Overlady: Attack of the Minions (Thread II)

A Winter's Heroic Interlude In Three Parts

Part 3 – Yellow






The grand hall of the Montmorency family was a rival to the ancestral homes of any of the other great families of Tristain. Busts of ancestors glowered down from plinths and the weaponry of former heroes decorated the walls. Yet the grand paintings were blackened with soot, the velvet curtains were tattered and balding, and the silverware had long since been sold off. There were not enough candles to light such a vast space, and the fire was unlit.

Montmorency de la Montmorency was wrapped up warm, her breath visible in the chill air. Her familiar Robin was refusing to come out of the warmth of her pocket; frogs were too sensible creatures for that. The blond ringlets falling around her face couldn't soften her hard eyes. She forced herself to smile, even though she was so very sick of putting on a happy face. But she couldn't let her younger sister or her step-sisters see her sadness or her anger. She couldn't let her wicked step-mother see any trace of weakness.

Her father loudly drained the dregs from the bottle of wine in his hand, and without thinking went to open the next one before him. He wasn't watering it down, Monmon thought sadly, and hated herself for mentally totting up the cost. But it was what she did. Her stepmother reached out to try to move the bottle away from him, but he slapped her hand out of the way.

Her sister Charlotte caught her eye, glancing over at their step-sisters Marguerite and Charlotte-Marguerite. If her own name hadn't been enough of a clue, their father was atrocious at naming children. The little brats were fighting again. They couldn't even stay quiet at a moment like this.

Darn it. Darn it all. Things had been better once. Before her brothers had died in the war. Before her mother had died giving birth to Charlotte. Before her father had sunk down into a bottle and married her shrill harpy of an evil stepmother.

And certainly before that little tick of a priest had shown up. Monmon looked over at Abbé Étienne Guibourg, seated next to her father, with a stare that was very nearly a glare. The priest was blond and pale, almost bloodless, with watery blue eyes. He was her father's spiritual advisor, at least in name. In practice, he was the one who ran the family. Her father listened to him much more than he did her. No matter how hard she tried to change things or prevent him from wasting the money her heroing brought in, that sugar-head was there to reassure her drunk of a father that what he was doing was the right thing. She'd have been able to hold the creditors at bay if it hadn't been for him, and Monmon was all but sure that he was the one who had arranged the marriage.

Oh, there was something going on with him, no doubt, and many times she'd been on the edge of asking her friends to… remove him. She could just tell them he was evil, and they'd spring into action. But she couldn't order a man's death on a personal grudge without proof that he was actually in league with the dark powers. That wasn't what a good person did. Stupid useless sense of decency.

And there he was, standing up, with that wretched cursed slight smile on his face. The abbé clasped its hands together. "Let us pray," he said. "We thank the Lord God for his manifold gifts to us, and hope that in the forthcoming year we might fully make use of them. We thank the Founder for the gift of family, which brings us what we all deserve. We thank the lesser spirits who are the sentinels of the Lord on this earth, who ensure that all shall be made right. And most of all, we thank the Church, for the blessings it provides so that we may right all past sins."

Monmon was certainly praying. She was praying that he'd be hit by a cart.






After the meal, Monmon made her way to the study to once again check the accounts. It was a habit she had acquired years ago, and it calmed her down. Yes, it seldom provided good news, but at least she knew the bad news was coming. She had always felt that it was better to know that you were about to be torn to shreds by a ravenous swarm of vampire bats than to sit in blissful ignorance right until the first fangs sunk into your flesh.

Things were not going well. Her father's wavering, shaky handwriting wobbled across the page, counting out expenditure after expenditure and very little to balance it out. To Fr. Giles, 23 e. payment and interest. To Abbé Eccles, 12 e., wine and repayment. From Fr. Giles, 12e winnings. To Fr. Giles, 23e, payment and interest. The names went on and on.

She twirled a lock of hair around one finger. She had tried to get her father to practice double ledger accounting, but as it was he couldn't even manage single. And trying to handle the household accounts was always an exercise in forensics and trying to piece together things from scraps of paper tucked into drawers or occasionally torn into shreds and tossed into the wastepaper bin. But as far as she could discern, everything she'd made from the incident with Kirche's evil succubus half-sister had just gone. Vanished into the triple holes of creditors, card tables, and her father's drinking habit.

"Sugar," she whispered, letting her head sink down onto the table with a quiet thud. "Sugar, sugar, sugar." That had been her last chance, and he'd wasted it. Just like he always did.

"You shouldn't spend so much time in here," her stepmother said. Monmon jumped. She hadn't heard the woman come in.

"I think I should," she replied coolly, not looking up.

"Montmorency, please. You're wasting your time in here. You should be trying to enjoy your youth, while you still have it."

