Len's eyes flew open in confusion. Something was wrong. Why was she, where was she, what in the hell?!?

This whole situation was difficult for her to get a handle on because everything felt off. She wasn't quite clear what could've happened to put her in this state but she knew with absolute certainty that something was wrong. Bit by bit, she struggled to wrap her mind around the current state of things but it kept fading away from her before she could get a handle on it. Something was entirely wrong and yet she hadn't the slightest clue what it might be. Dragging her tired husk out of the bed she was lying in, she surveyed the world around her.

"I'm... I'm home?"

The words were out of her mouth before she really understood what they meant. This wasn't the bed she'd fallen asleep in, a cozy enough stuffed mattress of wool that passed for quality for a Kelvachian House Sled. It had been comfortable enough compared to the piled furs she'd been sleeping in at Grenus' Hovel, the dilapidated Orc outpost that she'd been dumped in command of. Neither of those bedding options had compared favorably to even a mediocre mattress built to modern US standards, which was why it had felt so strange waking up on one. Her body had stopped being used to the idea of proper lumbar support and she'd accepted her new reality. It hadn't hurt that her new body had always been used to them.

Lenore Wraithwhisper was a woman who'd gone through some shit. She'd been unceremoniously summoned to another world and thrust into battle after battle in a desperate struggle for survival in the service of a Demon Lord she hadn't known. Well, that was perhaps an exaggeration. She'd been thrust into a tournament system used to rank candidates for the *entertainment* of that Demon Lord and she'd actually met her rather promptly. It hadn't been the most pleasant of introductions but they'd actually hit it off rather quickly, all things considered.

But now she was back on Earth for no obvious reason. More than that, she wasn't alone. Glancing back at her bed she saw... her?

Well, not her exactly, it was the body she'd once occupied, but she obviously wasn't "her" anymore. Look, getting transmigrated into another world and someone else's body did weird things for one's ideas of personhood and tense. In front of her was her old body. One presumably occupied by the original Lenore Wraithwhishper. She'd met the woman once and had been, well, a little put off. She'd been a gruff sort who'd clearly been dealing with her own shit and hadn't been terribly inclined to be patient with her counterpart as she tried to catch up on issues. Still, the meeting had made it clear that SHE had been the one summoned to Earth, rather than Len being summoned, which had been useful knowledge to add, at least.

Which made it all the stranger that Len was here now. If the summoning was so crucial that it had required another person be ripped from her body, you'd think that it wouldn't have been possible to summon her here like this. Shrugging, Len opted for the obvious reaction.

"What the hell is going on here?" she snapped at the woman in her body.

The figure didn't stir. Grumbling, Len moved to her side of the bed to shake her awake. As she did, she noticed the blood pooling beneath the woman and, upon closer inspection, that she didn't have a pulse. Swearing, she tried to find the wound, tried to do something to see if she could save her body from whatever had happened to it but before she could do anything more there was a deafening explosion outside. Stumbling to the window to see what could be going on she saw a literal hellscape. The city was in ruins, dead littered the streets and, oh yeah, literal demons were crawling over the wreckage.

She'd seen her share of demons during the Proving that had afforded her the lowly rank she held within Astrid's army, but they'd seemed rather (for lack of a better word) civilized. There was structure, recognizable remotion, general comradery to be had with the various races that made up the Demon Lord's Army. What was on here? Mindless monstrosity. Voracious creatures feasting on whatever they could get their claws into. Mindless horrors that damaged the psyche just to look at. It was a nightmare she could barely comprehend.

Just as she was trying to come to grips with that development, the air beside her shimmered and a small man appeared. At first she assumed him to be a child, but the proportions were wrong. He was definitely a fully-grown adult man who just happened to be three feet tall.

"Who the blazes are you?" he blurted at her unceremoniously.

"Uhh..." she said lamely, "Lenore Wraithwhisper. Or Claire Henderson. Whatever."

"Oh, the other one. What are you doing here?"

"That's what I'd like to know, dammit. What the fuck is going on here?"

"This is really above my pay grade," he said with a resigned sigh. "It shouldn't be possible that you're here, let alone now that she's failed."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Failed?" Len rubbed her temples. "She'd mentioned something about unleashing something terrible but was pretty vague about the specifics."

"Not surprising, she's shown a remarkable tendency to bumble through her actions rather than thinking things through."

"Is... is she dead?"

"Hrm? Oh yes, quite dead."

"What does that mean for me?"

"Nothing, I'd imagine. I'm about to reset things and hope that she does a better job of things on her next go around?"

"Reset?! You mean you can just do that?"

"Easily, it's well within my authority and the higher-ups are still entertained by it so there should be no troubles here. Hopefully she'll make it a little longer next time. Three weeks is a bit less than impressive."

