Interrogating be the head went about as well as I had expected. I managed to get a few more crude answers out of him, but didn’t really want to stay there long enough to work my way through the more complex ones. To my knowledge, we were still undetected, but I doubted that we would be lucky enough for the bodies to be in a spot that was completely out of the way. It was possible, but not something I wanted to work from.

Having no good way to dispose of them, I decided to just leave the decapitated shapeshifter and puddle that had been the other one. What I did do was take the time to search them. Their clothes were… dull. Really, really, dull. They were just dark grey jeans and a dark grey t-shirt. Even their underwear was grey. I couldn’t be sure, since shapeshifter slime seemed to be rather… staining, but I was fairly confident every item of clothing they had was the exact same color. Well, the exact same color before all the blood stains.

“I’m definitely getting a cult vibe here.” I commented as we walked away from the scene, holding up the head’s underwear. Marian looked over at me.

“Couldn’t you take their clothes and change into one of them?” I sucked air in through my teeth and made an apologetically pained expression.

“Well… I sort of shed a lot of mass, so I could look like Steph and, you know, explain why neither of you were around for a while. And… they both were a lot bigger. So…” She was giving me a look that clearly said she thought I was lying. Which I wasn’t.

All I was doing was presenting true information as if it had anything to do with the current situation. It was true that I had lost mass to pass as Steph, which didn’t mean I couldn’t easily regain it by eating the headless body or using magic to fake matter. Or, you know, change the fact that I could look like whatever viable form I wanted with the mass I had. “Plus, neither of their shirts are exactly intact.” I was pretty sure she didn’t trust my excuse… I mean, explanation, but she did drop it.

We walked for a minute of silence. “Are you mad at me?” I finally asked. She looked over, before returning her attention forwards without responding. I held the head up next to her face. “Are you angry at Sam?” I said in a tone usually reserved for voicing over small furry animals, moving the head’s jaw to match my words, despite his efforts to resist. She barely even reacted. I pulled the head back. “You aren’t even going to answer Mr. Head.” I returned the newly dubbed Mr. Head to her face. “You won’t even talk to me?” I puppetted. I was pretty sure I saw her eye twitch.

“Do you have no sense of danger at all?” I legitimately considered the question.

“Maybe, it depends on your definition. Is that why you are angry?” I held Mr. Head to my chest, slowly petting his hairless scalp while I waited for a response.

“I’m angry because an inhuman psychopath with no regard for my wellbeing forced me into slavery before dragging me into a scenario straight out of a bad horror movie.” Her voice was tense, like she would really prefer to be yelling.

I laughed. “That seems like a very distorted view. Don’t you think, Mr. Head?” Unsurprisingly, he chose not to comment. “I think it would be more accurate to say that you attempted to murder something that proved to be beyond your scope and were given an incredibly generous offer rather than punished accordingly.”

She just gaped at me. “How is this a generous offer? What could possibly be punishment if this is a generous offer?” She sounded completely incredulous.

I quirked an eyebrow. “Well, what would I do normally? Let’s see, you attempted to kill me for independently selfish reasons, which means you are already fairly sinful. So, I would have given you a more… intensive way of cultivating yourself.” I stroked Mr. Head, considering. “Well, first I would have killed you. Then, when I got back to the Underworld, I would pluck your soul out of the river before you formed a new body. It does take quite a while without direct intervention, after all.” I was semi-lost in thought, so I didn’t see whatever her reaction to that was.

“There are a number of things I could do from there. I could drop you at the bottom of one of the great caves and make it so you reformed there every time you were brutally killed by one of the… denizens.” I deliberately didn’t look at her this time. “I could also make you into a giant meat blob that endlessly regenerated, then sell you to a farm or restaurant. I could even make you lactate and lay eggs. I would get a pretty good price for that.” I could feel her watching me now, but didn’t stop my contemplative stare.

“I mean, if you think being a factory farm animal is bad here, you should try it in the Underworld. Am I right, Mr. Head?” I continued without checking for blinks. “Of course, I could also make you into an inhuman tentacle monster with anatomy that would make even the darkest depths of the internet blush and base instincts to match, then drop you into Asmodeus princedom for… public use.” She stopped walking, and I stopped a few more steps ahead.

