Three Years Ago
He watched the other kids run and laugh and play. Fear and anxiety held him back. Daniel wasn’t sure how to play with kids his age… and they were all so strange. He’d never seen this many different races in one place! They’d been introduced, but he couldn’t bring himself to join in.
Nearby, Lea and Nes decided what game the group would play while the others fooled around. Nesyamun was the tallest and oldest of the kids, twelve years old, making him their leader even as they orbited Lea. Layers of white gauze bandages covered his entire body, or maybe he was made of them—hard to tell from a distance.
Cassie rode piggyback on Wendi as they and Paul played with Ziege. The young Caprid woman looked like a mid-twenties, sharper, blue version of her red little sister.
Kenta also played with his younger sibling, Harumi, his abundant black hair tossing the fair-skinned eight-year-old high as she screamed in delight. Her animated hair twinned into his as he swung her in circles, the two of them haloed in a cloud of fluffy black wisps.
Rana crouched nearby, watching like Daniel, but closer by and more involved. An obese toad squatted on her head like a moist, squishy hat. Bufo, Rana’s brother.
“Persephone,” Calephor called from the flagpole, drawing Daniel’s attention as well, “Do you have a minute?”
The flag bore the Traveling Orphanage’s emblem, a ring of squares protecting several smaller circles at the center. The woven shapes represented members of the TO, each with a different colored thread. The two grey shapes were new.
“Certainly,” his mother said from beside him. She closed the book he’d been pretending to read with her, giving the leader of the Traveling Orphanage her full attention.
“I’d hate to seem an ungracious host,” the man said as he approached, “If either of you needs anything: books, movies, refreshments, let me know. What’s ours is yours.”
Calephor, most called him Cale, ranked as by far the most interesting person Daniel had ever seen. In pictures or from a distance, however, he appeared to be a normal thirty-something man with a mullet and jeans. Well-built and handsome… most of the time. A snapshot couldn’t show the constant shifting of his form.
As he approached, Daniel saw thousands of insects crawling around him, most as small as gnats and ants. They swarmed on and inside his clothes, marching up and down his arms on constant alert. Out of nowhere, Cale’s nose sprouted legs and moved half an inch. Once, his eye peaked out of his skull for a look around. Thousands of interconnected carapaces comprising his skin shuffled as he spoke. Daniel saw between them at times: Cale’s veins were worms, his bones beetles, each critter gripping the next end to end. Hairs migrated across his scalp, giving him a widow’s peak, sideburns, and bald spots by turns.
On the sleeveless t-shirt he wore, over his heart, blazed the golden symbol of a front-facing grasshopper with extended wings.
“No, thank you,” his mother said with a smile, “We are quite alright. I’ve had something to drink, and Daniel doesn’t have full control of his magic as yet.”
“I know the feeling.” Cale winked at Daniel and brushed a scrap of wood with his foot. As if they’d been working inside it for months, hundreds of termites exploded from the crumbling branch. “Mastering yourself is no easy task.”
While Daniel looked as if he hadn’t eaten a bite since birth, she appeared to be a perfectly healthy woman. Her attitude and bearing felt older than Cale, but she looked about as young. Her soft gaze and kind expression belied the steel beneath she showed when Daniel disobeyed. She wore plain brown robes with nothing over her heart. She was beautiful; she was his mother.
She often told him he’d learn to control his magic one day… that he’d be able to touch delicate things and eat delicious food when he grew up. More than just discipline, he needed to know himself—whatever that meant.
Persephone brushed aside a strand of long dark hair. “That can’t be all you came to say.”
The man laughed. “You seriously doubt I’m only trying to keep you comfortable? With how one-sided this is?” The side of his cheek opened to let a stray tooth go for a stroll.
“Our deal is completely fair.”
“Your protection—Persephone’s protection,” he emphasized his wonder at those two words and shrugged off the rest, “In exchange for, what? A few playmates? It hardly seems right.”
Persephone smiled wider and shook her head. “You’ve severely undervalued the importance of Daniel’s having friends his age. A happy childhood is priceless. This is the best environment I can provide.” His mother put a protective hand on his cheek and caressed him. He didn’t mind. She could touch him without getting hurt.
“Lady, with you at our side, we are safe. Since I started the Traveling Orphanage for Nesyamun’s sake, we’ve cowered and fled and fought for survival every step of the way. Your strength transcends the Realms. Even the worst Monsters think twice when they see you. You’re a deterrent, the best defense. They fear you.”
“Because I can kill them.”
Daniel had never seen a real fight. When his mother revealed her power, the bad guys ran away. Pride filled him at the thought.
Cale’s eyebrows rose with sudden knowledge and flew off his face, “Henry’s back.” He turned to face the group and shouted the news, “Our Quartermaster has returned!”
The adults on watch stood to welcome their comrade. A wax man in his late forties named Lumière sat on a stump. His flaming candle head burned bright despite the bright day. He held a long, four-pronged candelabra in his hands like a staff.
Nyctea, a harpy woman well into her twenties, landed nearby. She wore a fluffy blue coat that complimented her snowy owl bird half and didn’t constrain her plumage. Her heavy eyebrows and hooked nose accented comely features. She seemed nice around the kids, especially Cassie. At times, though, the cold cleanness of her white hair, razor talons, and the severity of her expression hinted at battle prowess sharpened by years of violence.
Her muted steps and every movement possessed an eerie, supernatural silence. She never made a sound or spoke a word—not even Sendings—keeping strictly to sign language. Over her heart on a sarashi wrap glittered the golden symbol of an owl with huge eyes and either olive branches or feathers around it.
Rising from her seat at the base of a tree, Gaja stepped from under the branches and straightened to her full ten feet. Though an enormous woman, she had average human proportions. Her arms and legs were heavily muscled, but not chiseled. Together with the feminine curves of her thirtyish body, they gave her a strong, matronly appearance.
Gaja was humanoid except for her blue skin, four arms, wide fanlike elephant ears, sharp white tusks, and long, prehensile trunk. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence and affection. She wore silken pants and a shirt with the golden emblem of an elephant head over her heart.
The man returning lacked any inhuman features. John Henry, a hefty man in his thirties, waved his meaty, work-hardened arms to accept his friends’ welcome. He wore overalls and a white shirt with a stylized hammer inside the outline of a castle over his heart. His face and bearing instantly ingratiated him with strangers. Daniel caught himself smiling to see the man come through the trees.
His mother once told him this man built relationships as fast as he built walls. She’d cautioned Daniel when around people with mind-affecting abilities, as their magic was often as involuntary and dangerous as his. However, she’d also said not to treat them unfairly. Dealing with such people required wisdom and wit, not reflexive judgment.
John laughed as he approached and said, “Thank civilized worlds for subcontracting—I earned enough money to buy supplies for six months!”
Lea rushed to him, arms open. “John!”
He scooped her into an embrace. “Good to see you, Sugarplum.”
“Welcome back, love,” Gaja said in a deep feminine voice as she knelt to embrace them. She patted Lea’s head with her trunk, and the girl laughed.
“My girls.” John squeezed the two as Lea affectionately bumped her head against the man’s trimmed beard.
Cale finally separated the happy three with his sense of practicality. “I guess it’s time to leave unless anyone has a reason to stay…” He gave the crowd a once over and clapped his hands when nobody objected. “Off we go!”
They rounded up the kids in a few minutes, and Daniel lost another chance to participate in their fun. He and his mother stood apart from the tight-knit group as children gravitated to their guardians. Gaja lifted Lea onto her head for a ride, and Paul fell into step behind his uncle. Nes and Cale exchanged nods as the bandage boy approached his foster father. Cassie flapped over to Nyctea, and the two of them kited along not far above the trio of sibling pairs.
“Lumière, to the nearest node,” Cale said. “Though let’s stay out of the Wilds for a while. We should enjoy some peace while it lasts.” The candle man pointed their heading, and the group left the Eastwood Forest with the edge of town barely in sight. Cale charged his ring and let fly.
The children waited for the adults to secure the gate per procedure. The ring floated to the inconspicuous spatial conjunction as if pulled by gravity while their guardians stood at the ready between it and their wards. Cale and Persephone would hold this side as the rear line until everyone else went through.
His mother had explained this to him before, as she’d told him to run and use his Portal Ring to escape in the worst case. Her warnings filtered through the back of his mind seconds before the gate opened, but everything felt ordinary.
That changed the very instant the worlds connected. A scream of unending horror and despair tore through the air, the unprovoked reaction startling everyone. The adults looked around in confusion, some even angered by the interruption, until they saw who screamed. Cassandra, the Clairaudient girl, collapsed into a fetal ball on the ground.
The girl who heard the future.
Gaja grabbed John by the waist as he morphed into a sledgehammer proportional to her size. Cale spread his arms, and hordes of ants streamed from the ground in pockets while clouds of flies buzzed forth from cracks in his skin to enter the portal.
