“It was long, long ago. A formless darkness swallowed all of creation, and from it was born the Aether. There were no intelligent creatures, demon, angel, human, or-” Jadis reached out and smacked the Frog Demon on the back of the head, disrupting his onerous performance. The expression on her face hinted at her annoyance. 

“I promise you that if you waste my time, I will have no need for you any longer.” She surprised herself with the cold steel in her tone. She would kill this demon, as congenial as it seemed compared to others. “Speak, Savis.”

The demon scowled and rubbed at his head. “Fine. You prove that humans are as unrefined as I remember.” The complaint in his nasaly voice grated at her nerves. “Do you know of the Spider Demon, Queen of the Grand Web?”

Jadis stilled. Part of her wished to draw her blade, but she was able to restrain herself. “Who in the Hells would not know of her?”

Savis nodded, looking away as he kept speaking. “She once owned half of this Hell, agreed upon by her and the Mistress of Ash. Just before the Veil, the Master of Darkness took full ownership and she left. Kaveris held this place for the Spider Queen for many centuries awaiting her return.”

As the demon spoke, a continuous chill assaulted her body. “To think that this creature has been alive that whole time.” It was part amazement, part horror. It was impossible to conceive of what it would be like to live as a demon, fearful of being consumed by something more powerful and terrifying than themselves. Then again, was it so different than the lives humans had lived before they had begun building villages and cities?

She cleared her head of the notion, trying to disengage from the sympathy that always threatened to simmer and boil over. Then she said, “Yes, I gathered as much, demon. How did you come to be master of this space that belonged to the Spider Demon?” She gave as menacing a stare as she could muster, though her round face and soft features had rarely inspired such reactions. Even still, she saw a flash of fear in the rotund eyes of Frog Demon.

He shifted, rubbing his hands together. “Well, I… well you have to understand…. I am not a fighter. I am a trickster. So when I first came to this place, I did not come alone…”

Jadis furrowed her brow. “Seeing as there was no other demon inside, I can assume what happened to them.” Demons killed demons, that was the first lesson she had learned from Dua Pria.

Savis puffed up his chest. “Only one of us could be Master of the House.” Jadis did not reply, doing what she could to cool her features to hide her disgust. After an uncomfortably long silence, Savis continued. “Once Ishkul had bound Kaveris, I… disposed of her using a spell.”

Jadis mulled this over, unable to stop herself from flexing her jaw. Then she said, “How, exactly, did you maintain control?”

Savis stared for a moment, a blank expression on his face. “There was nothing to maintain control over. The mind was shattered, subdued. It was the power that remained.”

“Abominable,” Dua Pria thought with a sneer. Jadis couldn’t help but agree. She had never heard of a demon vivisecting other demons to utilize their powers, usually they just consumed one another. To destroy a mind yet render the essence into a tool for use… Jadis had not even known this was possible.

She had to know why. “Why would you not simply consume Kaveris?”

Savis narrowed his beady eyes. “And waste the pocket dimension it made? Absoutely not!” He shook his head in disgust.

“Could you have not remade it once you took Kaveris’ power?” she asked the question earnestly.

The Frog Demon thought on this for a moment before shaking his head. “I guess I could have tried, but that isn’t my strength, at least not like Kaveris could. That one was a real master with a web.”

Jadis felt silent for a long moment, and after reflecting on this decided she would prefer to move on. “What powers did you gain in that place?”

This time, Savis shuffled a bit more uncomfortably, scooting back a few inches from Jadis. “I was Master of the House. I controlled many things. Shape. Perception. Gravity. Climate. Though…” He looked down at the ground. “There were parts I could never enter, and things I wasn’t able to change from Kaveris’ original design.”

Jadis smirked. “So one of you intentionally made it a wasted husk?”

Savis gave another childlike reaction, smacking his small closed fists on the wooden platform. “Do not speak ill of my home!” His voice had raised up nearly an octave as he yelled his response. 

The reaction was so absurd that she stepped away, crossing her arms. She didn’t look away from the creature, but she needed a moment to ponder the reality of the demon before her. “It is so… human like,” she thought, communicating with Dua Pria.

