Chapter 18: Chapter 19: A Handmaiden and a seeker of morality

The demon-hunter folded his arms. Broadened his stance. He was not so visually impressive as some Tfai had met--more round-faced than chiseled, tired-eyed, with a mop of brown hair over grey armor covered in warding runes and a black robe beneath.

Perhaps a greater threat, then.

As against this, Tfai Sul Ametra had six arms that frequently folded into each other and out again, a sequence of metal and crystal shards suspended in lightning torrents for her tail, and a visage of overlapping serrated fangs and sharp plates. With her inner energies emitting as bronze luminescence and jade tones rising from her frame, she knew herself to be a most beautiful outer demon.

All of which made his first words rather... deflating.

"You!" the demon-hunter called, his voice echoing through silver plinths. "You're an outer devil, are you not? You look the part."

There was, and would always be, far more to an outer demon than simple looks, but Tfai supposed that trying to communicate that to this human would be wasted energy--to say nothing of the distinction between an outer demon and an outer devil.

"I seek Machrae Diir!" he continued. "You will guide me."

Tfai drifted closer. Her form opened, or shifted its dimensionality. She wove around, phased through, overlapped the many odd plinths--all varying heights, all pockmarked by sockets for the other long-vanished components of the ancient device once meant to fill this forsaken plane.

"Haven't you heard?" she asked. Her head warped down and sideways--in short, tilted. A body-tic learned from an old friend. Her horns split lengthwise into vibrating double-vision glimpses of themselves. "The Ashenvein Gates stand sealed. None may enter."

"Then you will get me in," said the demon-hunter. "You're an outer devil, just as she is. She'll let you in, will she not?"

Tfai amended her earlier thought. This obtuse lackwit would be no threat to anyone... except someone in a most vulnerable place.

"Persuade me," she said. Tfai did not normally imbue her manifest body with eyebrows. However, on seeing the demon-hunter's hand drift towards the pistol at his hip, what could she do but conjure a roaring electric arc to raise? "I hope you have a lot of bullets.”

"It doesn't take many."

"When you gun down the demons you know, right?" Tfai said. "What's your name, human? Where are you from? Do you even know what Machrae Diir is, other than the name of a place where a famous demon dwells? Do you know why she's famous?"

"I don't need to know any of that," he scoffed. "No amount of preparation will substitute for direct experience. I'll adapt to her tricks when I see them. I've been through this before--there are always stories. Always a demon in a palace telling everyone how strong they are." He shifted. "All talk."

Tfai shrugged. "Maybe. You can shoot at me all you want, but I'm not going to help you get in. I can't. When the Gates are sealed, the Gates are sealed. Anyone who's not inside Machrae Diir when it happens... you're all just out of luck."

She stretched with a yawn of harmonic rumbles that rattled the hapless human to his bones. His flesh distorted for a flicker into spiny effusions of bone and underslung muscle breaking through unbroken skin, a face's lines gone jagged and interleaving.

Tfai settled, patient.

With her settling the distortions ended, and the demon-hunter snapped his pistol free.

Fifteen shots blooming like sparks and marble-dust. Fifteen little messengers of lead and antimony. Fifteen micro-maelstroms dappling Tfai's figure.

"Are you done?" she asked.

"Are you?" the demon-hunter demanded.

"Dude," Tfai said, gesturing with amphichiral claws, "I was stretching. I'm a reality-warping eldritch entity. My stretches are a little more ornate than a human's. I have to stretch my aura, too. That's not an excuse to try to kill me." She clacked her jaws. "Well... come on, showboat. I meant what I said. Persuade me that you have a good reason to get into Machrae Diir. It's the least you can do after trying to shoot me."

"Trying?" he echoed, baring his teeth.

"Do you see any exit wounds? Any debris?" She snorted. "Probably for the best. I bleed plasma when I'm actually wounded."

"And?" he asked.

"And I don't know that those wards of yours would be able to stop an instant burst of thermal radiation in the million-degree range," Tfai answered, poking his nose. "Now come on."

"Are you insane?" he said. His mouth hung open. He brushed his bandolier fitfully, glancing from his empty pistol--runes of binding, breaking, slaying giving off glitters in warning rhythms along its barrel and receiver--to the outer demon, and back again. "You tried to kill me."

"If I tried to kill you, I would succeed," Tfai said. "Look." She phased right through him. He shivered against electric tingles and hollow razor sensations like a memory of an ice-knife's cut, "if I was trying to hurt you, you'd know. It's not subtle. I would shift to a more eloquent tone, a certain age-famed diction,"

Tfai deepened her voice. It resonated--every word's echo enfolded in the moments before she actually spoke it. "I would sing you death-hymns of a winter kiss, a charnel dawn! Shall I sieve your soul-fibers through my revelation? Scatter you unto Void and sup my fill from the new growth nourished by the mortal dregs of you?"

