I’ve avoided describing the In Between until now because… well, it’s fucking insane. Time for some more exposition: the In Between (sometimes called Mesis) like the name suggests is the middle ground between the spirit world, heaven and hell, and the physical world, our plane of existence. It’s a place of both spirit and physicality meaning spiritual beings like ghosts or various other monsters and even thought can feel just as solid as you or me. In the mortal world, ghosts or demons can only interact with physical objects if they expend arcane energy, but in the In Between, everyone and everything is on an equal playing field. Furthermore, there are a huge variety of mostly hostile creatures that live in the In Between; some of them are native to the world and others are created by the thoughts and fears of humans. In fact, with significant concentration someone in the In Between can spontaneously generate matter. And that’s not even half the weirdness in that god-forsaken shithole; the best way to really explain it is to describe the first time I went there.
It was the third mission I ever went on as a Gnosilepides; lead by Kaine, Emma, Neil, and I were sent to Yellowstone National Park. A couple of tourists’ bodies were discovered ripped to pieces, and the order believed it was the work of goblins. Occasionally, portals to the In Between naturally appear on earth (usually at the intersection of lay lines) releasing monsters. It was our job to find the portal, seal it, and killing anything that escaped from it. Getting to the portal required at least a four mile hike through a dense forest.
“Are we almost there?” I said exhausted after a couple of hours. I was 18 and although I was in much better shape back then, hiking never appealed to me.
“Why are you tired?” Emma teased putting emphasis on the word tired. She had her red hair put up into a bun with a green t-shirt, rock climbing gloves to cover her tattoos, and jeans tucked into boots, a much better choice of footwear than my tennis shoes with the tread worn away.
“No,” I started in a playfully mean tone, “I just want to kill some goblins and get out of here. When can we do a real mission?”
“Before we can be entrusted with large responsibilities, we must show we can handle smaller ones,” Neil said matter-of-factly. He also had his dreadlocks pulled up tied behind his head, and he wore a similar style of boots as Emma with a grey hoodie.
“Shhh,” Kaine interjected with authority. He looked like he was listening intently to something, and his hair was blowing in the wind. I stopped to listen too, and I heard something in the tree directly above me. As I looked up, I saw something standing on a low branch: it was big, with a huge bulging stomach, and it was naked; it had blue-grey skin, and all of its limbs seemed comically small compared to its huge girth. Its head was devoted solely to a pair of giant black eyes, and its stomach suddenly split apart revealing large spikey teeth. Although its feet were relatively normal, it didn’t have hands; instead, its arms ended in blades made of bone. With a roar from its stomach mouth, it jumped down straight toward me. Without missing a beat, I summoned my sword and decapitated it before its hand blades could cut me.
“What the fuck was that?” I shouted.
“It was a goblin, just a heavily mutated one,” Kaine responded. “The longer a goblin is together in the In Between, the more the energy there twists it into something horrific. Most goblins get killed, their energy dispersing before they look like that. When they reform, they start off looking at least partially human.”
“Well, that’s not terrifying,” Emma said with a smile. “The portal should be somewhere nearby; we should spread out and look for it. Any one of us can easily handle a goblin or two.”
“No, we should stick together. I have a bad feeling,” Kaine said grimly.
“What?” I chuckled. “It’s just a bunch of,” before I could finish my sentence, three men came out of nowhere moving incredibly fast; the one that came for me had black skin. Side note: humans are ridiculously bad at naming skin colors. Every human on earth has brown skin; we just have different shades of brown; when I say this guy has black skin, I mean he had black skin. Black like darkness, like obsidian, black black. He was about 7 feet tall, incredibly muscular, with razor sharp teeth in addition to tusks jutting out of his mouth, and he was shirtless. Even worse, he was somehow faster than me. He had a “knife” aimed straight at me; I say “knife” because even though it looked like a knife in his hands, it would look like a sword in mind. I dodged the first jab, and he nimbly turned around and swung at my face. I blocked the blow with my sword, but he was so much stronger than me my meager strength provided basically no resistance. My block slowed him down by maybe a fifth of a second, but it was enough for me to dodge the blow save for a three inch gash on my chest. He reared back for another attack; knowing I couldn’t face him physically, I decided to face him magically. I lifted my hand, and with the flash of a blue rune, I sent a million volts worth of lightning at him. The moment the lightning hit him, I noticed two things: first of all, as the bolt struck him, it pushed him back about fifteen feet, and his skin glowed with sigils. He had them tattooed over every inch of his body, and they provided some protection from magical attacks. The second thing I noticed was his eyes; his eyes were glowing orange with rectangular pupils – like a goat’s eyes. He had the democculus.
What the fuck was going on? Was this guy possessed? Why wasn’t he using magic? While my attacker was momentarily stunned, I stole at glance at my friends; Emma was barely parrying a blow from another man who was identical to the one I was fighting in every way except he had green skin. Neil had created a semispherical dome of rock that surrounded him while the third guy also identical to the other two but with purple skin sliced through it. They all had the same glowing orange goat eyes. Kaine was nowhere in sight. Three possessed people in the middle of a national park in the vicinity of goblin sightings? This was bad. By the time I looked back at the black… thing, he was charging me with his knife outstretched. I summoned a gust of wind, but it barely slowed him down. I narrowly dodged another slice and changed tactics: I lifted up the ground he was standing under: a piece of the ground itself flew ten feet in the air before he jumped off of it. That was exactly what I was hoping for; I caused the section of earth to strike him on the way down crushing him under it. I didn’t expect it to actually kill him; after all, it was mostly top soil, but I thought it would buy me enough time to help Emma and Neil. I was wrong; less than two seconds later, he rose from the ground completely covered in dirt. He looked at me with murder in his eyes. He really looked at me for the first time, and his anger was replaced with shock. He didn’t move at all; he just stared at me, and after a few seconds, he kneeled before me.
