Everything had quietened down somewhat after Herag got his hands on Hagor, which felt strange. Usually an involuntary craniotomy via jaw musculature tended to have quite the opposite effect. Emma chalked it all up to Herag's general popularity, mixed with a nice helping of pants-shitting fear on the behalf of everyone else when it came to regarding him.

In this case, Emma found herself falling on the side of the fearful. She hadn't known, when she let Herag out, how fucking weird he was, save for what he'd told her about himself and some vague sense that he was a psycho. That didn't necessarily mean much of course, assuming every man you met was a psycho just came naturally to small women who had lived through several years of adult life without being strangled to death. But it certainly didn't help Emma's nerves.

What did, was that Aexilica had made it through everything alongside her.

She was fucked up of course. So was Emma for that matter but, as usual, the combination of magically-replenishing armour and not being a front-liner left her injuries somewhat less extensive than the other woman's. Emma had ended up using her healing potion on Aexilica, and even after that she had a few cuts and scrapes left over.

Better than a lot had gotten, Emma knew. And better than most would have gotten even in her position, Aexilica, it seemed, healed fast. A day had passed, and she seemed to have done a week of recovery. Injuries aside, Emma was actually a good deal worse off than her in regards to fatigue.

"We made it." Aexilica grumbled, when at last they were alone.

"We made it." Emma agreed, because there didn't seem much else worth commenting on besides their survival, and she found that Aexilica had more or less captured the essence of it. They were still alive, despite it all. Felt good.

Except for all the injuries of course. Those felt…not good.

Adding to the list of not-good-feeling things was the sound of Guldin's voice. He hadn't gotten less confident over a measly thing like watching Emma fucking incinerate people's limbs off, oh no. No, in fact he seemed to have regained a great deal of the ironclad smugness he'd had when they first encountered one another. And he was putting it to good use, of course, whining at Herag over something Emma barely even bothered to listen in on.

"You should take those whores and sacrifice them now, while you have the chance!"

Ah, maybe her lack of interest wasn't such a great policy. At least until such a time as there were zero power-mad priests intent on cutting out her heart and feeding it to some viking pantheon.

"The fuck you should!" Emma snapped, leaping to her feet just a shade too quickly and fighting back the sudden wave of pained weariness that ran through her protesting body as a result.

Herag eyed the Priest evenly, not snapping at him the way Emma did.

"What makes you say that?" The berserker asked. He'd calmed down a bit, at least, since the fighting, but only a bit. Emma still found the man altogether more twitchy than she was comfortable with, waves of distilled violence seeming to radiate off him with every passing moment. Clearly, Guldin picked up on it too. He took a few steps back before replying.

"They began as enemies," He explained, "And have done everything in their power to backstab and trick their way into greater prominence since arriving here. Safer to be done with them entirely."

The Priest's backsteps did him no good at all, because when Guldin moved it was with such abrupt speed that he crossed the added distance before even Emma could notice. One moment he was just standing there, the next he was standing right before Guldin. Hand around the Priest's neck, lifting him high, glaring at him. His teeth were bared, long and sharp. Lips curled back, eyes narrowed. It looked, for one moment, like the predatory snarl of some great pursuit hunter.

Maybe it was, or maybe it was something much more dangerous still.

"These women are my allies." Herag told Guldin, speaking slowly and picking over every word as if they disgusted him just to utter. Emma didn't see any sort of strain in him at all, despite the awkward angle at which he was holding the Priest and the jerking kicks his victim was flailing out with. He might have been hoisting up a rag doll for all his exertion. "They have fought with me, bled with me, freed me from jail and brought me news of my father's murder, and you wish me to betray them in turn? To reward their aid with death?"

Guldin tried to say something in his own defence, or at least Emma assumed he did. It was kind of hard to tell, he seemed to be limited to gurgling and choking with so tight a grip left around his neck. His face was making the slow transition from red to purple, and his struggling was growing more desperate and energetic by the second. Soon, she knew, it would start to become less. Seconds passed. It became less.

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"That's enough." She called out, earning her a glance from Herag which almost left her standing in a puddle of her own urine. He looked somehow offended to have been interrupted, as if his random murderous rage were some holy sacrament.

"Are you giving me orders?" Herag sounded calm enough as he asked her, but Emma knew better than to let that relax her. He often sounded calm, now that he'd been freed. And he almost never was.

"Of course not," She replied, evenly, carefully, suddenly aware that she was in fact staring down a large, angry man who could be within arms reach of her almost faster than reaction-speed. "But you are doing this on my behalf, right? I appreciate that, but I don't need you to fight my battles for me."

