demons learned this trick from the human beings themselves.”
“What did you say?” Roland asked and then quickly realized that Parsha only told the rumor to him.
All the officials in the hall looked startled, wondering why the king raised such a question.
“It was rumored that long before the beginning of the first Battle of Divine Will, back when the demons were no different from beasts, some person got in contact with them and taught them knowledge,” Parsha said in a low voice. “A few people believed that this explained why the Senior Demons looked like human beings, but the Three Chiefs thought it was absolute nonsense and forbade the people from talking about it. As a result, only the witches in the upper level of the Union still remember this rumor.”
Roland held his breath and tried to talk to the ancient witch through his mind, “Do you believe it?”
“I’m not sure.” To his surprise, Pasha was uncertain about the rumor. “If it’s true, then it means that we have to be extremely careful when communicating with the demons.”
After a moment of thought, Roland asked Parsha about a specific detail of the rumor. “Was the person in the story a witch or a common person?”
Parsha sighed lightly. “Some people said it was a witch and some said it was a common person.”
“What an unreliable rumor,” Roland thought.
He agreed with the Three Chiefs of the Union on their decision to stop the rumor. After all, no matter how the demons came about to become the enemy of all of humanity, they still had to guide their followers to defeat them. He
changed the subject. “If a lord remained unmoved by the demons’ offer, what would they do?”
“They’d keep harassing him, or even send an army to the city to besiege it until the lord surrendered,” Pasha said. “This old trick had proven to be very effective in conquering small towns and cities.”
“Do you mean to say that the demons will come back again?” Roland sneered. “Barov.”
“Yes!” The City Hall Director stood up immediately.
“Soothe the subjects first, and then we’ll hold a memorial ceremony for the soldiers who died in combat. It’s the best way to raise the spirits of the mourning people.” Roland stressed each word with due strength. “As for the demons, I’ll let them know that things are different now. This isn’t the first Battle of Divine Will anymore.”