Cale’s face paled in shock, then flushed with anger as he gritted his teeth. “A Demon.” He exploded into hundreds of thousands of gnats in a flash. In the same moment, congregating bug swarms reconstructed the insect man on the front line. “It’s right on top of us!”
No time to escape.
The Demon stepped through and closed the portal. It walked like a man, It’s skin alabaster white. Sticky black pools of crude oil looked directly at Daniel. He felt the Demon form a connection between It and himself—like a splash of warm mud that soaked through his clothes, making him unclean.
What are you doing here, with them?
There were no actual words, just a feeling he understood without uncertainty. No pleasant chime in his head alerted him to a Rosetta Stone sending. In a voice nobody else heard, the Demon spoke directly to Daniel’s heart. Terror froze him.
Nyctea attacked first with the speed and precision of a sniper round. When she beat her wings, they cut through the air without resistance. As she launched forward and transformed into a snowy owl with a fifteen-foot wingspan on the fly, not a hair on a child’s head or even a blade of grass stirred in her wake. She broke the sound barrier in a silent second with no trace, not even a puff of mist.
When Daniel’s eyes caught up to her, she was circling for another strike after having opened a terrible gash in the Demon’s shoulder with her predatory talons. It bled black ooze, as did its clothes—which were not fabric but a loose layer of skin textured to look like clothes. The Demon turned towards the children and their guardians.
The Daniel in the memory heard Rana’s voice echo, “They don’t feel pain…”
A second since the Demon entered the world and events were already occurring faster than Daniel’s conscious mind could process them, but his unconscious mind absorbed it all. He would remember everything.
Cale almost matched Nyctea’s reaction speed. The swarming insects in the area pressed in close and merged around the Demon. Thousands of bugs became one giant centipede with a foot-wide head. The magical creature constricted, digging into It’s arms and torso with dozens of dagger-sharp legs, and bit into It’s side to inject venom that sizzled like acid.
You think you’re safe with them, Daniel?
His mother activated her power.
Taking a golden badge never far from hand, she slapped the emblem of the winged scythe and broken crown over her heart. The golden filigree became embroidery, merging with and transforming the plain fabric. Her brown clothing became black, forming robes with long sleeves and a cowl that partially shadowed her face. A pair of white wings sprouted from her back to unfold around Daniel in a shimmering shower. Each feather trailed a thread of dust as their surfaces reacted with the air, giving the wings an aftereffect like thousands of speed lines.
The Demon saw his mother’s true form, It must have, but It did not run.
“They don’t know fear…”
Nyctea struck the Demon across the other shoulder at Mach 2, her size doubled to a thirty-foot wingspan, leaving an even deeper gash. Owl feathers strewn about the area distorted the air around the Demon. Each feather fell as if through a thick liquid. The Daniel in the memory realized the feathers emitted aura bubbles that, as they connected, merged and enlarged. Everything inside the aura went silent and slow as if plunged underwater.
Slamming down her enormous hands with a flick of her wrists, Ziege pushed herself ten feet into the air to get a clear line of sight on the Demon. With a moment of thought, her blue claws gained a terrible aura that pained the eye to see and the mind to recall. She swung with all her strength and, with a sound like tearing cloth, her claws ripped into and dug through the very air—horrible magic leaving visible scars of distortion behind. She hurled these air scars sailing over her allies’ heads to strike at the Demon. They cleaved through stone and soil and demonic flesh with indiscriminate slices.
You think they can protect you?
The Demon raised its arm.
At Cale’s command, all the grass in a hundred square feet disintegrated in a rolling wave of tiny bodies as the biomass transformed into thousands of millipedes that rolled into balls, droning stinkbugs, assorted flies, and scuttling cockroaches. They raised a wall of bodies that grew taller by the moment. All the tens of thousands of gnats and flies he’d manifested or previously found in the area converged behind the wall, clumping into dense clouds and fusing into thousands of grasshoppers.
Like a symphony of nails on chalkboards, a thousand pairs of serrated insect legs rubbed together in a head-splitting cacophony.
Meanwhile, Bufo the toad and Lumière worked in concert, creating walls of wax and sprays of quick-hardening foam between the Demon and It’s targets. A row of candles like great stone pillars rose from the ground, and the spaces between them filled with expanding globs of gray cement.
Before the Demon attacked, Daniel’s mother grabbed him by the collar of his robes and beat her wings. Unlike Nyctea’s, they kicked up a huge cloud of dust as Persephone’s wings rocketed them both to the very front of the group.
Two seconds had passed. During that time, Gaja hefted John the sledgehammer high. Here, in the third second, they struck the ground together. Before the front line, the soil burst open as a structure rose. An entire castle wall, complete with crenulations and parapets, emerged fully formed. The stones were rock native to the region, but the very top of the wall was dirt and grass. A rusty bicycle handle stuck partway out of a block, showing the wall had been cobbled together from materials on hand.
They can’t even protect themselves. Here, I’ll show you.
Before the two of them went behind cover, Daniel saw the Demon show them the palm of its hand. Like an evil blossom, four more hands sprouted from its wrist, palms out, to form a reverse pentagram. Each hand varied in size and build as if coming from different people. The skin of each cracked open in places but instead of bleeding black, they glowed scarlet. These lines formed five separate symbols of the sun which burned steadily brighter towards a coming climax.
In a fleeting snowstorm of feathers, Nyctea swept by in her largest form yet to deliver a last round of silencing feathers and raking claws from her sixty-foot wingspan body.
The Demon was a wreck of gaping gouges, shredded flesh, and punctures spurting oily black blood to completely cover the alabaster skin from view, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing could interrupt the incoming attack.
As the fourth second ended, Lumière finished his candles, Bufo hopped off Rana’s head, Nyctea in the distance dipped a wing for the sharpest possible turn at her speed while expanding to her maximum size, Cale pushed the limits of his ability to create and control those tiny minions, Gaja and John grew titanic, and Ziege shielded nearby children with her body.
The Daniel in the memory saw all these things and understood a measure of them. The Daniel in the moment perceived those seconds as a storm of lightning-fast arcs, explosions of molten wax, upheaved soil, and teeth-shattering impacts, incomprehensible. Persephone set him behind her and faced the Demon’s direction with her wings spread to their fullest. Even with three walls of protection, he knew his mother had put them at the fore of the group for a reason.
He understood when the flames came. Though he couldn’t see them, he sensed their progress with his second sight, heard their tidal wave roar, and felt their heat on his skin when they surged past. They filled the bubble of suppressive silence and backfired on the Demon for a hopeful instant before they ruptured the barrier and dispelled the hex. They hesitated as the grasshopper sonata attempted to disrupt the Demon’s concentration but burst forth as from a broken dam when their radiant heat roasted the insects.
They incinerated bugs, turned surrounding trees to ash and scattered the coals, tore through candles like butter, ripped apart flame retardant foam through sheer expansive force, and liquefied the castle wall in an instant. Wide enough to engulf the entire company and hot enough to turn the ground beneath them to molten rock, the oncoming river of flame might have killed them all.
Yet, when they hit Persephone, the flames turned to dust. She neutralized heat in mere inches. Her open wings sheltered him and the others in the cone of her shadow, an island among flames. The Daniel in the moment only felt awed by his mother’s power, but the Daniel in the memory understood the Demon had taken their measure when It touched their hearts—It intended not to kill them, but to break them.
“By the gods!” Cale shouted in frustration as he shielded his eyes, “Did It devour an entire company of mages? What’s a demon this powerful doing here?” Fate gave no reply. They heard only the sound of the fiery river widening, deepening, threatening to engulf them.
While Persephone didn’t burn, the pain on her face showed this may not have been an easy decision. She clenched her fist and drew it back as she closed her eyes in concentration. Persephone opened her mouth, teeth gleaming white and fierce, ready to shout as she threw her arm forward. Daniel sensed her power manifest as she punched into the heart of the blaze with a single kiai, “Aiyah!”
A spear of annihilation parted the river of fire, opening a perfectly circular window through the flames.
The unraveling streams of divided fire dispersed to reveal a slim crescent of dark flesh that escaped the diameter of her attack.
Persephone cocked her fist for a second strike and took their moment of reprieve to say, “Take the children and run. I cannot defeat this enemy.”
The remaining fifth of the Demon’s face grinned. Her strongest attack had failed.
Rana’s damning words tolled, “They can’t be killed…”
Cale acted without hesitation. He extended one hand towards the Demon and the other to the kids. Thousands of flies and crickets spontaneously generated from his fingertips and united to form larger insectoid constructs. Cale attacked the Demon with a centipede twice the size as before, now he had time to muster his strength. Several giant thrumming cicada mounts formed under their young riders, and he ordered them to take off immediately. Most adults stayed behind to hold off the Demon.
“Ziege, take Daniel,” Cale said. She nodded, then darted forward to grab the boy and run. Wendi followed at her side.
Head peeking over her claws to look back, he watched the receding battle.
