After Desdemona left I stewed for a while, pacing back and forth, my bare feet cold against the black marble. At last, exhausted in spirit, if not physically, I climbed into bed and drifted off to sleep. I half expected to wake up in my old bed, with my old life, as if it were a dream.
Strangely, I dreamed of a dinosaur. I was standing in front of a massive skull, talking to a group of people whose faces were veiled in shadows.
“Mom, look!” It was a child’s voice, though I couldn’t tell who it came from. “It’s a T-Rex!”
“It is a tyrannosaur,” I said, “but not a T. rex. We call it a Bistahieversor.” I chuckled. I remembered this was something I’d had to correct people on quite a few times. “I know, it’s a mouthful.” I walked closer to the skull until I could gaze into its mouth, past rows of menacing teeth. “Most of the tyrannosaur fossils we’ve found show scarring of the bone, including this one. We have to assume most tyrannosaurs lived short, violent lives. The world was not a friendly place back then.” I smiled at the group. “Thankfully, we live in much more peaceful times now.”
Someone raised a hand from the front of the crowd. “Yes?” I asked. “You don’t need to raise your hand, by the way. You can just ask.”
“What’s it mean? Its name?” A woman’s voice, one that sounded almost familiar, as if I recognized her, or should have.
I paused for a moment, trying to remember. It would have come to me much more quickly in my past life, but right now, every fragment of memory was a struggle to unearth. “It’s actually two words combined,” I said. “From Navajo and Greek. But it means, roughly, ‘Destroyer of the Badlands.’”
I stared up at the skull, big enough to devour me whole, before moving on. The group followed behind me, but I had reached the end of that particular memory. My dream dissolved, and I drifted into darkness.
----------------------------------------
When I awoke, it was to the sound of her voice. Her words pulled me out of the dark once more. “Wake up,” Desdemona said. “We need to talk.” My eyes flashed open, and I wondered for a brief, fearful moment if she had brought the guards or come back to try and kill me.
To my relief, she was alone. Night had fallen by now, and Mona was holding what looked like a gaslamp in front of her with one hand. It was the room’s only source of illumination. She leaned forward and placed it on the nightstand, which was covered in sharp angles and black spikes like most of the other furniture I’d seen. On the surface of the nightstand, someone had engraved carvings of various demons, some of them screaming, some being stabbed with spears, some laughing maniacally. Similarly, the posts of my bed were covered in jagged runes, ones that earlier I had translated to “blood” and “conquest” and things of that nature. A charming aesthetic, to be sure.
I observed her carefully. She seemed calmer now than before, no longer angry. I took a deep breath. “We do need to talk, don’t we?”
“I shouldn’t have stabbed you.” It was not quite an apology, but I felt it was the closest I would get. “When I learned the truth, I panicked. I thought you were an infiltrator, an enemy, not that you… How is your hand?”
I looked down at it. Flexed my fingers. I couldn’t even see the wound, and the pain was gone completely. “I seem to heal more quickly than I used to.”
“You have the body of a living god,” she said. “So that’s to be expected. It’s good you’ve healed. If you had a wound tomorrow, the others would question it.”
“It sounds like you’ve agreed to keep my secret.”
“It’s our secret, now. If anyone finds out that your form is being inhabited by whoever the fuck you are, my head will be on a spike, and your soul will be cast back into the dark.”
“About that. The dark place I was in, was that Hell?”
“The Goddess of Light might think so, but we call it the Void,” she said. “Six hundred years ago, between previous incarnations of Greg-Theryx, a demonic philosopher during one of our more decadent periods postulated that the Void could not truly be Hell because Hell was within each one of us.”
“How edgy,” I said dryly. Only half her face was illuminated by the lamp. In the dim light, she seemed haunted, as if by tragedy. I wondered if I was that tragedy, but I doubted it. At least, I doubted I was the first. Despite her tough exterior, the fact was that she’d been in a position with a high attrition rate and every reasonable expectation that she’d be at the mercy of a tyrannical god. How could she not have been at least a little haunted by that? She had always lived close to death.
“So who are you, exactly, Greg?”
“I come from a planet called Earth, from a, uh, land called New Mexico. I don’t remember much else. My old life feels like a dream. I think I died… I think there was a crash, shattering glass, maybe. But I can’t remember clearly.”
“Never heard of that place. Earth? You named it after … dirt?”
Oh, I thought. Since my brain seemed to automatically understand how to translate what I was saying into Demonic, I hadn’t been thinking about the difference between what I was literally saying and what I intended to say. I wondered if Earth and earth, and the difference between them, was impossible to translate to the demonic tongue. It was not entirely clear to me what planet we were on, now, or our place in the universe.
I suppose I had allowed the silence to stretch too long, because she said, “I probably shouldn’t get in the habit of calling you Greg. If I say that in front of anyone else, they’ll expect you to discipline me.”
“This Greg-Theryx fellow seems like a psycho,” I said.
“You’re Greg-Theryx, now. That’s why I came back here. We need to get you ready for tomorrow.”
“Ready?”
