Caedra Allal Nisariel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
abyssalarcana) wrote2018-02-27 09:15 pm
abyssalarcana) wrote2018-02-27 09:15 pm
Entry tags:
A thorough history
Caedra was born to a family that lived just north of Taunsa, in Abachar. They were goatherds and fishing people, who followed the herds from pasture to pasture along the watersheds of Lake Terek and nearby waterways. The family - her two parents and her older brother Tumus - were captured by Tocharan slavers who drove them and a few others from the lakes up to Maee, then through the Valley of Qaba to the slave markets at S'bue Sulucri. Caedra, only 4 years old at this point, was allowed to stay with her mother, and the two were sold to a wealthy noble family of horse breeders to work as domestic servants. Her father and two others were sold to a lord who ran a copper mine. She does not know what happened to her brother or the handful of other people who came with them.
As Caedra grew up, she was taught Tocharan, and forbidden from using her own native language - which her mother also did not teach her, fearful that one or both of them would be punished for speaking it. Her parents ended up devising a way to contact each other and were even able to secretly meet. The noble family did not treat her and her mother terribly - it seemed that as long as they did the work required, they were mostly ignored. But Caedra grew up seeing the world as a cruel and unjust place due to how she and her family had been stolen from their homes, and how most of the people who lived in the city looked at her and her mother as livestock rather than people.
When Caedra was nine, she and her mother were sold again, this time to an older knight and landholder on the city's edge. They moved to his manor, and lost touch with her father for a time. The new owner was crueler and would take out his anger on them and the other slaves for the smallest of infractions. He often smelled of alcohol. He was also, Caedra eventually discovered, a worshiper of the creature the Tocharans called Lord Amamot Nisariel. Perhaps her former captors had been followers as well, but the knight was particularly involved, and there were meetings in his chapel that she was never allowed to attend, but would sometimes listen in on, and usually had to clean up after. Sometimes she saw people - people like her, from Abachar - who were brought in to these meetings, bound and blindfolded, who did not come back out. Once, one of them spotted her beneath a lifted corner of his blindfold, and begged for her to help, but she pretended not to understand, and then ran and hid. He would die, and it was a shame, but she had to do what she needed for her own safety.
At age 11, Caedra began to develop a streak of selfishness and rebellion that ultimately were responsible for her survival. She snuck things away from the manor house in her pockets, she skipped out on duties just a bit early and prowled through the markets, she grabbed extra food from the kitchen for her and her mother that was supposed to have gone to the other slaves. She became quite skilled at hiding and sneaking around, and managed to sit in on some of those secret meetings, where people were sacrificed to paint the floor with blood, and demons were called forth into the circle, who would bring the bodies back with them - as well as anyone else who got too close. It became evident that this 'knight' was in fact a slaver himself - he had his own militia, and raided nomadic tribes and small villages, and who was building up his own contributions to the local army. It seemed the whole city was in on the worship of this Amamot, and in their looting and pillaging, they were reaching his hands farther and farther into the continent.
She stole books, and paper, and learned to copy down the symbols and circles she saw before cleaning them up. She was too afraid to try to use any of it herself, but she wanted to learn. This was a powerful evil, she could feel the very air shudder when the people of this city performed their awful rituals, but perhaps it could be used against these people to free her and her mother, to locate her father, and maybe even her brother.
Years more passed, until at 14, her father escaped and found them. He had Tumus with him, but the boy was now scarred and mute. Together, and with friends of her father's, they left the city of circles, never to return - but the one thing Caedra made sure to grab before they left was a small bag full of books and papers that she had stolen and hidden away. Some day, she would have her revenge.
When her parents ended up settling in Orrim, she continued eastward as a young adult of 16 and ended up in Hafeld, where she found work doing odd jobs such as weighing and sorting fish at the docks, repairing nets, and mending clothing. She found learning Common to be fairly difficult, largely to social isolation, and soon found herself missing her parents and finding her new location too foreign once the novelty wore off. Unable to pay her way back to Orrim, she tried to stow away on a ship but was caught and turned in to the city guard, who sentenced her to a short stay in jail before turning her back out on the street.