“I assure you, it is anything but. Demons can play on your emotions and turn your wits against you.” The venom in her tone was barely contained.

After a moment of silence, she replied, “Do you truly think that is what is happening right now?”

Jadis stared in silence at the Frog Demon for a long, undisturbed moment as she waited Dua Pria’s reply. Then, so quiet she almost missed it, she heard a whispered, “No…“

The Huntress sighed and placed a foot on the stair between her and the demon, leaning down onto her knee. “I am not a demon, so you do not have to worry about me devouring you. But I will kill you, just as I killed your… house.” Her voice fell flat as she finished, but then she emphasized her point by patting the sheathed sword on her hip.

For the first time, the demon laughed, a wide smile taking over his face. Jadis found she did not like the expression. There was something greedy and conniving in his mirth. “I know that no mere sword killed Kaveris.” He pointed a long, dark green finger at Jadis’ chest. “You have a secret around your neck.” The words came out sing songy like one child teasing another.

In an instant, Jadis had drawn her sword and pressed in close. She was face to face with the demon, her blade against his neck. 

“Jadis!” Dua Pria’s voice rang in her mind, but she ignored it.

The Huntress had no time to reply, though, as a wall of force slammed into her, sending her soaring through the air. She twisted, barley overcoming the shock of the hit as she tilted her hips around so that she landed on her feet. She rolled back, mitigating the impact and coming back up with her sword between them. 

Savis’ neck and chest had ballooned, launching Jadis away, and it slowly deflated as the demon looked at her with malice flashing in his narrowed eyes. “Too. Close.”

She scowled in response and motioned between herself and the demon with her sword. “Between you and me, you have no rights here, demon.”

The Frog Demon scoffed, voice booming. “This is the Dimlight, human! It is you that has no-“

She had not waited for him to reply. Jadis had pulled the pouch from the back of her belt and cast the contents outward, just as she had with the panther demon. The crackle of energy sparked to life and flame filled the air above Savis, then she rushed forward. Jadis was at him in an instant, the incantation for her shield the only sign she approached as she stepped through the quickly fading plume of fire. The tip of her sword slashed out just as the fire faded and she dropped her shield. It scratched across his chest before it stabbed into his shoulder. She quickly withdrew it and kicked the demon in the stomach, sending him onto his back.

“Do you know to whom you speak?” she yelled, anger flashing through her body like a wildfire. 

Savis cowered, his hands coming up as his bluster drained away. Black ichor stained the front of his robes in disgusting rivulets. “You wield the Primordial Flame, you are one of the Itor!” The desperation in his voice tempered her anger a few degrees.

“I am the Huntress of the Flame and you will bow to my will or be reduced to ash,” she said aggressively. “Never forget this.” 

He did not meet her eyes, cowering in total submission. So close now, the wide, thick band of singed skin along the back of his head had become obvious. 

After a long moment letting the threat hang in the air, Jadis pulled back and stepped away, sheathing her blade. “I suggest you keep your trickery reserved for others, Frog Demon.”

Slowly, Savis pulled his hands away from his face and looked at Jadis. The expression on his face did not contain the same hate that it did before, but rather a gentler expression. Respect? Acceptance? His rounded features made it difficult to tell. “I… noted.” He sighed, placing his hands in his lap. He settled and in a moment he looked nothing more than a small green child pouting on the platform.

“You have lived since before the Veil?” Jadis asked.

Savis nodded. “I have not had the displeasure of Cycling in many centuries. Few possess the wealth of my memories and knowledge.”

Jadis nodded, doubtful over the truth of such words. But even still, one such as him must have many stories to tell. After a long moment, she said, “Tell me of the Red Flame Root.”

Savis tilted his head. “Why is a human interested in demon folk tales?” Slowly, Jadis lowered her hand to her sheathed sword and gave the demon a pointed look. He sighed before continuing. “The heart of chaos, the engine of creation. The home of the Primordial Flame before Kalomare nabbed it for him and his cr-” he paused, looking away from Jadis. “His dedicated warriors.” The demon thought for a moment. “There are legends that no one can enter it without being destroyed.”