“Forgive me,” he said in an impossibly deep voice, “I didn’t know you were a host for the masters.” I know I say this a lot, but seriously, what the fuck was going on? Suddenly, Kaine appeared from above, and with a single swing of his rapier, a type of thin sword, he decapitated the thing. I didn’t have time to think about anything; Emma and Neil were still in trouble. I ran toward Neil who was still in his rock shield though the purple monster had nearly broken through it. I raised my hand, an orange sigil appearing in front of it, and launched a huge fireball at the creature. He jumped about twenty feet in the air dodging the fireball completely; that may sound like a bad thing, but this was my checkmate. Whatever these things were and whatever their connection to demons, while something is in the air, it’s only under the influence of gravity. It’s pretty much impossible to dodge anything while falling; I took this opportunity to launch an even bigger fireball at him. As the fire struck him, it exploded launching fire in all directions. Luckily, the forest didn’t catch fire, but he did. A burning body fell to the ground striking with tremendous force. I thought that would be the end, but only seconds later he jumped to his feet just in time for Kaine to move impossibly fast and slit his throat.
At the same time, Emma was in duel she couldn’t possibly win; using all of her speed, she was just able to prevent the green monster from striking her down. Every blow he dealt, she was able to deflect just enough to keep it from killing her, but she couldn’t gain an edge.
“EMMA!” I shouted as I launched three sharpened icicles right at her attacker. With a glance, Emma locked him into a clash of their weapons to force him to stay in the path of the ice spears, but he skillfully kept their swords pressed against one another while he dodged two of the icicles and caught the third in his free hand. I might not have killed him, but I did distract him long enough for Emma to pull a knife out of her left boot, something I had no idea she had, and stabbed the creature right in his eye. With a scream, he kicked Emma right in the chest sending her flying backward as he held his eye. As he crouched down moaning, he glared his remaining eye at me and started to get up. As he began to run toward me, Kaine’s rapier suddenly appeared through his chest. It had pierced his heart. I ran over to help Emma up as Neil’s earth shield collapsed.
“What are those things?” Neil asked.
“Orcs,” Kaine replied with a grimace. At our bewildered looks, he sighed, “They’re humans, or at least they used to be until they drank demon blood. More precisely, they drank the blood of a human possessed by a demon; it causes physiological changes in their bodies. They get bigger, stronger, faster, their skin changes color, and maybe most notably, they achieve the democculus. The more powerful the demon, the greater the transformation. These guys definitely drank of an archdemon, and my guess is that demonologist is somewhere ne—GET DOWN!”
As he shouted the last two words, I ducked and brought up my shield around Neil, Emma, and myself. About a third of a second later, I heard bangs coming from a few hundred feet away in the trees. It was automatic gun fire. Normally, a spellsword’s shield can easily deflect hundreds, even thousands of bullets even from the most powerful guns, but something was different about this case. I could feel my shield cracking; I couldn’t keep it up for long. Emma saw what was happening and added her shield to mine. “The bullets are warded!” Neil shouted. I looked at the bullets bouncing off of the shield, and sure enough there were glowing sigils on each piece of metal. I looked around, but Kaine had vanished completely.
“STOP YOU FOOL!” a female voice rung out bouncing off of trees and seeming to come from everywhere. “Can’t you see that one’s possessed?” she asked her voice changing from harsh to smooth, almost sexually charged. “What luck. Not only did our little rouse attract some of the mighty Gnosilepides,” those two words were dripped in sarcasm, “We managed to collect one of the masters!” Evidently, she was in charge of the orcs; was it her blood they had drank? I stole a look all around, and I saw them. In one of the largest trees I had ever seen, there were three orcs of various colors standing on different branches along with a woman. She had jet black hair, a white belly shirt with a skin-tight brown leather jacket over it with brown pants tucked into high heeled boots. I don’t know how she made it this far out into the wilderness in heels, but she did. Additionally, she wore the same type of fingerless gloves leather gloves I did, but hers were brown – translation: she was a spellsword. She stepped off the branch and fell thirty feet onto the ground below without even bending her legs. She walked nonchalantly toward us; as she got closer, I could see her eyes: they were glowing orange with rectangular pupils. “I’ll make a deal with you, little demon. You come with us, and your friends get to live. Whaddya say?” she said in the same voice.
I closed my eyes and thought; if regular mortals could become so powerful just from drinking her blood, she must be incredibly strong… maybe stronger than Kaine. I lowered my shield and stood up. “What the fuck are you doing?” Emma hissed at me.
“I’m making sure you walk out of here!” I spat back.
