The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Our Demagogue, Your Necromancer

"Soal! Irene!"

Soal blinked his lethargy away as he felt the sandily-cracked adobe behind him, semi-expectant of the youthful Anter's giggling figure before him, countered only by her late sister's looming haughtiness. In return, he, covered by tattered bedsheets on a rickety bed adjacent to Irene's, nearly jumped from its foundation as Gnat stood in the dark chamber before the two of them, decorated in entirety: traditional Sulukridger attire, coupled with a distinctly mango-hued cape.

"Gn -- Natasha, how long has it been? Whose side are you on?" Soal groggily sat up following the initial startling burst of movement, aware that her preferences in training with the stern pseudo-Sulukridger and his sentinels -- both those mechanical and those sorcerous -- had developed staggeringly. "This may sound odd, but... is Hemingway really... working against us?"

Gnat folded her arms. "The Breyer Bejir would certainly say so. But there has been a disparagement in the Highest Plane, and the Kyueb Reacsoa is growing desperate. So say the Observing voices in my head, to which I can only respond with perplexity."

"Huh? What? What's going on?" Both of them were in fact stunned as a result of Irene's frisky arousal leaping from her sheets and onto her feet as if their voices had sounded an alarm, which had unfortunately occurred many a time in her past. "...You haven't come here to...fight...have you?"

"No," Soal gaped, inciting his relatively longtime confidante to repeat that action. Gnat remained firm in the face of this workaday gesture. "Hardly. Listen."

"Ahem," she enunciated with a somewhat bashful tone, awaiting the irreverent Master Bringer's attention. "I may be Ch -- Hemingway's loyal protege, but I resume neutrality in this struggle. I may appear to chide his enemies, but I truly loathe the antagonism. I only wish to defeat the only true evils that we must now face... the one that has enraged our skies, and the one that attempts to quash us from above."

"Thank you... deeply," Irene exhaled heavily before retreating to the comparative comfort of her bed to listen to the rest of the declaration. "Yet, I persist in my belief that both our own demagogue and your own necromancer are out to kill each other, with utterly disastrous results."

"There is something you can do," the Bejirian Incarnation informed palely, "but it will take all of your strength to abort the quests that both of them will direct to you two."

"In what way?" Soal's teeth chattered as a cadaverous breeze whistled from the mountains through the vaguely defined windows of the measly adobe cottage. "We aren't Sulukridgers, but is there a Master Bringer after all?"

"Ivel did not tell you," Gnat speculated from Soal's mental map of the scenario, and used it without his vocal permission to craft a response. "about your true worth, which I learned from 'your own demagogue'. ...You are the Blessed Ones of this Second Plane. The protagonists."

The Master Bringer was speechless, but Gnat recurred in the revelation. "The Kyueb Reacsoa selected you at birth to represent the entire Plane," she grimly whispered, but as high in volume a whisper as fathomable. "Your success in any life-threatening situation is guaranteed, but your publicity is never ignored. It was not your decision, but you had traded privacy for invincibility. This is why both sides want your back, terribly. It is why Hemingway knows that the Ambassador is only using you as 'vessels' to capture the Reacsoa Hand, and why he knows that you can defy his plot holes. Make a choice. Save one side. But do not decide wrongly, or realize the ending of the Plane at a catastrophic cost. I leave you with this evaluation. Farewell."

The Master Bringer was shocked, but with no time to react, they may very well have fallen under a veil of sleep before Gnat evanesced from the city, whisked away behind a mango-colored curtain by her own punctures of the omnipresent Rift.