From the Fire to the Forge


A sudden and encompassing darkness cut off his experimentation. His slab
faced the opening through which he had been flown, and that opening was
now blocked by a reptilian head of gargantuan proportions.

Xander stared in disbelief, his mind whirling uselessly, unable to
comprehend the sheer size of the beast. Slitted yellow eyes that looked
like they out-massed him twice over scanned the interior before focusing
on him. Xander whimpered, jerking at his bonds again when a forked
tongue slithered out, easily crossing the depth of the cave to slide
across his body, leaving a disgusting moistness in its wake.

"Oh my God, I'm gonna die!" Xander screamed to himself, as the beast
before him opened a maw that could have swallowed an elephant whole, and
in the depths of it Xander saw a red glow growing brighter. "Oh, shit!"
he exclaimed aloud, as he realized he was about to burn in the flames of
a dragon.

In his desperation, he called on the ability he had used most recently,
firing a thick stream of molten metal at the immense beast, but he was
too late. The glow in the throat became a rushing, billowing flame that
seared outward.

He was hit first by a wave of superheated air being pushed forward by
the flames, then the rush of flame washed over him, instantly
incinerating his tears of fear. The sudden and intense rise in heat that
arrived with the flame did not taper off nor remain steady, but seemed
to become hotter and hotter. Xander was amazed when he realized that the
stone was melting around him, and though he was in intense pain from the
heat, he was not dead.

He certainly wished he was, however. The draught he had taken to protect
himself from the flowing metal and stone worked well enough, but did
nothing to actually protect him from the flames, and he screamed as his
flesh blackened and his skin flaked and was torn free by the pressure of
the flaming wind.

He could not help but scream, but screaming made it worse still, as the
moisture in his mouth was instantly evaporated, and his mouth and tongue
were covered in blisters that were just as quickly popped, blackened,
and blown free, choking him with his own ashes.

As the stone around his feet finally flowed away, Xander stumbled
forward, then quickly turning, shambled as swiftly as he could deeper
into the cavern, mind consumed by pain and the desire to flee it, all
higher thought lost for the moment.

Whether his desperate attempt at an attack had worked, or merely stalled
the beast, was discarded as unimportant compared to the simple necessity
of fleeing the encompassing, radiating heat, for the dragon's fiery
breath had done more than merely melt the stone holding him; it had
melted much of the stone of the chamber, such that even as he fled, his
raw and aching feet, though unharmed as per his power by the heat of the
flowing stone, were steadily stripped of burned and blackened flesh by
the friction of their passage through the thick and clinging stone, and
his face, hands, and indeed most of his skin, his clothing having been
burned away, though unharmed by the radiant heat of the glowing stones
that remained where the melted stone had flowed away, were yet by it
reminded and renewed in their complaint of the pain of being burned by
the flames.

When he was finally past the glowing stones and the liquid floor, and
had managed to stumble into a passageway that by dint of a rightward
turn succeeded in placing him beyond the direct heating influence of the
radiant inferno behind him, Xander was finally able to collect himself
enough to ingest a stronger instant healing draught. This washed away
the exhaustion of being constantly healed and flayed, though the memory
of the pain lingered, and with the exhaustion and immediate agony
abated, Xander was able to think clearly enough to slowly and gently
lower the temperature of the air around him, and to raise its humidity
by ever so slight degrees.

He wanted to flee further, but he heard no sound of stone being scraped
nor scales sliding nor metal clinking behind him, and so he did not move
until the air about him was heavy with moisture, and his own skin
bedewed with condensation.

Finally heaving himself back to a standing position, and wishing for the
shoes and clothing so recently lost, stumbled on down the passage. He
was fleeing not merely the dragon, for he had some little hope that it
might have at least been driven off by his attack, or even killed if he
had managed a lucky hit. After all, he knew that tank-killer mines and
rounds often did the actual punching through armor with a spray of
molten metal directed and given force via a shaped charge, and his spray
of liquid metal had hopefully resembled that more than a little. Yet
even if it had been killed or fled, the two demonesses would likely
return soon, and given that the larger of the two had reshaped the stone
to imprison him, he had little hope of even a dead dragon's long keeping
them out of their lair.

Hope failed him when even as the sounds of falling stone clattered in
the far distance behind him, he came to the end of the passage he was
in. It was not such an end as might be found in a hallway or mine, with
neatly squared walls; rather as he had progressed the cavern had itself
transitioned from moderately worked stone to a natural rift, and it had
grown steadily closer, until know he knew that to continue forward
risked his becoming trapped, wedged between stone walls with no-one to
rescue him.

