Thaltos narrowed his eyes at Torque. The burning jealousy of the love Torque and Asakai shared made Thaltos really, really want to hurt them both in the worst way possible, but he was an assassin, not a villain. It was not his choice to decide if his former comrades lived or died. If possible, the their bodies should be preserved...
Thaltos looked at the weapon in Torque's hand, recognizing it as the source of the warrior's power. Supposedly it contained the soul energy of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of slain warriors...
Thaltos smiled. He had an idea, but he had to move very quickly.
As the Daemon-possessed Torque charged with blinding speed at Thaltos, the Gorgon-spawn knew what he had to do. Calling upon all of the speed and strength that he had from the unholy union of God and monster that made him, Thaltos moved with the velocity of a striking serpent and the strength of Hephaestus' hammer.
Torque moved in quickly and directed a great slash down at Thaltos' center of mass that could have cleaved him in two. With such strength behind the blade, not even the Shears could withstand a direct blow...so Thaltos didn't try to block Deathscream, he instead ducked down and rammed Torque in the torso with his shoulder, lifting him up and throwing him over his back to land on his chest on the ground.
Before Torque could rise, Thaltos threw the charged bandit head he held at the back of Torque's head, where the blast impact disoriented Torque, giving him what must surely be a dizzying concussion. Before any reaction could come from the fallen man, Thaltos struck like lightning, severing Torque's hand that held Deathscream halfway down his forearm, the Shears' lethal blades cleaving the bone with ease.
Gripping Deathscream by Torque's severed wrist, Thaltos jammed one of the Shears of Atropos into the hilt of Deathscream, where the vast treasure trove of soul energy was waiting to be drunk greedily in by the Shears.
The backlash was almost too much, and only the very life-devouring nature of the Shears enabled Thaltos to survive the shockwave that ripped through the Shear embedded in Deathscream. The energy filled the Shears, and still there seemed an endless amount more. To make space for the floodgate of energy, the Shears began to give off massive amounts of lightning energy that ripped across the clearing where they stood. One left a blackened scar across Thaltos' chest, one lashed out and scored a deep burn in Asakai's shoulder as another incinerated some of the feathers on the end of one of her wings, and another swept Balthizar's feet out from under him as it impacted his shins.
Still there was too much energy. The Shears couldn't drain quickly enough to absorb the torrent of power, and the excess bled through into Thaltos, charring his skin even blacker and causing the sigil tattoos on his arms to glow a bright red. The metal arm braces, shinguards, belt, and jewelry Thaltos wore heated to a bright orange, and Thaltos screamed as he felt as if he were being cooked alive in the fires of Hades itself. Smoke rose from his skin as his very soul was boiled.
The energy traveled through him until it reached the point he had known it eventually would...the space behind his eyes where the power was gathered from the Shears for his fearsome Gorgon Stare.
Thaltos' eyes flew open from when they had been squeezed shut in agony, his pupils and irises gone now, his entire eyes a swimming and glowing mass of crimson energy. From them burst forth a highly potent Gorgon Stare beam, which rocketed towards the sky until Thaltos struggled to pull his head down to look at Torque. The energy washed over him and Torque was instantly turned to stone, but the beam didn't stop there. The ground around Torque and Thaltos became stone as well, the wave of petrification spreading out around them rapidly. In a small part of his mind not consumed by the madness of utter agony, Thaltos imagined that the ground for a mile below was being turned to Gorgon stone.
Thaltos poured his Gorgon energy into the ground, petrifying more and more landscape around him, until he managed to jerk the Shear of Atropos out of Deathscream, ending the tirade of energyflow that was tormenting his body.
He collapsed, still holding the severed wrist of Torque, and so holding Deathscream. The blade, still held by the hand of a Dragonis, was glad to cease its rage and lay quietly beside him as Thaltos' body smoked on the petrified ground. As he, though unconscious, was now the wielder of Deathscream, Asakai's wrath was quelled. Torque was no longer her master, only the smoking ruin of a man on the ground could be considered her liege, and he had given no orders to slay Balthizar. She drifted over to him to stand beside him.
Balthizar gaped in shock at the awesome power that had been unleashed and nearly killed Thaltos. Torque could be reclaimed, the act of being turned to stone by Gorgon magic was an enchantment, one that could be reversed by one who knew how, so he laid preserved upon the rock, no longer a threat, with no injury any more grave than a severed wrist and a mild concussion. When he was unstoned, he would awaken with one hell of a headache, and a bleeding stump at his wrist, but by that time hopefully Daemon will have been slain, his control over Torque lost.
Asakai was also neutralized as a threat, as even if she was a slave to Daemon, she could serve only the words of her master, the wielder of Deathscream. She would not act without an order from Thaltos or whomever else held the blade.
((Sorry if that's a little overboard...I figured it was a good way to end that conflict without outright killing one of our characters. Thaltos is badly injured, nearly dead in fact, and Torque is out of it for awhile, unless some way can be made to remove both Daemon's possession and the stone enchantment before Daemon is killed.))
