The Crying Demon watched Everie leave with a smile on her bloated face. The girl had an awfully strong personality for one that had endured so much.

Perhaps she was right to choose her as the Root’s host. The Great Beast frowned; her merest change in expression seemed to distort reality, now that she allowed her presence to fully flood the Confluence.

No matter, she told herself. The Crying Demon flexed her limbs, snapping the chains binding her taut. Such Insight is not for one such as me to ponder upon.

Failure as I was, that much I understand.

Matters of the soul were but fragments of her storied past. For now, the Crying Demon did what she had done for aeons:

She guarded.

The Ninth Realm was divided into four primary areas. There were the Cathedrals - outposts that the lesser Sereph guarded. Hell - the pocketspace filled with Zabaniya’s abominations, though her brother himself had long since entered slumber - pervaded much of the rest.

Then there was the confluence, at the very center. The entrance to the rest of the infinitely spanning Realm of Soul; an endless void, filled with twisting, intertwined branches of the Soulstream.

Beyond that was the Final Layer, and the realm of the Divine that lay beyond.

The Crying Demon guarded the Confluence, as she’d ever-so enigmatically told little Everie. It was her sworn duty. Her sacred task.

The chains that kept her here were reminders of her failure, and a last atonement to those that she’d left behind, scrabbling in the dirt.

There they are, she thought, narrowing her single eye. Her limbs flexed what looked to be an unnatural grace; after so many years in her current form, she navigated the crevasses of her body with an expert touch.

That also applied to the magic that imbued this form. As she flexed her will - the concentrate of her energy that was her core - reality itself seemed to grind to a halt. The full force of her power slashed through the Layers themselves, unmaking existence wherever it touched.

was an application of her original ability that only worked because of the immense power of her current, inhabited body. Even as a failure, her greatest creation was powerful to an extent she could only have dreamed of when she was younger.

Now? It was but a reminder of her failure to make it something even more.

What? Her eye widened.

To her surprise, the sole interloper skilfully dodged the rift. The Crying Demon grumbled; that meant this wasn’t just some stray. If an actual attack was imminent, she would have to respond with ever- greater force. If only...

Her wounds - the product of aeons of constant assault - ached. Her energy was still abundant, and her actual physical integrity didn’t have so much as a scratch. But the fight had taken a toll on her in other ways.

Fine, she thought, angrily. A futile effort, then, albeit by someone relatively skilled. Let’s see if you can dodge this!

Space yawned. Reality widened, and the interloper stumbled backwards as a chunk of existence itself was rent open by the Crying Demon’s powers.

It is done, she thought, slumping.

She loathed using this aspect of her abilities. Unlike mortal spatial magic, her rifts penetrated Layers without resistance - an ultimate magic beyond even the Sereph and her pathetic Brother. The Ember-Witch had called it phase-magic, although the Crying Demon herself disliked that moniker. It seemed too passive a name for something that could cause such catastrophic damage… were she to exercise her power wantonly.

Though Hell may be a perversion, created by Zabaniya in an attempt to control the Confluence, it nevertheless retains importance in the natural order. Without it...

The Crying Demon sighed. It doesn’t matter, she thought. It’s all over, anyway.

She stretched out her limbs, relaxing herself. The constant assault upon her meant it was difficult for her to find time to rest.

The Crying Demon closed her single eye, as if to-

She shot upward, a scowl painted across her face. Her will flexed, and her inner eye caught sight of something that profoundly irritated her.

It’s still alive? The Crying Demon thought, incredulously. That’s impossible. No mortal being should have been able to survive that. Unless...

“Correct, sister,” drawled a familiar - if profoundly irritating - voice. “Your little tricks won’t work on me - at least, not with how little effort you put in them.”

The Crying Demon growled, heaving her body upwards. Spires of rock and chasms of stone crumbled as she rose to her full height, staring down minaciously at the little vermin that dared to sneak into her dominion.

“Asterion,” she spat. “Your master must be awfully desperate if she expended the energy to send you here.”

The Sereph smirked, and she couldn’t help but notice how normal he looked. The Sereph were supposed to be obnoxious in the forms they chose, often choosing to appear as celestial or other phenomena. It was partly due to the fact that their unimaginable power made it difficult to even descend through the Final Layer, let alone physically manifest.