He stared at it dumbly for a long minute, the sounds of voices now
drifting incomprehensibly through the twisting ravine, before thought
and sanity returned, and he remembered the powers that he had been
given. Somehow, some way, there must be a solution to this dilemma in
them.

Once more his mind passed rapidly over the superheroes and villains of
his childhood comics. Again one of the first to spring to mind was
Morrie Bench, Hydro-man, and this time Xander's desire to escape was
such, with the fresh memory of the most intense pain he had ever
experienced to drive him, that Xander wasted no time wondering if it
would work, or what he risked by doing it.

He had power over fluids; if Morrie could do it, so could he. Almost the
same instant the idea entered his head, he had followed it, his entire
body flowing into a liquid state, and rushing down through the ever
tightening cracks in the rocks, letting gravity do the work. The only
effort he found he had to put forth was to keep himself together, to
draw back up whatever portions found a path that was separated from the
rest, and to fight against the continual tendency of his body to
re-solidify.

He was not sure what was causing that, but whatever minor pain he
experienced when a hand or knee re-solidified only to be caught in the
stone was negligible compared to the pain he had just experienced, and
the almost total lack of pain he experienced in his liquid state. Each
twinge of pain served to focus his attention just enough to reliquify
that piece of himself, and he flowed on.

As he descended, the ground became hotter, and he passed veins of rock
that were hotter still, some of the moisture in his body turned to
steam. At first he was mildly concerned, though the absence of any
resulting pain kept him from panicking, and when the steam remained with
him, and seemed completely under his control, he was reminded that he
had gained power over fluids, not merely liquids, so gases and vapors
were evidently included.

Every now and then he passed through a rising stream of gases released
from volcanic rocks down somewhere below him. At first he ignored these
as unimportant, but after a while he realized that he could sense some
difference between them.

It was nothing so familiar as a taste or a smell, but rather a sensation
he could not quite describe, yet after his fourth and fifth encounters,
he realized that he could recognize a gas he had seen before, and even
recognize that one of them was relatively pure, and the other a more
complex mixture.

Realizing that, he paused for a brief interval while he sampled the air
itself, trying to identify what composed it. He was about ready to give
up, knowing that Willow would have known the relative percentages of the
various components of air and been able to identify them by their mere
plentifulness relative to each other . . . though whether that would
actually work here, on what he was confident was a different world was
an open question. He realized just in time, as he was about to abandon
the task, that he had the perfect means of identifying the gases.

This was a significant moment, for prior to this, Xander had only really
been thinking about liquids, though he had said fluid when asked for a
wish. Now he produced bubbles of pure nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon
dioxide, they being the three gases he could most readily recall.

Sampling each, he compared them to the gases in the air around him, and
to his memory of the gases he had passed through. Carbon dioxide, he
realized, was a component of the mixed gases, and he wondered why they
held together coherently when carbon dioxide was also in the air.

A moment's thought gave him the answer; the coherent batches of gas that
had held mostly together while passing through the air, and himself, had
been warmer, the source and reason for their rising in the first place.

At first he merely attributed this to the heat of molten rock somewhere
below, but as he resumed his downward journey, he became curious about
the mixed batches.

He could understand how simple air could be heated, and rise, but the
mix in these clouds was not the same as the air around him. He could
understand the bits of pure gas, as the release of gas pockets in the
magma, but that again would not explain the complex clouds.

Feeling confident now, all hints of pain having vanished in this new
form and the sounds and fears of returning giants well past, he began to
focus his downward motion, spreading out and allowing himself to seep
down multiple paths, though never far enough to risk losing cohesion,
until he sensed a mixed gas cloud, then pulling all of himself down that
path.

He repeated this several times, only stopping when he passed through a
long crack into a passage that was apparently a worked stone hallway.
Immediately he drew back into the crack, and peered tentatively into the
hall, concerned that he might have been spotted by whatever beings or,
more likely, demons that had made or used it.

Much to his surprise, he realized that he could see into the hallway by
the light of the flickering torches set in wall-sconces, even when only
a tiny bit of himself was slipped to the end of the crack; though as far
as he could tell, neither of his eyes were in that bit of substance.