“If I don’t help you, they’re going to figure it out immediately. Ilmatar, Shatterbone, somebody. You won’t last long, and neither will I. I’m going to prepare you as best I can.”
I couldn’t see any reasonable alternative, so I nodded. “Okay.”
“First of all, don’t thank anyone ever again. Never apologize for anything. If something is perfect, you say it’s satisfactory. Everything else is middling or disappointing. If someone performs badly, you’ll be expected to become extremely angry, perhaps kill someone or cut off their ear, finger, or toe, depending on your whim and the severity of their failure. No matter what happens, never act surprised or startled by anything.”
“Uh, I don’t know if I can do all that.”
“Hopefully, people will be so scared of you that nothing will go wrong.” She narrowed her eyes. “Or I guess you’ll have to pretend to be pleased by everything.”
“Much more in my wheelhouse, if I’m being honest.” I tried to smile, hoping to inspire confidence, but she only rolled her eyes at me.
“Red demons are viewed as physically stronger and superior at pyromancy. Green demons are considered smarter and therefore better at more analytical magic. Blue demons are supposedly faster, and more nimble. None of these things are true, but many demons believe them.”
“A superstitious people. But aren’t we all?” I paused and took a breath. “I have some questions for you, too,” I said. There was something I’d been wondering, about why exactly Desdemona had even become High Priestess, if she’d expected to be killed so easily. It didn’t seem worth it. “I thought it would be useful to learn more about you, too.”
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Her one eye that I could see rolled. “We don’t have time to get to know each other. Tomorrow I’ll be leading sermons all morning while you have a meeting in the Hall of War, so I won’t be able to cover for you. You’ll be alone with Shatterbone, and the other Generals for hours. That will be your first big test.”
“Ah, yes. This war everyone seems so worried about.” I sighed.
“So…” She paused for a moment, as if wishing to delay the inevitable or dreading what I was going to say. “How much do you know about military strategy? You didn’t happen to be a warrior on your planet, perhaps some kind of renowned battlefield commander?”
My first response was to laugh, which probably wasn’t reassuring since she frowned deeply. “No,” I said, after collecting myself. “I know nothing. I worked in a museum, I think? I mean, I’ve watched some documentaries about war.”
“Doc-u-mentaries?” she echoed. I suppose there was no good translation of the word, because I’d said it in English, leaving her baffled.
“Educational video programs. Historical records of military conflicts.”
“Oh.” She didn’t say anything for a while. “So you’re a scholar.”
“That’s being generous, but I’ve read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It’s, uh, a well-known military treatise on my planet.” By read, I meant that I’d skimmed through it once, but I didn’t want to admit that. I could already feel her disappointment, her fear. I half expected her to give up on our budding alliance, to turn me in or throw herself from the tower. I wasn’t sure which.
“This will be more difficult than I imagined,” she said, looking troubled. But a moment later she jumped from the bed.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
For a moment I wondered how much I could trust her. But then I realized I didn’t have a choice. For better or worse, she was my only chance, and probably always had been.
----------------------------------------
She left me there, tired and confused, before returning fifteen minutes later carrying a thick leather-bound tome and a serving tray. She placed the tray on the dining table across the room, then walked over to me, heaved the book onto the bed, and began to page through it. “This is from the library,” she said. “It’s the main text of our church, what you might call a ‘documentary,’ of the previous times the Dark Lord was summoned and a historical record of his greatness.” She turned the book around to face me and opened it to a page near the end. “It’s called the Book of Grievances.” She walked to the tray, grabbed two pastries, then handed the larger one to me. “I thought you might be hungry, Master, so I took the liberty. You should know the tower kitchen never closes. Not for you, at least.”
“Thanks,” I said, but she winced, and I cursed my mistake. “Right. No gratitude. By the way, a documentary isn’t really the same as a—you know, never mind.” I took a hesitant bite, finding to my satisfaction that the pastry was filled with some kind of savory, marinated meat. I wondered what kind of meat it was, but perhaps it was better I didn’t know. What did demons eat, anyway?
Instead, I turned my attention to the tome. As expected, the book was written in Demonic. My eyes swam over the jagged-looking runes for a few seconds before the symbols resolved into focus, at which point I could read them fluently. “Record of the 6th Crusade, In the 1361st Year of the Void,” the page began. I realized I could read the runes incredibly quickly. Could I read faster, now, too? Even in a language I hadn’t even known existed until today? All my senses felt keen, and my mind sharper than ever.
Greg-Theryx, the God of the Void, had been summoned on the winter solstice. He had raised an army to conquer the world, uniting the nations of monsters, who lived in the seven realms of the Voidlands—Dreadthorn, Lycanta, Arachnia, Ophidium, Anguila, Kaykoran, and Dysthenna. The names of each nation flew through my mind. I would have to learn more about them in time. In any event, the Book said these seven realms formed an alliance under Greg-Theryx’s leadership. An alliance known as The Midnight Pact.
With the balance of power tipping away from them, the humans, elves, and celestials performed a ritual and summoned Sun-Domia, the Goddess of Light. She assembled a mighty host from all the divine nations known as the Grand Alliance. After a great struggle, Greg-Theryx grew tired of the conflict and returned to the Void, as it was not the right time for His final darkness to encroach upon the world. However, he promised to return in two hundred and twelve years.