“That’s what you think,” Asterion said, rolling his shockingly vibrant blue eyes. The Crying Demon felt her hackles rise - Asterion may not be the most powerful of the Sereph, but he was still a Greater divinity. There should have been absolutely no possible way for one such as him to descend, not with her Seal in place, unless...

The Crying Demon’s single pupil dilated. “If you think this is enough for you to penetrate the first Layer and enter the mortal realm, you will be sorely disappointed,” she snorted. “You’d have to get through me first, which is impossible even for you.

“I have no need to do so,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I am perfectly aware none except for perhaps the Great Mother can contest you. After all, you are the only Divine being left in the mortal plane.”

He sighed. “Using your Dominion as a Seal to prevent the Greater Sereph from penetrating through the final layer, all while guarding the Confluence so that the souls of our Lesser brethren can not descend to do our bidding. For aeons, no less! I would say I had no idea the Great Mother created you to be so irritatingly persistent, but...”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Enough,” the Crying Demon boomed. “I am not like you, or your pathetic kin. Mortal-kind deserves not your Great Mother’s pathetic attempts at control.”

“Our Great Mother,” Asterion said, sighing. “When will you learn?”

“When my body has been ground to dust, and my soul erased from existence,” she growled.

Asterion blinked. “You know that to be impossible, Sister,” he said. “You cannot die. Only fade, and return to the primordial Root. Which you stole, by the way.”

He paused, before chuckling. “Truth be told, I was impressed by you - at least, at first. Despite how pathetic you are, you were the greatest threat Mother ever faced. With your... minions, you destroyed countless of my lesser brethren. And then you stole the Root! The source of us all!”

Then he turned up his nose. “And then, after failing to open and access it, you abandoned it. Oh, how we searched for it! And then it turns out you gave it to a mortal girl...”

He snorted. “Do you truly think she has the capacity to do what even the Great Mother could not? She is a perfect being, after all, and as much as it pains me to say, that body of yours, if completed, could have been the same.” Then Asterion scowled. “But it is not complete. Your little experiment was a failure - a product of your hubris. Is it not time to admit defeat and return to our mother’s embrace?”

“You know nothing of this,” the Crying Demon said, quietly. “Leave.”

“Still, this is not the purpose of my little visit to you, little sister,” he said, shrugging. “You will fall eventually - that is for certain. But my duty is not to watch you writhe on the ground. I am here to reclaim what you stole.”

“Just try it,” she snarled. “You can’t get past me. Not you, not anyone.”

“When did I say I had to pass through you?” Asterion said, frowning.

“What?” the Crying Demon snarled. For the first time since their encounter, she faltered. “What are you talking about?”

“Why would a Greater Being such as myself deign to descend into this pathetic place? I am not an animal - the Great Mother seeks to expand her dominion into it, after all. Not join it,” Asterion snorted. “This is but a shell I am transferring my consciousness into. It is but a tiny sliver of my energy.”

“But-” the Crying Demon’s eyes widened.

Oh no.

Asterion cackled. “You understand now, don’t you?”

“But that’s impossible!” she shouted. Asterion winced as the Layers he was painted upon crumbled, his form flickering. “You of all the Sereph have assumed a mortal form?” she boomed, sending tremors rippling throughout space. “But how?”

Asterion laughed. “So you have figured me out,” he chuckled, fanning himself with his pearlescent hand. “That’s funny, little Sister. And why so shocked? It’s not like it’s never been done before.”

“After all, what would that make you, little sister?”

Her Eye narrowed. “Be that as it may,” she said, slowly, “A mortal cannot contest one that is Divine. You have no chance of coming past me.”

The Crying Demon winced upon uttering those words. She’d spent her entire existence playing as a mortal proving that notion wrong again and again, after all.

But the Sereph only understood what they knew to be true. That was the only reason how The Crying Demon had fought them and their kin for so long.

Fought her kin.

“Perhaps not myself,” Asterion said, shrugging. “Even despite my assumption of this pathetic form, I am too Great to be fully mortal.”

