Chapter 24: Chapter 25: A young sinner, the Lady, and the Miidyaerita, Part Two

The Lady keeps her promise, and her subjects, or peers, or friends, or whatever the hell I should call the many demons of Machrae Diir, keep it too. I start to get the point quickly enough. Every knows exactly what I did. Who and what I am.

The Lady--I learn more and more of her names, but I never feel right calling her something other than her pseudo-title--rarely appears. If I want to talk to her, to ask advice or for a different assignment or just to scream at her, I can do that.

I usually don't. I'm grudging. Acid in my gullet, a snarl on my face. But no matter how much I posture, curse, hint at just how much I enjoyed what I did... no one lets me move them with my rage.

"Thanks for carrying that."

"Remember to rest."

"Does it help you to scream? Okay. Then feel free."

Once I lose my grip and monologue to a slender, shapely lust-demon with a sculpted girldick straining the lines of her gossamer gown--fractal sunflares blossoming all along her horns and hips. I rant, rave, slaver like a rabid dog while I talk about every kill.

"Mhm," she finally says. "Alright, hun. Those sound like some murders alright." She extends her hand. "Name's Parphyaera."

I grin, taking her hand and squeezing hard.

It's like trying to crush a neutron star under my fingers. I can barely even tighten them.

While I grunt, groan, and strain, Parphyaera dives into her own monologue about how she decided to start her own sex trade just so she could snare a girl who jilted her, and have the satisfaction of breaking her personally.

"Here's the thing." She pauses to grind up a glowing shard of something I eventually recognize for an angel's halo. "I've tried the redemption arc thing. It did nothing to heal me. Then I came here, and Kai sat me down and she said something like--paraphrasing 'cuz, you know, it's Kai--she said, 'it's not that you regret destroying that girl's life. It's that you regret that while you were focused on that, you did things that should've brought you happiness, but you never enjoyed them because they were just stepping stones to something else. In a way, you let her control you because you felt you had to get back at her." Parphyaera stops there to snort the ground-up halo dust. Divine light brims in her eyes and stirs inside her skin, turning it translucent and highlighting her squirming veins.

"Oh, fuck, that's good." She leans back across the bar. Her hen makes a big, wrinkled tent in her gown. "And I realized... Kairliina was right, y'know? The girl I broke was nobody to me. She's still nobody, centuries later. All the time and energy I spent on her, I could've spent on somebody it made me happy to remember." She whistles to one of the infuriating, always-smirking demon twinks that every fucking bar in Machrae Diir seems to have for servers. "Come here, boy." She lifts her dress right there in public and I flinch away. "Take care of this for mommy, would you?"

I scramble out just as the incubus licks his lips and hurries over to Parphyaera.

That's how I learn about the Unsung Covenant of the Rotting and Renewing Heart. The Miidyaerita of Machrae Diir, whatever 'Miidyaerita' means.

I get to recognize them pretty soon. All mature, poised, elegant, full of insight and this downright infuriating sense of inevitability. It seems like they're all lust-demons, and most are succubi like the Lady. Their numbers are few, but they always seem to show up right when thinking of causing problems for Machrae Diir.

The Lady's their leader, as I finally figure out.

I feel like I'm doing a real bad job of whatever it is my inclusion in Machrae Diir is supposed to involve. I try to piss people off, unnerve them, even just annoy them enough they'll leave. I get into fights. I'm frequently lazy, and cynical as all hell. I know they see it.

But no matter how few the eldritch creatures I coax up from the deep reaches of Machrae Diir, no matter how bad I am about getting a runic pallet of gifts from the Ashenvein Gates to the Rift or vice-versa, everyone just says "thank you." No one bars me from showing up at parties where I just lounge against the wall, and sneer at all comers.

I start getting a weird, weird feeling. Something I could almost swear I remember from back when I was too young to understand that my parents were abusive, bigoted trash.

It's ticklish and hollows me before it fills me. The more it sets in, the more easily I... fucksakes... the more easily I become frightened. The more easily I start to see I've been frightened all along. I start to taste blood, to smell voided bowels and terror.

It wears me down, that ticklish something unfolding somewhere under my obsidian ribs. It wears me down until I reach a day of amber gleams from midnight arrow-slits and the great maelstrom's howling. The clack of foot claws in my mad dash for the Galespire.

I hurry across the shifting platforms and clamber through the mazework four-dimensional tunnels to arrive at her throne room, where the Lady acknowledges me only with a slow nod and a brief flick of her eyes. She sits in silence, drawing signs and portents from the ether, while I huddle against a pillar nearby.

