Chapter 23: Chapter 24: A young sinner, the Lady, and the Miidyaerita, Part One

Chiron's Pyre. The threshold-blade. The great curved sword of the eight-point guard. My savior and my ruin, redeemer and destroyer. A temptation. The easy answer.

A hundred triumphs, a thousand defeats, and too many infinities to count held in every little ripple of its iron. So much simpler to let its hymn wash out rebellion. Every stroke embodying the ever-denser weight of my long life. Every stroke resonating with the force of all those that came before, multiplied by its own.

Such undeniable power. Yes... it'd be easier.

"Who the fuck are you supposed to be?" the young one asks.

I catalogue her more callously than any angel. Four horns, runic swirls branching ever-smaller on her orange-skinned limbs until they become minuscule eddies like transplanted patterns. Black hair. Fleshless, igneous bone hands. These are the young one's physical traits. At least, the most salient to me.

To an angel's eyes, the demon betokens strife, the grand duality, the great Enemy given form and breath and warmth. The shadow manifest against Heaven. Memorable things.

I am me. But my victory over the Shard has brought less freedom than I hoped. I face sudden stillness when I visit an infernal court, hushed whispers sharply cut off, and sometimes an accusing claw and wrathful cry: "I know who you truly are! Deceiver, traitor, tyrant!" Every now and then I wonder if they're right, if I'm really just Seurchraig wearing the skin of a young demon she assimilated. Either way, I feel older than my age...

Oh, enough. For fuck's sake, Kai, get this over with and go suck someone off. A succubus only has thoughts like this when she goes too long without indulging her lust.

I stand over her, covered in my own invisible paradoxes. Silver graphite armor harder than diamond and more resilient than impact gel. Flesh of iridescent white runes overlapping. All ten horns today.

"You murdered seventeen people," I say.

"What's it to you?" She rolls around, putting her arms behind her to push her chest up further, grinning fire at me. "That penis envy piece is just for show?"

I acknowledge that with a raised eyebrow. "Nope. Just not for you."

"Oh, well aren't we pretentious--" she begins.

"I sentence you to life," I interrupt. That flummoxes her just long enough to add, "I met your sister. Heard about your parents. Sounds as though they gave you ample cause, kindred. Otherwise I'd say you murdered nineteen people."

"Wait a fucking second," she says. Scrambles upright. Distances herself in a belated pulse of fire.

I fold space before she finishes recompiling her form. Bring us right back together.

"I've heard of you," she sneers. "You're that pretentious bitch with the savior complex."

"Saviors?" I tilt my head. "Is that what you think Machrae Diir stands for? Is that what you think I stand for?"

"Who gives a shit what you stand for?" She spits, snaps her body forward and flexes her claws as though any of that will impress me.

I shrug. "My darlings like me. You want my frank sentiments?" I rattle talons on my sword. "Yes, I think you're evil. Not in jest. Nor a lust-inspiring, indulgent way."

"What the fuck would you know?" Again she retreats. But not very far. Not to another plane. Faint hope, a spiteful challenge? Both, perhaps. Perhaps I should find the mystery more sobering than stimulating. Or perhaps to deny myself my own curiosity would be that oh-so Christian penance again--self-harm.

"If you mean what I know about your evil," I say, inclining my head, "I sifted the auras at your kill sites. I witnessed. I felt. I communed with those victims whose ghosts would answer me. I comprehend both sides of your slaughter in full. And if you mean mine..."

I look out through the tangled cables and darkened, burned-down husks of vines in the ember-ridden city around us. The infernal circuitry of this stygian place where the aggregate souls of machines find their own visions of hell.

A natural hiding place for a mortal-born sister.

"Young one," I laugh, "I'm the Lady of Machrae Diir. Evil is just another indulgence."

I bloom, rose-pink from the tips of my ten horns and cobalt from the star-eating seam of my maw. My nova doubles, my shadows seethe from blue to scorching jet black. Oh, the joy of the Carag ascendant! I could stop myself from being amused by her shock, but where's the fun in that?

