At least my luck was holding, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, things got worse. Something about the hills had changed. Some hills had gained significant height and could be considered mountains. Some hills had been flattened out. The colors of the rocks were made up of became more varied. There were blacks, greens, blues, yellow, whites and greys. It was a dazzling array of colors blanketing the landscape. It didn’t seem to be the same place as I had been when talking to Angel and Vashti.

I could still feel them inside my head. All ten of them were there, and that other thing that I had felt after I had arrived in the city. I couldn’t see anyone near me, so I reached out with my senses. It didn’t take long. There was someone approaching. Someone with an aura that was one of the darkest I had seen yet. An aura so black it made Marchenko look like a choir boy.

A man appeared. He wore a blue business suit, with a white shirt and a tie the color of blood. His eyes were a dark crimson flashing with lightning. He walked towards me with hands clasped behind his back.

“I see your plan worked, my friend.” I had expected some sort of gloating or challenge from this guy, but not this greeting. There was something about the way he said ‘friend’ as well that set me on edge. He had known me before yet didn’t consider me a friend. Had we been enemies? The meaning of the words he spoke was baffling to me. I had no idea what he was talking about and was now on the defensive in this conversation.

“You think?” I retorted. It partly came from being surprised by his words as much as it did from me being fed up with all the unknowns involving my present state.

“I admit, when you first came to me with your plan, I was sure you were baiting a trap for me. To be frank, I still am because there wasn’t much hope you would make it this far. Now look at you,” he said with a false smile. “Snagging a handful of angels to have fun with later was just genius. Was that something you had planned from the start?”

“Yes, look at me. I made it this far, and one step closer,” I responded with what seemed to fit with what he was expecting. This made the man laugh. It was a deep belly laugh.

“You’re not even sure what you are one step closer to are you?” he smiled that fake smile again. “You don’t even know who you are—or were. The amount of planning and effort you put into getting this far, all of it lost on you now. See, I knew you lied to me when you laid out your plan the first time. Oh, the plan was pure genius, I’ll give you that. It would be far too risky for me to attempt a stunt like you have done. I don’t know of any other demon that could have pulled it off. In my head though, I knew there was no way you, the greatest of all the demon lords were going to share any of that power with me.”

I had been a demon lord? Could that be why some of the things I had done happened instinctively? My subconscious remembered even if I couldn’t. That was implying this guy was telling me the truth and not feeding me a line crap. I didn’t pick up on any little telltale signs that he had lie, that didn’t mean they didn’t happen just that I wasn’t aware of them.

“This is a better result than I could have hoped for though,” the man laughed again. “Your plan worked so well you outplayed yourself. I know where you hid it, so for me to come out of this game ahead all I have to do is move it somewhere else. The vultures are already circling what you abandoned, which means lots of opportunities for me.”

His smile spread across his face. There was nothing real about that smile. We stood there, staring at each other, sizing each other up a dozen paces apart. I wasn’t prepared for another fight this soon, not when I was at such a disadvantage. This guy oozed more power than Marchenko possessed, and I didn’t come out of those fights very far ahead of the loser.

“What makes you think my plan failed?” I wanted to try and get as much information out of this guy as I could before we started throwing punches at each other.

He waved one finger at me in admonishment. “You already know the answer to that.”

I thought over what he had said. I had apparently been a powerful demon, came up with a plan to get more power that involved me somehow temporarily losing my memories and power. He had also said that I had come to him with my plan for his assistance, that I agreed to share some of the power I gained with him. This guy knew who I was and knew some details of that plan. There was something I had hidden which was the key to all of that power and he knew where it was. None of this jogged anything in my head. Apparently, he was right. Whatever I had done didn’t seem to have worked out the way I had thought it would. That was again, if I had been told the unvarnished truth.

Then the thought occurred to me, that he didn’t know exactly what I remembered from before. Having come talk to me like this was a way for him to test me, to test what I knew. He didn’t know how much of my power I had command of at my fingertips at the moment. I wasn’t as strong as I had been before, at least according to him. He wasn’t sure if I was still the stronger of the two of us. I needed to find a way to turn the table against this guy.

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I suspected that that the first feeling of something being in my head when I arrived in the city was whatever the key to the power was. That meant I knew where it was. Sort of. More correctly, I knew the direction of where it was hidden, and I knew that it was far away from my present location—wherever that was. He didn’t know that fact.