He grinned at this. He had always wondered how Sandman or Hydro-man
could continue to see when their eyes had become sand or water. Reminded
by this that he had been able to interpret the air before, and with his
confidence greatly boosted by his ability to see without eyes, Xander
took his transformation a step further, pushing past liquid to a fully
gaseous state.

Extending himself gingerly into the corridor, he focused his strange
everywhere-vision back on himself, ensuring that as intended, he blended
perfectly and invisibly with the air, visible, if at all, as nothing
more than a slight heat haze where the air's motion and density differed
slightly from the background.

Looking back and forth down the corridor, and verifying that he was
thoroughly alone, Xander took a moment to push fully back to human form,
verifying that he still had all his bits and pieces. His clothes being a
complete loss, and the corridor rather cold in spite of being lit by
flaming torches, he quickly returned to gaseous form, reassured by his
ability to resume human form, the absence of any obvious trauma, and the
fact this his normal form now seemed completely healed, not even showing
any redness from the intense flame or molten rock.

Moving closer to one of the torches, Xander sampled the gas coming off
of it, and determined that while it was releasing a not wholly
dissimilar collection of heated gasses, they were mixing much more
quickly, and losing their heat load to the surrounding air much too
rapidly to be the source that he had followed thus far.

He was not certain, however, that they weren't strong enough to have led
him astray at the very last turning he had taken.

He also discovered that though some of his substance got caught up in
the flame and burned, this did not feel painful, nor seem to hurt him,
and though he had gained a bit of oxygen from it, reminding him that
of a line that Willow had quoted at him when he was talking about the
Human Torch one day, that he had not really understood, "Combustion is
oxidation allegro." He was not sure what allegro even was, aside from
something from music class, but he could now see that when bits of him
burned in the flame, they split and gained oxygen.

Distracted by this, he spent several minutes playing with the flame,
indulging the pyromaniac in the heart of so many little boys. The flames
would leap and roar with power if he fed them a burst of oxygen, or
gutter and threaten to die if fed extra carbon dioxide. Other gases he
could think of had varying effects, mostly affecting the color and
intensity of the flame.

He had just begun to experiment with carrying a flame away from the
torch, by continually feeding oxygen and propane into a single spot in
the air, near the flame, and then trying to move it away without
reducing the flow of gases, before being interrupted. Propane was the
first gas he had thought of that actually burned reasonably well, but
though he was able to draw the flame far enough from the torch to tell
that it was a separate flame, he found it devilishly hard to keep the
flow of the two gases consistent enough. Too much of either would
flare up, use up enough oxygen in the immediate vicinity to snuff the
flames, and leave him spraying flammable gas into the air unburnt.

He had made just the barest of progress with this when he heard what
sounded like a heavy thud, followed by footsteps. He dropped what he was
doing, and focused on ensuring that he was wholly invisible. His body's
tendency to re-solidify if he took his attention away had not lessened
noticeably, and he did not want to deal with another encounter just yet,
especially not if it involved more pain.

Drifting up to the ceiling, he slid down the hall to a point midway
between two torches, where the shadows were the deepest, and waited.
Soon enough, three figures appeared from around a corner at one end of
the hall.

They were bumping into each other in an apparently deliberate fashion,
as if trying to knock one another off balance, almost like a living game
of ping-pong. They were, Xander guessed, no more than five feet tall,
with long pointed ears with furry tufts, and sharp-snouted faces covered
in red and white fur, making them look much like foxes. In spite of this
fox-like appearance, they were standing and moving much like humans,
though as one got a better hit in, causing another to spin, Xander
realized they had large furry tails, red with a white tip.

Sheaths hung at their sides, a short one on the left, a longer one to
the right. They were wearing dark red leather tunics with green trim,
green leggings, and heavy boots. There were flashes of torchlight
reflecting from beneath the boots, leading Xander to assume they had
soles that were nailed on, rather than sewn. Their clothing looked faded
and well-worn, with noticeably shinier patches where the arm rubbed
against the body, and occasional stains.

They looked stouter than he would have expected for a people that seemed
to be related to foxes. He thought of foxes as little dog-like creatures
that ran and hid, his impression coming largely from Disney movies and
stories of English fox-hunts from children's books. He did not think he
had ever seen a fox in real life before.

These three, however, rather than looking like fox-men to his mind,
looked more like a cross between a fox and a fantasy dwarf, short,
stout, and powerfully built.

They passed him by without appearing to see him, though he noticed all
three sniff the air curiously. He briefly considered following them,
before reminding himself that he was escaping from demons already, and
should be avoiding them rather. They were in the same mountain, for all
he knew, they might be working together.

