Yeah so I bitched out. I’ve always been bad with women, but after my wife left it hit a whole new level. I haven’t even been with anyone in years, and after all the realizations I’ve had about myself and my issues, I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea in the first place. Shit, I already hate living in my own head, so on one hand, wouldn’t it be absolutely dickish of me to subject someone else’s eternity to that as well? On the other hand, eternity is an actual problem for me now, and I sure as hell don’t wanna spend that alone. It’s only been three months since I met this girl, let’s just calm the hell down, and take this slow.
I checked on the soup and saw that it was ready to be eaten. I grabbed us some bowls and spoons, then divvied it out and announced, “Sophia, dinner!” We sat at the kitchen table in silence, trying to ignore what had just happened and failing miserably. I eventually broke the awkward silence with, “You never did answer by the way, how far along is it?”
Sophia took a bite of the stew before answering, “You hit it dead on with your assessment earlier. I need the materials and have no idea how to get them. Once I have a starting point, I have some workarounds to use magic to fill in all the gaps and permanently turn mana into stuff, but it’s really inefficient, to the point where your entire mana pool would maybe give you a grain of sand. So yeah, the less of that I have to do the better. This is really good by the way.”
I tried the stew as well and shrugged. It was nowhere near as tasty as the food I had gotten at the inn, but still was infinitely better than what I had been eating the last time I traveled. “Ehh, I’ll do better. I’ll have to look around and try to get local recipes at the next town I visit, cuz as of right now I’m mainly going off of what smells right. Also, have you tried starting with an asteroid? Or are there none close enough to Hell that are big enough to use? Worst case scenario you could try to steal the moon, but that might fuck some people over.”
Sophia shook her head, “Hell doesn’t have a sun or moon, at least our part doesn’t. It’s covered in a permanent dome of smoke. I don’t know if other parts of Hell have a moon or not though.”
Pure confusion rushed through me, before I asked, “I thought Hell was one planet though, one solid landmass?” Sophia nodded, “Then how does one part of Hell maybe have a moon but not your part? That makes no sense.”
This time Sophia was the one who was confused, “Because we have the smoke instead?”
“Wait….Have you never tried to go above the smoke?”
“No, why would I? Are there supposed to be floating land masses up there?”
“Well I mean, flying islands are absolutely standard fantasy, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Sophia the moon isn’t something that only parts of the world have, it’s a gigantic rock millions of miles away from the planet, shit, back on my original world, we straight up landed people on ours. Now, Hell may not have a moon, but my new Earth sure as hell does, so we’re two for two so far.”
I spent the majority of dinner teaching Sophia about the basics of astrophysics as I remembered it, stuff like how the planet is actually a giant sphere, atmosphere, gravity, and how moons revolve around the planet while planets revolve around the sun, rather than the other way around. Some of it she had already known, but the majority was completely new information to her. In an attempt to not hog all of the conversation, I asked if she had any tips regarding emotional control, after all: my previous method for anger management was primarily to just freeze up and pretend I didn’t feel an intense desire to kill everyone around me. Here however, that would occasionally become necessary, so I would have to find a better way for this new world.
This prompted her to tell me to find an aggressive hobby I could channel my anger into so that I didn’t aim my wrath at anyone I genuinely liked. Apparently a lot of demons have hobbies of torture or deathmatches, so those were options, just not options I had any intention of taking. I had a couple ideas in mind, but kept them to myself for the time being. She also shared that she had earned her title by gaining a certain amount of control over her desire. Not complete control, but enough that her flames wouldn’t usually engage themselves without her express command. This was also how I learned that apparently the flame tattoos on her body had a sort of pseudo-sentience, and weren’t 100% controlled by her. She then kept asking questions about the astrophysics of my original Earth, trying to figure out ways to solve the problems she had come across in making her old world.
As we were cleaning the table after dinner, I felt the need to clarify, “I do need to make something clear, these are the laws of physics as they applied to my original Earth, and mana does not fall under those laws. However, the laws of my earth were never really complete, and it wasn’t exactly unheard of for a discovery to be made that completely went against everything we thought we knew and made us question everything we have learned. However, mana does behave in a predictable manner, which leads me to believe that it is not entirely outside of the laws of science. It just has its own complementary laws, which I am not yet aware of. If you make a rock out of magic, it still falls down, it still bounces away when you throw it at a tree, and it still irritates your skin if you rub your hand on it really fast. That’s direct proof that unless you’re actively using magic against them, the laws of gravity, conservation of momentum, and friction still apply here, so why not other laws?”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I’ll still need you to teach me all about these laws that you know. Worst case scenario, even just by gaining a rudimentary understanding of them, I’ll be able to use magic to force them to work as I envision them to. A sort of middle ground between your science and my magic.”
I reached my hand out to her and said, “Well then, pleasure to be working with you. I fully expect royalties if my ideas pan out and help you finish your world.” The flames on her body flooded her face as she took my hand, hit me with a beautiful smile, and responded, “Sure, maybe you can even be its king.”