Lonely and desperate for something to help take control back over her life, she started to experiment with the black magic she had sometimes seen the slavers use when she was young. Meaning no true ill will against the city itself, she collected blood from a dead gang member after stalking a group late at night, then retreated underground to attempt to summon a demon. The demons she could name were few, however, and most were more like forces of nature, she had heard. Not something one could bargain with. Amamot, though, was a demon who had worked with the people who had subjugated her and her friends and family - so clearly, he could be reasoned with, and also she relished the idea that if she succeeded in controlling him, she might be able to have some sort of revenge.
She spread the blood out in a mimicry of the intricate circles she had spied when cleaning floors as a child, and concentrated as she chanted the demon's name - and was shocked when an avatar of his did appear, though he seemed entertained by her attempt, which wasn't exactly her desired outcome. So much for controlling him, she realized a bit too late. After he'd had his laugh and asked what the hell she had been trying, she explained herself - and seeing the raw potential in this girl, who had managed what she did with no real training, he agreed to consider a deal with her. He would take her on as a warlock, lending her some of his power, in exchange for her helping him to improve his influence in Hafeld. She only hesitated briefly, still in shock that her attempts had yielded a chance to speak with a demon lord, then eagerly agreed. With power from this demon, she could make a name for herself, and some day could return to her family - or go farther west, and take revenge on her former masters. She wasn't so naive as to think only good could come of this, but it was a risk she was willing to take.
She learned quickly, and found her demon patron to be surprisingly pleasant, so long as she did as he asked. And she relished the attention from someone so old and wise and powerful, and his authority and the rewards he granted her made it easier than she would have thought it would be, to slip out into the night and call forth the creatures of the Abyss to do their work, to turn a blind eye to the resulting devastation. In fact, it sort of grew on her, this control over the lives of others, and she imagined she was punishing them as a vigilante might, for her early targets were alcoholics, criminals, and addicts.
So when Amamot asked her to open a gate and keep it open, so that he might come and go as he pleased, to enter her bedroom and lavish his attentions on her in person - well, she was more than willing. He was her addiction. In his arms, she felt safe, valued, craved.
And she would never forget the way he smiled subtly, when he first placed a heavy, clawed hand on her swollen belly. A real, genuine smile, not a cruel smirk, but an indication that somewhere within him was a spark of a capacity for awe and even love. Everything she had heard about demons, everything she had read, insisted they were savage, heartless monsters bent solely on destruction. But here was Lord Amamot Nisariel, worshiped by slavers and would-be tyrants, and rather than destroy, he had created something with her. She swore herself to him once again, promising to do anything he asked of her for as long as her soul could serve, in this life and the next. And he teased her, of course, when she offered to take his name. Demons don't do marriage. At least he was honest about it.
Caedra also would never forget the way the midwife paled when Virion was delivered. How the woman's expression turned from kind patience to horror, how she screamed and tried to smother the baby. Exhausted but panicked, Caedra killed the poor woman with a bolt of black energy, and reached for her son to pull him close, to see what was wrong, and felt her stomach flip. Somehow she hadn't been expecting the jet-black eyes, the hard litte buds on his head, behind each ear, the clawed wings folded tightly against his back, or the trembling of his downy tail. What seemed exotic and attractive on Amamot instead invoked a deep horror within her when seeing them on her own child.
Over the following months the demon lord became less affectionate, and Caedra began to suspect she had been misled - that all he had wanted was a son. A son which she feared for daily, as his half-demon traits developed. With what knowledge of herbalism she had learned in her youth, as well as the magic she possessed, she tried to stunt the growth of his horns and docked his tail and wings, steeling herself as the baby shrieked with pain that the herbs could not fully numb while she ground the soft bones down and coated their ends with toxins.