“Dante, do you have that little faith in us?” Neil asked calmly. “We would die for you, but we’re not going to have to. Together, we will defeat this monster,” he continued with absolute certainty. Just then, the big tree the orcs still stood in started groaning. Everyone looked at it, even Demonicunt. She never said her name, but I’m pretty sure it’s Demonicunt. All of the leaves began withering in front of our eyes, changing from green to orange to brown, and the wood itself began creaking under the weight of the orcs as if it could break at any moment. Water began seeping out of the bark all over the tree; hundreds, maybe thousands of drops all came together to create a sphere of water. Once it was done building, it was at least a few dozen gallons. Suddenly, it split into three different entities moving impossibly fast and struck each of the orcs on the tree; the water was moving so fast, it was able to pierce their magic resistance skin. All of them fell onto the ground below, and it looked like they had been shot by large caliber bullets.
Demonicunt began laughing maniacally; it was one of the scariest sounds I had ever heard. She seemed delighted at this turn of events. “Of course, they didn’t send you three out her all alone. Tell me; who is your teacher? Cedric Williams? Akari Kaneko? Don’t tell me it’s Quinn himself!” She squealed the last sentence in delight. Suddenly, multiple “bullets” of water began rushing at her in different directions; she carelessly lifted her left hand, a pink sigil appearing as a dome of pink light surrounded her. The water struck the shield without damaging it at all.
With a vicious smile, she said, “Come out, come out, wherever you are! Or I might start taking my frustration out on the young ones. Kaine jumped to the ground in front of us out of the trees. “Kaine Faulkner, the Gnosilepides’ rising star! The most powerful spellsword since Margarette Vellucci herself!” I squirmed uncomfortably at the mention of my mother’s name.
“I see you know me,” Kaine growled, “But I don’t know you, and frankly, I don’t care. You have one chance to get out of here, or I will kill you.”
She cackled again, and it was no less disturbing the second time. “You think you can kill me?” she asked in a deranged manner, and then she closed her eyes. I could feel power being released; it felt very similar to the power I had used before in the exit exam. Then she started… changing. Two black spots appeared above her eyes, and horns began to protrude. They wrapped around her head like ram antlers; furthermore, the bones in her hands began audibly creaking, and claws ripped through the flesh of her fingers. From each finger a foot long jet black blade protruded kind of like that female Wolverine from X-men 2. “Do you still harbor the delusion?” This time her voice was different; it sounded like it was two voices at once perfectly in sync. One of them was her regular voice while the other was impossibly deep and familiar.
Kaine stared at her unfazed and replied, “You know, I think I do.” He holstered his rapier on his side purposefully cutting his left hand as he did. He wiped a drop of the blood on a small leather pouch he always kept buckled to his left leg. A red sigil appeared in front of his right hand, and the pouch opened. He was using hemomancy…
“Oooh blood magic!” Demonicunt squealed with joy. “I might have underestimated you!”
“You have seen anything yet,” Kaine said with a smile as he reached into the pouch and pulled out a small dagger. The hilt of the dagger was a shiny silver with a red gem on the end, but the blade was odd. It was black unlike anything I had ever seen; it reflected exactly 0 light. It looked like it was a hole in reality in the shape of a stone age era crudely sharpened rock.
Demonicunt’s mouth was agape; she was shocked. “Is that what I think it is?” she whispered.
Kaine had a shit-eating grin at this point. “It’s one of the three hellblades known to the mortal plane.” At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, but Kaine filled us in later. You might have wondered before why the levels of hell are ordered backward: the first level of hell is the deepest while the seventh is the least deep. That’s because each level was at one point a mortal world not so different from ours; in each case, seven different times, the gods abandoned the world, bled it of any physicality and created a new level of hell. All of the physical matter had to go somewhere, so it oozed into the In Between in the form of molten ore deep below the surface. In a few cases, mortals were able to dig deep enough into the In Between to mine the ore, and in even fewer cases, three to be specific at least as far as is known, that ore was smelted into weapons. So what? Well, the blades are special because they can cut through anything including reality itself.
“First you use hemomancy, and now you’re using a hellblade?” Demonicunt teased with false bravado. “You could be executed twice over by your own order!”
“We learned a long time ago by people just like you that sometimes you have to bend the rules to survive,” Kaine spat. Without warning, he attacked: with an almost imperceptible twitch of his left hand holding the hellblade, he vanished in a puff of grey smoke. Suddenly, he reappeared in another puff of smoke directly behind Demonicunt, but she was ready for it. She summoned her shield in all directions around her, but the hellblade sliced right through it like it wasn’t there. She jumped about 45 feet backward and up and landed on an overhead tree branch.
Kaine was the most capable wielder of any hellblade at anytime in history: he used it to slice a hole in the mortal realm and into the In Between, sealing the rift behind him. Once in the In Between, he sliced a hole back to our reality; it gave him the apparent ability to teleport.
“I see I’ve certainly underestimated you,” Demonicunt said regaining some of the confidence in her voice. “But, I’m not going to lie down and die,” her voice became flat. “I’m going to show you what a real demonologist looks like.” She lifted her hand, and a dozen… creatures appeared; they looked like what a child whose parents were eaten by wolves thinks wolves look like. They had four legs and stood about 6 feet tall; instead of hair, they had thousands of red spikes that were razor sharp; the only exception was a small line of grey spikes that ran along their spines. Their teeth were black and huge just like their claws, and they had two tails thin as ropes and just as flexible that ended in curved blades. Every single pair of their glowing red eyes with grey pupils were fixed on Kaine.
“Oh fuck,” Emma whispered. “Most demonologists are lucky if they can summon even a single demon.”
I scrunched my face in confusion at that and said, “Demons are purely spiritual entities; they have no form. Plus, it takes a dozen practitioners to summon a single demon into the mortal realm.”