Time moves oddly in Machrae Diir. I'm not sure how long I sit there, staring at all the nothing around me and screaming silently in my own mind for it to stay nothing.

I don't want to see. I don't want the nothingness to tear open.

Still, and soft, and quiet. Please. Stay.

"Greth?" the Lady asks, rising. I snap to. "I'm leaving the throne room, dove. I wish to walk around Coremaw Hearth and see how my anomaly-fields fare. You may stay here if you desire. Or if you'd rather, you're most welcome to walk with me--"

I'd forgotten I could move so fast.

Coremaw Hearth lives up to its name. Shattered masonry and concrete rubble held together by tenuous reinforcing rods. Toothy metalloid spurs and wires, bizarre spindly constructs and hovering engines interspersed by glowing, living mineral plants.

And of course, the Hearths themselves: enormous pits spiraling down, down, down to the scorching depths. The Lady has kindled miniature stars far below. They burn inside cradles of dark matter, structures visible only as seeming holes in the fabric of her domain. No mortal I've ever known would feel at home here. Few demons, even. The whole place is so consciously, intentionally strange.

The Lady loves it. Her eyes shine. She lingers over every mutant spur of architecture like a flower of bone marrow, every scythe-limbed monstrosity.

And I start to understand. I sink beyond rational emotion. There's no association, mortal or otherworldly, that I could use to explain the soft restful sensations I begin to feel just from looking on the ever-changing world-lines of a conical tower.

Hey, wait. Why do I feel I need to explain that at all?

Answer's simple: that's how I started. Rest needed a justification. Joy needed a price. Harshness and hardship, those were the only things I was allowed to take for granted.

"I think I'm broken," I say, while the Lady scoops a handful of glowing slag from a fissure in the ground and slips it into her mouth with a distinctly sexual sigh of delight. She stifles it and turns to listen to me. "Everyone here is... nice. You're all so fucking nice to me. No one's told me any bullshit like 'it's not your fault' or tried to convince me that my parents were somehow to blame when I killed the other seventeen people. I'm a monster. We all agree on that. But they're so nice."

The Lady waits.

"I've started to... to feel things. Things like I'm supposed to feel when people are kind to me. I-I was excited, earlier, to bring that scholar in the Lambent Quarter the tome she asked for. I thought about how I kind of like her, and then... then I thought..."

I clutch my shoulders. The Lady gathers herself. Ready to lunge in and stop me if I start clawing myself. I don't. But I sure as hell want to.

"I thought about how visceral, how satisfying it would be to sit on her chest and grin down at her while I tore her throat out."

"Hm." The Lady appraises me. "And you sought refuge in my sanctum because you have spent days digging for some psychic fault, some unmended wound, something to explain why you desire to do violence to someone you like. Someone who shows you kindness."

"Yeah," I say, kicking a small stone into rocky shrapnel.

"Sweetheart, you're a demon,” the Lady says, with a soft, almost motherly sigh. “You're viewing your desires through a human lens. Demonic impulses are abyssal. Innately irrational, bubbling up from our deep selves. I often contemplate maiming or killing my lovers. And then...” she shrugs. "I just choose otherwise, because the brief joy of eviscerating means far less to me than the infinite joys of the days we spend together."

"Is it... is it that simple?" I ask. "Just love myself for what I am, and I can trust myself to choose how to use it?"

"Simple, and incredibly difficult," she agrees. "But doable. The desire gets you there, young Greth. Cling to it."

She stretches. yawns.

"Besides, Greth, death and unmaking mean very different things among our kind. With the right preparation, carving the ones you love into meat-shavings can be a lot of fun." Her eyes flash. "It makes for the most outrageously kinky se--"

"Yeah, thanks, Kai, I get that part." I stand side-on to her, awkward. "Sorry, I'm not trying to kink-shame you or anything."

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"Oh, no need to apologize, dove." She swats the air as though to smack my anxiety down. "Setting boundaries is just part of negotiating between competing desires. I find that stimulating. It's a great opportunity to learn more about what stirs the hearts of other beings. That helps me become a more skilled creatrix, occultist, and yes, seductress."

She leans, pruning coral-like protrusions from a glittering heap of slag. "May I give you my opinion about your anxiety attack?

I flop my arms. "Sure."