“But would that extend to my lesser brethren?” The Crying Demon felt her heart sink. “No-”

“Yes,” Asterion grinned. “It may not be much. Just the tiniest sliver of energy. The tiniest sliver of will. But it adds up over time, doesn’t it? We are beings made of pure will. We have both power and time in abundance.”

“And how hard could it be to dominate a mortal mind?”

Her single eye dilated. “This is-”

“Blasphemy,” Asterion snorted. “Exactly what you did, all those years ago. We just took a page out of your book, Sister.”

His eyes narrowed. “Despite the originality of your methods,” he said, “You couldn’t have expected to be the only Sereph capable of entering a soul forever, could you?”

“But my Dominion!” she cried. “You cannot incarnate like the little mortals did. You cannot manifest-”

“We only need to possess a mind, as I am doing now,” Asterion waved her protests off dismissively. “‘Till our will transforms it to do our bidding. We tested this in the worlds you did not protect. Drove mortal minds into a frenzy. They worshiped us already - all it took was a little push. There are cracks in the Seals you put on the final Layer already, little sister. That’s how the Lesser Sereph slipped through all this time to attack you.” Asterion said. “And there’s only so much of the Soul Streams you can guard. The Ninth Realm is a huge place! We only had to send a tiny bit of will. A tiny bit of power through, when you slept or when your guard was down.”

“And when sufficient time has passed, and our proxies have developed sufficient strength” he said, smiling. “We will kill that girl and take back what’s rightfully ours. After we destroy the other side of this quixotic seal you’ve built, our Greater brethren will be capable of manifesting fully as well.”

Asterion cackled. “And the glory of the Great Mother will pervade all of existence once more.”

The Crying Demon was silent. Asterion tilted his head.

“What. Do you despair?” he said, an evil smile encroaching upon his utterly normal visage. “Do you cry out, for now you know all your rebellion was for naught?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, simply. “I just think the Great Mother has forgotten one aspect of this grand equation she seems to think she has formulated.”

Asterion tilted his head. “Oh?”

“If the Divine creates puppets in such a way,” she said, “those vessels would be lesser than even the fledgelings you send to harass me. They would be mortal. They will be able to be killed by other mortals.”

The Sereph frowned. “So what?” he snorted. “Our will and power will grant them strength beyond mortal ken.”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand, would you?” she snarled. “The tenacity of those that clutch to even the slightest sliver of hope.”

The air screamed.

“As long as I don’t let you through here, then there is hope yet!”

Asterion’s eyes bulged as the Crying Demon threw out a hand, sending him spiraling backwards. Spacetime yawned as the Sereph flew through an infinity of Layers, shattering through phases of reality with every distance. By the time he halted himself, plummeting straight into the dimensional flooring of Hell, Asterion had traveled no more than a hundred meters.

But in that span, he might as well have traveled across a universe.

Her eyes narrowed as she saw that he had survived even that after all. Despite being in a mortal form, Asterion was stronger than a Lesser Sereph. Was his will just so great? If then-

No, she thought, fixating on Asterion as he rose from the rubble he had been implanted in. There’s hope yet.

As long as I don’t let the Greater Divine through, then the mortals can fight back. Even against the Lesser Divine, they have a chance.

Fight back...

The Crying Demon swallowed.

Will it really be enough?

She thought of all the mortals she knew. All those that had joined her quest to fight the Sereph - and, to a lesser extent, Zabaniya.

Mortals that had killed gods, back when the Divine still walked the physical realms. Back before the Fragmentation - their banishment.

And so, the Crying Demon believed.

Asterion erupted out of the blackstone with a screech of rage. This wasn’t really him, but the sensation of hurt transferred to his will past the Final Layer all the same.

The Crying Demon believed that Everie could win. She had to. But first, she had to warn her.

Fight back, Everie, she thought, as she rose to fight. Her will disseminated into the pores of reality. With her focus on maintaining the Seal, she could hardly spare the energy to fight, let alone to send a message through the Nine Cardinal Layers.

But a being such as her had more of an influence on existence than logic would deem possible.

Fight back, she thought. The Crying Demon put all her spare might into the message - not just to Everie, but to everyone she knew. To her past comrades.To both the people and monsters she loved and detested. She had no hope it would manifest, but there was no room for what could not be. Her will was dominion; it was reality; it simply was.

And Beware of the Marked.