Jadis nodded, trying to keep her reactions as nonchalant as possible as she ignored his sarcasm. “And where is it located?”

The Frog Demon laughed and looked at her again. “Where is the mortal plane? Where are the Heavens?” The condescending tone made the Huntress grind her teeth.

“Where… is the door, then?” She said stiffly, crossing her arms to stop herself from pulling out her sword again.

Savis’ cheerful demeanor faded quickly. He opened his mouth to speak, then paused before closing his mouth. A serious look entered his squinted eyes. “I fail to see why-“

Jadis smiled, teeth bared, and asked more sharply. “Where is the door.” There was no kindness in her smile. 

The demon nodded, looking away. He scanned the nearby wood, eyes tracing back and forth too quickly for him to be seeing anything. Then he looked up to the trees at the edge of the mountain top. Then to the sky. 

Jadis sighed loudly, stepping back up onto the platform. “I thought that we went over this, demon.”

Finally, Savis’ eyes came back to Jadis. “I have never seen the door.”

Jadis motioned to him with a hand. “Your countenance tells me that you know more than that.” She crossed her arms again.

Savis nodded. “I have heard many, many things. That it is made of the abyss and the hatred of mankind. That it shines so bright and pale that it ruins the definition of beauty.”

“And the location?” she said, tone barely suppressing the violence welling up inside her.

The Frog seemed to notice this and blanched. “While some say it is in the Sixth Hell, most agree that it is most likely in fact in the Fourth Heaven.” For the first time, the demon spoke softly and calmly to Jadis. 

“The Blisswake,” she replied, caught off-guard by the answer. She had expected the deepest layer of the Hells or the most exalted height of the Heavens. The Blisswake was an odd choice based on what her education had told her thus far.

The demon nodded. “Yes, hidden among the languid silver pools and flower gardens is, apparently, the doorway to Creation. Though who can be certain about the location of something gone for a thousand years? And besides, the location doesn’t really matter since I cannot tell you about the mechanics of its lock.”

Jadis’ stomach sunk. Before she could reply, Dua Pria said, “There are places in the cosmos which have doorways between them independent of the main paths through the Mortal Plane.” This caused the Huntress to frown as she listened. The revelation disrupted her thoughts for she had been under the assumption that the only pathways between the Heavens and Hells lay in her world. If one could transverse them laterally… deciding to focus, she tucked that thought away for later examination.

She nodded at the Frog Demon and stepped back. After a moment of pondering any other questions she needed answered, she decided that she had actually received what she had wanted. It was surprising in a way, after so many months of work without a payoff, even this small success was exciting. “Well, Savis, you have earned your life from me. I have no more questions.”

Slowly the demon stood up, looking at Jadis warily. “So… I am free to go?” he asked tentatively. 

Jadis nodded. “Beware, though. Should I hear that you have killed a human, or should you make any trouble for me going forward… I will return to deal with this problem. Do you understand?”

The demon swallowed and nodded. “As you commanded, I will never forget.” He said it with an unfortunately begrudging tone. Then, in an instant, he was gone.

Jadis sighed, turning away and walking to the open packed dirt beyond the wooden platform. She sat down, cross-legged, and did her best to repress the sneeze that came upon her from the puff of dust from her landing. “So what did you think of our little amphibious friend?” she asked Dua Pria.

“He was quite pathetic for a demon. I actually liked looking upon him, the hatred I feel was constantly sated at the sight of his weakness.” There was a warm, malicious quality to her words that made it impossible to doubt their truth. 

“I would have to agree, he was much weaker than I would expect for a demon tapped into another’s power.” Jadis reached into her left hip pouch and pulled out the remaining nuts and berries she had packed, popping them into her mouth and chewing slowly. “But from what you have told me, a Demon’s ability to shape reality is intuitive. It does not sound impossible that Kaveris had shaped its pocket space already before being rendered… inert?“

“I don’t know what you would call it. I have never heard of demons doing that to one another, so perhaps it is a unique trait to the Frog Demon, or its late compatriot.” Dua Pria sighed. “I do not wish to see more of it. I could barely perceive the other demon.”