“That’s why they summon demons to the In Between and get them to possess the creatures there. Then all they have to do is those possessed beings from the In Between,” she replied.
“Then she could have a whole fucking army ready to go,” I said as the horrific realization sunk in.
“And that’s exactly why we’re going to help him,” Neil stated without a hint of fear. Before he finished the sentence, every single wolf charged Kaine as Demonicunt leapt toward him, accelerating with a gust of wind. Kaine rapidly vanished and reappeared each time striking a wolf down. Each time a wolf was struck by a mortal blow, an amorphous red shape shot into the ground, presumably the demon returning to hell. In less than a second, Kaine had killed 7 of the creatures while Demonicunt went to the top of a tree and lifted her hand. A white hot fireball bigger than an SUV soared down toward both Kaine and the wolves. Kaine vanished again as the fire struck the ground exploding sending fire in all directions. Emma, Neil and I were thirty feet away, and it took the strength of all of our combined shields to just barely avoid being incinerated. The rest of the wolves weren’t so lucky; every trace of them was gone save for the red spirits spiraling into the ground. Kaine appeared behind Demonicunt who had just enough time to block the hellblade with her claws. As they were physical manifestations from hell, the hellblade didn’t slice straight through them; however, as they stood on the branch, blade clashing against claw, her pinky claw broke then her ring finger. With a look of horror, she jumped backward and away from him out of the tree while Kain lifted his hand, and dozens and dozens of lightning bolts all surged straight toward her. I expected her to raise her shield, but instead with a wave of her hand and a pink light, a large bat-like creature appeared between the two of them interceding the lightning and preventing any of the bolts from striking Demonica. She managed to flip around and land somewhat clumsily on her hands and knees. Neil took that moment to strike.
Neil has a lot of good qualities: he’s courageous, honest, hardworking, but he has a major flaw. He honestly believes that evil can never triumph over good. I seriously doubt ever even occurred to him that this demon bitch could have killed us all. That might explain how he could be so fucking stupid: he rushed her with his mace raised over head. Demonicunt was certainly off balance after that landing, but she quickly regained her footing and kicked Neil right in the chest sending him flying backward right toward me. With a snarl on her face, she raised her hand at us, and with a flash of a brown sigil, a huge crack shot through the ground aimed right at us.
Suddenly, I was overcome with a wave of vertigo, and then I was falling… again. {Can we skip this part?} I thought-screamed into the void.
{Uhh, hi,} I said to the dam face monster.
With a sudden realization, I replied, {You need me to let you in.}
The dam eyes stared at me (or at my mental projection or whatever) for thirty seconds before agreeing,
{It seems like Kaine’s got it handled. Besides, if I destroy the dam, what stops you from taking over my body?} I asked suspiciously.
I squinted my imaginary eyes at the monster; he had presented me with a false dichotomy. Either I give him full control, or everyone dies. There was another possibility though: instead of removing the dam completely, I could lower it letting some but not all of the demon’s power into me.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I opened my eyes in the real world feeling a huge surge of energy permeating my soul and body. The crack in the ground continued toward us as the land we stood on gave out from under us. We dropped about 10 feet, and the wall of earth on each side of us began to close in; Emma tried to block it with her shield, but as the ground came in on us from both sides, her shield shattered. I calmly raised both hands, one toward each enclosing sea of dirt with brown runes appearing over each hand; creaks could be heard throughout the area emanating in all directions with me as the epicenter, and the ground came to a stop. I jumped out of the hole and surveyed Demonicunt with demon eyes: her soul’s looked terrified with its mouth open in a silent scream. It had a black stain in its core just as mine did along with tendrils reaching out from it; unlike mine, however, the “veins” extended to every part of her soul. She dodged an attack from Kaine as her eyes fell on me.
“Oooh, look who’s decided to join us. Master archdemon, help me dispense this retched spellsword,” she shouted in glee. At that moment, Kaine appeared directly behind her; her head suddenly lowered as she bent her knees, avoiding the hellblade by less than an inch.
“I don’t think so, bitch!” I shouted as I launched a white hot fireball straight toward her. With a twitch of his dagger, Kaine vanished; Demonicunt glanced back at the fiery destruction headed toward her, and she raised her shield the instance before she would have been toasted. The ground shook, and a blindingly bright white light encompassed the world. When it faded, her shield was in tact, and she had a scowl on her face.
“Is that how it is?” she asked in an unhinged voice. “FINE!” With one hand keeping her shield up, she pointed the other at me. I was roughly thirty feet away from her, and suddenly in the space between us, a twenty foot tall, grey monster appeared. It looked vaguely humanoid but with hooves instead of feet and large black tusks jutting out of its mouth. Its eyes were glowing green with pentagonally shaped pupils; the oddest thing though was it had no soul. I suppose to be more precise, its body was its soul. Entities from the In Between don’t have separate physical and spiritual parts. They are all spiritual but can make themselves physical by expending pneuma. Despite lacking a soul, it still had a black stain within it. As it stared at me, it roared loud enough to shake all of the trees in the area.
“It’s a possessed ogre,” Emma said, suddenly behind me. “Kaine, we’ll take the monster. Just kill the demon bitch!” she shouted.
“Heh heh heh, little mortal thinks it can kill me?” the ogre spoke with two voices simultaneously. The words were clumsily pronounced like someone that had never spoken English before; I guess ogre mouths aren’t equipped to speak mortal languages.