If he’d dared to hope the Demon weakened, a volcanic eruption of black matter bursting from the dark crescent destroyed that hope. The Daniel in the memory saw tar-covered arms clawing their way hand over hand a thousand upon a thousand-fold into a black tower. The Daniel in the moment saw only the oozing demon flesh materializing from nowhere as a geyser shooting skyward solidified into a two-hundred-foot-tall arm.
A dripping black hand cast It’s shadow on the fleeing children.
Persephone punched three times, opening three holes in the Demon’s wrist side by side to sever the hand.
You’re so afraid, Daniel.
At the base of the arm, the same white face reformed. The face opened its mouth to vomit a black hand, and from that hand grew others, and from those grew more again and again in a stream of demonic flesh rushing towards Daniel.
Afraid I’m going to get you,
With a flicker of her wings, Persephone blocked the attack with her body. Oily demon flesh crashed into her as a breaking wave and split. Unfortunately, the splintered streams found new targets to aim for, snaking through the air to strike at Lumière and Nyctea.
Afraid they’re going to die,
While Nyctea slipped through strings of black tightening on her like a noose in an aileron roll, they tore Lumière in half immediately. He clutched his staff for balance as the wax dripping from his upper torso formed new legs.
Afraid to do anything, even move.
The severed hand fell from high above and divided into five at the base of the fingers as it descended on the escaping children. White bodies with individual faces and forms emerged from the dripping demon flesh—all with black eyes. Many of these lesser demons leaped from their falling finger, having already selected a victim. Each possessed a unique magic not even the Daniel in the memory could begin to sort.
Do you hate being afraid, Daniel? There is no fear in here, with me.
Bufo the toad swelled to rival a four-story building for height and weight. He spat gobs of slime and foam to slow descending demons. Next, his tongue flashed in a burst of speed to lasso one of the five fingers. His mouth opened wide to reveal not the throat of a frog but an endless dark expanse. He reeled in the demonic mass and swallowed it whole to no ill effect.
The four remaining demon fingers divided the Traveling Orphanage into fractions as they landed.
Meanwhile, Gaja grew to match Bufo’s height, though only a fourth of his weight. John the sledgehammer expanded with her, now the length and mass of a school bus. She wielded him the way Rana would wield Paul years hence except, when these two shared their powers, the result was greater than the sum of its parts. Gaja swung him through the air in a high arc that obliterated any demons he hit in splattering black bursts.
Candle towers rose into the sky, their bright flames burning the lesser demons that fell on them into ugly grease stains on the wax. Ziege slashed the air with her free hand in lightning succession. The tears in the sky sliced apart her targets like flying daggers.
The great owl’s full form inspired awe. With a brilliant white wingspan of a hundred feet, Nyctea became a fleeting flash over the battlefield. She tagged dozens of demons with enough silencing feathers to still them completely. She tore others to ribbons with her talons on every pass of her supersonic flight.
Daniel watched as his mother held off the main demonic body with severe blows and Cale sent more composite bugs to reinforce his comrades. His hope rose again, but the Demon sensed it.
There’s so much pain in the world.
Physical pain.
A black, lashing tentacle whipped around Persephone to strike Bufo the toad. Before he could avoid it, the demonic appendage severed his front leg. A torrent of flowing blood was cut short as the limb regenerated. Persephone’s disintegrating punch severed that writhing demon claw, but others replaced it. She couldn’t keep up with the Demon’s speed and proliferation.
Bufo the toad was struck repeatedly despite her furious defense. Multiple lethal slices and stab wounds gushed fountains of blood and healed in seconds, but he couldn’t endure this forever. The entire four stories’ worth of toad transmuted to slime interspersed with rivulets of spilled blood.
You hurt all the time, don’t you? You’re starving to death, every day. Don’t you want that to end? Isn’t that worth any price?
A white figure stood from each of the four demon fingers, two men and two women. In unison, they raised a hand that radiated bright blue from a deadly cobalt eye inscribed on their skin in black-oozing cracks. The adults attacked, but dozens of lesser demons shielded the four with their bodies—horrific amalgamations of human body parts with barely any range of motion, all hands or feet or covered in eyes and ears—their large forms blocking the way.
The pain of knowledge.
Persephone saw the four. “No!”
She desperately tried to blast them to dust, her power penetrating defenses other adults struggled to scratch.
Not fast enough. The first of the demonic mages Persephone targeted shot a bolt of lightning before vaporizing in a puff of dust. Blue lightning struck the second figure, who absorbed it into his cobalt aura—doubling the intensity.
One of the demonic digits exploded as Nyctea burst through its length in a supersonic tackle. As the pieces reformed into lesser demons and took on more disgusting forms, the feathers she’d left in her wake darted through the air to imbed the quills in black flesh.
The cumulative spark passed from the second to the third demon mage an instant before dozens of feathers skewered the white figure.
Then Gaja, in full blue elephant form—her thunderous six-legged steps almost causing an earthquake, her trunk swinging John the Sledgehammer, tusks scything left and right—crashed through the second demonic finger and barreled towards the third. Hundreds of bites, cuts, and punches rained on her from lesser demons, but nothing could stop her. Instead, her indomitable frame built speed as she ran, crushing anything in her path.
The pain of knowing everything you have simply isn’t enough.
The two remaining demon mages continued to charge those unblinking feline cobalt eyes. Before anyone could eliminate them, the third passed its power to the fourth. Every black body between Persephone and that last white figure burst like water balloons filled with dust as she pumped her fists in a frenzy.
The last demon mage, a woman with sharp features, gave a terrible grin. She wore a spotted coat and leopard headdress of ethereal material that radiated blue. In her hands, she held a tremendous cobalt aura surrounding a floating pair of predatory eyes that stared at Daniel.
Persephone clapped, releasing a primal scream of anger and fear as everything separating the two women winked out of existence.
The demon mage shot a tendril of cobalt and said, even as she disintegrated, “Bolt From the Blue.”
The combined power of four demon mages, shaped by their greatest caster, slithered between enemies and allies alike, headed straight for Daniel. Ziege hid him behind her back to take the attack with her chest. Yet, instead of being damaged, she absorbed the glowing projectile. Surprised, Ziege looked down at her body radiating cobalt light.
Daniel couldn’t see the expression on the woman’s face as she backhanded her little sister as hard as she could. Wendi flew dozens of feet before skidding to a halt on the ground. The red devil girl stood unscathed with a bewildered expression. Then Ziege threw Daniel away in a lofty arc.
Flying through the air gave Daniel a perfect view of the sky… a crystal clear, cloudless blue sky… a sky fractured by the mother of all lightning bolts from beyond the horizon.
The accusing finger of a spiteful deity descended as a waterfall of light pouring from heaven.
Daniel landed with his hearing blown, his sight blinded, and the wind knocked from his chest by the shockwave. When sight finally returned, all that remained of the young woman who’d saved him was a jagged burn-scar on the ground.
The pain of loss.
He turned to Wendi, whose mouth formed a word. For all his deafness, he wasn’t spared hearing it. The Rosetta Stone faithfully sent every note of her tortured, broken scream directly to his brain to perfectly and indelibly engrave it there. A part of him, forever.
“Ziege!”
Wendi’s red skin deepened to blue, her fists became claws, and she ripped apart anything black or white in reach with mad abandon.
Do you enjoy this pain? No? Then why resist me? There is no pain in here.
Cale somehow managed to out-shout Wendi so his last command could reach them. “RETREAT! Take who you can and run!”
Nyctea swooped to grab Cassie, the bat girl’s lone panicked flight sluggish by comparison. A thicket of black claws and tentacles blocked the way. When the owl pulled back to avoid crashing, hundreds of hand tendrils reached for her. Spinning and twisting ahead of pursuit straight up, Nyctea’s speed outdistanced all but one arm whipping out from the main Demon.
It ripped into her wing, nails dragging paths of red through feathers. She shrank to her humanoid size to slip the Demon’s clinging grasp. Nyctea stalled at the top of her arc and began the long fall to a tangle of writhing black flesh below.
A pink tongue lashed out to grab her. Bufo the toad, the size of a truck, reeled her in and hopped away—leaving the battle behind.
Gaja shifted to a humanoid fifty-foot-tall form, swung John the sledgehammer with all four arms, and shouted with two voices from one throat, “We can beat this!” as she slammed the hammerhead into the ground.
The soil below each of the thousand lesser demons around her split to deposit them in shallow pits. Rock and dirt became brick-and-mortar traps. As the lesser demons fell, they triggered crushing walls that squished those unable to scramble out in time.
How much pain will they have to suffer until you’re satisfied? This is your fault, Daniel. You are the reason I came here. Give in, and it all ends.
“Help!” Lea called as she fled on foot from a pursuing lesser demon, her cicada mount nowhere in sight.
“Lea?” said Gaja. Then John spoke through the same lips as he yanked and pulled on Gaja’s arm to get her moving, “We have to help her!”
As they broke into a run, demon tentacles hit Gaja like cannonballs, whipped her skin, and raked at her with claws. Though each attack dealt minor damage, her tough blue skin allowed her to bowl straight through everything in her way. Gaja smacked aside a lesser demon with an oversized hand, then offered to Lea.