Raising a child as a single mother was difficult; raising a half-demon, however, was a unique challenge. He was such a good-hearted boy, too, and it was painful to see him suffer bullying from his peers, not to mention the judgment and prejudice passed on her and her son whenever they left the house. It wasn't long before Caedra began to grow physically weak, as well. She still did her best to serve Lord Amamot, using her own abilities to hide and sneak and gather information on important figures of the nobility for him, or easy locations to infiltrate, or even just to harvest civilians by hand - and she had become quite adept at quiet, careful murder, late at night when her child was asleep and the drunks and lowlifes were out in the alleyways. That was always how she justified it - she didn't believe she was evil, not like the demon she loved. She was simply using the power granted to her to clean up the city, one person at a time. At 22 she took the largest step in Amamot's greater plan to secure Hafeld, and summoned multiple demons throughout key locations in the city, resulting in what became known as the Black Night. The creatures she summoned tore their way through the city on a reckless spree of violence and destruction, resulting in the deaths of some 20 innocent people. She was careful, able to turn invisible, to change her own face, to do everything in secret, and although she was among those who were later questioned, she was never caught.
But soon she was unable to work, as she was exhausted and frail, as corruption and hatred sapped away at her very soul with every use of the power she was given. And she never was able to regain Amamot's affection, and perhaps that, more than anything, was what truly took the last of her will to live, at only 37 years of age.
But as her son mourned her death, her soul was ferried to its rightful owner. Caedra awoke at Ironhold, Amamot's grand domain in the Abyss. He did not meet with her, instead sending his butler to welcome her to her new life, but he made sure she had servants to care for her and a guard to protect her until she became adjusted to life among the tanar'ri.
While many of her mortal memories escaped Caedra, she remembered enough to hate Amamot for what he had done to her. She had loved him and served him earnestly, and in return she had been used and abandoned, and died without ever seeing her son reach adulthood. And that hate built, as the Abyss dug in its claws and tore at her mind, urging her to sate her anger through bloodlust. She took it out on the lesser creatures that swarmed around the palace outskirts, rather than their lord himself - not that she could have done so much as raise a finger against him, anyway. Once she had calmed down, she sought him out at the tallest overlook at Ironhold Palace, hoping to at least understand what her role here was to be. There in his full and godlike presence in the Abyss, the first time she saw the demon lord himself rather than just an avatar, she knelt before him in terror and awe.
It has now been nearly forty years since Caedra's death. She remembers only small fragments of her mortal life, and she considers the portions of the Abyss controlled by Amamot to be her true home. In that time she has seen both her son and grandson come to join her and Amamot. Virion, who spent most of his life struggling with his half-demon nature and his desire to be good and fit in with the mortal world, eventually took his own life. Caedra has cared for him since then, and helped him train in the art of combat. She makes the layer known as The Garden of Thorns her primary dwelling, after Amamot appointed her to oversee it, although sometimes it feels a bit like banishment. The Garden is vast and covered in thickets of thorned vines, crisscrossed by rivers of liquid nitrogen and dotted with iron-hard willow-like trees. Deep within the layer, near the banks of a tributary of the river Anahita, Caedra has a walled garden, a little cottage, a place she can store her poetry and collect a wide variety of unusual Abyssal plants. Most importantly to Amamot, she has a large stone bowl she can use as a scrying pool, from which she can spy on a variety of people and places across the planes as needed to further his own plans of conquest and destruction.
Most recently, Caedra has spent much of her time keeping an eye on her grandson Malthus, who himself is a warlock for his grandfather while traveling with friends of his. The group had been on the hunt for a Giant wizard whose work threatened the realm through the use of some primordial artifacts left behind by the gods. Unbeknownst to his friends, Malthus wanted to steal one or more of these artifacts for Amamot, to help his grandfather invade the material plane. After months of searching, Malthus located one, a massive black stone that could bridge the gap between worlds, but it was well-defended by allies of his supposed friends, and stealing it would have been difficult alone, so Malthus helped Caedra travel to Arneth by providing a targeting circle for her plane shifting abilities - and gifted her a book of poetry from Chopul, a city far from anywhere she had ever been, which delighted her to no end. Once she had sent her grandson off safely to rejoin his adventuring group, Caedra proceeded alone toward the temple that housed the artifact she sought.