Monmon looked up at her wicked stepmother with barely veiled hostility. She remembered how she'd met the woman for the first time. She had been nine, her mother had barely been dead a year, and here was this gold-digging shrew out to win her father's hand. The woman had dared pretend to be nice and had tried to bribe her with a honeycomb! Nothing she had done since then had improved Monmon's opinion of her.

"Perhaps," she said, "but it's my time to waste."

The other woman narrowed her eyes. "Fine. Do as you will. You always do," she said, brushing aside a lock of dark hair shot through with white.

Monmon finished her depressing work, and with a sigh headed back to her room. The door was open and a lamp was on. Drawing her wand, she edged her way in, wary of who the intruder might be.

She knew who it was rummaging through her book shelves. And he wasn't even trying to hide his presence here.

"Abbé Guibourg," Monmon said, inclining her head to him with the absolute minimum respect she could get away with without him complaining to her father. "And what precisely would you be doing in my quarters?"

The pale man smiled, blue eyes crinkling. "Your father instructed me to ensure that you weren't trying to hide anything from him. With how very important you are to the family, mmm, he just couldn't stand to have your reputation ruined by any form of misconduct." He raised a selection of letters. "And what would these be?"

"Letters from friends," Monmon said, trying not to shift guiltily or look away. Because she had no reason to look guilty. They were just letters from friends. Kirche was just a friend. Tabitha was… Kirche's friend. Danny was just a friend, for all that he was a brat. And most certainly, in every way possible, Guiche was just a friend. Even if she would wish otherwise.

"Oh? Then you won't mind if I read them," he said, stepping closer with his oily smile.

"Feel free," Monmon retorted.

"Then I will."

"Fine."

"Fine!" He pocketed the letters, crumpling the parchment. "I believe I have my educational reading materials for tonight."

"Then please leave. I intend to get changed out of my formal wear, so it is not creased," she said wearily. She saw him out the door, made sure he was far away, and the locked the door and dragged the draft excluder in front of it.

Dang. He'd found another one of her ablative caches of forged letters. Some day he might find something actually valuable to her.

Not Guiche's letters, though. She'd burned them after reading. It was the only safe way, given what they implied. How she felt. It didn't matter if he found the letters from the friends who were really just friends. Montmorency was used to that kind of violation. But she had cried as she watched the parchment blacken and char, taking with it a future she wished she could have had.

"I hate him," Montmorency whispered to herself. "I hate him I hate him I hate him so very much."






But of course, that wasn't the end of her familial duties. There were certain things that the Montmorencys had to do, even if they were reduced to penury and their lands were a fraction of what they once were. That was the reason that the family formed up along with the elderly priest who oversaw the chapel by the shore, and headed down to Lake Ragdorian.

Monmon would like to say that her hatred for Abbé Guibourg and how he wasn't out here in the cold kept her warm on the way down there, but unfortunately mere hatred wasn't enough to defeat the climate. Her only exposed flesh was a thin line between her hood and the scarfs covering her mouth and despite that she was fairly sure her eyeballs were freezing over.

It was said that once her ancestors had dwelled in the ancient ruins by the lake, which had once been a city greater than Versailles and Bruxelles combined. Honestly, she didn't give that very much credit. If every city that claimed to be greater than all modern cities had actually been so, at least one of them should have survived. But the foundations of the stone towers of the ruins were of such a scale that once they must have been a thing to look upon. And from this ancient city had passed down a legacy and a heritage to her and her family.

All the Montmoreny family were water mages, and all of them were a little more aware of the spirits that hid themselves in the world than most people were. Even most mages couldn't see them unless they deliberately revealed themselves. Usually, Monmon wished she couldn't. She didn't want to have this uncanny power, and she didn't want the spirits paying more attention to her than they did to other people. Her life was complicated enough as it was.

Unfortunately, the spirits didn't care. The water spirits of Ragdorian Lake had to be placated at the right times of year, or else they'd raise the waters of the lake and flood the entire district. And her kin in Gallia had been slain by a mad queen long ago, so it was entirely up to the Montmorency family now.

When you put it like that, she thought darkly to distract herself from the feeling of her tear ducts solidifying, spirits were right bastards.

"… and so at the closing of the year, we offer to you these gifts," droned the old priest, speaking words he'd spoken for decades.

One by one, the family members went to throw their offerings into the lake. Sometimes she might see a watery hand drag them down, but more often lately they'd just sink. Her younger sister thought that the misfortune of the family was because the spirits were angry. Monmon wished she could be that optimistic. If it was just the spirits, there'd be a nice, doable target to focus on for making things better.

Her father made his offerings. Then she, as heir, stepped onto the pier to cast her gift into the water.