The girl turned to face them, laughing, and they recoiled. Lea’s eyes were black as tar.
Across the battlefield, white-skinned simulacrums of the children rose, cackling, from among the demons. Gaja’s face showed devastation.
The pain of hopelessness.
Daniel saw pale copies of himself mixed in. He opened his mouth to let everyone know where he was, but they beat him to it.
“Here I am!” “It’s really me!” “Help!”
Adults and children alike were scattered and confused. A forest of lesser demons waving tentacles clouded vision and clogged ears with noise.
“They’re counterfeits!” Lumière said, “The real kids are alive! I know where they are!” A demon whip promptly split him in half, but he reformed from the wax—unharmed. “I will not let you have them! Demon, you can’t kill me that easily, nor can you take my soul!”
“Don’t need to,” the Demon said in a hundred languages, from a hundred mouths in unison, “I don’t need you.” A tentacle wrapped around Lumière’s torso, swung him around, then flung him miles away from the battlefield.
“I am Moloch. This battle was over before it began.”
That name reverberated through Daniel as if he’d been punched in the soul.
No one will save you.
:Cale, I’ve changed my mind.: His mother broadcast to the group, :I’m going to destroy this demon.: The unspoken second half of that sentence rang in Daniel’s heart with fear and certainty. ‘Even if it kills me.’ :All I ask is you take my son to safety.:
:One of my insects found him, I’m on it.:
Cale appeared before Daniel in a split second, formed from the multiplied body of a passing gnat. He started making a carriage of insects thick enough to move Daniel.
Just then, Cale turned as if he’d been stabbed in the back. The Daniel in the memory realized Moloch must have attracted his attention—Is the Demon talking to everyone? The Daniel in the moment followed the man’s eyes to see Nes—the real Nesyamun—fighting off a lesser demon alongside Kenta and Harumi.
They were losing.
Cale didn’t meet Daniel’s eyes as he spoke into the air, “I’m sorry.”
The pain of betrayal.
Cale dissipated and reappeared at the side of his ward. His arm became a huge centipede that bit off the head of a lesser demon clutching a terrified Nes. In seconds, Cale constructed a cicada mount large enough for four riders. Defending it consumed all his concentration.
In a voice tinged with rage but as sincere as she could make it, Persephone let everyone know, :I forgive you, Calephor.:
Entangled in ropes of black demon flesh, Kenta sank into the dark masses along with the sister he held above the muck with his hair. “Take her!” he shouted to Nes.
Cloth ribbons caught the little girl as Cale wrapped his centipede arm around Nes’ waist and leaped onto the cicada.
“No!” Harumi said, “I’m not leaving him!” Her hair tips knotted to the last strands of her brother’s but ripped as Cale pulled her and Nes to safety. The cicada lifted above the battlefield and sped away as Kenta was swallowed.
Blows rained harder on Gaja than ever before, driving back even the mighty elephant woman.
:What about Lea?!: John’s strained voice rang in Daniel’s head.
“We can’t get caught in the blast,” Gaja said as she turned away and pulled him along. The sledgehammer dragged behind, powerless against the strength of her charging elephant form.
Bufo, Nyctea, Cale, Nes, Harumi, Gaja, and John receded into the distance. The Daniel in the moment had no idea where the other kids were, but the Daniel in the memory knew they hadn’t escaped.
The pain of despair.
The white form of Moloch emerged from of the surrounding black flesh before Daniel.
Join me and you will have power beyond your imagination, true immortality, and all the worlds will be your playthings.
“Daniel, run!”
He couldn’t run, too scared to move. The voices inside wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t think.
Do you honestly believe you’ll ever be able to master that power yourself? You’ll never hold a flower in your hands. Destruction is your nature. The world is dust in your hands and ash in your mouth. We’ll make a perfect team.
The Demon’s top half blew away in a cloud of dust, and his mother landed at his side, wings spread over him. Persephone, the last adult standing.
The white figure of the Demon regrew to oppose her.
Moloch shook his head. “I know what you’re trying, but I won’t let you complete the summoning.”
Oily rivers of demon blood infested the land. Thousands of hands rose, congregated, grasped each other, and built a fractal tower of hands in the shape of a hand. The demonic fist came down.
Persephone’s punches drilled perfect holes in it, over and over, but the majority of the mass slammed home. Nothing but dust touched them—the wings on her back dissolved everything.
Yet Moloch threw everything at her in a relentless assault: whips of arms, flails of nails, hungry mouths, compounded body parts, and bouts of magic Daniel didn’t recognize. Lesser demons sacrificed themselves with no sense of self-preservation.
His mother’s voice rang quietly in his mind, :Daniel, I’m so sorry I won’t be there to see you grow up. I know you’ll become a fine man.: She flashed him one last smile, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. :Goodbye. I’ll always love you.:
The endless barrage wore away her defenses. Defeat in the face of this onslaught seemed inevitable. Until, finally, a lance of black fingernails broke through and pierced her chest. Persephone shuddered with pain, and her struggles ceased.
And so she falls. And so they all fall.
“Idiot,” Persephone spat flecks of blood at Moloch.
The demonic weapon that pierced her became ash. Her blood dripped from the open wound.
“This is the summoning.” Persephone stood tall. “From this broken body, I wreak Ruin.”
Her clothes transfigured to the time-worn rags of a great ruler’s robe. Her body went rigid as death and lifted into the air like a puppet. The Demon continued It’s attack, but she annihilated everything that touched her.
Power and menace rolled off her in waves, threatening to destroy everything—even Daniel. Then she spoke in her own voice, “Perses, you hoary king, you can use every last drop of my life-force to lay waste, but don’t you dare touch my son.” Her frozen posture melted as she regained control of her body, “No, I won’t allow you to harm one living thing!”
An expanding sphere of destruction cut an empty crater beneath her. Nothing inorganic remained inside. The ground gave way beneath Daniel, and he fell away from her on the descending floor of the crater unharmed. Demon flesh evaporated like mist under the heat of the sun.
The crater grew hundreds of feet wide, then thousands of feet in diameter. Along with Daniel fell grass and grubs bereft of soil but undamaged by the aura of Ruin. The nearby city disappeared in passing, its naked inhabitants landing light on the crater floor.
Only one thing without breath remained in the sphere of destruction, the very core of the Demon. Moloch tried to fight, to produce It’s terrible weapons, but they were mere delays. The core shifted and squirmed in vain to produce black mass faster than It’s obliteration.
Yet the Demon would find escape even in It’s destruction. Moloch inverted himself, preparing to funnel his essence away to a timeless expanse from which he could return another day.
“Where do you think you’re going, you spiteful ghost? You want to leave here unscathed after what you’ve done today? You think you can run from the inevitable? Do you know what I am?” She took another agonizing gasp, but she was beyond pain. “With my dying breath, I bring forth Death.”
Persephone reached out her hand to grasp the handle of a materializing scythe.
“Too long have you haunted the world of the living, too long have you spread your filth across the land, too long have you corrupted the hearts of the innocent. To one who will not die, if you will not go quietly, I shall bring the end to you—for I am Death’s Messenger.”
She lifted the scythe with both hands.
“Et revertatur pulvis in Terram suam unde erat et spiritus redeat ad Deum qui dedit illum!”
The dark scythe glowed, and, with one beat of her wings, Persephone bisected the demonic core.
No, that was the Daniel in the moment’s first impression. The Daniel in the memory realized Persephone actually cut Moloch’s connection to the physical world. Without that link, the Demon’s attempt at escape became its self-imposed exile.
As the remaining demon flesh evaporated to dust, Moloch lashed out to the last.
She is wrong. I may not return, but this is not my End. I came to claim the new generation, and I have not failed. My Will shall persist in the hearts of all I touched, and you, Daniel, are no exception.
Remember this, your mother’s death is your fault. Ziege’s death as well. You killed them. Nothing good can come from either of us—we destroy the beautiful things of the world. It is our nature.
This is my truth. May it poison your every thought.
There is no victory for the living. Only pain.
And then Moloch was gone from the universe.
And then she was gone too.
The Daniel in the moment fell into darkness and guilt and oblivion, forgetting everything to escape Moloch’s truth.
The Daniel in the memory watched as the scene faded and took a moment to think. The dreadful weight of those words came upon him again, but where once he had abandoned these memories, now he faced them.
You’re wrong Moloch.
The Demon’s words, which had sounded so sensible and true then, he recognized for insanity now. I didn’t kill them; you did. I saved six lives today. I helped people by using my powers, and nobody died. I remember everything Mary taught me, and I’ll never forget. I can keep trying to be as good and kind and strong as my mother. There is nothing of you in me! I won’t let your lies slow me down!
An invisible pressure eased, if slightly. The intolerable became bearable. Despite Daniel's relief, as he returned to reality in the present, his loss—two mothers in one night—brought him to tears.