There was an angel at the temple. She couldn't see it, but she could feel its awful radiance. She had to act fast, for it was sure to find her as quickly as she had found it. Caedra hurriedly summoned assistance, hoping that those who had been selected to join her could take a harder challenge than they had anticipated. They needed that stone - and it wouldn't hurt to capture that angel as well and drag it back with them.
Unfortunately, things went poorly. The two groups clashed, and were nearly evenly matched, but the radiant arrows fired from the angel's bow were well-aimed, and banished her and some of the other demons back to the Abyss, while the rest scattered and fled once things started going south. Angry and discouraged, Caedra ordered the execution of one of the demons who had fought particularly poorly, looking to make an example for the rest, and reported back to Amamot to explain what had gone wrong.
Over the next few weeks, Caedra watched from a distance through her scrying pool as some of her grandson's friends left, one by one, called away by personal duties. The remaining members of the group found replacements - good-hearted, capable people with the same goals. But Malthus had no attachment to them and evidently decided to head to the Abyss, to meet up with his father, who he dearly missed, and the other members of his family who had helped him along the way - and as a gift for his grandfather, he hoped to bring all of those good, kind people he had been traveling with, to remove them from Arneth so they couldn't stand in Amamot's way once they eventually, inevitably would realize what was going on.
But Malthus did this on his own, without asking for the proper magical knowledge that would allow him to achieve this, and only he was pulled into the Abyss as the rest escaped. Shocked, Caedra messaged Ifiet, Malthus' familiar, and requested that the quiet little demon follow her grandson's former companions. Then Caedra hurriedly got up and headed to the cage at the Slave Pits, where those who tried to planeshift to Amamot's domain were inevitably trapped, so she could go retrieve the poor boy.
Amamot had beaten her there, and had Malthus in his arms, his great wings spread to shelter his grandson from the searing heat of the ever-burning sky. Caedra had so many questions for her grandson, but mostly she was grateful that he seemed to have arrived in one piece.
As Caedra grew up, she was taught Tocharan, and forbidden from using her own native language - which her mother also did not teach her, fearful that one or both of them would be punished for speaking it. Her parents ended up devising a way to contact each other and were even able to secretly meet. The noble family did not treat her and her mother terribly - it seemed that as long as they did the work required, they were mostly ignored. But Caedra grew up seeing the world as a cruel and unjust place due to how she and her family had been stolen from their homes, and how most of the people who lived in the city looked at her and her mother as livestock rather than people.
When Caedra was nine, she and her mother were sold again, this time to an older knight and landholder on the city's edge. They moved to his manor, and lost touch with her father for a time. The new owner was crueler and would take out his anger on them and the other slaves for the smallest of infractions. He often smelled of alcohol. He was also, Caedra eventually discovered, a worshiper of the creature the Tocharans called Lord Amamot Nisariel. Perhaps her former captors had been followers as well, but the knight was particularly involved, and there were meetings in his chapel that she was never allowed to attend, but would sometimes listen in on, and usually had to clean up after. Sometimes she saw people - people like her, from Abachar - who were brought in to these meetings, bound and blindfolded, who did not come back out. Once, one of them spotted her beneath a lifted corner of his blindfold, and begged for her to help, but she pretended not to understand, and then ran and hid. He would die, and it was a shame, but she had to do what she needed for her own safety.