“Wait, what?” I asked. “He left? It wasn’t the right time? It sure sounds like he was defeated.”
“This is from our own temple library,” Desdemona explained. “There are certain unfortunate truths that must be obscured from the masses.”
“Ah, yes, so it’s bullshit.”
Desdemona scowled. “Our Master always promised he would return, and that much, at least, I believe in.”
Reading between the lines, I surmised that Greg-Theryx had been sent back to the Void. What remained of the various nations of The Pact had crawled back home, defeated. The Book described them waiting patiently for their God’s return, but to me it sounded a lot like surrender.
“Okay,” I said. “Perhaps it wasn’t a lie … until I showed up and ruined His promised return. But I can’t help but feel we’ve now diverged from scripture.” The time scales as described in the Book still made my head spin. Had these people really been at this for over a thousand years? “It’s really been a millenia of this? Six so-called Crusades, since the first war between the gods?”
“The war is not between the gods,” Mona said, “it is between the divine races and the Void-touched. The gods became embroiled in the wars of mortals.”
“And he’s really been gone for over two hundred years?”
“The summoning ritual requires a very particular astronomical alignment. Yes, we’ve been waiting all this time. Waiting for you to deliver us. To return our people to their rightful place.”
I looked at her, my eyes searching her face. She seemed determined, I thought. I began to understand why she’d risen so high in the ranks. Why she’d been the one chosen to awaken me. It seemed sad that if Greg-Theryx had really been summoned, she might have already been dead.
“I wanted to ask why you became High Priestess, if the odds of you being killed were so high. But now I understand. When you lost the war…”
“It has not gone well for us. In past centuries, we relied on our allies for many supplies. As part of our most recent peace agreement with the Grand Alliance, we are forbidden from trade. We smuggle what we can, but…” The way she spoke, I thought it must be personal to her. I wondered what had happened. “I became High Priestess because I wished to be a capable servant for a worthy master. Instead, I have you.” Her voice dripped with despair. “You, who are not a warrior, and do not even know magic.”
“I never asked to be here, you know.”
“I don’t mean to offend. If we are to work together, I wish to be honest with you.”
“How do I learn magic, anyway? It would be useful for me to know.” I had to admit, it sounded fun—more fun than getting stabbed or maimed, at least.
“In theory, you memorize incantations from a spell book. They’re written in the Old Tongue, which bears little resemblance to the language we speak today.” She pursed her lips and shook her head slowly. “Since you seem to understand Demonic, perhaps you would also take quickly to the Old Tongue. But the words aren’t enough. You must also possess the raw determination to forge them into a new reality. That is the essence of magical power, what demons refer to as Will.”
“Do you have a lot, then?” I asked. “Will?”
She smirked. “I didn’t become High Priestess just because I’m beautiful. I am, but that’s not the reason. I’m better at pyromancy than Asmodeus, and he’s had centuries more time to practice. And now … this.” She sighed. “All that time I spent studying, practicing my craft, and for what? We’re doomed.”
“Teach me,” I said. “Pyromancy.”
“Even for a prodigy, it takes years to learn and decades to master. Sun-Domia’s army will be at our gates long before then. I’m afraid there’s no time to teach you.”
I sighed. “In that case, why even help me with any of this? You don’t seem to think we can win.”
Her voice sounded bitter; her purpose had turned to dust in her hands. “The war is already lost. It was lost as soon as you awakened. What’s left is to survive as long as we can. The manner in which we lose is still important.”
“So that’s it, huh? If our demon friends don’t kill us, the Army of Light will?”
She approached the bed and in a smooth motion, climbed underneath the sheets next to me. The speed of her movements surprised me. “Move over,” she said. “I’m staying the night.”
I shifted, dragging the book with me, until it was in the middle of the large bed, sitting between us.
“Things will look better this way,” she explained, answering the question I hadn’t asked, because I’d already understood. “To the others, it will make it seem you are happy with me.”
“That will be good for you.”
“And for you.” She leaned over and turned off her lamp with a click. The room fell into darkness. After a moment, my eyes adjusted, and I could see her outline, her red eyes watching me. Even in the shadows, she was beautiful. Now that she was closer to me, her scent filled my senses, and my cheeks must have flushed, for I felt my face burn.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she added.
“I wasn’t.”
“Good. We should rest now. I’ll quiz you in the morning.”
I think the darkness of sleep, so much like death, still frightened me. Every time I slipped away, I worried I might never wake up, or else awaken in a different place, in a different body, my memories fading away once more.
To distract myself, I listened to the rise and fall of Desdemona’s breath, obsessing over every slight movement or sound we made. She was like me, I realized. She had a difficult time getting settled.
Like a wall of propriety, the book was still there between us, a reassuring weight that discouraged any stray hands. And it was also a reminder of everything I didn’t know. The lessons I hadn’t yet learned.
At last, Mona let out a soft sigh of contentment, and her breathing slowed. I counted the rhythm of her heart, its faint vibration, until at last I felt calm enough to surrender.