"YOU?" she demands. "YOU'RE going to try and offer me a second chance? Are you fucking insane?"

"Absolutely, completely, utterly, and irretrievably," I agree. "Now, look, little kindred. You can run to some other penitent demons, and they'll feed you the usual slop that you've reached a precious moment of clarity and, as much as it hurts, this is your one chance to do better than your demonic nature. Or," I place a proud hand to my chest, "you can choose the true escape! Your veil's off, sweetheart. Everyone knows the monster you are. The rejection, the pain of being hunted, those are the worst parts. You're already surviving those. Now seize the dark joy of self-loving sin, and be free at last!"

"You're terrible at this," she mutters. "Way too peppy."

"I still tend to sink too deep into my own persona, yes," I say. "Very slow progress. But, it is progress. Also, uh..." I gesture. "I am new to this part. This little heart-to-heart marks the first time I've tried to coax another demon to enter my realm. Everyone else has found their own way to me after they have a while alone. Do you want that?"

"Thought I wasn't allowed? Like I was about to turn around and murderfuck some more people if you weren't there to stop me." She spits a lava-glob out the window onto the multi-track streets. "Not that you're wrong."

"Hm..." I peer at her. "Yes I suppose you would. And it might be fun to watch! Still..." I drift closer. Hover an easy circle around one side of her. "Do you want that? To be alone?"

She averts her eyes.

"My friends call me Kai," I add helpfully. I sigh at her silence, and drift midair.

Sky-igniting streamers billow on my breath. Nova-waves course on the walls and floors. "If you want me to reassure you, that I, personally, will always cherish and understand you," I say, "well, I'm already well-settled for lovers and best friends. I can promise acquaintance, that's all. And you'll never know for sure, ever again, that anyone who claims to accept, appreciate, even love you for who you are, actually does. And after a few years? You'll be forced to see you never really knew that in the first place."

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"You..." she shakes her head, laughing bitterly. "You are fucking awful at this."

I ponder that. "Would you trust me if I kept promising that tomorrow will be easy? You killed people. No other controlled your mind. No blackout episode. You chose."

Her claws scrape on her wrists. "Yeah."

"Well," I say, "you can keep doing that. Rampage through dimensions. See how long you last in the power game. Or..." I trace fire-wakes in the air with my claws. "Choose us. Choose Machrae Diir, and other demons who might just come to love you for what you truly are."

"And what if I say I don't need you?" she asks. A glare over her shoulder. "What if I choose to do it alone?"

"You can." I shrug snowdrifts of pale blue, filled with transparent visions of toppling pillars among shifting sands, of cloven forms streaming away in the wakes of my power, of a six-horned figure sighing as she curls up for the night, all by herself, in yet another bed. "I did, for a while. It made everything a hundred times harder. No one was impressed. I was very lonely. And in the end, I still had to fight through the same amount of fear the first time I spread my legs for a stranger and told them to take me."

"But I could go it alone," she says.

"Yes," I agree. "You could."

She tenses. I warm, a soft swell of pride in my sun-devouring breast, to see her bare her fangs and charge me in a low-to-the-ground smoke-and-fire blitz.

"C'mon, you stuck-up old bitch," she snarls, "prove you can handle me!"

A blur, a sidestep around her uppercut, a swat of one palm on her right hand to pull her off balance and an upward sweep of my knee to send her right through the ceiling.

I consider some more ornate options--a quantum-continuum teleport, simultaneously behind her and straight ahead--but decide on simplicity. A soar, a charge with a last-second whirl to weave under the hook on the tip of her tail. It grazes just by my cleft chin and clashes sparks from my horns, but misses my hair completely, a perfect success!

Now, a light touch to her temple triggering instant kinetic conversion from one vector to a hundred. Her form ripples with a pure-force internal detonation.