"You're a demon. Violence and violent power are integral parts of what we are." The Lady straightens. "So is self-determination at any cost. Maximum possible agency to chart our own courses. I think that in this case, you and I share a trauma. Violence is fun, Greth, but it is also a risk. Your murders put you in great danger, danger you felt unable to face. So rather than any failure to abide by human morality, it's the helplessness you felt over letting external stressors push you into that danger that has left you with CPTSD."

She contemplates an empty space, filled only by slowly-shifting ashes. With a wave of her hand she raises a bizarre growth of metallic reds and oranges with black flesh between them. It looks like a nightmare take on a compass rose--too many arms, too many directions that are anything except cardinal. "That's why you must learn creation," the Lady concludes. "So you'll have an intimate part of your identity to retreat to when the others are torn asunder by trauma. One that affords you the tools to build yourself anew."

"Huh." This stillness feels like nothing so much as a key slotting to a lock. "I..." The rock covered in bubbling, seeping hot goo-stuff seems as good a place to have a heavy sit-down as anywhere else. "I think... I think that's it. You're..." I lick my lips, still grappling with the shock of actually understanding myself. "You're a genius, you know that?"

Kairliina laughs. "Yes, but let's be clear, the five hundred years of practice, the power I've created in myself, and the community support of Machrae Diir that allow me to offer effective demon therapy." She passes by, almost patting my shoulder without thinking about it. When she freezes I look for a few second at her hovering hand.

Then I take it gently by the wrist and lift it, higher, until it's above my short hair and big, barbed horns. Without another word, Kairliina settles her hand in place and ruffles my hair. I squirm up to meet the warmth of her palm. And just like that, I'm so happy I cry.

It just feels so good to be touched. That's all I wanted. The touch, the affection. I thought I had to be a good person to earn it, I thought...

"Everyone needs affection," Kairliina says, with a soft knowing smile. "Monsters too."

That opens the floodgates. I spend hours crying myself out against her chest and smearing all kinds of demon-snot on her gown. Even after that day, it takes years to create pathways back and reclaim all the lost and broken pieces of me. Back and forth, spirals up, spirals down. Some days I forget that I'm supposed to be working on myself. Some days I'm full of bile and fury again, hating everyone in Machrae Diir for their hypocrisy.

But then I'll sleep, as far as a demon like sleeps--a living dream manifest in the world, sprawls of shapes and limbs and colors all disassembled in muzzy comfort. I know that some demons, mostly the -cubi ones like Kairliina, tend to sleep in a way more like mortals sleep: their minds falling out of the world to some deep elsewhere-place. I'm pretty sure their forms phase out of reality while they're dreaming, though, and that terrifies me. So I sleep in my own way, and when I wake, I wake up to a dimension where I see nothing but love inside and out. Teachers. Peers. Friends.

I've grown confident enough in creation to pull velvet rooms and iron halls, plush couches and chitinous barges together from the morass within minutes. Slow, steady, and calm. Weaving with rhythmic twists of my claws. Little flicks of my tail.

I've learned eleven musical instruments from as many worlds. I play for other denizens, sometimes, at one of the clubs along the Rift of Recompense. They clap. and I turn into this unheralded girl who blushes, who smiles, who brushes her hair back behind her horns and makes an adorable bob. She's just so grateful to share her joy with them.

Other demons smile when they see me. Mortals and spirits who come to Machrae Diir know my name. The Unsung Covenant are always pleased to meet up with me on a walk.

Proud, even.

I make people happy. I make their lives better by being here. Me. Greth. I make things better. How odd it is to think about that. My parents spent all their lives trying to beat the evil out of me, each other, and themselves. They obsessed over doing good, genuinely believed in righteousness in their warped way, yet spent most of their time hurting everything they touched. All at once, the thought clicks: as long as I exist, I add what I am to the universe. So much growth, so much effort just to comprehend those few words.

It's anticlimactic at first. But the longer I contemplate it, the more precious I see my knowledge is. When I was full of fury and violence, with that aching sense of separation from everything, violence and separation--lives torn apart--were the only things I could add. Penance, that tired old story of a demon ashamed of her own nature... I'd just be filling myself with more violence, more division.

So I keep chasing joy, and finding it, and joy is what I add to Machrae Diir.

When the moment comes, I'm alone in my room after a day where everything went completely right. I helped guide a bunch of newcomers through some of the darker, more perilous parts of Machrae Diir. A succubus living along the Rift confessed her love to me, and I confessed right back. Alashri. My mind's eye swims, drunk, on the upward curves her horns, and the orange beads of her sclerae, and the glowing green of her slit irises.

Such silky red hair, such soft skin--like iron made supple.