“I do,” she responded with a steady voice. More quietly she said, “Even before being possessed, ogres are resistant to magic. You and Neil distract it with big flashy spells while I slit its throat.” Neil and I nodded in unison. The ogre reached over and bear hugged a forty foot tree. Seemingly effortlessly, he convulsed his back, ripping the tree out of the ground by its roots and swung it down toward us. Emma and Neil jumped out of the way, but I held my ground and launched a continuous stream of white hot fire in a large cone. Before the tree could squash me, the sudden flame caused the ogre to pause and even get pushed back a step. It bent its knees to stabilize and came running toward me. I kept the flame up until the very last second and jumped out of the way; the ogre continued forward knocking several more trees down. The one it was holding was burned to a crisp and mostly disintegrated, but the ogre’s skin was unblemished. Emma was right; the creature was very resistance to magic.
As the ogre ripped another tree out of the ground, Emma got my attention. I couldn’t tell precisely what she was trying to tell me, but I got the gist: lure the ogre into the area where she and Neil were doing… something. Unfortunately, the ogre or at least the demon running the show wasn’t stupid; instead of charging me, he launched the tree at me like a javelin. I stuck both hands out in front of me with pale white runes appearing, and a gust of wind stronger than any hurricane shot out. The tree shot back striking the ogre in the chest and breaking into dozens of pieces. Unfortunately, my control over the spell was dwarfed by its power: the wind blew about two feet of topsoil off the ground and ripped several more trees out of the ground. Thankfully, Emma and Neil were behind the gust though Kaine and Demonicunt weren’t so lucky. Demonicunt was shot backward hitting a tree hard enough to shatter the first layer of bark, and Kaine was forced to simultaneously bring up his shield and hold onto another tree. I killed the wind upon seeing the havoc it was wreaking. When I looked back at the ogre, he had jumped straight toward me. Another gust of wind would have stopped him, but it could have also killed Kaine, so instead I launched a dozen, sharpened ice javelins at the beast. The ice shattered harmlessly against its skin; I jumped out of the way just as his fist hit where I had been standing half a second earlier. On impact, a five-foot diameter crater was formed, and a seismic wave emanated out in all directions. As I landed, I launched another stream of fire at the ogre taunting him toward the trap my friends had set up. It worked well: I jumped from tree to tree to avoid the ground they were altering, and he ran after me knocking the trees down one at a time. Both Emma and Neil were hiding behind a particularly large tree with their hands glowing with sigils and touching the ground. As the ogre’s foot hit the spot, it sank into the ground as did its other foot and then its entire body. Emma and Neil had combined geomancy and hydromancy to create quicksand. The demon sank in the material up to its neck in less than two seconds; I thought we had beaten it, but the trap wasn’t big enough. The monster’s muscled arm ripped through solid ground itself to pull himself up.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was only going to get one shot at this: I felt the pneuma inside of me: it was a mixture of my own power and the demon’s. I focused as much power as I could into a single spell; a rust-colored sigil appeared in front of each hand, and before the ogre had completely freed itself, the ground exploded as a torrent of lava was ejected. The red hot sludge struck the creature as it exited the ground, and even more fell down upon it. I instantly dropped to my knees as dizziness overcame me; the ogre screamed in pain. Without missing a beat, Neil shot a wave of frigid air at the lava immediately hardening the magma into rock. Excluding most of the monster’s head, his entire body was encased in hard rock; as he began to struggle to escape, Emma, appearing as a green blur, slit the ogre’s throat nearly decapitating it. It struggled to breathe for several seconds until a green spirit left its body and shot through the ground. The green eyes of the ogre turned to grey, its pupils becoming circular, and then it vanished.
I struggled to get to my feet; I was nearly out of pneuma both mine and the demon’s I had borrowed. If I cast even one more spell, I’d black out. I looked to Demonicunt just in time to see Kaine appear and slash her shallowly across the back. She had several similar such cuts all over her body: unless she had an ace up her sleeve, it was only a matter of time until Kaine took her out, and judging by the look on her face, she knew it. With a wave of her hand, another demon appeared; this one looked like a balloon with tentacles that floated through the air. As far as I could tell, it had no eyes or even a mouth, but its tentacles crackled with some form of bio-electricity. As it rushed Kaine, Demonicunt moved for her own attack but it wasn’t directed at Kaine. She moved with blinding speed right toward me; I didn’t have time to move my entire body, but I was able to redirect my weight enough to save my life. Her claws sliced deep into my chest, and I fell back to the ground.
“It’s over!” Demonicunt screamed with glee. Suddenly, I jumped to my feet, grabbed Emma’s knife out of her boot, and held it to my own throat. My body wasn’t listening to my commands; the only thing I could do was move my eyes; I looked toward Demonicunt. She had a red sigil glowing in front of her left hand; she hadn’t been trying to kill me. All she wanted was enough of my blood to control me with hemomancy. I walked over to stand next to her. “If anyone so much as sneezes at me, little demon boy here is dead!” she shouted. Together, we slowly backed away while Kaine, Emma, and Neil stared after us. I looked for the demon octopus thing, but it was gone; Kaine must have killed it a few seconds too slow to save me. Fuck! How could I allow myself to get caught? If I cast another spell, I could intentionally deplete myself of pneuma, and blood magic or not I’d pass out; surely that would be the only opening Kaine would need. Unfortunately, I realized I wasn’t as close to empty as I had been just two minutes earlier. I tried to gasp, but my body wouldn’t let me; the demon’s power was steadily pouring into me. I didn’t know what would happen if the demonic pneuma overwhelmed my own, but I knew it would be bad. Maybe it could lock me up behind a dam… I pictured the dam in my mind – not the easiest task when my eyes were forced to stay open.