Three Years Ago
He watched the other kids run and laugh and play. Fear and anxiety held him back. Daniel wasn’t sure how to play with kids his age… and they were all so strange. He’d never seen this many different races in one place! They’d been introduced, but he couldn’t bring himself to join in.
Nearby, Lea and Nes decided what game the group would play while the others fooled around. Nesyamun was the tallest and oldest of the kids, twelve years old, making him their leader even as they orbited Lea. Layers of white gauze bandages covered his entire body, or maybe he was made of them—hard to tell from a distance.
Cassie rode piggyback on Wendi as they and Paul played with Ziege. The young Caprid woman looked like a mid-twenties, sharper, blue version of her red little sister.
Kenta also played with his younger sibling, Harumi, his abundant black hair tossing the fair-skinned eight-year-old high as she screamed in delight. Her animated hair twinned into his as he swung her in circles, the two of them haloed in a cloud of fluffy black wisps.
Rana crouched nearby, watching like Daniel, but closer by and more involved. An obese toad squatted on her head like a moist, squishy hat. Bufo, Rana’s brother.
“Persephone,” Calephor called from the flagpole, drawing Daniel’s attention as well, “Do you have a minute?”
The flag bore the Traveling Orphanage’s emblem, a ring of squares protecting several smaller circles at the center. The woven shapes represented members of the TO, each with a different colored thread. The two grey shapes were new.
“Certainly,” his mother said from beside him. She closed the book he’d been pretending to read with her, giving the leader of the Traveling Orphanage her full attention.
“I’d hate to seem an ungracious host,” the man said as he approached, “If either of you needs anything: books, movies, refreshments, let me know. What’s ours is yours.”
Calephor, most called him Cale, ranked as by far the most interesting person Daniel had ever seen. In pictures or from a distance, however, he appeared to be a normal thirty-something man with a mullet and jeans. Well-built and handsome… most of the time. A snapshot couldn’t show the constant shifting of his form.
As he approached, Daniel saw thousands of insects crawling around him, most as small as gnats and ants. They swarmed on and inside his clothes, marching up and down his arms on constant alert. Out of nowhere, Cale’s nose sprouted legs and moved half an inch. Once, his eye peaked out of his skull for a look around. Thousands of interconnected carapaces comprising his skin shuffled as he spoke. Daniel saw between them at times: Cale’s veins were worms, his bones beetles, each critter gripping the next end to end. Hairs migrated across his scalp, giving him a widow’s peak, sideburns, and bald spots by turns.
On the sleeveless t-shirt he wore, over his heart, blazed the golden symbol of a front-facing grasshopper with extended wings.
“No, thank you,” his mother said with a smile, “We are quite alright. I’ve had something to drink, and Daniel doesn’t have full control of his magic as yet.”
“I know the feeling.” Cale winked at Daniel and brushed a scrap of wood with his foot. As if they’d been working inside it for months, hundreds of termites exploded from the crumbling branch. “Mastering yourself is no easy task.”
While Daniel looked as if he hadn’t eaten a bite since birth, she appeared to be a perfectly healthy woman. Her attitude and bearing felt older than Cale, but she looked about as young. Her soft gaze and kind expression belied the steel beneath she showed when Daniel disobeyed. She wore plain brown robes with nothing over her heart. She was beautiful; she was his mother.
She often told him he’d learn to control his magic one day… that he’d be able to touch delicate things and eat delicious food when he grew up. More than just discipline, he needed to know himself—whatever that meant.
Persephone brushed aside a strand of long dark hair. “That can’t be all you came to say.”
The man laughed. “You seriously doubt I’m only trying to keep you comfortable? With how one-sided this is?” The side of his cheek opened to let a stray tooth go for a stroll.
“Our deal is completely fair.”
“Your protection—Persephone’s protection,” he emphasized his wonder at those two words and shrugged off the rest, “In exchange for, what? A few playmates? It hardly seems right.”
Persephone smiled wider and shook her head. “You’ve severely undervalued the importance of Daniel’s having friends his age. A happy childhood is priceless. This is the best environment I can provide.” His mother put a protective hand on his cheek and caressed him. He didn’t mind. She could touch him without getting hurt.
“Lady, with you at our side, we are safe. Since I started the Traveling Orphanage for Nesyamun’s sake, we’ve cowered and fled and fought for survival every step of the way. Your strength transcends the Realms. Even the worst Monsters think twice when they see you. You’re a deterrent, the best defense. They fear you.”
“Because I can kill them.”
Daniel had never seen a real fight. When his mother revealed her power, the bad guys ran away. Pride filled him at the thought.
Cale’s eyebrows rose with sudden knowledge and flew off his face, “Henry’s back.” He turned to face the group and shouted the news, “Our Quartermaster has returned!”
The adults on watch stood to welcome their comrade. A wax man in his late forties named Lumière sat on a stump. His flaming candle head burned bright despite the bright day. He held a long, four-pronged candelabra in his hands like a staff.
Nyctea, a harpy woman well into her twenties, landed nearby. She wore a fluffy blue coat that complimented her snowy owl bird half and didn’t constrain her plumage. Her heavy eyebrows and hooked nose accented comely features. She seemed nice around the kids, especially Cassie. At times, though, the cold cleanness of her white hair, razor talons, and the severity of her expression hinted at battle prowess sharpened by years of violence.
Her muted steps and every movement possessed an eerie, supernatural silence. She never made a sound or spoke a word—not even Sendings—keeping strictly to sign language. Over her heart on a sarashi wrap glittered the golden symbol of an owl with huge eyes and either olive branches or feathers around it.
Rising from her seat at the base of a tree, Gaja stepped from under the branches and straightened to her full ten feet. Though an enormous woman, she had average human proportions. Her arms and legs were heavily muscled, but not chiseled. Together with the feminine curves of her thirtyish body, they gave her a strong, matronly appearance.
Gaja was humanoid except for her blue skin, four arms, wide fanlike elephant ears, sharp white tusks, and long, prehensile trunk. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence and affection. She wore silken pants and a shirt with the golden emblem of an elephant head over her heart.
The man returning lacked any inhuman features. John Henry, a hefty man in his thirties, waved his meaty, work-hardened arms to accept his friends’ welcome. He wore overalls and a white shirt with a stylized hammer inside the outline of a castle over his heart. His face and bearing instantly ingratiated him with strangers. Daniel caught himself smiling to see the man come through the trees.
His mother once told him this man built relationships as fast as he built walls. She’d cautioned Daniel when around people with mind-affecting abilities, as their magic was often as involuntary and dangerous as his. However, she’d also said not to treat them unfairly. Dealing with such people required wisdom and wit, not reflexive judgment.
John laughed as he approached and said, “Thank civilized worlds for subcontracting—I earned enough money to buy supplies for six months!”
Lea rushed to him, arms open. “John!”
He scooped her into an embrace. “Good to see you, Sugarplum.”
“Welcome back, love,” Gaja said in a deep feminine voice as she knelt to embrace them. She patted Lea’s head with her trunk, and the girl laughed.
“My girls.” John squeezed the two as Lea affectionately bumped her head against the man’s trimmed beard.
Cale finally separated the happy three with his sense of practicality. “I guess it’s time to leave unless anyone has a reason to stay…” He gave the crowd a once over and clapped his hands when nobody objected. “Off we go!”
They rounded up the kids in a few minutes, and Daniel lost another chance to participate in their fun. He and his mother stood apart from the tight-knit group as children gravitated to their guardians. Gaja lifted Lea onto her head for a ride, and Paul fell into step behind his uncle. Nes and Cale exchanged nods as the bandage boy approached his foster father. Cassie flapped over to Nyctea, and the two of them kited along not far above the trio of sibling pairs.
“Lumière, to the nearest node,” Cale said. “Though let’s stay out of the Wilds for a while. We should enjoy some peace while it lasts.” The candle man pointed their heading, and the group left the Eastwood Forest with the edge of town barely in sight. Cale charged his ring and let fly.
The children waited for the adults to secure the gate per procedure. The ring floated to the inconspicuous spatial conjunction as if pulled by gravity while their guardians stood at the ready between it and their wards. Cale and Persephone would hold this side as the rear line until everyone else went through.
His mother had explained this to him before, as she’d told him to run and use his Portal Ring to escape in the worst case. Her warnings filtered through the back of his mind seconds before the gate opened, but everything felt ordinary.
That changed the very instant the worlds connected. A scream of unending horror and despair tore through the air, the unprovoked reaction startling everyone. The adults looked around in confusion, some even angered by the interruption, until they saw who screamed. Cassandra, the Clairaudient girl, collapsed into a fetal ball on the ground.
The girl who heard the future.
Gaja grabbed John by the waist as he morphed into a sledgehammer proportional to her size. Cale spread his arms, and hordes of ants streamed from the ground in pockets while clouds of flies buzzed forth from cracks in his skin to enter the portal.
