The pelgrane asked in its gravelly voice, “Where are you going, alone at night, with your white skin shining so, like a beacon in the dark?”

“I head North, to the Fer Aquila mountains,” Prexil answered. He continued, “wherefore are you in this place, madame pelgrane?”

“I am hungry. I have several small mouths to feed, for my nest is full. My eggs having recently hatched. Five squawking, ravenous little man-eaters!” the pelgrane said, turning its head at an angle to measure Prexil with one beady, bulging eye. It then clacked its beak, showing rows of long, sharp teeth. “Are you a ghost?”

“No… no ghost am I, but a demonolator, flesh and blood… but not the kind of flesh which would nourish you. One nip, Lady Fiend, and you would writhe in spasms of pain. Dying, perhaps… before every of node interior tissue was affected by a radically exteriorizing provulsion before exploding into plasm. The spasms are not always the cause of mortification. Sometimes it is the provulsion and dynamic, expulsing plasmafication. It is a matter of conjecture as to which is the more painful of the two.”

The pelgrane pursed the long, fleshy lips which lined the edges of its bony beak and considered this, then pronounced, “I am not familiar with this term, ‘demonolator,'” as it hopped twice, moving a bit closer to Prexil.

At this, Prexil straightened and then relaxed, smiling a disturbingly knowing smile. He replied, “Discerning the meaning is of no great difficulty, it means ‘one who relates with demons, often by way of worship.'”

The pelgrane cocked its head to the opposite side, and with a new eye looked him up and down. “Ah, so you are a demon worshiper. I have never before eaten one of those.”

Prexil laughed and made a gracious bow at the waist, flourishing an arm.

“Are you also a wizard?” the pelgrane continued, asking, “Do you carry with you an array of many spells?”

Prexil’s smile widened, “Oh, indeed so. Would you like me to list them?”

The pelgrane hopped again, now the reach of two arms away from Prexil. It smiled. “Oh, yes. I am always impressed by such pronouncements from delicious men folk.”

“I believe I know one, in particular, of which I am most certain you have never heard.”

“Indeed?” asked the pelgrane, making another hop, getting close to being an arm’s length from Prexil.

“Most certainly so. Are you familiar with Shan’s Invocating Vortex of Exsanguination?” Prexil’s smile widened into a sinister grin that caused the pelgrane to take a half-hop back. Then Prexil pulled back his sleeves and raised both hands.

“There is no need…” started the pelgrane, but the pronouncement of Shan’s Invocating Vortex of Exsanguination is short, and Prexil was well practiced.

The pelgrane screamed a piercing, desperate cry and tried to leap into the air, beating its great wings, but already its blood was being ripped from it in great, rope-like streams, swirling into a crimson whirlwind before Prexil. His hands moved in stirring eldritch motions, and he laughed a terribly child-like, girlish laugh, full of scorn and mockery.

“But I have babies!” the pelgrane wailed as it fought to twist and fly itself free from the unseen pull.

“Do not worry over them, mistress,” Prexil advised, “Their deaths shall be quick. I will find them… and feed them to Shan!”

The sanguine vortex burst and flashed with dark, red-purple light. The pelgrane fought, flapping with a pleaful desperation to save its life, causing a stir of detritus and the great limbs to creak on nearby trees, to no avail. It was as if ropes of pulsating blood had caught it and were pulling it toward an infernal, churning, rotating storm.

The spell sucked blood and skin and then muscle, sinew, and then bone. It extruded the stuff of the pelgrane from the creature in several curving, writhing streams, into the vortex, which summoned Shan, prince of demons from 23rd dimension of the Underworld.