Chapter 35: Chapter 36: A cat, the emerald wanderer, and what makes a devil

"Finally... found you..." I pant, paws on my knees.

The emerald lady--emerald hair, emerald eyes, emerald gown, alabaster skin with a faint rosy flush of exertion and right, yeah, of course she'd be hot, should've expected that--looks just as disoriented as I feel. Considering she's been the one raising stony pillars at breakneck speed, punting herself from rooftop to rooftop in this valley of overgrown iron ruins, and I've been the one sprinting and yelling and trying to catch up, I can't help but feel a little annoyed about that.

"Oh!" she says, startled. "I understand now. This conversation hasn't happened."

What.

"I mean," she adds, scrunching her eyes as though at some distant horizon, "for you it's happening, but for me it won't have until it does."

"Which will be when?" I ask.

She smiles. "Soon."

"Oh, gods," I groan, "I should've known you'd be insane."

"Do you suppose I am?" she asks. "Well, I hope it's not too much trouble. I'll try to avoid being too weird about this. It's the first time I've been summoned into a future I might diverge from. It feels odd, gauzy." She taps her lips. "Gauzy? Hm. I feel as though in continuum I'm overusing that one. Granted, it might be--"

"Alright, wait, stop.” I hold my paws out. "I cannot communicate like this. I can just... go? I'm not asking you to change, but I cannot do this."

She waves a hand with emerald-painted nails. "It'll be fine, I'll contain it. Dream-like rambling is the best for talking about lore, anyway."

My eyes don’t feel like they belong to me. Slitted, one red and one gold, staring of their own accord at this very, very strange woman. "Why?"

She shrugs. "People get bored, otherwise."

"Right, uh... how did you know I was going to ask..." I stop. "Never mind. "Are you sure you're human?"

"I will be when we talk.” She nods firmly. "And I am right now. Except when I'm something else. Which is rare, unless I'm thinking about myself. I'm bad at being human."

I offer the best deadpan stare a cat can give. "I figured."

She smiles wryly. "For the record, I figured because most beings seldom seek me out otherwise. 'Hey Caerllyn, want a drink?' 'Hey Caerllyn, wanna play something?' I wish they did. But it's always, 'word me some words, word-lady, different from the ones you already worded. I want special words for me only.'"

The extreme un-presence of a sword at her side starts to make me nervous.

"I can still just go," I suggest.

"No, no, it's fine, really!" the emerald lady says. "Ask your question. It's a light enough thing. I just feel like I'm being slut-shamed sometimes. That's all." She clears her throat. "There. A dose of light trauma-dumping at your journey's end, a seer's price for tracking me down in the maybe-future to ask me a question."

"And you already know what the answer is, right?" I ask.

She beams. "No! Isn't foresight fun?"

"It seems more like disorienting and inconvenient."

She grins, cocking her thumbs upward and pointing both her fingers at me. I’m not familiar with this gesture, but somehow I know it’s ridiculous for her to make it. "Also true!" She knuckles her chin. "Is a precognitive manifestation really the same as foresight, though, or should I understand it more as a quantum summoning of the sort possibly depicted in the Black Books of Jung--"

"So about demons and devils," I interrupt, making her flinch. "Sorry. Uh, just... I've been reading through a lot of your past works, actually, and I've been trying to understand what each of those words means to you."

The emerald lady, who I can't help but think of as the emerald lady even though I know she said her name, brightens. She circles to sit on a mussy, fallen beam with the remnants of decaying wires hanging down into a chamber with some kind of spinning device at its center--for water filtration, maybe?

I pick a spot a little further from the hole. I'm, um... actually scared of heights.

"Well, I could tell you a lot," she says. "But if you've read what I already wrote..." She blushes, raising one hand's back to cover her face. "Sorry. I'm, um... I'll still be new to the idea of someone actually asking me about my work by the time we talk. So, um... if you've read what I already wrote, then I must assume there's something I didn't explain well." She waves a hand around her head. "I feel all the meanings reverberating around me in continuum. Makes it easy to lose track of the ones I failed to convey."