At age 11, Caedra began to develop a streak of selfishness and rebellion that ultimately were responsible for her survival. She snuck things away from the manor house in her pockets, she skipped out on duties just a bit early and prowled through the markets, she grabbed extra food from the kitchen for her and her mother that was supposed to have gone to the other slaves. She became quite skilled at hiding and sneaking around, and managed to sit in on some of those secret meetings, where people were sacrificed to paint the floor with blood, and demons were called forth into the circle, who would bring the bodies back with them - as well as anyone else who got too close. It became evident that this 'knight' was in fact a slaver himself - he had his own militia, and raided nomadic tribes and small villages, and who was building up his own contributions to the local army. It seemed the whole city was in on the worship of this Amamot, and in their looting and pillaging, they were reaching his hands farther and farther into the continent.
She stole books, and paper, and learned to copy down the symbols and circles she saw before cleaning them up. She was too afraid to try to use any of it herself, but she wanted to learn. This was a powerful evil, she could feel the very air shudder when the people of this city performed their awful rituals, but perhaps it could be used against these people to free her and her mother, to locate her father, and maybe even her brother.
Years more passed, until at 14, her father escaped and found them. He had Tumus with him, but the boy was now scarred and mute. Together, and with friends of her father's, they left the city of circles, never to return - but the one thing Caedra made sure to grab before they left was a small bag full of books and papers that she had stolen and hidden away. Some day, she would have her revenge.
When her parents ended up settling in Orrim, she continued eastward as a young adult of 16 and ended up in Hafeld, where she found work doing odd jobs such as weighing and sorting fish at the docks, repairing nets, and mending clothing. She found learning Common to be fairly difficult, largely to social isolation, and soon found herself missing her parents and finding her new location too foreign once the novelty wore off. Unable to pay her way back to Orrim, she tried to stow away on a ship but was caught and turned in to the city guard, who sentenced her to a short stay in jail before turning her back out on the street.
Lonely and desperate for something to help take control back over her life, she started to experiment with the black magic she had sometimes seen the slavers use when she was young. Meaning no true ill will against the city itself, she collected blood from a dead gang member after stalking a group late at night, then retreated underground to attempt to summon a demon. The demons she could name were few, however, and most were more like forces of nature, she had heard. Not something one could bargain with. Amamot, though, was a demon who had worked with the people who had subjugated her and her friends and family - so clearly, he could be reasoned with, and also she relished the idea that if she succeeded in controlling him, she might be able to have some sort of revenge.
She spread the blood out in a mimicry of the intricate circles she had spied when cleaning floors as a child, and concentrated as she chanted the demon's name - and was shocked when an avatar of his did appear, though he seemed entertained by her attempt, which wasn't exactly her desired outcome. So much for controlling him, she realized a bit too late. After he'd had his laugh and asked what the hell she had been trying, she explained herself - and seeing the raw potential in this girl, who had managed what she did with no real training, he agreed to consider a deal with her. He would take her on as a warlock, lending her some of his power, in exchange for her helping him to improve his influence in Hafeld. She only hesitated briefly, still in shock that her attempts had yielded a chance to speak with a demon lord, then eagerly agreed. With power from this demon, she could make a name for herself, and some day could return to her family - or go farther west, and take revenge on her former masters. She wasn't so naive as to think only good could come of this, but it was a risk she was willing to take.
She learned quickly, and found her demon patron to be surprisingly pleasant, so long as she did as he asked. And she relished the attention from someone so old and wise and powerful, and his authority and the rewards he granted her made it easier than she would have thought it would be, to slip out into the night and call forth the creatures of the Abyss to do their work, to turn a blind eye to the resulting devastation. In fact, it sort of grew on her, this control over the lives of others, and she imagined she was punishing them as a vigilante might, for her early targets were alcoholics, criminals, and addicts.
So when Amamot asked her to open a gate and keep it open, so that he might come and go as he pleased, to enter her bedroom and lavish his attentions on her in person - well, she was more than willing. He was her addiction. In his arms, she felt safe, valued, craved.