A plume of water erupted before her, blasting a freezing mist up from Lake Ragdorian. She screamed a little bit from the biting cold. From the depths up rose a water spirit; a creature of water. Initially it was a formless, vague humanoid but as it rose it took on her own appearance. One hand was outreached.

Monmon froze, unsure of what to do.

Unfortunately it turned out that rather than offering a choice, the spirit was making a demand. With a firm yank, the water spirit pulled her into the lake water. Then followed freezing cold and the screaming of her lungs for air.






Monmon surfaced, gasping for breath. Icy water dribbled down from her sodden blond hair, completely ruining her ringlets. Perhaps that was why it took a moment to realise that the air here was warm. She looked up at the cavern roof encrusted with blue-glowing crystals, and…

… there was air down here. There shouldn't be air down here. She was underwater. Even through the cold shock, she had felt herself descend, and descend, and descend. She had to be at the bottom of the lake, if not under it. And yet there was air down there and the water wasn't chilling her to the very bone.

The spirit pulled her out of the water, then pulled the water out of her mouth and clothes. Monmon just coughed and spluttered. It didn't fix her hair, though. She wasn't surprised. Her hair didn't naturally take her customary shape, and tended to look more like someone had tried to drown her if she didn't sleep with her hair in curlers.

"Bleargh," she said, working her bone-dry mouth and wetting it again. A squirming in her pocket alerted her to her distressed familiar, and she freed him, dropping him in a puddle where he could wet his skin again.

"Come," said the spirit that wore her face, leaning over her. "They are waiting."

"Who are waiting?" Monmon croaked, licking her lips.

"They are."

The spirit led her down twisting corridors, down to a pool that lay in this strange space below the earth. Perhaps it had once been the temple of some long forgotten god, because there were arches in the ceiling and the faceless remnants of old statues. The white stone here looked a bit like some of the oldest ruins that Monmon had seen all over Tristain and beyond in her time heroing. Water dripped from the roof, echoing in the hush.

There were three water spirits waiting for her, sitting on the still pool. They sat around a crystal that glowed a faint blue. It had once been flawless and perfect, but a spider-like crack propagated down one side.

Monmon bowed her head, and said nothing. Nothing should be offered to the spirits unless it was agreed; no names should be asked.

One spoke. His beard and shaggy mane of hair was white sea-foam; his blue-green body was rotund and heavy. "I speak for the water of the seas," he said.

"I speak for the living water of the rivers and lakes," said the next water-spirit. She was tall and spindly; long limbs stretched out with too many joints. The water in her body was silty in her legs but clearer in the head.

"And I am the water in air, the falling rain," said the last. This water-spirit took the form of a small girl-child with rounded features, and she was hard to see in the gloom. She was nearly entirely transparent; pure liquid whose surface rippled with unseen impacts.

"We wish to speak to you," said Father Ocean. "Once there was a marriage and a child was born. You are our distant kin, for all that you are wrapped in markay flesh."

"The elves will not listen to us," said Mother River. "Their lords are deaf to the cries of water. From great stone structures comes forth terrible things that pollute their rivers. From their fields wash food for plants that chokes river mouths with algal blooms. They do not care."

"Your spirit is scarred by the marks born by those who have fought the Abyss, but you remain pure of its influence. You stand against demonkind. We are desperate," said the Rain Child. "The pressure of the Abyss builds up under the world, and the heat rises. Something is swelling up the place of the demons. It grows hotter. The fires rise. Soon they shall break through."

Montmorency blinked. "What is… the world is in great danger?"

"Yes."

"Why haven't you told someone?"

"We are telling someone."

"How soon?" Monmon asked, mind focussing on that concern as she tried not to think about the fact that the water spirits claimed her as their own kin. "How much time do these lands have?"

"We do not understand time as you do," said the Rain Child. "Such things are for the mortals, and you pretend to be mortal."

"We do not even know," said the spirit of the lake.

"Quiet," snapped Mother River. "This is not your place to speak, especially since you lost the Ring of Andvari."

"I didn't lose it! It was stolen! I can't believe you'd say it's my fau—"

The Rain-Child clasped her hands together. "It does not matter if it is to happen a year from now or a century. It must be stopped regardless," she said firmly. "Evil will destroy the world. Evil will corrupt the world. Evil will make things as they should not be. This cannot be permitted."

Monmon decided to pay attention to the Rain-Child rather than the degenerating argument between the lake spirit and Mother River. It felt much more gratifying to be tasked with such a mighty endeavour by three wise spirits of the waters, as opposed to bickering children. Even if the one she was listening to was the one who appeared as a child. "What might be causing this?" she asked. "Do you have any knowledge of what the demons are planning?"

