The crimson witch

Kaliglia and he had dispatched most of the second wave, the creatures had grown frightened and-perhaps more important and more deadly-maddened for revenge, and had gone to get comrades to finish him off, not counting on an intervening witch and her powerful magics to put a stop to their violence.
        “Manbats are not Talented,” Cheryn said, lacing her fingers, pulling her knees between her arms, and resting her delicate chin upon her knees. “They're only Mues, mutants, twisted creatures warped by the Hidden Flames of the Great Fire. Something like Kaliglia here. Oh, we had his sort of dragon-lizard before, but not one with the ability to talk. Still, he cannot use magics, and neither can the manbats.”
        “But when the manbat went to summon aid,” Jake said, “he didn't go very far. He slipped away and was out of our sight no more than a few minutes. Certainly it would take him longer than that to reach Castle Lelar and gather fighting comrades.”
        “Yes,” she agreed, shaking her head so that her long, black hair tumbled over her shoulders, shook against the sweet curve of her breasts where they bulged against her brilliant robe. “Yes, that is true enough. It raises other possibilities for answers. Chiefly, it indicates that there is a detachment of manbats somewhere within the neighborhood. What size that detachment is could be a serious question that could impede our progress. It would be wise to move forward slowly and to begin moving relatively soon before the others -if there are others, perhaps we defeated the entire detachment-discover the missing demons and set out searching for them.”
        “But why” Kaliglia said perplexedly, “would there be so many demons so far from the castle walls? They only patrol the castle and the city, not the open plains.”
        “We may never discover the answer to that-if we're lucky,” Cheryn said, shivering and drawing her arms tighter about her.
        “You're afraid of them?” Jake asked, remembering how she had ashed them in one fell swoop, leaving no traces of their fiendish corpses or of the corpses of those he had already killed.
        “I am afraid of anything that is Lelar's. He is a powerful Sorceror.”
        “He's Talented?”
        “Of course. Who but a Talented could become a king?”
        “Let's go, then.”
        “Wait,” she said, scrunching her bare toes on the hard-packed ground, digging her toenails in and making little lines about her feet.
        “What is it?”
        “What are you seeking in Lelar? You have not yet said.”
        He hesitated, his mind unsure of what he should let his tongue say. He had yet to feel he could really trust anyone here but Kell, for only Kell had done for him a thing that was helpful and protective. No. No, that was not altogether so. This witch before him had done something for him that had no harm in it and was protective in a way. And this second time, it had been of her volition; there was no question of rape. He let his eyes roam over her, devouring her fair face, her flowing midnight locks, the ample curves of her woman's body, the slender lines of her calves and ankles where they slid from beneath the robe. Finally, he nodded his head as much to himself as to her and got up, scrounging around for a stick, returning to sit next to her when he had found one of suitable length and thickness. He began drawing a line on the dust coat of the earth. “This is the world I come from,” he said, indicating the line. “Imagine everything that happens there-all the lives and places and things and events and thoughts and hopes and dreams-summed up in this line. Okay?”
        “In just a line?”
        “Yes. Look, the farther the line goes, the more modern the era it represents. Any dot on it is a year. The longer I draw it, the more ancient the beginning of it becomes. The moving point always represents the present. The undisturbed dust before the stick is the future.”
        “I understand.”
        Kaliglia grumbled, strained his neck over both of them and watched the stick with interest.
        Jake looked to the girl and the dragon, and seeing that they really did grasp his analogy, he continued. “At some point in history, this worldline split into two worldlines. As time went on, your world developed more rapidly than did mine. Your people discovered atomic energy long before my people did. The worlds had split, and yours rushed toward modernity faster