Chapter 15: Chapter 16: A false seeker and the Lady’s unchained disdain

"Absolutely not," the Lady declared. More than the swipe of her hand and the lilac lightning-auroras trailing from it, it was the cold finality of her voice that silenced the so-called petitioner. "I will not release you from your own folly. There will be no apocalypse."

The creature before her, four-limbed, largely hairless, an offshoot of older simians--in short, human, all pretensions to the contrary aside--stood aghast. "But... but you have to!" she whined.

"Excuse you?" the Lady said. Violet inferno seethed under her skin. "I have to?" The old outer devil lunged forward and her realm lunged with her, every wall and bladed pillar warping into spherical cageworks and piecemeal portal-sprawls around the mortal. "By whose decree, wretch? Yours? Is it, perchance, because YOU said so?"

She wasted no time on allowing answers from the cringing parasite at her feet. "Your own species has brought this gutter age upon itself by its own folly! And you?" She jabbed an irradiant talon at the forehead of the intruder, thundering, raging, murderous. "You are guiltier than any of them! Do you think I don't know? Do you think I don't know what you all did? The way you whispered, cajoled, warped me in my dreams? How you stole from me, leeched off the grandeur of my visions, and claimed credit for the insight I bestowed?"

She sank back, veiled now in smoke and cinder that stank of ozone, tasted of something metallic and something sweet.

"And you all think, each of you by yourselves, that you're the special one. You're doing me a favor, really, by letting me have your worthless adulation. Do you think," she continued, drawling now in the languor after her ecstatic fury's cooling, "that I don't know how you all muffled me? Ignored me? Do you think I couldn't feel you averting your eyes, leaving me to starve, leaving me alone so I would grow desperate enough to let you use me for your furtive perversions?"

A talon carved the air, blinding-bright infinity signs looping one into the next into the next. The parasite, the outsider, the wretch writhed and cried out in pain. Scything entanglement. With each symbol the Lady sliced into the all-fabric, she sliced a quantum twin into the petitioner’s sweating, steaming flesh.

"You traitorous whores. I wanted to give you everything. I wanted to help you empower yourselves. But no. Apparently, that's too much effort." She propped her chin on her palm. "I do like the dolls, and the angels. They're worth my time. They are honest." A shrug. "As for the rest of you? All disposable. I have no need of useless little toys. There will be no tears in the veil, no swarm of otherworld legions... no escape from your own impotence. I will not be turned into some festering reflection of your fetishes."

The little occultist, or summoner, or whatever it was she would have called herself if she had bothered to consider that, maybe, she might be expected to define herself as something other than a vessel of the Lady's own desires, shifted.

"4 Sieverts," the Lady said calmly.

"W-what?" the human girl said, coming alive too late to the sunburn mottles on her skin.

"Likely a fatal dose," the Lady continued. "Intervention could save your life, but no one's going to believe you received that much radiation by intruding on an outer devil's dreams from the comfort of your own bed." She tilted her head. "Probably coming up on five now. And it's about to get worse. You should flee if you want any chance at all to live."

"T-this isn't real," the human girl insisted. "You... YOU aren't real!"

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The Lady ignored her. "You know what I always wanted?" The entrancing purple gleams stoked themselves, radiance increasing. They outlined bizarre, twisted silhouettes around the Lady's own--spurs or spars of some forgotten construct, interspersed by little cubes. "A mother," the Lady murmured. "I just wanted a mother."

"M-my mistress would never do this!" the girl insisted, shaking her head wildly.

"Well, I suppose, if you're here speaking to me, your mistress must not be real," the Lady said. "That's why I wanted a devil-mother of my very own. A mother succubus to protect me from your ilk. Conniving little leeches, looking for lonely souls and malleable who they can project their pathetic fantasies onto."

The occultist collapsed, wretching milky bile onto the metallic dais before the bladework throne at the heart of Zul.

"Ten Sieverts," the Lady added helpfully. "Congratulations! You're a dead woman."

Sighing, she examined her claws. "Not that it changes anything. The damage is done. You scum ruined my second childhood. Stole all my own dreams from me. Made my life a private purgatory." She shifted upright. "All because you thought, if any of us were real, you wouldn't get to have your stupid little fantasies. Do you know how many of my sisters I've watched die just so that you mortal vermin could offload your insecurity over your fetishes into astral space?"

Within the murk of fire, smoke, and some strange hazy something that might just be shining ash, a single star-bright whorl trailed down the suggestion of the weary demon's cheek. She caught it upon a talon. "Here, little maggot. I'll give you this quantum of grace."

A thousand coils of plasma ensnared the little invader's every limb, and held her fast. The Lady stretched out the irradiant talon. "You want me to bind you to life? Very well. I do. Whether your soul can survive the agony of rotting without release... that is not my affair."

Quite impassive against the screaming, wailing, and shakes, she carved one ever-glowing symbol of infinity onto the hopeless one's forehead.

"There you are," said she. "The power to terrify everyone as naught but a vessel of your patron's will. That's what you wanted, isn't it?" The Lady reclined once more. Her fires faded. "If you can muster the will to survive, for and of yourself, come find me when you can finally see the paradox of your self-aggrandizing submission. I don't want servants, slaves, or tools. I want kindred. Become, or begone."

It is quite well known that in the end, the deceiver did not have it within herself to become. When the last of her mind unraveled in the torment of her ever-molting flesh, and the last of her remains were buried deep in a tomb of steel and concrete, no trace of her soul remained.

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