It was about as well as Emma could play it. Acknowledgement that he was doing something for her, no hardline orders, no challenges to his authority, and a gentle nudge that his attempt at helping may well be an insult instead. Now she just needed to wait and see if he had the cognisance to take her several hints.

Things would get fucking difficult if he didn't.

Herag stood there, glowering, trembling. Emma genuinely didn't know whether she'd be subjected to another detonation of violence or not. In the end, she wasn't.

The berserker—the new Earl?— dropped Guldin with no more effort than he'd needed to pick him up and choke him. The Priest landed hard, gasping in air like it was being tariffed by Trump.

"You're right." Herag grunted, turning away from Emma and diffusing the situation instantly. She exhaled. Exhaled a lot, about half a minute's worth of air all pouring out of her. She hadn't noticed herself holding it in. It almost made Emma giggle, but she got the feeling that Herag would take exception to a gesture like that, which made it about as appealing as taking a nap on Guldin's stone slabs.

"Thank you." Emma noted shortly, turning and taking her leave.

The fortress had changed a lot, in so brief a time, and in more ways than just its new ruler. Hagor's forces had essentially dissolved at his death, but that was no surprise. Technically the Priests of Scurgla were not meant to even lead men into battle, their role was about spiritual advice and communion with the Gods.

In practice, of course, they generally just ignored that rule, and the only limit on a Priest's forces was that they had no official authority to levy them. Anyone who wanted to follow one, would. But that meant that it was usually a Priest's power that led to him boasting a sizeable flock of killers. Hagor was a dead man, now, and had the power of a dead man. So those men who had once been his were now Herag's.

It meant that rebuilding was going very well, and order had been restored practically instantly. The pockets of resistance took only as long as the arriving news of their leader's death to die down. Emma greatly appreciated that, as she'd more or less hit her quota for life or death struggles that week already, and didn't fancy going into overtime.

What else had happened? There'd been so much. Ah yes, Herag was informing everybody that the military forces of Vichin were weak and decadent, he had declared himself ruler but not Earl—yet—and he was very angrily looking for his older brother to kill him.

Emma found that last one a bit strange. She had an annoying brother, of course, but she'd never wanted him dead. Turned out Herag took it personally somewhat that Vari hadn't put up much of a fight before being captured. In his eyes, he should've made Hagor kill him.

It did not, apparently, occur to him that he had also let himself be captured, and remained in his cell without a fight. Emma suspected it actually wasn't something he fully believed either, but she couldn't prove that and it wasn't her problem so she didn't bother worrying about it.

Life got remarkably simple when one adopted that policy, she'd found. It had carried her safely through a pandemic and all sorts of other issues, and now it was serving well enough to keep her from being tangled up in whatever local politics was threatening to complicate her life even now. She should've done it from the start.

No more of this "hero" bullshit, she thought. Emma had been promised a reward by Herag for all she'd done, and she wasn't disappointed. It arrived shortly after she returned to her quarters.

"This is for us." Aexilica told her, surprising Emma by standing and waiting for her in her quarters. Then disappointing her by having all of her clothes on and staring at a large chest set down on the ground instead.

It was almost silly, an old-style, broad, bulky thing with wood and hard leather making up the majority of its body. When the Aethiqi opened it, however, Emma found the breath catching in her throat. Inside was a pile of glinting, shining silver.

Silver coins, silver rings, silver candelabras, silver bracelets. Everything was silver, and everything was good.

The silver pile was not filling the chest, of course. Emma estimated that, if the whole container could fit ninety or so litres inside, maybe a fifth of that volume was actually being occupied. And the pile was hardly some neat stack, either. There was a good deal of empty space in-between the objects, which would mean that its value was—

Why am I trying to downplay this?

Emma jumped, actually jumped, and squealed. She was rich. Her whole life she'd wanted to have an absolute shit ton of money, and somehow Herag had known her dream and handed it to her. In a single moment, he'd made everything she struggled for worth it.

"Ah, am I interrupting something?"

Emma whirled around, hunched over and hissing like some sort of feral beast as she stepped between the demonic, evil intruder and her Money Pile. She was almost unsurprised to see the face of Vari the Idiot crowding her doorway, peering in awkwardly at she and Aexilica.

"What do you want?" Aexilica snapped, apparently remembering just as clearly as Emma did that it was he who'd first attacked Tepetlmoseua and started this whole mess. Apparently, he remembered it too. He looked far from confident as he spoke.

"I…" Jarl Vari hesitated, wavered, then seemed to crumble before Emma's very eyes. "I need your help. I know I've not given you any reason to offer it, but I think my brother is planning to kill me and you're the only ones I know who can do something about it."

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