I feel like a complete ass for getting annoyed earlier. Her weird way of experiencing reality... it clearly makes her happy. "Well, sometimes you use the terms 'demon' and 'devil' interchangeably," I say. "But at others it seems as though there's some vital difference. "Like, in the early stages of iterating your outer devil theorems, you often used the term 'outer demon', but later on you exclusively used the term 'outer devil'. Why?"

"Well," she says, "first, let's be clear that when I use the English words 'demon' and 'devil, "I'm using them as shorthand for the Vulshiir words 'gosm'--"

Lurching, canted sight. Claws wrap a threshold, shadows surge like smoke inside the surface of the walls. fractured impression of a grinning fanged maw. The deep abyss welling up inside my head just before I dream. Whiplash warp like a a missed jump and a ledge cracking my chin.

The emerald lady switches her legs, now crossing the left over the right, and continues, "--and 'saevul.'" Lightning coils in steel sinew, Forge-glows and scalding and the monolith's touch unfolding into knowing.

I snap back to myself. "Holy shit... t-that's what you meant when you wrote that Vulshiir is a language of the power, huh?" I swallow my nerves. "The Carag tongue, t-the Ruinborn Hymn... was that an early effort to create Vulshiir?"

"Oho," the emerald lady laughs. "Very astute! They're the same, actually. But events spiraled outside my control, I perished of sickness before I could realize that, and so I'm afraid my writings paint an incomplete picture of me. I am Carag, you see. The very first of..." she stops. Her smile dims. "Well.. that is... I wanted to be Carag, and no Carag existed before me. No prior lives, as I once wrote. That was all psychosis."

"Oh." My tail wraps my ankles. "Sorry. That you died before you could finish it."

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"I got a second chance. I try to focus on that." Her rekindled smile is pearly and bewitching and when she arrives in this moment to give it, it will be meant for me alone. "You really have done your research if you know about Caragliiri. When was it, 2019 A.D that I removed those posts from my old blog? I'm flattered. But yes," she continues, while I reel from the raw sunniness of her praises, "Caragliiri and Vulshiir are the same speech in the end. I created 'Caragliiri' as something of a Veil-Name for Vulshiir. I did not yet believe I, myself, could be powerful enough to write it."

Another deep smile. "But I'm getting off-topic. Or rather, I'm giving more of the topic than you asked for. The answer to your question, taken conventionally, is simple. I always found something oddly compelling about the notion of the Hells versus the Abyss, you see."

"Really?" I ask. "Like, you do mean--"

"The Forgotten Realms, and Pathfinder," she agrees. "I know. My, you’re well versed on Earth culture. All this study just to comprehend little old me? Still, hardly the inspiration you'd expect, given where I wound up. I felt they touched on something important about my own understanding of the difference between a demon and a devil, but..."

She purses her lips. And gods, those are some lips, I--

"I'm still talking!~" Caerllyn sing-songs. "Am I more here, or are you less so? Focus, little kitty. Mistress is talking."

She knows. I'm made of glass and she KNOWS.

"Y-yes ma'am," I stammer. "Sorry ma'am."

"Good girl." She frowns, running her fingers over her big, pretty, iridescent horns. She waves through them and they disappear into smoke and--

Why am I thinking about the color blue?

"Still human," Caerllyn mutters. "I must stick to this. The way out is through. Revelations in flesh… ahem." She folds her hands. "So, yes, certain tabletop games and their lore. I just figured out the answer earlier today, so your timing will be very good."

"That's... is that how that works?" I ask.

"Stop thinking about it, pet," she orders.

"Y-yes ma'am, of course ma'am." Her smile... I would die for her...