And she would never forget the way he smiled subtly, when he first placed a heavy, clawed hand on her swollen belly. A real, genuine smile, not a cruel smirk, but an indication that somewhere within him was a spark of a capacity for awe and even love. Everything she had heard about demons, everything she had read, insisted they were savage, heartless monsters bent solely on destruction. But here was Lord Amamot Nisariel, worshiped by slavers and would-be tyrants, and rather than destroy, he had created something with her. She swore herself to him once again, promising to do anything he asked of her for as long as her soul could serve, in this life and the next. And he teased her, of course, when she offered to take his name. Demons don't do marriage. At least he was honest about it.
Caedra also would never forget the way the midwife paled when Virion was delivered. How the woman's expression turned from kind patience to horror, how she screamed and tried to smother the baby. Exhausted but panicked, Caedra killed the poor woman with a bolt of black energy, and reached for her son to pull him close, to see what was wrong, and felt her stomach flip. Somehow she hadn't been expecting the jet-black eyes, the hard litte buds on his head, behind each ear, the clawed wings folded tightly against his back, or the trembling of his downy tail. What seemed exotic and attractive on Amamot instead invoked a deep horror within her when seeing them on her own child.
Over the following months the demon lord became less affectionate, and Caedra began to suspect she had been misled - that all he had wanted was a son. A son which she feared for daily, as his half-demon traits developed. With what knowledge of herbalism she had learned in her youth, as well as the magic she possessed, she tried to stunt the growth of his horns and docked his tail and wings, steeling herself as the baby shrieked with pain that the herbs could not fully numb while she ground the soft bones down and coated their ends with toxins.
Raising a child as a single mother was difficult; raising a half-demon, however, was a unique challenge. He was such a good-hearted boy, too, and it was painful to see him suffer bullying from his peers, not to mention the judgment and prejudice passed on her and her son whenever they left the house. It wasn't long before Caedra began to grow physically weak, as well. She still did her best to serve Lord Amamot, using her own abilities to hide and sneak and gather information on important figures of the nobility for him, or easy locations to infiltrate, or even just to harvest civilians by hand - and she had become quite adept at quiet, careful murder, late at night when her child was asleep and the drunks and lowlifes were out in the alleyways. That was always how she justified it - she didn't believe she was evil, not like the demon she loved. She was simply using the power granted to her to clean up the city, one person at a time. At 22 she took the largest step in Amamot's greater plan to secure Hafeld, and summoned multiple demons throughout key locations in the city, resulting in what became known as the Black Night. The creatures she summoned tore their way through the city on a reckless spree of violence and destruction, resulting in the deaths of some 20 innocent people. She was careful, able to turn invisible, to change her own face, to do everything in secret, and although she was among those who were later questioned, she was never caught.
But soon she was unable to work, as she was exhausted and frail, as corruption and hatred sapped away at her very soul with every use of the power she was given. And she never was able to regain Amamot's affection, and perhaps that, more than anything, was what truly took the last of her will to live, at only 37 years of age.
But as her son mourned her death, her soul was ferried to its rightful owner. Caedra awoke at Ironhold, Amamot's grand domain in the Abyss. He did not meet with her, instead sending his butler to welcome her to her new life, but he made sure she had servants to care for her and a guard to protect her until she became adjusted to life among the tanar'ri.
While many of her mortal memories escaped Caedra, she remembered enough to hate Amamot for what he had done to her. She had loved him and served him earnestly, and in return she had been used and abandoned, and died without ever seeing her son reach adulthood. And that hate built, as the Abyss dug in its claws and tore at her mind, urging her to sate her anger through bloodlust. She took it out on the lesser creatures that swarmed around the palace outskirts, rather than their lord himself - not that she could have done so much as raise a finger against him, anyway. Once she had calmed down, she sought him out at the tallest overlook at Ironhold Palace, hoping to at least understand what her role here was to be. There in his full and godlike presence in the Abyss, the first time she saw the demon lord himself rather than just an avatar, she knelt before him in terror and awe.