{I told you already; you’re not taking control of me!} I screamed in my mind.
[But I already have control of you!] a new voice announced. Double fuck. She was in my mind too; there’s a mystical connection between blood and the soul. That’s how she was controlling me in the first place. I took a chance and went to the dam, imagining it to be complete. It grew a few feet cutting off anymore power from entering into me. Suddenly, I felt intense weariness throughout my entire body; every muscle screamed in pain and even my mind felt over extended. My legs would have collapsed out from under me if my muscles weren’t being forced to ignore the pain. I was afraid somehow Demonicunt would be able to set the demon free, but she was either unable or unwilling. I cleared my thoughts and tried to think of nothing at all.
The other spellswords were following us, but they stayed about thirty feet behind us (or maybe ahead of us since we were walking backward.) You’re probably wondering if I forgot this was supposed to be a story about the In Between. I didn’t. After half an hour of not having control of my body, we stopped. “It was nice to meet you Kaine, but I’ll have to kill you later!” She raised both hands, brown sigils before them, and rock sprung from the ground enclosing us as it connected to form a hollow sphere. Together, we turned and jumped into a portal I hadn’t known was there. A portal to the In Between. (I told you it was coming.)
We emerged in an alien world; color worked differently here. Everything seemed to be muted; the sky was grey, the ground was a brownish grey, and even the setting sun was grey. We were on top of a rocky mountain; I tried to look around, but I still couldn’t move. My body moved of its own accord to look at Demonicunt. She flashed me a sadistic grin and released the blood spell; I fell to the ground painfully. I tried to get to my feet, and a boot struck me right in the side. “Urghh!” I cried.
“You try anything, and I mean fucking anything, and I’ll kill you. You might think that I need you, but I don’t! I only need the demon in you, and if I have to, I can separate the two of you,” Demonicunt said as she placed the heel of her boot against my throat. I looked up at her with as much hate in my eyes as I could muster, but she only smiled in return, removing her shoe.
I stood up able to freely observe my surroundings for the first time. I looked down below and beheld the In Between. The main attraction was a giant “river” that I eventually discovered was the inspiration for Styx in Greek mythology. It may technically be a river as it consistently flows in one direction (is that what makes a body of water a river? I don’t fucking know,) but it was enormous. From my vantage point, I could only see one bank, but I learned later there is indeed another bank. In the water were tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of small boats each of which had a ferryman at the helm with a paddle and a lantern emitting grey light to illuminate the way. Here’s where things get… weird. Weirder. I don’t know if the In Between has a magnetic field, but I’m going to assign directions to make this easier to describe. The river flowed from north to south; I glanced north toward the source of the river, and I saw something impossible. I couldn’t discern what I was looking at at first as it was very far away. How far? I had no idea, hundreds maybe even thousands of miles. If you’ve ever looked at a mountain from a great distance on earth, you’ll know it’s tinged with blue just like the sky is blue. Something similar was happening here, but the object was tinged grey, kind of like looking through a colored filter. So what was this object? It was a great white wall seemingly made of marble or some type of stone, but that’s not the weird part. It went all the way up… As far as I could tell, it was infinitely high, as in it went up and up an up, and I couldn’t see where it ended. What’s more, it also seemed to extend forever to both the east and west. The only break in the wall was a gate where the river poured out; this I learned later was the gate of heaven. Anything that can fight the river’s current and pass through that gate is going on a one way trip to heaven. Demonicunt saw my astonishment and told me to look in the other direction. There was a similar infinitely high and long wall on the Southern side of the river, but it was a deep black. Like black hole black; ok, I’ve never seen a black hole, but it looked like the wall was reflecting no light at all. The only break in that wall is a gate from which the river pours in: the gate of hell. Neither wall can be scaled or walked around; the gates are the only way past them. To make things even more complicated, in the east-west direction, the In Between is like a Pacman world: if you’re on the west side of the river and walk far enough west, you’ll see the east side of the river and vice-versa. In other words, if you walk far enough east or west, you’ll pop out on the other side.
I didn’t know any of this at the time; I only knew what I saw which was a grey world with tens of thousands of little boats on the central river; I did, however, note in my mind that the vast majority of the little boats were moving with the current and only a few were traveling against it. (More plainly, well over 90% of people go to hell. No offense, but you’re probably one of them statistically.) “Come on,” Demonicunt snapped me out of my thoughts; she lifted her hand, and a group of bat-demons like she had summoned before came flying. One of them flew right at me; I tried to duck, but each of its foot-claw things wrapped around one of my arms and took off. I looked back and another one had grabbed her. I had a minor fear of heights, so this was fucking terrifying not to even mention there was a 99% chance I was going to my death and likely a painful one at that. I stole a glance back at the mountain we had just been standing on right as Kaine appeared holding his hellblade. He aimed a spell at Demonicunt, but she lifted her hand and a drop of my blood levitated a few inches above her palm. Kaine squinted at us not moving until he was just a speck. I turned back toward the direction we were flying and closed my eyes.