"It was the whole framing--slotting everything into law and chaos," Caerllyn continues. "I felt it was important that demons were fiends who chased their own instincts, where devils embraced law, and had certain longstanding rulers who always made it clear who they were, all these contracts and consent-mechanisms plotting out the way they’d take a soul, but why?" She grins. "I've finally figured it out. Rule, my dear sweet kitten--"

KITTEN?! It's a good thing I can't sweat, and that cats don't have any equally obvious tells, like highly-expressive ears.

"--focus, dear." Caerllyn doesn't seem even a little displeased to say it. "Law, ultimately, is about who rules whom. And rule," she adds, turning the word over on her tongue and oh fuck I'm going to die of thirst, "is about power projection. Rule," she declares, with triumphant gleams in her big, green, pretty pretty eyes, "is irradiant."

She holds her left hand out and all I can think of are those fingers tracing me, slipping into my mouth. "So you see, in my understanding a demon--gosm--" Parted lips and heated sighs and claws tickling my belly and teasing my-- "--is a being linked with personal impulses, the deep psyche, and all the iceberg of identity under the surface."

"The devil, the saevul--" She is the lambent blue and the six-horned succumbing, the gate is wide and welcoming and I will be adorned in the signs of her possession and I will be redeemed! Blessed, oh blessed are we, her elect, her-- "is a rare subclass of such demons. The devil, irradiant," Caerllyn slides a sly razor smile across her emerald lips, "is a paradox creature, a demon inclined to be selfish and secretive who, in her irradiance, shines her deepest self into all around her and so transmutes them toward her own nature."

She licks her teeth. "Now, here's where I went astray in the distinction for many, many centuries. There's a difference between irradiance as a single act, and irradiance as a continuous, intentional part of one's identity. I like to play the dark star sometimes, shining my into the souls around me, changing and transmuting them with all the wondrous mysteries of my abyss..." She pauses to pointedly push her horns back into her head.

I'm so sad to see them go. I guess she has to do this, but... I think they're really beautiful. Her horns. They're part of her, after all.

"But," she continues, "to be a devil means defining yourself by your irradiance. It passes beyond just shining yourself into others. It means holding a magnifiying glass to the way your light illuminates them." Her visage creases. Pain. That's pain in her eyes. "It means flaring over, and over, and over, insisting that they must feel the same way that you do about everything you give to them, that they must reach the same conclusions, that they must decide on the same actions, and I..." She sniffles, shaking her head.

"Poor stupid girl. I wanted to be abyssal. That's what makes a succubus happy! The dream-sieve, wild and free and instinctive, radiant when it makes me happy, radiant only when I enjoy the chance to unleash myself. To be irradiant, forcing myself to measure everything I achieved by whether the beings I met responded to it as though they were my kindred spirits in every way, shape, and form... small wonder I mangled my own lust."

The silence settles until I can conceive a question to break it.

"So... so demons might gather followers, but won't change their natures?" I ask.

"Well," Caerllyn says, waggling a hand, "a demon may try changing a follower's nature as long as it feels fulfilling. However, where the devil does this because their own identity requires them to change the natures around them, for the demon it's about the experience of the attempt, of enjoying the action itself. Whether the demon actually succeeds in changing that being's nature is a side issue. I've just as often used my irradiance to double the reflected light of those I cherish, and reinforce their own ideal selves, as I have to seed them with my little gifts." She tilts her head. "Does that answer your question?"

"Y-yes, uh," I gulp. "It does. It... will have?"

"Let me worry over my perspective, pet." She stands, feet stepping on empty air over the old chamber. "I will shine it forth in my own time." She taps my forehead. "Be yourself."

I quiver. "Y-yes, mistress."

Caerllyn beams. "That's a good girl! Now, if you've read everything else, you know what I'll want you to do next, won't you?" She leans forward. Whispers in my ear. "Wherever I go, I want to hear all sorts of rumors about your adventures."

I shudder. My eyes roll back. I--

I'm alone in a valley of overgrown iron ruins. Scents of earth, growing things, a brief hint of something strange and sharp on the wind. I feel I've just learned something, then forgotten again.

I guess... I'll remember when the time comes?

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