The Speaker had never seen a volcano. She knew what they were and the damage they could do but she had never seen one. There were no volcanoes near Yachium and the Speaker had never left the Duchy. Seeing the volcano now made the Speaker realized she didn’t miss much.

Mount Morningstar was a tall, conical volcano and to the Speaker, it was just a mountain with a very steep slope. The Speaker could see smoke coming out of the crater at the top of the volcano but outside that, it was just a boring mountain. It’s not even as tall as Middle Keg! The Speaker knew she was biased but to her, Mount Morningstar got nothing on the Keg Mountains. Big Keg dwarfed it handsomely. As if the 99 Gods were present to prove her bias, one of her companions had to, at this exact time, remark on the view.

“Wow! This is amazing!”

The Speaker looked at the offending ignorant monster and kept a neutral face. The demon was said the remark was one of the new demons the group had picked up along the way to Mount Morningstar. The Speaker’s original suspicion about Doxuhr and the blast were correct. According to Doxuhr, the blast that devastated the South Homeless Plains was one of change and countless humans and animals would no doubt had been “reborn” by the fire into demons. The demon and his flying flaming horse were sent by their unknown superiors on a recruiting mission.

Those superiors were idiots.

Doxuhr had been flying for several days without any success till they met up with the Speaker’s group and it didn’t take long for the Speaker to figure out why. Although the flaming horse was a wondrous creation, neither it nor Doxuhr had any tracking skills. Worse was the fact that when other demons saw the duo in the sky, they usually hid themselves from them.

It made sense right? When you have just been changed to some sort of unknown monster, your first instinct would naturally be to run and hide right? For some reason that escaped the Speaker, this was something that never occurred to Doxuhr and his superiors. They seem to believe that the newly born demons would fall over themselves to see the Creator.

As if the new demons would know who their Creator was?

So after a day of nonsensically following the flying Doxuhr, the Speaker told Apep to “offer” their tracking services to the demon. The demon was under the impression that the Werewolves were animals transformed by the blast and that Apep had somehow managed to tame the ‘demon wolves’. It was an impression the Speaker did not correct. Doxuhr happily accepted Apep’s offer and using their sense, the Werewolves quickly found other demons. Happy with the haul, Doxuhr finally decided it was time for the group to go back to see their “Master”.

So now they were a happy going back. Outside the Werewolves and Apep, there were three demons who were giants with only one eye; according to the trio, they could shoot beams of light from their eyes. A red-skinned female with white hair and a pair of wings who could fly and said her voice could confused her enemies. A demon that had a body that was all muscle and no skin; according to the demon, he felt no pain and no longer need to eat, sleep or tired. Finally, there was a couple who had human bodies but those lower bodies were those of spiders. The couple both had eight legs protruding out of shiny black carapaces like spiders… if spider had legs with pointed ends that looked like swords!

It seems to the Speaker that the variety in the Demon race was even greater than those in the Kin but she personally wondered if that’s a good thing. The Kin were always looking forward to the day when a new member of their race was added but one could generally see the similarities between the various groups of the Kin. The Speaker would be hard-pressed to say the same of the demons. The Red Creator seen to have a haphazard style of creating it’s creatures as all the demons looked different from each other. About the only similarity the Speaker could see was that all the demons had horns and even then, they all sport different types of horns.

The trio of giants had a single big curved horn coming out from the center of their forehead; the winged female had a pair of sharp horns that came out horizontally from the either side of her head before pointing sharply upwards; the skinless demon had small spikes protruding out of the top of his head; the spider couple however both had elongated heads that sport 4 pairs of short horns on their forehead above the eyes. Of course the potential problems could be all in the head of the Speaker because the demons themselves don’t seem to be too bothered by their differences.

“Wait till you see the inside!” Doxuhr laughed when he saw the wide eyes that met his pronouncement. “Yes! We are going inside the volcano. Follow me!”

The demon recruiter walked his flaming horse towards Mount Morningstar and the Werewolves immediately followed. This trip had already taken longer than expected and all of the Werewolves wanted to get to the Red Creator as soon as possible. As the Speaker expected, the rest of the demons followed. The group made good time and they were soon near the foot of the volcano.

Doxuhr knew exactly where to go and led the group over the rocky terrain till they saw a dirt track. They follow it to a cave and the Speaker could immediately see that they had arrived. The cave entrance itself was pretty small and the Werewolves might have missed it if they didn’t have a guide. Even from the outside, the Speaker could see the bright red light coming from the inside of the cave. She could hear a few of the demons murmuring among themselves but Doxuhr ignored the murmuring and went straight into the cave. Kinshra was right behind him and the Speaker was only a step behind the female alpha.

The moment the duo stepped into the cave, several red lights appeared in front of them. Appearing out of mid-air, the lights looked like small flames to the Speaker but the moment the thought came to the Speaker, the lights began to condense. For a moment, no one knew what was going on but then the lights began to form a shape. It was a ball! The lights condensed to form a ball; a floating ball of fire and in the middle of the ball was an iris. The iris moved and looked at both Kinshra and the Speaker. Then the Speaker heard the voice in her head, a fierce fiery voice that she had not heard in many winters.

“SPEAKER!”

The Red Creator recognized her and was clearly delighted by her presence.

“Master?”

Doxuhr’s voice betrayed his surprise and he was now looking at the two Werewolves in puzzlement. The Speaker allowed herself a small smile and transformed back to her wolfgirl form. Murmurs of shock erupted behind her. The Speaker ignored them and stepped forward towards the floating ball of fire. She knelt in front of it and said.

“Great Red Creator! This Speaker bring greetings from the Creator of the Keg Mountains!”

…………………………………............................................................................................

Please visit my blog at http://ghosttalesstories.blogspot.sg/