A pause.

"See? I talk very differently when I'm not toning myself down to keep you... safer."

"I do not need you," the demon-hunter growled.

"You do if you want to learn to hold it together in an outer devil's presence," Tfai said. "Or at least, an outer devil like the Lady. If you're struggling with me, well..."

Shuddering. Nausea. Displacement. Now, colonnaded corridors twisting into corkscrew angles. Rifts pouring reverse-light--or shadows that behaved as light should, dis-illuminating all they touched. The hunter's psyche flinched with every step.

At every turn, an imagined being flashed in his sight. This hallucination writhed with tendrils and parasite-growth wriggling beneath slimy skin. That one hunched with tiered arms and tiered eyes and tiered mouths, pulling itself towards him on a thousand serpent tails. These, but two of limitless nightmare visions.

"Isn't it fun?" Tfai laughed. "It's like a game, it really is! You just have to remember that you're not walking in the reality they are. Keep spiritual distance, keep vaulting yourself away, and they won't phase into the same plane of being. That's all it takes to be safe."

"All... all it takes?" he echoed, with a choking sound and a lidless stare in his eyes. Then, screaming, he reloaded his pistol and--

Snowblind juddering. Multicolor flashes streaming across the screen where his visual cortex raised its illusion of eyesight.

"That one was my fault," Tfai said. "Sorry. Too advanced."

Now, a realm of fallen walkways, unfinished bridges, sparse silvery scaffolds corroded by strange pitting yet free of anything that could be called rust--such uncanny sheens for work so deformed by time.

"H-how am I to persuade you?" the demon-hunter asked. "If I can't... if there's nothing I can do to you..."

Tfai drew a long, long, long breath. Air ignited as it coursed in towards the star-like furnace of her form. Whirling fires made her a beacon in the dark-sky domain.

"Have you considered," she finally said, with long-suffering tones, "the grandmaster technique known as 'talking to me like a person?'"

"I..."The demon-hunter put his pistol's safety on. Holstered it. He muttered. "My name is..." A sigh. "Orson."

"My sympathies," Tfai said. "I," she added, "am Tfai Sul Ametra. It's good to be formally introduced. Alright, Mr. Orson, the mortal on a mission. Tell me why you think you should be in Machrae Diir. Convince me to help you."

"How am I to do that?" he groaned. "I don't know what an outer devil would want."

"You don't need to hide your intentions from me, and if you think you do, you shouldn't be trying to talk to me.” She expanded into a hundred interconnected visions of herself, silhouettes blended by blades and spokes like the fixtures of an immense stained glass window. “So are you going to choose to believe in the reality I am presenting, that I am an alien but not unfriendly being, or do you prefer your preconceptions?"

Orson could not help but stop and look back. "Eh?"

"Do you think outer demon is just a term we apply to ourselves for flair?" she asked, condensing back to a single self. "Orson, I understand! My very existence directly violates every pattern your mind uses to anchor itself, to keep life simple enough to grasp. Struggling with my nature doesn't make you bigoted. It makes you human. And I'm sure there is much about the deeper nature of the demons you're already familiar with that you don't truly comprehend, only... they are less alien. They can hide it more easily."

Orson stiffened. "That doesn't help," he finally said.

"I know," Tfai said in turn. "If you want to go to Machrae Diir, you can't keep resorting to your gun every time something makes you see how small you are. How small your understanding is of what it means to live."

The demon-hunter considered the rift ahead. The span directly before him was broken, dark stone and exposed spars like jagged ribs. Its last near portion stood as island of furrowed, gnarled old rock atop two buttressed supports. It was broken on the other side as well. Below, the long-ago collapse had smashed away an even longer portion from the relic-highway beneath. Yet when it finally resumed, it continued on unbroken as far as he could see.

So, Orson fished a grappling hook and rope from his pack. Three times he tossed it.

The third stuck.

"Look," he said, "I've found that I just have to commit to a course of action, and I go forward that way. Once I start doing something, I don't stop to think about it. I keep trying until I make it work."

So saying, he stepped off and swung down to find he had misjudged.

Even with a long jump at the end of an even longer swing by the rope--would the grappling hook hold firm for that?--it was terribly unlikely he'd be able to soar far enough to reach the edge of the next pathway. He came to a halt, dangling. The wind howled. His arms grew sore.

Finally, with a snarl of fury and many a swing of his legs, he kicked up momentum and, with the last rush of the ad-hoc pendulum, sent himself hurtling towards the next path. He might've made it. Yes--one could always claim that.

As it was, his fingers just brushed the edge. And then he was falling, falling, fal–

A rude jerking like the opening of a parachute. Instead of straps, however, electric claws held him under the arms.