He did not think that was particularly likely, but if it was the case,
it would be a bit late to worry about it after he had been captured by
them.

When a steady ringing sound started up in the opposite direction, Xander
made up his mind, and drifted towards it. The light from the torches was
not great, but Xander soon realized that he could see into even the
deepest shadows. He did not figure it out immediately, but eventually he
came to realize that when in his liquid or gaseous forms, the power that
allowed him to see anyway was using his entire body as a light capturing
device.

It was still somewhat limited by his mind, but he found he could look in
any direction without needing to actually move anything, and see into
deep shadows. He had not particularly noticed the darkness during the
trip down, which made him think that he could probably see even in pitch
blackness.

As he approached the ringing sound, he realized that it lacked the long
tapering sound of a bell. It was more akin to a hammer beating on a
piece of metal that had some good resonance to it.

Sure enough, when he finally found the room that was the source of the
sound, and infiltrated the room, snickering inaudibly to himself, by
drifting through the cracks around the closed door, he found it was a
great forge room, with three forge setups, two of which were in use.
Only one had active hammering, the other had its flame being stoked,
while something in the heart of the fire was being adjusted with long
tongs. Two more fox-men much like the three he had previously seen were
standing on either end of the room, watching.

They were well back from the flame, and considering that they had much
more fur than he had hair to fear a spark, he was not surprised. The
other four creatures--he could not honestly label them as men, being
unable to hazard a proper guess at their gender--were fur-less, and he
had to restrain himself mightily when he saw them, lest he lose
control and become visible in his shock.

He was immediately put in mind of childhood video games, as they were
humanoid turtles, in so far as he could tell. The spikes and other
appurtenances were more in line with say Koopas from Nintendo's Mario
Bros than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but they were very much like
video game characters brought to life. Squat and muscular, much like the
fox-men, they carried a heavy spiked carapace, and wore black leather
gloves, shoes, and face masks.

The masks were fitted with what looked like smoked glass goggles, so he
assumed it was more about facial and eye protection rather than identity
concealment.

He remembered someone mentioning that all foreigners looked alike to
them, and while he would agree about the fox-men, having seen little of
use to differentiate them, the turtle-people were readily identifiable.
He immediately tagged them with monikers, Scar for the one with a long
mark crossing the back of its carapace, Horn for the individual with a
rhino like horn on its snout, though it was only about three inches
long, Frill for the one that had a ring of horns on its head, jutting
out just above his mask, and finally Muscles for the relatively
unadorned turtle, as his muscles were considerably more impressive than
the other three.

Where the others had looked like uncommonly strong men, much like a
blacksmith or wrestler on his world, this one looked like a top
body-builder, with muscles on muscles. It was he--with the degree of
musculature, Xander could not help but apply a masculine pronoun in his
mind, though intellectually he realized he had no means to be sure--who
was pounding the long, slightly red metal billet, a flat block of metal
about three feet long and three inches by two inches thick, steadily
flattening it.

Horn was gripping the metal mass with tongs, moving it about, while
Muscles was hitting the same spot consistently, rather than shifting his
aim.  Occasionally Horn flipped it, always getting it laying flat again
just before the massive hammer impacted it.

The hammer Muscles was wielding was a hefty thing itself, though all
Xander could do was judge it to be larger than the sledges he had seen.
He did not know how large those sledge-hammers were, so had no gauge for
the weight of the hammer. It was certainly no war-hammer meant for
swiftly smashing bones or skulls, nor a showpiece to place on a mantel.
It was dull and utilitarian, roughly octagonal, though more like a
cut-off square on the face, with a slight flare at the tip that was
obviously from the force of many impacts, and not a matter of design,
given its unevenness.

Frill was operating a bellows, though it was unlike anything Xander
remembered seeing pictured in History or Social Studies classes. Rather
than pumping up and down on a moderately sized accordion style pump, he
was spinning a wheel using one protruding handle. The wheel was attached
by a belt to another apparatus that translated the circular motion into
vertical motion, moving the handle of a bellows built into the side of
the forge, that moved in a vertical arc considerably higher than the
squat turtle figure could have hoped to reach himself.

A similar bellows was attached to all three forges, though the other 
two were quiet and unmoving.

Scar was handling whatever was in the flames of the second forge with
long tongs gripped carefully in his gloved hands.

