And Yet She Persisted 2 (1/2)

Arusheluxem sighed, as she looked around the chamber. The iconography was of the blasphemous spawn of the outer darkness, the chaos from ancient times, when everything was far more, well, basic. Before Konol had done his thing, and then obligingly died. Making it about the one and only time the gods had ever been useful.

It was all wrong for what she needed to do, but she had neither the time nor the resources to hand to formalize the matter.

Fortunately, the nature of the being she was calling lent itself to utility over appearances, a concept distasteful to her own preferences.

Anise Lay’di. It made her smile, whenever they called her that. It’s what she used on her status screen, these days, now that her Conceal Status skill was up to decent levels. It had taken a little bit, once she’d been summoned, to unlock the cultist job and grind it to the point where she could reliably hide her status from the various means of viewing it. A trick which she’d have to help this new spawn master in short order.

First things first. The succubus laid the head down first, on the slimy mattress, then deposited the still-beating heart below it. Weaker now, but still fresh enough for her purposes. In fact… yes, she had time. “Occult Eye,” she murmured, and blinked as the world shifted to her view. An easy cultist trick, one that identified adherents of the same faith, and flagged objects of occult significance. In this case, she’d used it because it made artifacts of forbidden lores and the planes above and beyond, glow to her sight. Then she strolled back to the cove, looking for what had been left behind, when the cowards fled.

And she found it.

Minutes left, she gauged, returning to the room where a high priest had once indulged his kinks at the cost of his follower’s time and effort. She gathered her thoughts, cleared her mind, and checked her sanity. Good enough, she wagered. It had mainly been moxie and endurance burned during that farce of a fight. If she hadn’t had her hands literally full… ah. Regrets. She’d kill them later, she or one of the others.

“I invoke the Second Pact. The forbidden knowledge, offering the heart and mind of the mortal mob Cecelia Ragandor-Gearhart, as sacrifice to call forth a Hellsmith of the second circle, forging darkness to my desire. These the terms of the pact, in the true tongue;”

She cleared her throat, and began the lengthy process. Clarity was vital here, even a single missed syllable or accent could have disastrous repercussions.

Fortunately, being a daemon, she was fluent in her native tongue.

“Ent mayne, par an the seas arg sea, char twin stars arg thee, par an thesis bracketa…”

It felt good to speak the true tongue once more, the one that bent the mind, and drove daemon cultists to caffeine and insomnia, pouring over ancient texts time and again, to ensure that they had the commands inlaid correctly.

And as she spoke, the air thickened around the severed parts of the girl, Cecelia.

It was a mistake, to think that daemons cared about souls. They didn’t. The plane they came from was seen as a place of torment, where mortal souls suffered eternally. Anyone who truly knew anything about daemons knew that was a lie. Daemons didn’t LIKE mortals, certainly not enough to spend eternity with them. No, the true aim of daemons was a world where they didn’t NEED to do anything on this layer of reality. Empty. Silent. With no rogue variables blundering about, and nothing interrupting the major processes that they were charged to oversee.

No, daemons had no use at all for souls.

But brains? Those had memories. And hearts? They were symbolic, more or less. And tricky to recreate, much easier to recycle.

The succubus spoke and red energy pulsed up from the heart, its torn arteries stretching and growing, spreading out to flop upon the mattress, sprouting veins and capillaries as they went. One stretched upward, seeking like a snake, before slamming home into the severed throat of the head, in a manner that would have made Reverend Hatecraft reach for his lotion.

The head opened its mouth and screamed, unendingly, a scream that only grew louder as lungs formed, and the rest of the organs followed. Through it all Arusheluxem droned on, hitting each syllable with precision, feeling her sanity slip away bit by bit, taking her focus with it.

That was the trap of the pacts, more or less. They cost the very thing you needed a lot of to get them right, and failure had consequences. Nothing too horrible, usually, assuming you had the power to confine a rogue daemon, and the time to work through the pact, fixing the errors that you had made the first time around. But not everyone DID have the time and power, and so the end result was pleasing to the rogue daemons who could escape or regain their own free will, even to a limited degree.