Jadis nodded. “It took all of my focus to realize. It was strange, it is only after exiting the pocket space and facing off with Savis that I can truly differentiate between his aura and the residual aura of Kaveris.” Her appetite was curbed as she imagined those hanging ruins of the other demon, what she had thought were threads of Savis’ aura. They had truly been the rotting nerves and essence of something long dead yet still alive, animated to demonic whims.

“As I could not even recognize it in time, I can only commend you for the sharpness of your senses.” 

This caused Jadis to freeze for a moment before lowering the berry she had been about to toss in her mouth. It was very, very rare that Dua Pria bestowed any praise at all. More than one in a single day had her questioning reality a little bit. “Thank you, teacher,” she replied.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Stepping onto the stone ramparts of the ruined castle, Jadis questioned why the Demons were so strange about their localities. The Firefly plains that had greeted her when she entered the Dimlight had been calm, serene, and a good example how those who wandered the wilds of the Mortal Plane might end up in amazing or terrifying places, unaware they had stepped through dimensions. It had been remote, but relatively easy to access and entering had been quite easy. 

But here, in the Lost Outpost of Malphaezo, Jadis would have to seek out a doorway adjacent to a throne room in order to return to the mortal world. It was ridiculous, turning what could be a simple process into something tedious and random. Dua Pria’s words, remembered from previous lessons about navigating the cosmos, resounded in her head. “From the mortal plane one always enters the Heavens and Hells from fixed locations. But when you return, there is no guessing where one will appear.”

There was a whole lot of world Jadis didn’t know much about that could soon be her new home were she unlucky. She did her best to put the possibility out of her mind. 

As she climbed the ruined stone, Jadis was constantly confronted with the unspoken, forgotten story of this place. This outpost had obviously once been vibrant and populated, however many thousands of years ago. Perhaps even as far back as the beginning of time. Stalls sat in tatters of petrified fragments of rotted wood, the stones beneath them pitted and cracked by time.  Whatever war had afflicted it had rendered it ugly and ruined, a scar upon the Dimlight’s eerie mist. There were no corpses here, they had all long since decayed into dust. All that remained were the fragmented bits of armor scattered among the stone and moss.

“You are not asking many questions,” Dua Pria noted with an apprehensive tension in her voice.

Jadis motioned to the ruins around her. “Do you have lessons on the classification of rubble and how to identify break patterns? Is there some test you need to be preparing me for?” She had meant to ask the questions sarcastically, but the flash of anger that came out in them made her frown. 

Dua Pria prickled inside Jadis’ mind before answering. “I worry for your soft heart.” What might have been sweet was undercut by the striking sense of superiority in her voice. 

Jadis laughed without joy. “You do not worry about anything so far that I can tell.“

It was so tempting to tear off the necklace and toss it away. Fighting demons did not require nearly as much effort as talking to this Witch, and Jadis was starting to see how much the woman grated on her nerves. She had no desire to fight needlessly, but somehow that was all she and Dua Pria ever found themselves doing.

Without words, or simply pretending that Jadis didn’t exist, Dua Pria did not reply. The Huntress was glad for it, annoyed at the temperamental and haughty personality that had been pinned to her mind by the Gem. Even still, she used the lessons that Witch had taught her to calm her mind and slow her heart, breathing evenly.

The higher she climbed the ruins, the more apparent the gateway became. Unlike the energy of the demons she had encountered, it was much, much subtler, nearly as imperceptible as the lingering carcass of Kaveris had been. It was only the tension inside Jadis that made her aware of it, residual from her fights thus far. It was above her and to her left, and when she looked that direction she saw the crumbled ruins of a keep. Jadis wondered if the throne room would be her exit point.

She stopped near the edge of a crumbling staircase, no longer usable in its disrepair. She propped her leg up on a stone and rested her chin on her knee, savoring the stretch. As she stilled, focusing in on that sense of the divine powers of the Dimlight, a sense of crowding pressed up against Jadis’ mind. She opened her eyes and was reassured by the familiar solitude the majority of her journey had entailed thus far, but the feeling persisted, as if dozens of people were walking all around her. 

“The dead,” Dua Pria said softly.