While she's destabilized by that, instinctively pulling cast-off vapor trails of herself back together, I crush her with psychic vise of rose-pink force, seize her tail while she reels from that, and before the dust clears from the crater after I hurl her into the building--

"Okay okay okay!" she pants. She wheezes and holds trembling hands up to forestall any more follow-ups. "I give! Holy fuck, who stops you if you get out of hand?"

I freeze, tapping my lips. "Um, well... I'm mostly kept in check by my love for the little things in life. Making my weird little noises, playing silly games, keeping my pool of possible sex partners as wide as possible. You know, there's something so deeply satisfying about getting so horny that I'll submit to beings with less than fraction of my power, my own lust turning me helpless before mates I could annihilate with an errant sneeze--"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," the fledgling interrupts. "I get the weird noises and the games, but now you're talking some dysfunctional succubus shit and I really can't relate." 

"Whoops!" I titter, placing a talon to my fangs and blushing in embarrassment. "I do apologize for the monologues. Figuring out how monsters come to be what we are is one of my main hyperfixations, y’know?" I settle to the floor. "So... now that you've tested my worthiness to stand as your warden, will you give me the chance to show you my worthiness as a mentor?"

She groans with all the melodrama of a second puberty, making the rubble of our brief fight rattle against the ruins. "Can I get you to talk like a normal person?"

I smirk. "Commonplace phrases are my anomalies. Elaborate is my normal."

She drapes her hands over her face. "Just kill me now."

A few minutes and some generous portal-use bring us into the lambent halls. I learn the young one's name--Greth--and I set her to work.

"I desire an expansion along the Rift of Recompense," I say. “You take your claws and that nascent psionic talent, and you carve building material from the acausal morass on my realm's borders." I stretch. “Just rake ‘em through and think about what you want to get.”

"That... that's it?" she asks.

"That's how you start, yes," I answer. "Were you expecting something more dramatic?"

She bristles. "I want you to fucking take this seriously--"

"I am," I interrupt, becoming cobalt and razor cold. I tower, wearing the six horns of repose and contemplation, the unmistakable silhouette with my scalding maw and nova pinpoint-eyes. The Lady of Machrae Diir. "Let me make myself clear, Greth. I love indulgence, in creation and destruction and especially in lust. The lust, you can take or leave. But right now violence is all you know. There are many things in Machrae Diir I want to grow, do you understand? I want to avoid a future where you feel so insecure over your ability to create anything that you start pulling down the creations of other denizens."

A still hour, a lonely hour, a predawn hour in a realm that seldom sees a dawn. Azure streams course skyward along the ridged building and the pointed spires joined by blade-buttressed walls on the edge of the Rift.

"I told you," I intone, "this would be hard. This goes beyond good and evil." Specters rise from the umbra mantling my horns. "I want to keep Machrae Diir free of the onerous, exhausting, disempowering ordeal of needing constantly look for external threats to unite us, rather than just enjoying ourselves. I will do whatever I deem necessary to forge you into someone who will steer clear of pointless conflict." I straighten. Square my titanic shoulders. The redolent nova streams about me, my endtime corona in blinding streamers.

"And what if we all agree the war's fun?" Greth glares up at me.

My fangs reflect strange shapes moving in the night behind her. "Well, then we're speaking a language I can relate to. But wars seldom stay fun if you desire to fight them well. Arduous contests of attrition. Hurry up and wait. Logistics dictates strategy. It turns into a dry cognitive challenge of restraint and avoidance, punctuated by short terrifying bursts where you must bet everything on one decisive move, and often, by the time you realize your plans have paid off, it's too late and by too slim a margin to feel pleased."

Hands clasped, I lean over her until I'm looking down at her from straight above, spine warped at an uncanny angle. "You understand, Greth? Constant violence sounds fun at the start. But it quickly turns into an obligation. I despise obligations. I refuse to let you act in any way that will create them for me, here in my own home."

The fledgling glowers for a while. Then, with another snort, she glides to the ever-churning morass and digs her claws in. She rakes multicolor furrows, shears nebular clouds of miniature temples and occult sigils and miniature demon effigies.

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