"Great, cool, wonderful. So she's going to be alive again? Care to explain what's going to happen to me?"

"Oh, I imagine you'll go back to the world we plucked her from. Soul Summonings can be a bit tricky at times. Theoretically, you shouldn't be linked at all now but somehow that connection has been maintained. It's curious, to say the least. Still, I've got work to be doing so could you kindly pipe down?"

"No chance in hell, asshole, tell me what the fuck is going on or I'll wring your damn neck!"

She might have said more, but his eyes began glowing with a terrifying orange light and he was gone. Len was overcome by a wave of nausea as the world around her melted away. A moment later she was standing in the same room she'd been in but the light outside had lost the reddish glare. Now there were two people in the bed, Claire and... Chris, her fiancée. She'd spent far less time thinking about him than she cared to admit, didn't even want to acknowledge him when weighed against the relationship she was forming with Astrid. It was all so uncomfortable. She'd actually forgotten about the marriage she'd felt trapped into accepting. She knew immediately that this was the morning that she'd been swapped with the original Lenore.

"What in the world?"

Then she woke up to the familiar aches and pains that followed a night's rest in what passed for a mattress in Kelvach.

"Great, so that's another thing I'm going to get to worry about," she muttered.

"Hrm?"

Len's adopted daughter Keseryn stirred at her words.

"Don't worry about it, Kes," Len whispered softly. "Just go back to sleep."

"Hrmhuuuuu," Kes replied as she sank back to full unconsciousness.

Len slipped out of bed and sat at her desk to start collecting her thoughts. She briefly scribbled down everything that had just transpired to make sure she didn't shrug it off as a dream later. There was always the possibility that that was all it was, stress-induced paranoia fabricating some crazy scenario to guilt her over the life she seemed to be building in spite of herself on this side of whatever dimensional transport nonsense had brought her here. Still, she doubted it. It had all felt way to real, for all that it had been so fantastical, and she couldn't shake the idea that she'd just borne witness to something serious that would come back to bite her soon enough.

"Hey, Pitch."

"Yes, my mistress?"

Pitch's oily tones filled her ears and the world around her stilled. This creepy bastard did love to lay on the melodrama.

"Were you there for all that?"

"What ever do you mean, mistress?"

Pitch had been leaning hard into the obsequiousness lately. She'd given him a rather thorough shellacking recently over his conduct and his response had been to be downright insulting about his obedience. She was tempted to harass him further over it, but couldn't find the energy. Instead, she just ignored it.

"Getting sucked back to my original world? The weirdly short dude? The tremendous mental trauma of seeing my own corpse and the armies of Hell marching free on the mortal plane? Any of that ringing a bell?"

"Erm... no," said Pitch, confused enough to drop the toady act. "Would you care to elaborate on that?"

"Just what I said. Had a whole ass dream about being back home just long enough to see it all crumble to ash before a guy waved a magic wand or something and rewound time. Eh, must've been a dream."

"No," Pitch said, frowning. "I can see your dreams. You've definitely dreamed about home plenty. Wishy-washy nonsense about a fiancée you didn't care for, pity parties about how you miss your mom's cooking, more than a few nightmares of being trapped in something called a 'cubicle' with no means of escape for the rest of your life, and particularly vivid dreams about your dearest Demon Lord, but nothing about that lines up with what you're mentioning now."

"You've seen my world in my dreams?" she asked, letting the part about Astrid slide.

"Often. You know that we're linked now, there's very little that you experience that I'm not at the very least aware of."

"Then what the hell does it mean that I saw that?"

"I don't know. It's not like any part of this is a precise science. What little I know of the rest of my kind is firmly linked to this reality. Your existence is an anomaly on any number of fronts so it stands to reason that unexpected situations might arise. Still, for me not to be aware of it at all... that's more than a little concerning, truth be told."

"Well great, you're no use to me and I'm still stuck with nagging fears about what the hell is going on over there. Helpful as always, Pitch."

"My deepest apologies, my lady, I will endeavor to be of greater use to you in the near future. Perhaps you'd prefer to talk to your other minion? You seem to have more fun with her after all."

"Oh relax, mate. No need to be jealous. You're both horrid abominations from beyond time and space bent on driving me to madness. You don't need to compete."

"So you say, but you clearly prefer her company to mine."

Pitch's behavior wasn't exactly a sulk, but there was a definite poutiness to it that Len found rather amusing. Still, no sense in letting him in on that amusement.

"You know what? Yeah, think I would like to talk to her for a bit, if that's all right. I've got some things I'd like to clarify and she might be the better option on that front. Never did do much looking into the fact that she might still have a connection with her brother and I've suddenly got a lot more reason to test that theory."

"As you wish, my mistress."