A few hours later, I was dropped unceremoniously onto the ground. I stood up without opening my eyes and tried not to throw up; it wasn’t that I was afraid – it’s just nauseating to be flown by a creature with wings for longer than a Lord of the Rings movie. Plus, I was petrified; I opened my eyes taking in my surroundings. I was on the other side of the river now at the lowest peak of another set of mountains; the biome was different here though. It was snowing and dark, so dark I couldn’t even see the grey sky. I turned around and built into the side of mountain was a temple. At least, it looked like a temple: several large stone pillars upheld an awning under which was a large semi-spherical boulder unattached to the rest of the structure; sigils covered every square inch of the temple similar to the Krymmeno. I guess I spent too long staring because I was suddenly kicked in the back pushing me forward several feet. I hadn’t been doing nothing for the last few hours; ok, that’s exactly what I was doing, but midflight I also rested my body, mind, soul meaning I had regenerated a moderate amount of pneuma. My best shot at survival was to feign powerlessness and strike when the opportunity presented itself. I fell to the ground and lied there for ten seconds; as I started to get back up, hand grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. Demonicunt pulled a knife from somewhere and sliced the palm of my hand open.
“Oww, what the fuck?” I shouted.
She smiled widely and replied, “An offering!” She pulled me the rest of the way to the temple and wiped my hand on the boulder; the blood spontaneously began sliding over the surface of the rock rearranging itself into a strange symbol I had never seen before. It persisted in this arrangement for about ten seconds before it started glowing red and vaporized. The boulder began moving of its own accord; it rolled a few feet to the left revealing an archway that opened to the inside of the structure. Demonicunt pulled me inside with her hand still gripping my wrist. Inside was just darkness; with a raise of her hand and a flash of orange, she lit 6 torches placed all around a single room. It was large and smooth with a semi-spherical roof and once again sigils carved everywhere. At the far back wall were statues of three human-looking naked men; they were about ten feet tall, painstakingly crafted, and they each had enormous wings extending from their backs. Every detail was perfect from the veins in each muscled arm to thousands of feathers carved into the stone. They looked like the quintessential images of angels; in front of the statues was what looked like a birdbath: a stone bowl attached to a pedestal that connected to the ground. Most notably, there were dozens of amorphous colored collections of smoke: demons with no vessels. Demonicunt knelt before these entities and said, “Masters, I bring you one of your own.”
The spirits began circling around me in an agitated fashion; they were keeping a constant distance from me, but that didn’t make me feel much better. “Of course, I understand masters,” Demonicunt whispered, her eyes adverted from the demons. Evidently, they were talking to her, but I couldn’t hear anything. She suddenly stood and clapped her hands twice; I heard stone moving against stone, and suddenly some of the floor slid out of place revealing a large stone staircase stretching into the depths. She grabbed me once again, and we began our descent. The staircase spiraled down and every twenty feet or so there was an opening to another floor; as we passed each floor, I could see dozens of various types of creatures peering out looking at me all of which were possessed. Some of them were the same sorts of creatures I had seen earlier that day such as bats, wolves, balloon monster things, but there were also unfamiliar types. One floor was full of what I swear were bigfoots (bigfeet?); another had snake-like things with arms. Yet another had flying centipede monsters: basically, a worm with multiple sets of bug wings and hundreds of legs and on the end of each leg was a mouth. I could keep going, but you get the idea, an army of demons.
We walked down the stairs for at least an hour, and every floor we descended, the staircase became wider like it was built as a cone; this place must have been enormous. I didn’t count the number of levels due to the paralyzing fear and exhaustion, but it must have had more than any skyscraper. When we finally got to the ground floor, we walked through a stone tunnel emerging in what seemed to be a sanctuary. There were rows of pews all filled with orcs of various shapes and colors, at least a couple of hundred of them maybe more. At the front of the room was a pulpit and behind it were slightly smaller versions of the angel statues from the top level. An older man in all black and I shit you not a full length cape stalked toward Demonicunt and backhanded her so hard she fell to the ground nearly pulling me with her. “You fool!” he barked.
“Watch yourself Manthei!” she squealed. “Your father’s reputation will only get you so far!” Manthei? This was the son of the man that had killed my mother. I had to fight the urge to… I don’t know, bite him? Whatever my urge was, I was one hundred percent sure it would have gotten me killed. He walked over to me, and I gave him my most disgusted look as he ripped the left sleave of my shirt off revealing the Gnosilepides tattoo under it.
“Hey! I like this shirt; it’s my only one with Wolverine on it!” I said in protest.
I’m not sure if he registered I’d said anything; he looked at Demonicunt and spat, “Did you deactivate the tracking spell? No, of course not because you’re incapable of complex thought! You’ve brought them all here!” I’ll be honest, I had no clue I could be tracked via this tattoo; I felt about 2% violated and 98% relieved. There was a chance I could be rescued!
“Good!” she responded. “We’ll finish the real Manthei’s work! There’s only a few dozen of them left anyway!”
“They have allies,” he said through clenched teeth. “Plus, Quinn is an army himself.”
“Perhaps, but I bring a weapon. This boy is possessed with an archdemon,” she stated calmly. Manthei’s eyes whipped over toward me, and they changed from a dark brown to a glowing purple his pupil elongating and becoming asymmetrical.
“Can he be… persuaded?” he mused carefully choosing the last word.