Cale’s face paled in shock, then flushed with anger as he gritted his teeth. “A Demon.” He exploded into hundreds of thousands of gnats in a flash. In the same moment, congregating bug swarms reconstructed the insect man on the front line. “It’s right on top of us!”
No time to escape.
The Demon stepped through and closed the portal. It walked like a man, It’s skin alabaster white. Sticky black pools of crude oil looked directly at Daniel. He felt the Demon form a connection between It and himself—like a splash of warm mud that soaked through his clothes, making him unclean.
What are you doing here, with them?
There were no actual words, just a feeling he understood without uncertainty. No pleasant chime in his head alerted him to a Rosetta Stone sending. In a voice nobody else heard, the Demon spoke directly to Daniel’s heart. Terror froze him.
Nyctea attacked first with the speed and precision of a sniper round. When she beat her wings, they cut through the air without resistance. As she launched forward and transformed into a snowy owl with a fifteen-foot wingspan on the fly, not a hair on a child’s head or even a blade of grass stirred in her wake. She broke the sound barrier in a silent second with no trace, not even a puff of mist.
When Daniel’s eyes caught up to her, she was circling for another strike after having opened a terrible gash in the Demon’s shoulder with her predatory talons. It bled black ooze, as did its clothes—which were not fabric but a loose layer of skin textured to look like clothes. The Demon turned towards the children and their guardians.
The Daniel in the memory heard Rana’s voice echo, “They don’t feel pain…”
A second since the Demon entered the world and events were already occurring faster than Daniel’s conscious mind could process them, but his unconscious mind absorbed it all. He would remember everything.
Cale almost matched Nyctea’s reaction speed. The swarming insects in the area pressed in close and merged around the Demon. Thousands of bugs became one giant centipede with a foot-wide head. The magical creature constricted, digging into It’s arms and torso with dozens of dagger-sharp legs, and bit into It’s side to inject venom that sizzled like acid.
You think you’re safe with them, Daniel?
His mother activated her power.
Taking a golden badge never far from hand, she slapped the emblem of the winged scythe and broken crown over her heart. The golden filigree became embroidery, merging with and transforming the plain fabric. Her brown clothing became black, forming robes with long sleeves and a cowl that partially shadowed her face. A pair of white wings sprouted from her back to unfold around Daniel in a shimmering shower. Each feather trailed a thread of dust as their surfaces reacted with the air, giving the wings an aftereffect like thousands of speed lines.
The Demon saw his mother’s true form, It must have, but It did not run.
“They don’t know fear…”
Nyctea struck the Demon across the other shoulder at Mach 2, her size doubled to a thirty-foot wingspan, leaving an even deeper gash. Owl feathers strewn about the area distorted the air around the Demon. Each feather fell as if through a thick liquid. The Daniel in the memory realized the feathers emitted aura bubbles that, as they connected, merged and enlarged. Everything inside the aura went silent and slow as if plunged underwater.
Slamming down her enormous hands with a flick of her wrists, Ziege pushed herself ten feet into the air to get a clear line of sight on the Demon. With a moment of thought, her blue claws gained a terrible aura that pained the eye to see and the mind to recall. She swung with all her strength and, with a sound like tearing cloth, her claws ripped into and dug through the very air—horrible magic leaving visible scars of distortion behind. She hurled these air scars sailing over her allies’ heads to strike at the Demon. They cleaved through stone and soil and demonic flesh with indiscriminate slices.
You think they can protect you?
The Demon raised its arm.
At Cale’s command, all the grass in a hundred square feet disintegrated in a rolling wave of tiny bodies as the biomass transformed into thousands of millipedes that rolled into balls, droning stinkbugs, assorted flies, and scuttling cockroaches. They raised a wall of bodies that grew taller by the moment. All the tens of thousands of gnats and flies he’d manifested or previously found in the area converged behind the wall, clumping into dense clouds and fusing into thousands of grasshoppers.
Like a symphony of nails on chalkboards, a thousand pairs of serrated insect legs rubbed together in a head-splitting cacophony.
Meanwhile, Bufo the toad and Lumière worked in concert, creating walls of wax and sprays of quick-hardening foam between the Demon and It’s targets. A row of candles like great stone pillars rose from the ground, and the spaces between them filled with expanding globs of gray cement.
Before the Demon attacked, Daniel’s mother grabbed him by the collar of his robes and beat her wings. Unlike Nyctea’s, they kicked up a huge cloud of dust as Persephone’s wings rocketed them both to the very front of the group.
Two seconds had passed. During that time, Gaja hefted John the sledgehammer high. Here, in the third second, they struck the ground together. Before the front line, the soil burst open as a structure rose. An entire castle wall, complete with crenulations and parapets, emerged fully formed. The stones were rock native to the region, but the very top of the wall was dirt and grass. A rusty bicycle handle stuck partway out of a block, showing the wall had been cobbled together from materials on hand.
They can’t even protect themselves. Here, I’ll show you.
Before the two of them went behind cover, Daniel saw the Demon show them the palm of its hand. Like an evil blossom, four more hands sprouted from its wrist, palms out, to form a reverse pentagram. Each hand varied in size and build as if coming from different people. The skin of each cracked open in places but instead of bleeding black, they glowed scarlet. These lines formed five separate symbols of the sun which burned steadily brighter towards a coming climax.
In a fleeting snowstorm of feathers, Nyctea swept by in her largest form yet to deliver a last round of silencing feathers and raking claws from her sixty-foot wingspan body.
The Demon was a wreck of gaping gouges, shredded flesh, and punctures spurting oily black blood to completely cover the alabaster skin from view, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing could interrupt the incoming attack.
As the fourth second ended, Lumière finished his candles, Bufo hopped off Rana’s head, Nyctea in the distance dipped a wing for the sharpest possible turn at her speed while expanding to her maximum size, Cale pushed the limits of his ability to create and control those tiny minions, Gaja and John grew titanic, and Ziege shielded nearby children with her body.
The Daniel in the memory saw all these things and understood a measure of them. The Daniel in the moment perceived those seconds as a storm of lightning-fast arcs, explosions of molten wax, upheaved soil, and teeth-shattering impacts, incomprehensible. Persephone set him behind her and faced the Demon’s direction with her wings spread to their fullest. Even with three walls of protection, he knew his mother had put them at the fore of the group for a reason.
He understood when the flames came. Though he couldn’t see them, he sensed their progress with his second sight, heard their tidal wave roar, and felt their heat on his skin when they surged past. They filled the bubble of suppressive silence and backfired on the Demon for a hopeful instant before they ruptured the barrier and dispelled the hex. They hesitated as the grasshopper sonata attempted to disrupt the Demon’s concentration but burst forth as from a broken dam when their radiant heat roasted the insects.
They incinerated bugs, turned surrounding trees to ash and scattered the coals, tore through candles like butter, ripped apart flame retardant foam through sheer expansive force, and liquefied the castle wall in an instant. Wide enough to engulf the entire company and hot enough to turn the ground beneath them to molten rock, the oncoming river of flame might have killed them all.
Yet, when they hit Persephone, the flames turned to dust. She neutralized heat in mere inches. Her open wings sheltered him and the others in the cone of her shadow, an island among flames. The Daniel in the moment only felt awed by his mother’s power, but the Daniel in the memory understood the Demon had taken their measure when It touched their hearts—It intended not to kill them, but to break them.
“By the gods!” Cale shouted in frustration as he shielded his eyes, “Did It devour an entire company of mages? What’s a demon this powerful doing here?” Fate gave no reply. They heard only the sound of the fiery river widening, deepening, threatening to engulf them.
While Persephone didn’t burn, the pain on her face showed this may not have been an easy decision. She clenched her fist and drew it back as she closed her eyes in concentration. Persephone opened her mouth, teeth gleaming white and fierce, ready to shout as she threw her arm forward. Daniel sensed her power manifest as she punched into the heart of the blaze with a single kiai, “Aiyah!”
A spear of annihilation parted the river of fire, opening a perfectly circular window through the flames.
The unraveling streams of divided fire dispersed to reveal a slim crescent of dark flesh that escaped the diameter of her attack.
Persephone cocked her fist for a second strike and took their moment of reprieve to say, “Take the children and run. I cannot defeat this enemy.”
The remaining fifth of the Demon’s face grinned. Her strongest attack had failed.
Rana’s damning words tolled, “They can’t be killed…”
Cale acted without hesitation. He extended one hand towards the Demon and the other to the kids. Thousands of flies and crickets spontaneously generated from his fingertips and united to form larger insectoid constructs. Cale attacked the Demon with a centipede twice the size as before, now he had time to muster his strength. Several giant thrumming cicada mounts formed under their young riders, and he ordered them to take off immediately. Most adults stayed behind to hold off the Demon.
“Ziege, take Daniel,” Cale said. She nodded, then darted forward to grab the boy and run. Wendi followed at her side.
Head peeking over her claws to look back, he watched the receding battle.