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"You're describing stupidity," Tfai said flatly. "You are describing being stubborn for the sake of... what, exactly?"

"No one ever got anywhere by giving up after failing once," Orson said, squirming slightly.

"So if you stop to think about something, you'll give up?" Tfai asked. "And you think that's healthy? I think about things constantly while I'm doing them. It's how I get better."

"That isn't what I said--" Orson began.

"Yes, it is!" Tfai interrupted, squeezing. A scraping note entered her voice, and ear-numbing buzzes. "You are not free of the underlying implications of your own logic just because you choose not to think about what your own words mean! Your actions won’t cause effects they have no realistic prospect of achieving just because you claim they will! That's not how consequence works!"

A long, awkward pause.

"... how much leeway do I have before you drop me?" he asked.

"You just used it all," Tfai answered. "Now, since I've got you out here due to your own mistakes..." She shifted.

A sickening lurch: she dropped him.

An agonizing wrench: she caught his hand.

"Orson," she intoned, speaking with the most awful calm. A chance thunderstroke punctuated her words. Things writhed in the depths far below the supports of the ancient highways. "Be honest now. Were you hoping to play on my patience to learn the Lady's weaknesses?" She loosened one claw to trace it, lovingly, along the dark branches of the veins exposed on the underside of his wrist. "I'm not angry. I don't bother getting angry at my enemies. If I find wrath helps me fight better, then I'll just make myself wrathful. Outer demons are especially good at sensing lies. Words spoken of dissonance feel hollow. They ache. Clatter. Halt. Understood?"

Orson stared up at the being holding his hand.

Eyeless, yet seeing. Wingless, yet flying. Skinless, yet horribly warm. A siren of unseemly light and veiling shadows, of rays made sharper by the softening smoke of creation as it burned away in her star-eating belly.

"That was my plan," he confessed. "I... I won't deny i still underestimated you, but I never seriously expected that a nine millimeter pistol would be enough to kill any demon worth their, um... salt. Nor would salt, for that matter."

A beat. "I know that one's just reification."

"Is that all you think outer demons are?" Tfai asked. "Phantoms born out of humankind's own belief? Do you think the Lady tells her little tales because she NEEDS you all to believe in her?"

Orson's silence told all.

"God, you're so fucking dense," Tfai sighed.

Her claws popped wide.

"See you in Hell, you traitorous filth," she snarled--a final glimpse of her wicked corona bleeding off into lightning coils, and the glinting ripples of her ever-reshaping silhouette.

Then the abyss, and the writhing, and the end.

--then a sudden bronze-glow oval and a spinning sense so instant and whiplash that Orson puked as he fell into a lateral trajectory across the very walkway he'd been trying to reach. Tfai stopped him with a foot of eight segmented talons against his chest.

"I did consider using your sudden mental flux and instinctive yearning to escape from this terrible situation to induce a series of hallucinations that you might--emphasis, MIGHT--not normally have succumbed to," Tfai said, "but I did just decide not to kill you."

"How is that the same as killing me?" Orson asked.

"Spires of Shordag Miiliiar, you're so dumb," Tfai groaned, raking her claws through the plate-ridge facets of her face. "How can you still be alive when you're SO. DUMB?" She took a second look at him. "Hey, hold still." Where she acquired the plush, water-soaked towel was beside the point. She pulled Orson against her without waiting for an answer and began wiping down his face, cuirass, and bandoliers.

"Humans and your sensitive stomachs," she muttered. "How did Kai survive such flesh? Now. The Orson I met earlier today was a collected, driven demon-hunter assured enough of himself to bring off the act of being an incompetent blowhard... until he got too deep into the role, anyway. That is the life you live."

"Death?" Tfai took him by the chin, scrubbing with special vigor at a few stubborn spots. "... what did you eat? Never mind, don't tell me... death, mortal, death as a demon understands it, is the end of a way of being, as a particular incarnation of yourself. So if I unseated your entire sense of self, opened you to the terrifying possibility that everything you ever thought you saw in the world around you was just a trick of your mind to hide its own madness from it... could you really go back to your old life?"

"Probably not," Orson conceded.

"So, in a very real way, I would have killed Orson the demon-hunter," Tfai agreed. "Something might have persisted, a fractured being shaped of his old memories and huddling in his old flesh, but it would not be Orson anymore. You would die, and worse yet, die into an incarnation of you that both remembered the soul-death and its agonies, yet lived with the all-new torment of grieving for that lost life. It's far worse than a bullet-death. Such death as this poisons your very potential for rebirth."

"Is knowledge like this, um, common, in Machrae Diir?" Orson asked.

"Not only common, but intuitive," Tfai answered. "It has to be. Machrae Diir is the Lady's true sanctum, the heartland of her psyche. We must be strong enough to carry the insight of its making--to preserve it."