The basic setup of the forges was a massive brick oven, a billows on one
side, an open space in front of the flames, and on the other side, a
long flat table of metal that looked to be four or five inches thick. On
one end a horn protruded, and along one edge were a series of holes,
both square and circular, the purpose of which escaped Xander at the
moment.

Between the table and the forge was a small wall that served to separate
each forging area. It was placed beyond the table's edge, and was
festooned with tools and implements, some of which Xander recognized,
and others whose use was a mystery.

Finally, at the end of each table, furthest from the forge, were set two
large barrels with open tops, and a long trough, all filled with a
liquid.

Perhaps Xander should have been more concerned about being discovered
and captured, but he was little worried. He had been somewhat concerned
about the first three foxes, as he had taken human form in that
corridor, and he had observed them sniffing for him. They had had at
least the beginnings of suspicion, and may have also observed unusual
flickering from his playing with the flames. These individuals, on the
other hand, were absorbed in their work, first off, and secondly, had no
reason to even suspect his presence.

Thus it made, to his mind, a perfect opportunity to observe and learn
about them. So he watched as the billet was hammered and folded, then
returned to the fire.

The pairs switched then, as Muscles started pumping the bellows on the
first station, while Scar pulled out a brightly glowing hunk of metal
and set it on the table for Frill to start pounding.

Xander watched this go back and forth for a while, until they completed
the blades, looking something like a machete, and plunged them into the
troughs of water, sending up clouds of steam. He quickly slipped out of
the room then, worried that the difference in density or mobility of the
air that was himself would be visible when the steam reached him.

After verifying that no-one was in the hallway when he entered, Xander
drifted back to the doorway, and focused on working out how to eavesdrop
on the room to make certain he had not been noticed. 

Just a short bit of experimenting lead him to realize that by focusing
on the vibrations of the air, he could hear perfectly well, and even
move the viewpoint, as it were, of his hearing about the room, by
focusing on any given small volume of air, with the intention of hearing
the vibrations there.

He could also hear through the water in the trough and in the barrels,
which lead him to experiment with the blood in the turtle-people. Though
there was insufficient mass of fluid at any point in them for him to
hear anything other than a soft rushing and an occasional lub-dub, it
did lead to the stunning realization that by recognizing and identifying
not merely blood, but the overall pattern of a concentration of a
variety of fluids in a branching motif, he could readily identify the
location of everyone in the room without attempting to look within.

In fact, with a bit of concentration, he could even observe the motions
of the turtles, enough to clearly identify when they again switched
positions at their respective stations.

Caught up in the wonder of being able to effectively see through walls,
Xander expanded his senses, wandering up and down the halls unseeing,
his concentration focused outward, experiencing each room he came
across. Any bit of air was good for hearing, he found, but it took a
flat bit of liquid for him to see. Basically, he could only see into a
distant room by focusing on the skin, the surface of a liquid where it
met the air, and focusing only on light as it impinged that surface. By
allowing the skin to define a two-dimensional cross-section of the
light, he could match it fairly well to his retina.

It was excessively disorienting, however, as he discovered that
apparently his retina automatically flipped everything upside down;
presumably this corrected for another flipping that occurred in his
lens, but since he was not using a lens, it made it seem as though he
were standing on his head.

However, as in this form his inner ear had no solidity, and could not
function properly, it could not contradict what his virtual eyes were
seeing, and so though it was intellectually disorienting, and made him
feel as though he were a bat hanging upside down, it did not engender
any dizziness or nausea.

Of course, testing one or two senses in this way naturally led to
testing others. Touch, like sight, was effective only where he could
define a surface. When there was a pool of liquid in the room, he could
feel that surface as if it were his skin, and feel the movement of the
air across it, or feel things passing through it.

Unfortunately, as he discovered when he found a set of kitchens, feeling
water as if it were your skin was excessively unpleasant when someone
was cutting vegetables in it. Though there was no pain, the sensations
were unambiguous about a constant stream of items piercing his skin, and
this triggered every escape instinct, and sent shudders through his
diaphanous form.

Taste and smell worked only, as it were, by analogy. He could not
convince his brain to actually experience any taste or smell remotely
and identify it with something he already knew, yet his knowledge of
what was dissolved in the air was complete, and functioned much like
taste or smell. He could not intellectually put them into words, but
much like a hound dog, he could learn a given 'scent' or 'taste' and
identify it again, or hunt it down.