If he’d dared to hope the Demon weakened, a volcanic eruption of black matter bursting from the dark crescent destroyed that hope. The Daniel in the memory saw tar-covered arms clawing their way hand over hand a thousand upon a thousand-fold into a black tower. The Daniel in the moment saw only the oozing demon flesh materializing from nowhere as a geyser shooting skyward solidified into a two-hundred-foot-tall arm.
A dripping black hand cast It’s shadow on the fleeing children.
Persephone punched three times, opening three holes in the Demon’s wrist side by side to sever the hand.
You’re so afraid, Daniel.
At the base of the arm, the same white face reformed. The face opened its mouth to vomit a black hand, and from that hand grew others, and from those grew more again and again in a stream of demonic flesh rushing towards Daniel.
Afraid I’m going to get you,
With a flicker of her wings, Persephone blocked the attack with her body. Oily demon flesh crashed into her as a breaking wave and split. Unfortunately, the splintered streams found new targets to aim for, snaking through the air to strike at Lumière and Nyctea.
Afraid they’re going to die,
While Nyctea slipped through strings of black tightening on her like a noose in an aileron roll, they tore Lumière in half immediately. He clutched his staff for balance as the wax dripping from his upper torso formed new legs.
Afraid to do anything, even move.
The severed hand fell from high above and divided into five at the base of the fingers as it descended on the escaping children. White bodies with individual faces and forms emerged from the dripping demon flesh—all with black eyes. Many of these lesser demons leaped from their falling finger, having already selected a victim. Each possessed a unique magic not even the Daniel in the memory could begin to sort.
Do you hate being afraid, Daniel? There is no fear in here, with me.
Bufo the toad swelled to rival a four-story building for height and weight. He spat gobs of slime and foam to slow descending demons. Next, his tongue flashed in a burst of speed to lasso one of the five fingers. His mouth opened wide to reveal not the throat of a frog but an endless dark expanse. He reeled in the demonic mass and swallowed it whole to no ill effect.
The four remaining demon fingers divided the Traveling Orphanage into fractions as they landed.
Meanwhile, Gaja grew to match Bufo’s height, though only a fourth of his weight. John the sledgehammer expanded with her, now the length and mass of a school bus. She wielded him the way Rana would wield Paul years hence except, when these two shared their powers, the result was greater than the sum of its parts. Gaja swung him through the air in a high arc that obliterated any demons he hit in splattering black bursts.
Candle towers rose into the sky, their bright flames burning the lesser demons that fell on them into ugly grease stains on the wax. Ziege slashed the air with her free hand in lightning succession. The tears in the sky sliced apart her targets like flying daggers.
The great owl’s full form inspired awe. With a brilliant white wingspan of a hundred feet, Nyctea became a fleeting flash over the battlefield. She tagged dozens of demons with enough silencing feathers to still them completely. She tore others to ribbons with her talons on every pass of her supersonic flight.
Daniel watched as his mother held off the main demonic body with severe blows and Cale sent more composite bugs to reinforce his comrades. His hope rose again, but the Demon sensed it.
There’s so much pain in the world.
Physical pain.
A black, lashing tentacle whipped around Persephone to strike Bufo the toad. Before he could avoid it, the demonic appendage severed his front leg. A torrent of flowing blood was cut short as the limb regenerated. Persephone’s disintegrating punch severed that writhing demon claw, but others replaced it. She couldn’t keep up with the Demon’s speed and proliferation.
Bufo the toad was struck repeatedly despite her furious defense. Multiple lethal slices and stab wounds gushed fountains of blood and healed in seconds, but he couldn’t endure this forever. The entire four stories’ worth of toad transmuted to slime interspersed with rivulets of spilled blood.
You hurt all the time, don’t you? You’re starving to death, every day. Don’t you want that to end? Isn’t that worth any price?
A white figure stood from each of the four demon fingers, two men and two women. In unison, they raised a hand that radiated bright blue from a deadly cobalt eye inscribed on their skin in black-oozing cracks. The adults attacked, but dozens of lesser demons shielded the four with their bodies—horrific amalgamations of human body parts with barely any range of motion, all hands or feet or covered in eyes and ears—their large forms blocking the way.
The pain of knowledge.
Persephone saw the four. “No!”
She desperately tried to blast them to dust, her power penetrating defenses other adults struggled to scratch.
Not fast enough. The first of the demonic mages Persephone targeted shot a bolt of lightning before vaporizing in a puff of dust. Blue lightning struck the second figure, who absorbed it into his cobalt aura—doubling the intensity.
One of the demonic digits exploded as Nyctea burst through its length in a supersonic tackle. As the pieces reformed into lesser demons and took on more disgusting forms, the feathers she’d left in her wake darted through the air to imbed the quills in black flesh.
The cumulative spark passed from the second to the third demon mage an instant before dozens of feathers skewered the white figure.
Then Gaja, in full blue elephant form—her thunderous six-legged steps almost causing an earthquake, her trunk swinging John the Sledgehammer, tusks scything left and right—crashed through the second demonic finger and barreled towards the third. Hundreds of bites, cuts, and punches rained on her from lesser demons, but nothing could stop her. Instead, her indomitable frame built speed as she ran, crushing anything in her path.
The pain of knowing everything you have simply isn’t enough.
The two remaining demon mages continued to charge those unblinking feline cobalt eyes. Before anyone could eliminate them, the third passed its power to the fourth. Every black body between Persephone and that last white figure burst like water balloons filled with dust as she pumped her fists in a frenzy.
The last demon mage, a woman with sharp features, gave a terrible grin. She wore a spotted coat and leopard headdress of ethereal material that radiated blue. In her hands, she held a tremendous cobalt aura surrounding a floating pair of predatory eyes that stared at Daniel.
Persephone clapped, releasing a primal scream of anger and fear as everything separating the two women winked out of existence.
The demon mage shot a tendril of cobalt and said, even as she disintegrated, “Bolt From the Blue.”
The combined power of four demon mages, shaped by their greatest caster, slithered between enemies and allies alike, headed straight for Daniel. Ziege hid him behind her back to take the attack with her chest. Yet, instead of being damaged, she absorbed the glowing projectile. Surprised, Ziege looked down at her body radiating cobalt light.
Daniel couldn’t see the expression on the woman’s face as she backhanded her little sister as hard as she could. Wendi flew dozens of feet before skidding to a halt on the ground. The red devil girl stood unscathed with a bewildered expression. Then Ziege threw Daniel away in a lofty arc.
Flying through the air gave Daniel a perfect view of the sky… a crystal clear, cloudless blue sky… a sky fractured by the mother of all lightning bolts from beyond the horizon.
The accusing finger of a spiteful deity descended as a waterfall of light pouring from heaven.
Daniel landed with his hearing blown, his sight blinded, and the wind knocked from his chest by the shockwave. When sight finally returned, all that remained of the young woman who’d saved him was a jagged burn-scar on the ground.
The pain of loss.
He turned to Wendi, whose mouth formed a word. For all his deafness, he wasn’t spared hearing it. The Rosetta Stone faithfully sent every note of her tortured, broken scream directly to his brain to perfectly and indelibly engrave it there. A part of him, forever.
“Ziege!”
Wendi’s red skin deepened to blue, her fists became claws, and she ripped apart anything black or white in reach with mad abandon.
Do you enjoy this pain? No? Then why resist me? There is no pain in here.
Cale somehow managed to out-shout Wendi so his last command could reach them. “RETREAT! Take who you can and run!”
Nyctea swooped to grab Cassie, the bat girl’s lone panicked flight sluggish by comparison. A thicket of black claws and tentacles blocked the way. When the owl pulled back to avoid crashing, hundreds of hand tendrils reached for her. Spinning and twisting ahead of pursuit straight up, Nyctea’s speed outdistanced all but one arm whipping out from the main Demon.
It ripped into her wing, nails dragging paths of red through feathers. She shrank to her humanoid size to slip the Demon’s clinging grasp. Nyctea stalled at the top of her arc and began the long fall to a tangle of writhing black flesh below.
A pink tongue lashed out to grab her. Bufo the toad, the size of a truck, reeled her in and hopped away—leaving the battle behind.
Gaja shifted to a humanoid fifty-foot-tall form, swung John the sledgehammer with all four arms, and shouted with two voices from one throat, “We can beat this!” as she slammed the hammerhead into the ground.
The soil below each of the thousand lesser demons around her split to deposit them in shallow pits. Rock and dirt became brick-and-mortar traps. As the lesser demons fell, they triggered crushing walls that squished those unable to scramble out in time.
How much pain will they have to suffer until you’re satisfied? This is your fault, Daniel. You are the reason I came here. Give in, and it all ends.
“Help!” Lea called as she fled on foot from a pursuing lesser demon, her cicada mount nowhere in sight.
“Lea?” said Gaja. Then John spoke through the same lips as he yanked and pulled on Gaja’s arm to get her moving, “We have to help her!”
As they broke into a run, demon tentacles hit Gaja like cannonballs, whipped her skin, and raked at her with claws. Though each attack dealt minor damage, her tough blue skin allowed her to bowl straight through everything in her way. Gaja smacked aside a lesser demon with an oversized hand, then offered to Lea.