Jadis nodded, but was unable to respond. The dead? She closed her eyes, focusing in on that growing sense and wondered which dead Dua Pria meant. After a few minutes of careful observation, unable to glean anything, she sighed and squashed her sense of frustration at not being able to answer this herself. “You mean humans?”

If Dua Pria could shrug, it came in the form of the gruff, “Hmmm,” she so often replied with in the face of questions that she didn’t want to answer. “Simple answer, yes.”

Jadis sighed and rubbed at her forehead. “And the complicated answer?”

“Humans and others.” Her tone was flat and impatient.

“Others?”

“Yes, others. The heavens are vast, and there are, apparently, many droplets of life scattered in them.” The discomfort in Dua Pria’s voice was so palpable that Jadis couldn’t stop herself from frowning.

It was a perplexing concept. In her studies in school, she had heard that some of the leading astronomers of the Mahli College truly believed that there could be other worlds in the blackness of the stars. Jadis had thought it absurd at first, but she had come around to the idea that there was simply no way to know. Telescopes might see the stars, but they could not see any worlds that might dance around them. But if their sun had a world, why couldn’t others?

Jadis simply nodded at Dua Pria. It was not often she received answers to things she had relegated to beyond comprehension. “Fascinating,” she said.

Though she and Dua Pria thankfully did not share an emotional link, the grumbled, unitelligible response from the Witch told Jadis enough to know she had annoyed her mentor. She did not reply or say anything else, giving the woman space to approach her grievance. Jadis considered why her response would bother Dua Pria, but all she could come up with was that perhaps the unwilling teacher had some resentment about the knowledge that had been discovered in the modern day? Jadis decided she didn’t know the aggressive woman well enough to guess.

She stood and stretched for a moment, sighing at the release of some of the burning ache in her legs. Then she began to walk again, mounting up broken bits of stone. Dua Pria did not bring up the topic of otherworldly creatures again. Yet the revelation did not leave Jadis’ mind. Once she noticed the tide of dead souls rushing passed her, she could not stop examining them. Nothing solid could be revealed with her attention focused on them, but the longer she passively monitored the flow, the more she learned about what was happening to these dead beings as they flowed through the lost outpost. They were going the opposite direction she was, all of them emanating from her destination. It was so distracting that she had to cut herself off from the sense when she made an easily avoided bad step that nearly caused her to slip off the toppled pillar she was climbing. 

But it was difficult not to ponder the implications of the souls’ movements. There was a strange, divine logic in the entrance for the dead being the exit for the living. A symmetry that made Jadis want to know more. 

When at last she had climbed up the last rise that would bring her to the keep, Jadis took a moment to look back down the path she had taken. From up there it looked nearly impossible to climb, like a vertical obstacle course. Yet she could easily trace her path all the way back to where she had started at the outpost wall. She gave a satisfied huff and turned, entering into the keep. 

Unlike her ascent, navigating the keep was by far much easier. Though ruined and in a similar state to the rest of the outpost, the refined elegance inside stood in stark contrast to the barren, sparse decor up until this point. She passed a tall painting, torn and shredded with so much rot and grime on its surface that it was unintelligible save for a single, grimy face just barely poking out of the muck. A demons face with a pointed chin, blue skin, and six horns curving backwards over its bald head. Two black eyes sat in humanoid pits, but it had no nose or mouth. At least, those had been stolen by time were they there previously.

Jadis found it both reassuring and heartbreaking that time ravaged the Hells with the same persistence as it did in the Mortal Plane. As petty a though as it was, she felt glad that some sliver of the divine was forced to encounter it as humans did.

The door to the throne room was surprisingly whole and clean compared to everything else. A rich green paint, flaked off and scored with marks from weapons, coated the rounded door. There were no decorations save for the iron reinforcements attached to the wood, and it remained closed, blocking off the throne room. 

Jadis approached, laid her hand on the wood, and couldn’t stop from holding her breath as the world went dark around her.  She focused on her home, or at least the closest thing she had, and pictured vividly in her mind her bed, broken bed frame and all. 

She opened her eyes as new light pressed against them and sighed in relief. Jadis had been taken directly to the center of her small room.

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