When he happened upon a bathing hall, all thought of experimentation
left his head. He was lucky, perhaps, that being insubstantial, he
encountered no physical equivalent to the shot of hormones he otherwise
would have received, as he looked at a large pool filled with nude
females, all pleasing to his eye. They were mostly of the sort certain
fetishists on his world would have labeled 'furries,' but were uniformly
gorgeous.

Xander had encountered identifiable females previously in his recent
wandering, working in the kitchens, or cleaning rooms, and they had been
less than impressive, so he was under no illusions that all demon women
were as impeccably beautiful as the one that had so recently removed him
of his virginity, but this group would have no reason to be ashamed in
her company.

He gave up all pretense of observing remotely, drifting immediately into
the room and focusing the full of his vision on them. Some were closer
to a human norm than others, who bore tails or dark, leathery wings like
the giantess, or fur. But all were beautiful, and two of the furred ones
had something that drew his eye like nothing else, for they were
possessed of two pairs of breasts, one above the other. Their fur was
thin and short, like a short-haired dog, and did nothing to conceal
their gentle, full curves.

He was lucky that the absence of hormones in his system, though it
stopped none of his teenaged male interest in them, meant that there was
nothing physically clouding his senses or his thought processes, so even
in his awe, he was able to pay attention to their conversation.

Here he discovered that he was not entirely off in his guess that there
might be some connection between these creatures and the demonesses that
abducted him.

Apparently, had he looked closer, he might have even discovered a proper
stairway leading to these worked halls from their eyrie. Furthermore, he
learned, they were not merely demonesses, but also princesses, the
daughters of a Grand Duke. What is more, the Duke and they were both
apparently dragons as well as demons, and from the girls' eager
descriptions to each other, Xander realized that he had stumbled upon
the dream of every hot-blooded teenage male, a genuine harem!

These girls were the current favorites of the reigning Duke, who
apparently could and did take a more modest, near-human form to have his
pleasure with them, while taking an immense draconic war-form to battle
his own enemies, and an intermediate draconic form to lead his forces to
war.

Xander's heart fell to his feet when he realized that he may have either
slain or injured the father of the beauty that had given him the best
experience of his life. Granted, she and her sister had been discussing,
before they left to test her wings, whether she should literally consume
him to ensure that her improvements were not temporary, but they were
demonesses and he supposed it was to be expected, but still. She had
given him an awakening that he would never forget, and he may have
repaid her with her father's murder.

Though it had been in self-defense at the time, Xander could not help
but think, now that he was no longer in a blind panic, of all the ways
he could have resolved the situation without striking out, from the
intangible form he now had, which apparently found burning to be merely
amusing, to taking something that would temporarily allow him to
teleport away, to even simply using his power to stop or cool the
flames. After all, burning gases were fluid, and within his powers.

Perturbed as he was, Xander did not notice at first when the ladies
began to rise from the pool and dry themselves with linens. It did not
take him long, however, for when your entire surface serves as eyes, you
cannot simply cast your eyes down in despair and miss everything. He
actually saw everything from the first, it merely took him a long minute
to realize that they were preparing to leave.

Without really paying much attention, acting almost entirely on his
natural desire to be helpful and not a little out of gratitude for the
immense contribution they had unwittingly made to his store of fantasy
material, Xander began vanishing the water from the rising women, and
bathing them in soft blasts of warm, dry air.

Surprised though they were, it was quickly apparent, when their comments
drew Xander's attention to what he was doing, that they were of the
opinion that their Duke had arranged a new grooming spell for them, of
which they approved mightily. Momentarily prepared to flee when he
realized what he was doing, Xander instead continued his ministrations,
to preserve the appearance of an impersonal spell there for their
comfort, and not a perverted human male voyeur.

Glad to be of service, but also filled with chagrin at the realization
that he had allowed his prurient desires to cause him to invade their
privacy, Xander left the room and deliberately headed away from the
ladies. He was even more miserable when it occurred to him that he may
have robbed these ladies of their Duke, clearly a being they delighted
in, rather than some lecherous monster as might be supposed of a Duke in
Hell. Unlike, of course, the lecherous and voyeuristic monster that was
himself.

Xander was feeling quite low as he drifted downward, but he still paid
attention to his surroundings, and when he chanced upon a larger group
of soldiers marching with intent, he fell in to follow them.

Chances were reasonably good, he hoped, that soldiers marching with such
purpose would be heading to the outside of whatever sort of stronghold
they were in.