“Naturally, if you managed to grow to the point that you could escape, I would make you a minor daemon lord and let you work your way up from there.” I said without turning around. “Now, doesn’t it seem like just asking you to help me a little to make up for trying to murder me seem rather forgiving.” I finally turned to face her. “Oh, and I wouldn’t go giving up and dying.” I smiled at the look on her face. “You never know what might happen afterwards.” I spun on my heels and continued down the hall. “Come on, we have places to be.” I called back to the disturbed lilin behind me.

After a moment, she started walking and quickly caught up. She didn’t say anything for a while, before finally breaking the silence. “Could you really do all that?” She asked in a quiet voice. I looked over to her.

“Of course, Lilith isn’t going to stop me from taking the soul of one lilin.” I winced as in an unknowably distant non-reality beyond creation Lilith punched my arm, which was completely unjustified. I didn’t complain when she stole my stuff.

Marian didn’t immediately respond, so I decided to change the subject. “And, for another thing, this isn’t much like a horror movie.” She looked at me blankly, my comment clearly unexpected. “It’s more like a bad urban fantasy novel or maybe TV show.” I continued. “Don’t worry. As long as we keep an eye out for the protagonists, I’m sure we won’t get sparkled or bored to death, or whatever it is they do.” She was now giving me the expression my comments probably deserved.

“And, we might even get to watch a vampire and werewolf screw, or something.” I rolled my hand in a dismissive gesture. “Yeah… I really don’t know what urban fantasy is about.” She was giving me a weird look.

“You really shouldn’t use that word.” This time I gave her the weird look.

“What word? Urban? Fantasy? Screw?” She was definitely looking at me like I was missing something now.

“No, Vampire.” I just looked at her for a moment.

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“Why?” I really wasn’t sure why the name of a mythological creature in this nation’s culture would be something I shouldn’t say.

“Because it’s offensive?” She answered, utterly failing to enlighten.

“To who…” and then I got it. “That myth is derived from lilin?” I asked incredulously.

“You really didn’t realize that?” She sounded as if that was hard.

I threw my hands up, which was probably disorienting for Mr. Head. “Why would I. The myth seems pretty fucking random.” I raised my free hand and started listing off differences. “They apparently burn in sunlight, are allergic to garlic, don’t have reflections, can’t cross running water, sparkle…” I ran out of fingers. “They have practically nothing in common with lilin. And I didn’t even mention any of their powers. Lilitu have abilities like that, but not lilin.” It really was a ridiculous association. Based on my blood knowledge, there was practically no similarity.

“Do those really exist?” I glanced over at the question.

“Vampires? I don’t think so.” She shook her head.

“No, lilitu. Are they real?” I gave her a weird look.

“Uh, yes, last time I checked. Are they not around anymore?” She shook her head again.

“Not that anyone can prove. They’re really just a myth. You get people claiming they met one all the time, but there isn’t any good evidence.” I considered that. It was actually believable that the lilitu could and would manage something like that.

That was because lilitu were both sufficiently rare to pull something like that off and had the kind of power to not have to work at it. They were, essentially, the daemon lords of lilin. Daemon lord is a general term for a daemon empowered to the point that they were functionally a different species from the lesser members of their kind, usually by their daemon prince. They would have abilities that set them apart, making them demigod like beings. Lilitu, specifically, have a lot of potential abilities, not that any specific one would have any given power. That was mostly because Lilith has a truly terrifying level of innate abilities, which were in a perpetual state of evolution.

“Yes, they are real, although I can’t say that they are still in the physical world.” She seemed to consider that for a moment, but broke the brief silence with a seemingly unrelated question.

“Why would you do things like that to someone?” I immediately knew what she was asking.

“To help them.” I responded honestly. She stopped, and I turned to face her.

“How could you think that torturing someone like that is helping.” I looked at her, letting a little more… me bleed into my expression.

“The Underworld isn’t a punishment, it’s a path to salvation.” My voice was still physically Steph’s, but there was something else now. Something that wasn’t truly physical. “We don’t try to torture you, we try to give you a way to grow closer to perfection.” We had been following Mr. Head’s directions, as I had understood them, and were currently beside a door that supposedly lead to the main base for his group.

Rather than waiting for her to respond, I pushed the door open and walked through into what was clearly a cell block. There were to rows of cells on each side, broken up into to leaves with a walkway to make the upper level useable. They were clearly old, but both perfectly functional and not empty. A decent number of the metal cages had… humans? I was definitely sure that most were humanoid, but first glance couldn’t give much more than that. That was because a lot of them were either in a state of such abnormal human behavior that I couldn’t be sure without closer examination or were… twisted.