"The demons do not seem to know what is causing it," said Father Sea. "They know that their realm is becoming more polluted and heating up, but they are not sure whether the change in the climes of the Abyss is their fault or not."

"Some of them believe it may be the result of unnatural cycles," said the Rain-Child, raising her voice over the squabbling Mother River and the lake spirit. "The Four Evils have appeared once again. The Heirs to Darkness walk the land, and they unknowingly seek to make the Four into the Prime Evil. Perhaps the day approaches when the Throne of the Abyss shall be filled again."

"The King of the Abyss will break out of his prison?" Monmon breathed.

"Perhaps," said Father Sea, "or perhaps a new tyrant shall rise whose eyes are turned upwards. It matters not. It must be stopped."

"You shall stop it," said the Rain-Child.

"Me? But I—"

"You misunderstand," the piping voice contradicted her. "I speak of mortal-kind. It must be done, but we cannot say – or know – who can do it. You are our messenger to the mortals because you are our kin, but your flesh lets you act without the constraints of our nature."

Letting her head sink into her hands, Monmon tried not to sigh audibly. "So, what you're saying is that somehow, at some time, the Abyss will break into reality in some way. And I need to find a way to stop this."

The water spirits exchanged a look between each other. "That is an accurate summary," said Mother River haughtily.

Opening her mouth to make a caustic remark about unhelpful spirits, Monmon changed her mind. One was not meant to be sarcastic to spirits, not least because they could tear all the water out of your body if they were offended. "I understand," she said, bowing her head. "I shall do this for you, and in return…" she paused, aching at the knowledge of the boon she really wanted from them but compelled to ask for something else, "you will tell me if you find any more details about this plan of the Abyss."

"This is a fair trade," said Father Sea approvingly. "So it shall be."

No, it wasn't fair at all, Monmon thought to herself. It wasn't fair that they were asking this of her – but she didn't have a choice if they were telling the truth. Damn them, they were right. Such a plan of the Abyss had to be stopped.

"And," sullenly added the water spirit who had pulled Monmon down here, "it was not my fault the Ring of Andvari was stolen. I just want to make this clear. It was all the fault of a trickster thief. I'm not to blame at all. No matter what anyone else says."

"Take her back to her kind," ordered the Rain-Child sharply.

The trip up to the surface was no kinder on her than the voyage down, and she was unceremoniously dumped on the lakeside in the freezing cold.

She was rushed to bed to recover, and while she stared up at the ceiling she wondered what on earth she was going to tell her family. Monmon wished that she could simply say that she had been given an epic quest by the spirits and thus simply had no time for marriage, but she doubted she'd be believed. Between her drunkard of a father, her evil stepmother, and the vile presence of the abbé they'd just believe she was making it up to avoid hated matrimony.

No, Monmon decided, she couldn't tell her family. They might confine her to stop her running away. So she'd just need to make best use of the free time she had.






The lights were still on in the little house attached to the estate that was given to the abbé. It was much warmer in there than the main estate, and all the furnishings were in much better condition. If one were to pay very close attention to certain aspects of the walls and floorboards, any number of cunningly hidden caches of coins might be found.

Abbé Étienne Guibourg lit his pipe, and inhaled, contemplating things. All things considered, he wished the girl hadn't survived. When word had come that the spirits had dragged Montmorency into the lake, he had been interested – but then she had been returned a quarter of an hour later, mostly intact.

What had they done to her down there, and could he use it to his advantage? Perhaps. Some rumours might be useful; an implication of foul deeds here, a muttering of lost purity there. But then again, that might just put him in danger. His plans were reliant on things not being looked at too closely, and who knew what the family might do if they decided to try to disprove whatever whispers he set up.

And his plans were on… tentative territory as they stood. He had no idea what had truly happened in Amstelredamme, but Françoise-Athenais was gone. His ally on the Council was gone. The foolish woman must have trusted someone else to carry out Black Rites for her, and had wound up possessed. Such a shame. He had been lucky beyond belief when she had achieved that high rank, and perhaps he had grown too used to it.

"What do you think, Mysterion?" Étienne asked his familiar, idly running his fingers through the black fur of the hound. The dog only whuffled and sank into his gestures. "Yes, perhaps it is best to not unduly worry. Since she appears to have been dragged to the Abyss, there's very little risk that they'll find out my involvement."

But should he risk reminding Magdalene van Delft about their mutual… interest in demonology? Or would there be too much of a risk that she'd just have him killed?

Étienne ran his hands through his blonde hair. He just needed to stay focussed. No distractions.

First an unhappy marriage. Then a death. Then the end of the Montmorency family. The culmination of his plans.

No. Call it for what it was. Call it revenge.