I laughed at her misunderstanding, but also noticed how high my pulse, and the temperature in my own face had risen.
Sophia’s POV
After finishing up dinner, Leo went off to bed. He also told me he planned on staying here for a couple days before continuing on his journey, something about setting up his enchanting shed and carving eyes into his knives so he could see with them. Once I was sure he was asleep, I left the subspace and returned to Hell. I passed a confused Veronica as I made my way outside, and I looked up at the smoke filled sky, produced by the lake of fire off in the distance. I focused on my desire to rise into it and my own flames responded. My wings unfurled from my back and launched me into the air.
I couldn’t see anything beyond the darkness, hear or feel anything besides the wind rushing past my ears, smell or taste anything other than the smoke filling my lungs. Apparently, breathing this in was quite toxic for humans, but for demons, was no different than regular air. Leo had two hypotheses for this, either a) my specific branch of demon had evolved next to a literal lake of fire so developed in such a way that our lungs would be able to handle the smoke, or b) a kind of automatic magic that reclassified every kind of gas we breathed in to be considered “air”. He also devised experiments involving observing the reactions of different kinds of demons when locked in a room full of smoke, and also taking my species of demon and trying to inflict them with gaseous poison to see if we could still breathe it normally. For someone so adamant about not becoming a torturer, he has rather sinister ideas of things to do to people.
I kept rising for several minutes, losing all track of where I was, and how far I had gone. All I could think about were Leo’s explanations about space, and the wider universe beyond his world. Okay, that was a lie, I was also thinking plenty about that awkward moment when I was sitting on his lap, and what that meant for us moving forwards. A healthy amount of fear rose within me as I considered it. Leo was still human after all, and with one wrong move, he would die. And that’s from strangers, even worse, I am a semi-divine being. I am powerful enough to erase him from existence with just the slightest bit of effort, so if I ever lost control, if I ever was in a fit of passion and went too hard… I could easily shatter him completely by accident.
Not to mention emotionally. Leo had a lot of problems, ranging from trust issues, difficulties with attachment, low emotional intelligence leading to insensitivity at times, and all in all a very isolationist mindset. Could I really accept all of those and be with him regardless? Would his issues prevent him from giving me the emotional support I needed too? Or would I just end up as a crutch for him, eventually being taken for granted?
Slow down Sophia, I chided myself, you’ve only known this boy for three months. You’re over 5000 years old for fuck’s sake, stop acting like a human teenager and just take it easy, one day at a time.
The smoke was thinning. I could tell I was close, close to finding the answer to the question that had plagued me for so long. If Leo was right, then what I was about to see would completely change everything about my methodology. Everything I have worked for for millenia might just be in the palm of my hand.
I picked up speed, seeing the environment around me grow brighter. Feeling the wind push at me harder, almost trying to force me back to the ground, back to where my ambitions would never be sated. I tasted the smoke thinning, less dense, but still blocking my view of that for which I searched. Until, finally, miraculously, I broke through the last cloud of smoke.
I couldn’t put the majesty before me into proper words. The night sky, littered with pinpricks of twinkling light, illuminating the vast sea of dark and smoky clouds beneath me. I watched as some of the lights seemed to shoot through the sky, creating streaks of bluish white above me. However, I did not see a single moon.
Instead, I saw four. Four glorious, radiant moons, more than enough mass to start off my project by a ridiculous degree. Each one was larger than the planet Leo was currently traveling on, which meant that my long held dream, the one that everyone else I had told wrote off as nothing more than a wild fantasy that would never come to be, was not only possible, but would take far less time to accomplish than I originally thought. A surge of emotion too intense to bear flooded through my chest. Gratitude. Salvation. Vindication. Tears flooded my eyes, blurring the beautiful sight before me, causing it all to swirl together in a wondrous tapestry of unbridled majesty and emotional heft. I would start working on planning how to steal one of the moons later, but first, I had somewhere else I wanted to be right now. Someone who deserved all of the gratitude I currently felt within my heart. I let myself fall back to the ground, watching as the beautiful view was recovered by the layer of smoke.
Within a matter of minutes I was back in the subspace. I walked silently into the room that Leo had chosen for his own. Fortunately, I had made the beds rather large, too large for just one person. I lifted the blanket, then crawled up beside him, taking his arm and placing it over my waist. I then looked at the face of the man who had changed my life, had brought clarity to the path I walked with no more than a simple conversation, and whispered, “Thank you Leo, for everything.” I then finished the action I had started earlier in the day, now that he was asleep and there were no real consequences for it, and gently placed my lips against his. For now, I didn’t care how little time I’d known this man, how dangerous it was to get too close too fast. All that existed in my head was gratitude, so I expressed it. I then got myself comfortable in his arms, and drifted off to sleep.