So I'm completely unprepared when I duck into my penthouse apartment in a spectral skyscraper--it only houses twenty other people. It's about capturing the spirit of a largely-abandoned cityscape, Parphyaera once told me--and the most abyssal despair gouges me.

"I'm sorry!" I scream at the ceilings. "I take it back, I take it back, I take it back! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please... it can't be..."

I see Denev backing away through my living room. Hands held out before him.

"No," I whimper.

He screams without sound. Bloody clefts open. Red streaks my claws. Something tangy and hot spills down my throat. I retch. I claw. I wail and rend my scalp. That redhead girl in her little tech shop inside the old starship hull. The old man, blind, grinning right until I shoved his cane through his neck.

And then, right in the sort of paralyzing fear I used to believe I could never overcome once I let it claim me, I drop my hands to my sides and confront my hallucinations.

"I chose to kill you." I clasp my hands and bow to the wraiths. "I'm sorry. I scarcely knew your stories. I wanted a part of them, but the only thing I could imagine bringing to your lives was destruction. A demon has to chase her desires, in the end, so... so try as I might to stay away, when I finally gave up on denying myself, I could only choose violence."

I straighten. Fear still bubbles within me, fear that I'll slip, fear that I'll do it all again. But I can stand it now. I can claim this terror, too, as part of me, and control it.

"I choose to remember you, so that next time, I can choose a path that will give me more of others to experience. And that's selfish, yet... if I'd just been selfish like that," I shrug, helpless to change the past, and in embracing that, strong enough to change my future. "If I'd found the courage to be selfish from the start, all of you would still be alive."

And my apartment sits, still and empty.

"So," I ask my reflection, a wraith of myself staring back at me from among the strange arches of Machrae Diir's residential districts, a single glowing eye all but blotted out by the cobalt auroras spilling sideward from the Rift of Recompense. "I guess now it's just you I need to talk to, huh? Alright, killer." I consider my claws. "So, whose story do you want to become part of, instead?"

A dreamy walk in the shadowed night. I think about asking Alashri to walk with me, but sometimes a demon needs to wander alone with herself, and that's okay too. And hour later I'm on a plush couch surrounded by faces I know. Parphyaera, Kairliina and others--every demon of the Unsung Covenent. The Lady stands at the center of their circle.

Kairliina's so much shorter than I'm used to seeing her, wider hips, a bigger bust. I want to say she's under a hundred-fifty centimeters. "And you want to join the Miidyaerita why, if I may ask?" she asks.

I shrug. "I dunno. I just want to. It feels right." My shoulders rise up around me. Nerves push me deeper into the couch. "Although I guess... it is kind of a succubus-only thing..."

"Oh, no, it's not," Parphyaera laughs. "I'm a lust demon, but not a succubus."

A good-natured brute with bone-spikes studding his massive square jaw and a pentagon of slit-nostrils at the center of his green, craggy face, white fire blazing on his horns, thumps his chest. "I'm male, and I'm in the Miidyaerita." He grins sidelong at Kairliina. "Somebody's gotta look after high queen gremlin over there."

Kairliina blushes, averting her eyes. "Y-yes, well," she clears her throat. "Way back at the beginning of Machrae Diir, when I was dissociating from myself, in denial about my nature as a succubus, I insisted that the Miidyaerita must be all-female lust demons."

I nod. "So that the social structure around you would keep you doing succubus things, without the pressure of you embracing yourself as a succubus, right."

Kairliina nods in her turn. "Yes. But since then I've grown, learned to be my complete self again, and thus I've moved beyond the need to constrain the Miidyaerita. Whatever their gender, whether they're demons or dragons or undead or something else altogether, whether they're from Machrae Diir or anywhere else in all creation, Miidyaerita are monsters who choose to nurture other monsters. We do this without regard for any notion of the common good, or some dissonant dream of redemption. We do this simply because whether or not they deserve it, we always find ourselves learning to love them."

She glances about her. "Well, you heard young Greth, kindred. She wants to join the Miidyaerita simply because it feels like she ought to. And what do we say to that?"

Knowing glances and warm smiles exchanged. One by one each approaches, offers me their  hand to clasp, and says softly, "Miidyaerita kastejul."

That ticklish feeling ignites at last. It's so, so warm.

"I accept," I say. I'm melting. Tears flowing so swift and free and joyous. "Miidyaerita kastejul?"

"Welcome home, little sister," Kairliina says, beaming at me. "Miidyaerita kastejul. It means simply this: 'monsters look after their own.'"

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