Orson had the grace to gulp with renewed fear. "You're not just a random outer devil, are you?" he asked.

"Nope," Tfai agreed. "I've been hunting you, demon-hunter, for some time. Chasing rumors of a modern-day inquisitor hoping to catch my Lady, my FRIEND, at her lowest ebb."

She looked away. "She's sick, Orson. Sick with the illness humankind drove into her psyche when she lived on Earth. Still fighting to heal, after being free of all Earth’s realms for ages. This, the age of her ascension and the making of Machrae Diir? She only got to do this after centuries of ghostly wandering, growing in power by trials and battles through all the shadowed fathoms of many a spectral afterlife, looking for her way out of Earth’s astral planes, all while angels and rival demons and men just like you hunted her. Do you have any idea how much that would hurt--to have freedom itself laced with pain?"

Bronze lightning branched out from the snap of Tfai’s talons. Its flaring creepers tore space to carve out a honeycomb tower of mirror-polished bronze plates belching blacklight fire. One by one its holes guttered and went dark, and at last it collapsed to wastes below.

"On a good day," Tfai continued, "my Lady Kairlina is perhaps the strongest being remaining in our universe. A breaker of gods and shaper of worlds, a force of unyielding will mightier than any mythic delusion of destiny. She is peerless, and irradiant, and glorious in mastery."

She turned back. "But on a bad one? I've seen her wandering around, empty-eyed, shrunken back to a facsimile of a human form she reclaimed and reshaped to her own designs lifetimes ago. I've watched her pick at her jawline for scruff that hasn't been there for five hundred years." Hazy cutaway figures marched in the jade corona radiating from Tfai. Horns breaking loose and falling. A nova ebbing, over and over and over, to the hunched and stumbling shape of a pale woman with dark and wild hair.

"She plans wars with enemies she has long since destroyed. Unmade them into psychic vapor back in the hazy days before she reincarnated from her own dreams,  back when human civilization was young. She becomes convinced her oldest and most cherished friends are bitter enemies. Humanity has ALREADY killed her so many times, Orson."

For the first time, a quaver entered Tfai's voice. "She's fighting. Fighting every day so, so hard to hold on to this bright dream of an outer succubus with stars in her eyes. She wrote her stories to plead her case. And all any of you saw was a way to learn her weaknesses."

A low breeze stirred the prone human's hair. Tfai released him and burned the towel to vapor with a plasmatic pulse that burned his wards out with it. Only a sudden shield of Tfai's bronze lightning saved him from the same oblivion.

"I'm sorry," he said softly.

"That'll be a start," Tfai said, "if it's true. If not, understand that the next time we meet, I will be stronger still, and I will not give you grace again."

"Understood," Orson murmured. "Does she... does she want you telling these things? To her enemies?"

"I'm afraid it's too late to worry about that," Tfai answered. "She already did. Kairlina's most beautiful mistake, her most tragic, was simply that she chose to believe in the shining visions humankind showed her. To treat them as the heroes they said they wanted to be. She wrote her stories because she believed that if they just understood her, humans would come to love her as much as she loved them. She thought they were her friends. She wanted to equip them with the tools they needed to be safe with her. To help her help them."

Another gust.

"And they betrayed her, over and over and over again," Tfai finished. "So  now she spends half her days weeping and clinging to her lovers, and the other half in her throne room hallucinating the atrocities she believes she is guilty of. Because those are the things humans told her demons do. And even now, she loves you too much to stop listening."

And now the silence hung heavy between them. The intermittent crackles of Tfai's electric poise brought out deep chasms upon the erstwhile demon-hunter's brow, and under his eyes.

"... how do I make this right?" Orson asked.

"First?” Tfai said. “Learn to carry all this guilt, and the pain it brings, until you won't mistake it for the Lady giving you new pain if she happens to do something that reminds you how guilty you feel. Second? Leave."

"Because the Gates are sealed," Orson said.

"Good boy," Tfai said. "Yes, the Gates are sealed. They will remain sealed until the Lady heals, or... or until she gives up on healing."

"What if she does?" Orson asked. "Give up?"

"Then I hope you'll have spent your grace period well. Because if she gives up on her own goodness, after learning all the skill, the power, the zeal she was forced to learn in order to survive Earth and what humans did to her?"

Tfai shook her head. "Then there will be no power left in any universe that can stop Her."

Orson said little else, save to ask that Tfai open a portal back to his hidden headquarters. As he stood on its threshold, the demonologist considered.

"Tfai... I know what you are," he said. "May I ask WHO you are?"

"That's good, Orson," Tfai said. Her smile, a wide narrow swath of glinting hook-fangs and revolving thunderstorm auras, should have been terrible.

It was beautiful.

"Keep doing that," she continued. "I? I was once a handmaiden. Now, I am a Handmaiden."

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