Time to up the ante in this game a bit. I turned away from him and strode a half dozen paces away. With my back turned to him, I stared out at the landscape spread out in front of me. I stared without seeing. Nothing out there concerned me at the moment. There was no way I knew that, but this demon didn’t need to know that. Turning your back on a potential enemy was a sign of extreme stupidity or extreme confidence. The act told that enemy that you had taken measure of them and weren’t afraid of them. If the enemy held all the right cards, you were a goner, but this guy was missing some cards.

Time ticked away as I stood motionless. I waited for the other demon to cry chicken first. As far as I knew, there was no need for me to hurry to find the key. The only way time would be of the essence in getting to it would be if there were others who had knowledge of the key and its location. Nothing about what had been said between us here in the hills had led me to believe that to be true. Wondering why he had come to see me in the first place nagged at me. Had he come to see what state I was in, what memories or power I had remembered, or had he just come to laugh at me?

There was a feeling of power being used. I whirled to face the other demon to find that he had vanished. I reached out to feel for him. There was nothing detected nearby, so I pushed my senses out further and further. I don’t know how far I had reached before finding something. It was an object, not another demon, and it didn’t feel close to me.

I studied the object with my senses. I could only tell that it was a nexus of power. It reacted to the power of my senses like I had somehow turned on its power. I focused more intently on the object. To get to where it was, I needed to know where to find it. As I thought about the object’s location and trying to find it there was a transfer of power. I didn’t push power into it. The power move. One second, I held the power in my mind. The next, I could see that power inside the object. That realization jolted me somewhat, and I returned to myself. Off in the distance, I could see a rhythmic pulsing light. I had put a pointer on the object I had sensed. I was seeing that pointer in the form of that flashing light.

With a shrug I started jogging towards the light. It wasn’t a bounding jog, but each pace I took was far longer than I had believed possibly. It felt natural to be jogging like this; I felt no stress on my body in the activity. I realized I was crossing the ground at a dizzying speed. The ground flashed by me as I ran, no footfall was out of place as I charged on. It took me a half hour to get to the source of the power I had felt earlier. The trip must have been over forty miles as I looked back over the ground I had covered. The feat of endurance only held my attention for a moment.

The object I had detected was a stone, an ordinary looking chunk of limestone that stood around eight feet high. The rock was old and had stood here for a long time. Mosses and lichens covered much of its shape. There were no carvings, or markings on it that I could find. It didn’t appear to have a recognizable shape to it. Based on the ground around the stone I suspected that more of it might be hidden below the ground.

It seemed to be a column of limestone that had stood in this location for a long time but was reactive to power used in its vicinity. As soon as I started to pull in the energy I could see and feel around me the stone began to hum. It wasn’t anything close to the sound a human humming made though I could both hear it and feel it throughout my body. The more energy I pulled into myself the more intense the humming of the stone became. I began to feel my body vibrating as the intensity of the humming grew. The sensation quickly grew to the point that the sound began to hurt my ears, nausea overcame me. As I started to tumble forward, I reached out and grabbed the stone without thinking in an attempt to keep my balance. I released the pent-up energy at the same, that energy poured down my arm and through my arm into the stone.

Everything around me jumped or it seemed like it. My ears popped. My eyes started to roll back up into my head. My stomach jumped into my throat as the ground came out from under me. I fell to all fours. Water lapped at my legs and my forearms. I could feel the muck underneath my hands and between my fingers as I fell. The stench of rotting vegetation and stagnant water assaulted my nose. The droning of insects and frogs mixed with the calls of birds.

I stood up and tried to wipe my hands clean on my pants as I looked around. This swamp looked familiar. All I saw were dead trees, stripped of bark and bleached by the sun, and cattails. Something about the about the place told me I had been here before; it was something I knew but had nothing to go on to prove that to myself.

Walking was a test of endurance and balance. Each step I had to pull one foot free from the much as the other foot sank deeper from supporting all my weight. Trying to use a tree for support didn’t seem like the best idea. The thing would likely break, and I’d end up face first in the water or sitting in the thigh deep stuff.

A yell of frustration escaped from my mouth. My hands were balled into tight fists as I vented to the swamp around me. Silence was my answer. Even the insects seemed to have stopped. The creepy silence seemed to stretch on forever then the noise came crashing back in. The world around me had decided I was nothing to be concerned with.