It has now been nearly forty years since Caedra's death. She remembers only small fragments of her mortal life, and she considers the portions of the Abyss controlled by Amamot to be her true home. In that time she has seen both her son and grandson come to join her and Amamot. Virion, who spent most of his life struggling with his half-demon nature and his desire to be good and fit in with the mortal world, eventually took his own life. Caedra has cared for him since then, and helped him train in the art of combat. She makes the layer known as The Garden of Thorns her primary dwelling, after Amamot appointed her to oversee it, although sometimes it feels a bit like banishment. The Garden is vast and covered in thickets of thorned vines, crisscrossed by rivers of liquid nitrogen and dotted with iron-hard willow-like trees. Deep within the layer, near the banks of a tributary of the river Anahita, Caedra has a walled garden, a little cottage, a place she can store her poetry and collect a wide variety of unusual Abyssal plants. Most importantly to Amamot, she has a large stone bowl she can use as a scrying pool, from which she can spy on a variety of people and places across the planes as needed to further his own plans of conquest and destruction.
Most recently, Caedra has spent much of her time keeping an eye on her grandson Malthus, who himself is a warlock for his grandfather while traveling with friends of his. The group had been on the hunt for a Giant wizard whose work threatened the realm through the use of some primordial artifacts left behind by the gods. Unbeknownst to his friends, Malthus wanted to steal one or more of these artifacts for Amamot, to help his grandfather invade the material plane. After months of searching, Malthus located one, a massive black stone that could bridge the gap between worlds, but it was well-defended by allies of his supposed friends, and stealing it would have been difficult alone, so Malthus helped Caedra travel to Arneth by providing a targeting circle for her plane shifting abilities - and gifted her a book of poetry from Chopul, a city far from anywhere she had ever been, which delighted her to no end. Once she had sent her grandson off safely to rejoin his adventuring group, Caedra proceeded alone toward the temple that housed the artifact she sought.
There was an angel at the temple. She couldn't see it, but she could feel its awful radiance. She had to act fast, for it was sure to find her as quickly as she had found it. Caedra hurriedly summoned assistance, hoping that those who had been selected to join her could take a harder challenge than they had anticipated. They needed that stone - and it wouldn't hurt to capture that angel as well and drag it back with them.
Unfortunately, things went poorly. The two groups clashed, and were nearly evenly matched, but the radiant arrows fired from the angel's bow were well-aimed, and banished her and some of the other demons back to the Abyss, while the rest scattered and fled once things started going south. Angry and discouraged, Caedra ordered the execution of one of the demons who had fought particularly poorly, looking to make an example for the rest, and reported back to Amamot to explain what had gone wrong.
Over the next few weeks, Caedra watched from a distance through her scrying pool as some of her grandson's friends left, one by one, called away by personal duties. The remaining members of the group found replacements - good-hearted, capable people with the same goals. But Malthus had no attachment to them and evidently decided to head to the Abyss, to meet up with his father, who he dearly missed, and the other members of his family who had helped him along the way - and as a gift for his grandfather, he hoped to bring all of those good, kind people he had been traveling with, to remove them from Arneth so they couldn't stand in Amamot's way once they eventually, inevitably would realize what was going on.
But Malthus did this on his own, without asking for the proper magical knowledge that would allow him to achieve this, and only he was pulled into the Abyss as the rest escaped. Shocked, Caedra messaged Ifiet, Malthus' familiar, and requested that the quiet little demon follow her grandson's former companions. Then Caedra hurriedly got up and headed to the cage at the Slave Pits, where those who tried to planeshift to Amamot's domain were inevitably trapped, so she could go retrieve the poor boy.
Amamot had beaten her there, and had Malthus in his arms, his great wings spread to shelter his grandson from the searing heat of the ever-burning sky. Caedra had so many questions for her grandson, but mostly she was grateful that he seemed to have arrived in one piece.