Before long had passed, at least by his reckoning of time, there was another influx of metaphysical stuff in his range, this a great deal more than little Ilyana produced, and he looked up at about the same time as she climbed down, apparently quite familiar with this new angel. Couldn’t well be anything else, what with the pearly-white wings and all. Now, maybe an average man would have felt a little put-off by all the supernatural happenings in one day, gone back to his house, and lived his life out peacefully until he died, equally peacefully but boring.
Fortunately, Zilocke had never really been an average man.
“I would be the magic man, yes,” he said with a bright grin, nodding his head more-or-less politely. The older angel seemed a lot less interesting than the little one, though, so when she challenged him to a race, he accepted immediately, catching up with her in a few easy, loping strides. “Oh, I almost have you!” he called dramatically, but the stooped in his run to catch her under the arms and hoist her before him. “But what’s this? She flies! And so quickly!” He feigned a great deal of shock and struggle, and indeed, it was ‘Ilyana’ who crossed the threshold first, and the loser obligingly set her down in a seat by the tray of biscuits and took an armchair himself, this a little further away from the sugary treats.
He presumed that the other angel would follow them in, but honestly, he wasn’t sure he had any business being here. Certainly, this was far too much of a coincidence to mean that he wasn’t intended to be here, but that wasn’t the important thing. If someone wanted him to be a certain place or a certain way, he was usually disposed not to be, just out of a certain kind of contrariness in his disposition. Still, he supposed he’d hear them out, see what they had to say. The whole ‘save the world’ pitch probably wasn’t going to work as well as they were expecting, but then, this fellow was an angel. It probably always worked on other angels.
Before anyone could properly get to speaking, though, there was a knock on the door, and it corresponded to yet more supernatural substance, this different in character from that exuded by the angels. Honestly, it was a bit cloying on his senses, and the eye with the patch over it itched uncomfortably.
So naturally, he ignored it, and his reservations, and went to open the door. Pulling it open, he blinked a few times just to make sure his uncovered eye was working properly, then smiled, the expression somewhere between pleasant and lascivious, though it could not quite be called either. “Well,” he commented lightly, “this just keeps getting more and more interesting, doesn’t it?” Apparently, there was now a demon in the company.
Stepping aside to admit the woman, who seemed to be blindfolded, he returned to his chair and waited for someone to start talking. He could do all of it himself, of course, though he didn’t really see the need as of yet, much as he did like to talk. They probably had different things to say than he would, after all, and letting them do so was only polite.
The terrain they covered on their way to the gate was thankfully mostly flat, and the most predominant emotion leaking from Liriael at the moment was relief. The less the steps of herself and the concentrating Meister were interrupted by stones or inclines, the better chance they had of maintaining their hold. Their progress was somewhat slowed for the boy, who seemed not to move with utmost haste, but upon closer inspection, she decided that he was not sluggish on purpose, but rather because he had to be.
So she walked at his pace, keeping sight on the demon leading them northward. This would simply have to be the way of it for now, and though she’d never been forced to keep a foe this powerful bound for this long, her voice did not let up, and her efforts were bolstered by those of the human who walked beside her. Sweat beaded on Liri’s brow, and fatigue slowly, insidiously, began to creep up on her, but she pushed it aside. She had fought battles longer and harder than this one before, and though she knew she could end it by simply slaying the Wraith, she had no desire to remove it from existence when it could be returned with a little more effort to the plane on which it belonged.
Eventually, Xana stopped, and this was something Liri was unspeakably grateful for. She stopped as well, standing back far enough that the demon would have plenty of room to work. She did not know what was entailed in opening a gate, as she had never seen it done before, but she didn’t want herself or Takeuchi getting in the way, inadvertently or otherwise.