“I can be persuaded to rip your spleen out of your asshole,” I helpfully suggested. “My mother was Margarette Vellucci.” Manthei opened his eyes in shock, and even Demonicunt turned to stare at me.
“How did you acquire that demon?” he asked excitedly; if I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed he was about to cream himself.
I opened my mouth when the demon – I guess I need to be more specific here: my demon, the one living in my soul warned me,
I decided to follow the demon’s lead, “I rescued a confiscated book on demonology Kaine retrieved; I thought it would make me stronger.” It was a variation on the demon’s idea, but I had to give it my own spin.
Manthei eyed me for a moment before speaking, “You managed to summon an archdemon to the mortal plane on your first attempt? It’s a shame you won’t join us because we could indeed make you quite strong.” I couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so I just spit on him. In the face. Was it juvenile? Yes, but so was I. He calmly wiped off his face and coldly spoke, “There’s a good chance the spellswords believe you’re a traitor and come not just for our lives but yours too. Throw him in the dungeon; we’ll extract the archdemon once we’ve found a suitable host.” At his words, three of the larger orcs stood up; a green one took me by the left arm, an orange one took my right arm, and a purple one walked behind me. They marched me to a small room on the edge of the sanctuary in which was another set of stone stairs. I had gathered enough pneuma to take on one MAYBE two of the orcs, but I was still exhausted mentally and physically not to mention I hadn’t eaten in almost a day. If I tried to fight, I’d lose.
They marched me down a couple of flights of stairs and then threw me -not too gently I might add- into a door they opened. I fell to the ground, and as I got up, they closed the door plunging the room into complete darkness. I had expected them to somehow rob me of magic: cut my hands off or at least burn the tattoos on my hands or something, but they didn’t bother. I conjured a sphere of white light to illuminate the room and saw why. It was covered in defensive sigils; a nuclear bomb could go off in the room without causing a scratch. I looked around taking in all of my surroundings, and I gasped as I saw someone else there covering his eyes with his arms. I extinguished the light and said, “Sorry about that. I didn’t see you there.”
“It’s fine,” a gravely voice said. “I just haven’t seen light in a fortnight, maybe longer.” Something was weird about the voice, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“You’ve been here for over two weeks?!” I asked incredulously.
“Yes,” he replied simply. With a sudden realization, I figured out what was odd: he wasn’t speaking English. I wasn’t what you might call a “worldly” person; I’d never left the country excluding one trip to Canada. I also went to public school… and dropped out at 15. My point is, I didn’t nor do I now know any other languages, and yet I could understand him.
“How are you doing that?” I asked a little unnerved. “Are you a wizard?”
“What do you mean?” he inquired sounding puzzled.
“What language are you speaking, Italian? And how can I understand you?” At this point I was growing suspicious.
“Ah, I see,” he said knowingly. “You must be new; you poor bastard. But I have forgotten my manners; I am called Luca. If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been dead?”
“I’m Dante, nice to meet you, but what the hell are you talking about? I’m not dead, at least not yet,” I replied. With growing comprehension, I realized he must have been dead.
“You’re alive? How did you get here to the In Between?” he gasped.
“I’m a member of the Gnosilepides,” I started guessing that he was filled in, “And we were on a routine mission, but it was a trap by the demonologists. Some possessed bitch grabbed me and took me here.”
“Why?” he asked suspiciously.
“Why what?” I think I knew what he was going to ask, but I hoped I was wrong.
“Why did they take you? Spellswords travel in packs, but they didn’t take the squadron; they only took you. Why?” Ugh, why am I never wrong when I want to be?
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I guess she wanted a prisoner, and I was the closest.” “What about you? What’s your story?” I deflected.
Then, he told me his story. He was a factory worker in Italy in the early 80s when he died in his sleep; he didn’t know precisely why he died, but he had high blood pressure, so it was likely a heart attack. He appeared in the In Between in a long line to get onto a boat to travel the river Styx. Rumors about the nature of their location ran rampant in the queue; some claimed they were all doomed for hell while others argued they were already there. There was also absolutely zero security. No one forced the dead to get onto the boats; that being said, there also wasn’t anywhere good to go. The landscape close to where they were was barren and flat: just grey dirt everywhere except along the river where there was a forest in the distance. Luca decided living off of the land would be better than hell, so he ran. He lived hunting small, alien creatures and gathering unknown berries from the forest when he realized something: he never got hungry. He stopped eating all together and hid from various predators when he felt himself becoming more animalistic. His humanity was nearly lost when he was found by a group of people wearing medieval knight’s armor. They took him to a society of the dead called New Byzantium; the emperor was supposedly Constatine XI, the last Roman emperor until the fall of Constantinople. The story goes that upon his death, he and his royal guard abandoned the road to heaven/hell and instead formed a government with lords, ladies, and peasants. Although food, water, sleep, air, the needs of the body are no longer necessary for the souls of the departed, abstinence or anything else that makes one feel less human (such as changing one’s form or moving beyond human speed etc.) quickens the transformation into a goblin, a fate that eventually befalls all of the dead in the In Between. Luca was a simple peasant in New Byzantium: he tended the fields. I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but I guess he picked corn or whatever. Apparently, his field was on the edge of Byzantium territory, and a group of demon possessed monsters kidnapped him; the demonologists were attempting to find a way to possess dead human souls and/or goblins. There are millions of goblins in the In Between; however, they can’t be possessed like the native creatures. If they could be, the demonologists could have as many soldiers as they wanted.