She came to the end, as the skin formed, and Cecelia’s nude shell stopped screaming, and opened its eyelids for the first time. For a second nothing was there but blackness, darkness from a plane mortal mobs were never meant to touch. Then she blinked, and Cecelia’s eyes replaced it.

“…named Gshantatrixem,” Arusheluxem finished. “Bound by my will!”

“Inefficient,” the new daemon said, clambering to its feet. “Human form, insufficiently mature. Messy hormones. Good musculature structure.” It frowned. “No augmentations. Permission to self-improve?”

“Denied,” Arusheluxem told it. “You are playing the part of a woman called Cecelia Ragadorn Gearhart.”

It stared at her, contemptuously. “I am not skilled in subtlety and deception. You should have called a Deciever.”

“Fool. I have my reasons. You are the last part of a plan over a mortal decade in the making. You will NOT endanger my plans or I will see you suffer when we return to the branch of Var Rhun.”

The new daemon’s eyes went wide. “You know of… wait.” It studied her. “You appear mortal, and you pacted as one, but you are a daemon as well… this defies logic.”

“The meddlers gave the mortal mobs too much power. Power they did not secure from us.” The being known as Anise smiled at the new spawn. “I have taken four of their… jobs… as my own.” She’d nearly taken a fifth, before finding out that model wasn’t necessary, because some of her succubus skills overlapped in just the right way. “You will learn two, perhaps more, before we leave this place.”

“I am a Hellsmith,” the daemon appealed to her. “I ALREADY know what I need to know. I can build you war machines, great bombs and guns, gasses and shells to taint the land and slay your foes. I can augment your flesh with cold armor and hot weapons to smite down your foes. That is my purpose. Why do you wish me to pretend otherwise?”

“You’ll get to do all that too,” Arusheluxem smiled. “And let me show you what your host used to drive around in.” She grabbed a dirty sheet from the back of the room, threw it around the daemon spawn’s nudity, and had it hold it shut.

Dark, when they got out. Dark in a way that neither daemon truly cared about. And watching the new spawn’s eyes light up and jaw drop when it… she… saw Reason, made the jaunt worthwhile.

“Passable,” the Hellsmith declared, stalking around Reason, touching the legs of it, studying the gears and joints and engine. “Ah… yes. Room for improvement. Definite room for improvement. Solid base, though. Yes, I find this acceptable. For now.”

“Can you work it?”

The Hellsmith snorted. “Please. This is easy. I’ll need some flesh, some tools worth a damn, twenty meters of steel wire, six corpses worth of sinew, a few copper rods, some bell jars, and two brains for backup failover processors. Wait. Coal? They wasted a chassis like this on a coalburner? Seriously? Tch. Torment would be easier. Liquified, refined, about seventy proof and I’d get this baby screaming. Literally.”

“It has to look the same from the outside,” Arusheluxem cautioned. “For now, at any rate. Later we won’t have to hide.”

“What happens later?”

The creature called Anise looked around. Renick had left a token garrison, by the sounds of patrolling boots, and the distant torchlight moving around town, searching, ensuring that everyone was truly dead. Too many ears. “Come inside. You’ll need to stay in here anyway for a bit. I’ll see about arranging a knight and an animator to montage you.” Arusheluxem decided, pushing the reluctant Hellsmith away from drooling over Reason, and back to the church. “I’ll have to spin a cover story but that’s no big deal for these mouthbreathers. But in a day or two you’ll be on your own devices for a bit, so I need to make sure you’re ready before I go.”

“Go?” The newly-pacted daemon blinked at her. “Where are you going?”

“I’ll be off to deliver the good news to a pathetic king, that his shitty little kingdom gets to keep existing for a little while longer…” She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a red crystal, that glittered with green numbers, flashing endlessly in the night.

“That’s-“

She whipped her fingers to the Hellsmith’s mouth. “Ah ah ah. They call them Dungeon Cores, here. And most people have never seen one.”

“Cores? That’s entirely backwards.” The Hellsmith frowned.

“Yes, and oh, I love them so for coming at it in such an ass-backwards way. We wouldn’t be in this juicy, ripe situation if they hadn’t…”

*****

His existence was green light, entirely green light, and that was how he knew he was in his true body when he woke from unexpected sleep.