I took a few more steps in, scanning the captives. They were universally a sorry lot, filthy and not exactly sane. With closer examination, I was pretty sure a lot of them had been either normal humans or something that looked like it. It was also apparent that someone had put them through a truly inhuman level of… experimentation. Many of them had numerous surgical scars, often on their heads. Yeah, someone was definitely interested in these people’s grey matter, and, by the looks of it, they weren’t just sight seeing. That was fairly mundane compared to the less mortal tampering.

Almost every one of them had visible Celestial markings, the written form of the language of my kind, tattooed, cut or branded into their skin. That was made a lot easier to spot by the fact that none of them really had clothes, although a lot of them were restrained. The restraints were because the majority of them seemed to be rabid. It wasn’t exactly consistent, but the were peopleattacking the walls, wether they could reach them or not, with no sign of reason and others who seemed to be just flopping around their cells in ways that their bodies had never been meant to move.

I scanned over them with my divine sight, confirming what my knowledge of Celestial Speech had already told me. While their bodies weren’t in great condition, their souls were… horrible. While messing around with the physical brain of any animal could change its behavior, it wasn’t a way to affect the human soul. However, the Celestial Markings were bending the natural laws that regulated the mechanics of the soul itself, bending it out of shape like light bent by distorted glass. I scowled, finding myself silently infuriated by the sight.

That fury grew as warped soul after warped soul showed slight variations on the same tampering, making me as certain as I could be of what the objective of this crime against the gods was. A crime against me. As my eyes slid along the cages, they stopped at a captive that wasn’t right. Everyone else was either moving around in some sort of behavior that was clearly irrational or seemed to be simply catatonic, but the man in the cell at the left-hand end of the room wasn’t doing either. Instead, he was sitting cross legged in the middle of his cell, body both relaxed and upright and his head down as if he was meditating. Of course, it wasn’t just his posture that caught my attention. No, it was his soul, or lack there of.

Instead of a soul, even a warped one, his body was a void of spiritual nothingness to my divine sight. Rather than light, his form looked like a hole torn in the world, a clawing nothingness that was something both far more and far less than simple absence. It seemed to bleed out into the world around his physical body, reaching tendrils of non-creation into reality like a parasite burrowing into its host. Even without my divine sight, I would feel the unnaturalness of something neither mortal or divine, something alien and unknowable.

I slowly approached his cell, ignoring Marian’s horrified reaction to our surroundings. She quickly followed, likely feeling that I was the more familiar evil. Some of the captives did strictly react to our passing, but it wasn’t like their cried could be distinguished from the ones they were already making. As I got closer to the figure, I noticed that the walls of his cell were covered in wards. Surprisingly, they weren’t magical. Instead, his walls had been inscribed with Celestial Speech to the point that the space they took up was barely viable as space. Someone had done there best to make it impossible to enter the walls, which included physical forces trying to break them down. Celestial Marks were difficult and time consuming even for someone like me, so it must have taken an incredible amount of time for the demon, which I assumed had to be what did this, who inscribed them. They had to have been truly desperate to keep the captive captive.

As I walked up, his head lifted to face me, revealing that his eyes were closed. That didn’t stop him from looking straight at me. I watched a smile spread across his face as the formerly hidden Celestial Script under my feet activated, distorting the ambient primordial light around them and revealing their presence. “What?” Marian asked, as her motion was suddenly stopped.

“We are being captured.” I said in a tone without the slightest hint of alarm.

“What? How?” I didn’t bother to move, having already read enough of the script to know that any significant attempt to move would be met with increasing resistance.

“Well, Mr. Head, being… you know, a cultist whose friend I just murdered, lead us into a trap.” She was staring at me, probably wondering why I wasn’t doing anything. “I doubt this is actually meant for intruders. It’s probably for him.” I nodded at the humanoid abomination in the cell. “But, Mr. Head must have figured it would work just fine on us.” The Marks were activating in a chain now, rapidly bending reality towards there final purpose.

“So, you can get us out of it.” The circle of Marks was almost done now.

“No.” I answered, right before everything snapped out of existence. The last thing I saw before reality and me were forcibly separated was the captive’s eyes flick open, revealing twin windows into the endless void beyond. What a fucking dick.