The girl turned to face them, laughing, and they recoiled. Lea’s eyes were black as tar.
Across the battlefield, white-skinned simulacrums of the children rose, cackling, from among the demons. Gaja’s face showed devastation.
The pain of hopelessness.
Daniel saw pale copies of himself mixed in. He opened his mouth to let everyone know where he was, but they beat him to it.
“Here I am!” “It’s really me!” “Help!”
Adults and children alike were scattered and confused. A forest of lesser demons waving tentacles clouded vision and clogged ears with noise.
“They’re counterfeits!” Lumière said, “The real kids are alive! I know where they are!” A demon whip promptly split him in half, but he reformed from the wax—unharmed. “I will not let you have them! Demon, you can’t kill me that easily, nor can you take my soul!”
“Don’t need to,” the Demon said in a hundred languages, from a hundred mouths in unison, “I don’t need you.” A tentacle wrapped around Lumière’s torso, swung him around, then flung him miles away from the battlefield.
“I am Moloch. This battle was over before it began.”
That name reverberated through Daniel as if he’d been punched in the soul.
No one will save you.
:Cale, I’ve changed my mind.: His mother broadcast to the group, :I’m going to destroy this demon.: The unspoken second half of that sentence rang in Daniel’s heart with fear and certainty. ‘Even if it kills me.’ :All I ask is you take my son to safety.:
:One of my insects found him, I’m on it.:
Cale appeared before Daniel in a split second, formed from the multiplied body of a passing gnat. He started making a carriage of insects thick enough to move Daniel.
Just then, Cale turned as if he’d been stabbed in the back. The Daniel in the memory realized Moloch must have attracted his attention—Is the Demon talking to everyone? The Daniel in the moment followed the man’s eyes to see Nes—the real Nesyamun—fighting off a lesser demon alongside Kenta and Harumi.
They were losing.
Cale didn’t meet Daniel’s eyes as he spoke into the air, “I’m sorry.”
The pain of betrayal.
Cale dissipated and reappeared at the side of his ward. His arm became a huge centipede that bit off the head of a lesser demon clutching a terrified Nes. In seconds, Cale constructed a cicada mount large enough for four riders. Defending it consumed all his concentration.
In a voice tinged with rage but as sincere as she could make it, Persephone let everyone know, :I forgive you, Calephor.:
Entangled in ropes of black demon flesh, Kenta sank into the dark masses along with the sister he held above the muck with his hair. “Take her!” he shouted to Nes.
Cloth ribbons caught the little girl as Cale wrapped his centipede arm around Nes’ waist and leaped onto the cicada.
“No!” Harumi said, “I’m not leaving him!” Her hair tips knotted to the last strands of her brother’s but ripped as Cale pulled her and Nes to safety. The cicada lifted above the battlefield and sped away as Kenta was swallowed.
Blows rained harder on Gaja than ever before, driving back even the mighty elephant woman.
:What about Lea?!: John’s strained voice rang in Daniel’s head.
“We can’t get caught in the blast,” Gaja said as she turned away and pulled him along. The sledgehammer dragged behind, powerless against the strength of her charging elephant form.
Bufo, Nyctea, Cale, Nes, Harumi, Gaja, and John receded into the distance. The Daniel in the moment had no idea where the other kids were, but the Daniel in the memory knew they hadn’t escaped.
The pain of despair.
The white form of Moloch emerged from of the surrounding black flesh before Daniel.
Join me and you will have power beyond your imagination, true immortality, and all the worlds will be your playthings.
“Daniel, run!”
He couldn’t run, too scared to move. The voices inside wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t think.
Do you honestly believe you’ll ever be able to master that power yourself? You’ll never hold a flower in your hands. Destruction is your nature. The world is dust in your hands and ash in your mouth. We’ll make a perfect team.
The Demon’s top half blew away in a cloud of dust, and his mother landed at his side, wings spread over him. Persephone, the last adult standing.
The white figure of the Demon regrew to oppose her.
Moloch shook his head. “I know what you’re trying, but I won’t let you complete the summoning.”
Oily rivers of demon blood infested the land. Thousands of hands rose, congregated, grasped each other, and built a fractal tower of hands in the shape of a hand. The demonic fist came down.
Persephone’s punches drilled perfect holes in it, over and over, but the majority of the mass slammed home. Nothing but dust touched them—the wings on her back dissolved everything.
Yet Moloch threw everything at her in a relentless assault: whips of arms, flails of nails, hungry mouths, compounded body parts, and bouts of magic Daniel didn’t recognize. Lesser demons sacrificed themselves with no sense of self-preservation.
His mother’s voice rang quietly in his mind, :Daniel, I’m so sorry I won’t be there to see you grow up. I know you’ll become a fine man.: She flashed him one last smile, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. :Goodbye. I’ll always love you.:
The endless barrage wore away her defenses. Defeat in the face of this onslaught seemed inevitable. Until, finally, a lance of black fingernails broke through and pierced her chest. Persephone shuddered with pain, and her struggles ceased.
And so she falls. And so they all fall.
“Idiot,” Persephone spat flecks of blood at Moloch.
The demonic weapon that pierced her became ash. Her blood dripped from the open wound.
“This is the summoning.” Persephone stood tall. “From this broken body, I wreak Ruin.”
Her clothes transfigured to the time-worn rags of a great ruler’s robe. Her body went rigid as death and lifted into the air like a puppet. The Demon continued It’s attack, but she annihilated everything that touched her.
Power and menace rolled off her in waves, threatening to destroy everything—even Daniel. Then she spoke in her own voice, “Perses, you hoary king, you can use every last drop of my life-force to lay waste, but don’t you dare touch my son.” Her frozen posture melted as she regained control of her body, “No, I won’t allow you to harm one living thing!”
An expanding sphere of destruction cut an empty crater beneath her. Nothing inorganic remained inside. The ground gave way beneath Daniel, and he fell away from her on the descending floor of the crater unharmed. Demon flesh evaporated like mist under the heat of the sun.
The crater grew hundreds of feet wide, then thousands of feet in diameter. Along with Daniel fell grass and grubs bereft of soil but undamaged by the aura of Ruin. The nearby city disappeared in passing, its naked inhabitants landing light on the crater floor.
Only one thing without breath remained in the sphere of destruction, the very core of the Demon. Moloch tried to fight, to produce It’s terrible weapons, but they were mere delays. The core shifted and squirmed in vain to produce black mass faster than It’s obliteration.
Yet the Demon would find escape even in It’s destruction. Moloch inverted himself, preparing to funnel his essence away to a timeless expanse from which he could return another day.
“Where do you think you’re going, you spiteful ghost? You want to leave here unscathed after what you’ve done today? You think you can run from the inevitable? Do you know what I am?” She took another agonizing gasp, but she was beyond pain. “With my dying breath, I bring forth Death.”
Persephone reached out her hand to grasp the handle of a materializing scythe.
“Too long have you haunted the world of the living, too long have you spread your filth across the land, too long have you corrupted the hearts of the innocent. To one who will not die, if you will not go quietly, I shall bring the end to you—for I am Death’s Messenger.”
She lifted the scythe with both hands.
“Et revertatur pulvis in Terram suam unde erat et spiritus redeat ad Deum qui dedit illum!”
The dark scythe glowed, and, with one beat of her wings, Persephone bisected the demonic core.
No, that was the Daniel in the moment’s first impression. The Daniel in the memory realized Persephone actually cut Moloch’s connection to the physical world. Without that link, the Demon’s attempt at escape became its self-imposed exile.
As the remaining demon flesh evaporated to dust, Moloch lashed out to the last.
She is wrong. I may not return, but this is not my End. I came to claim the new generation, and I have not failed. My Will shall persist in the hearts of all I touched, and you, Daniel, are no exception.
Remember this, your mother’s death is your fault. Ziege’s death as well. You killed them. Nothing good can come from either of us—we destroy the beautiful things of the world. It is our nature.
This is my truth. May it poison your every thought.
There is no victory for the living. Only pain.
And then Moloch was gone from the universe.
And then she was gone too.
The Daniel in the moment fell into darkness and guilt and oblivion, forgetting everything to escape Moloch’s truth.
The Daniel in the memory watched as the scene faded and took a moment to think. The dreadful weight of those words came upon him again, but where once he had abandoned these memories, now he faced them.
You’re wrong Moloch.
The Demon’s words, which had sounded so sensible and true then, he recognized for insanity now. I didn’t kill them; you did. I saved six lives today. I helped people by using my powers, and nobody died. I remember everything Mary taught me, and I’ll never forget. I can keep trying to be as good and kind and strong as my mother. There is nothing of you in me! I won’t let your lies slow me down!
An invisible pressure eased, if slightly. The intolerable became bearable. Despite Daniel's relief, as he returned to reality in the present, his loss—two mothers in one night—brought him to tears.
