There was a crushing weight from all directions. Kotori felt cramped, as if she had been compressed into a tiny space. The sensation was extremely distressing, and alarm bells rang through her incoherent thoughts. She remembered the terror of being burned alive. The pain had been sudden and unbearable, like being seared with flaming oil, even though she had felt it for only a few moments.

—Clink. Clink.

There was a tapping sensation. 

Kotori was so frightened that she couldn't think straight. Demons? Sheep? Fire? None of this made any sense. At the present moment, she couldn't feel her fingers. She couldn't wiggle her toes, see anything, or smell anything. Kotori tried to raise her voice, but she couldn't summon a sound. Everything was black, except for this horrible vague awareness that she was somehow stuffed in a small box. 

—Clink. Clink. Clink.

The tapping noises came again.

The university professor tried to force herself to calm down. The noises — they weren't really noises, because Kotori couldn't hear anything. They were more like vibrations. The feeling was similar to shockwaves transmitted by a finger tapping on a fish tank, the velocity amplified as each wave traveled through a denser medium.

She was inside a sealed glass bottle, Kotori slowly realized.

The tapping was coming from outside.

Saikawa Kotori wasn't sure how she suddenly knew this, but she was somehow aware of this glass bottle. It was one of those small 32 oz jars similar to the kind that her grandmother used for pickling vegetables. The flawless glass lacked any impurities, and it was fully transparent. The top was covered with some kind of inverted glass bowl and sealed with a layer of strange liquid. Kotori recognized the design as essentially one of those traditional Chinese pickling jars.

It peeved her slightly to think of herself as a kind of pickle (maybe kimchi?).

No wonder why it felt so cramped.

But then it crossed her mind that it made zero sense for a human to fit inside a tiny 32 oz jar.

Kotori struggled with this for a few short minutes. However, after a little bit of mental gymnastics, she succeeded in shifting her awareness onto herself. Suddenly, she could see herself clearly. After getting a good look(?) at herself, everything made perfect sense, although Kotori's distress level skyrocketed several magnitudes higher. 

Um... yeah...

Kotori didn't have a body anymore.

She was kind of just an amorphous gaseous blob inside of a bottle.

Presumably, that was her soul.

+ + +

"My, my. This is quite a mess."

"Orkruz! All I need to know is whether you can fix it."

"You set the entire room on fire, My Lord. How do you want me to fix it?"

"Not the room, you fool. The pillow. I need you to fix my pillow."

Kotori strained her ears(?) as she slowly realized she could faintly make out a conversation.

There were two masculine voices in the room outside of the bell jar. One was suave and mellow, like a summer-roasted honey. The other was frigid and heavy, like glacial ice formed underneath centuries of pressure. The latter, Kotori recognized as the Demon Lord's voice. He sounded agitated and unsettled, as if something had upset him, although he was trying not to show it.

Kotori managed to shift her awareness again, and she now saw a picture of the scene.

The bedroom was burning. Loose cinders drifted through the air and incinerated furniture continued to burn down to embers. The air smelled(?) like sulphur, and Kotori's eyes(?) watered from the hot fumes. Despite the withering flames, two demons standing in the room seemed unbothered by the smoking fire.

The Demon Lord was still nude in all his glory, and he paced back and forth fretfully. The other long-haired man was dressed in luxurious silk bath robe. He looked as if he had just gotten out of bed in the middle of the night. His flawless skin was ghostly pale like the moon, and he mostly appeared preoccupied with the ashes that were drifting about in the air. Periodically, he waved his hand to keep them from sticking to his robe. From time to time, he leaned over and tapped the glass on Kotori's bottle, intrigued by the odd colorful amorphous shapes contained within the vessel.

Kotori (the bottle) was on a small bedside table. The enormous bed from earlier no longer existed (burned to crisp). The university professor noted with some worrisome concern that her table was indeed on fire, as one of the four scorched legs was steadily smoldering with a modest yet sizable flame that was slowly crawling up the furniture. 

The centerpiece of the scene, however, was a burnt corpse that presently laid on the ground. The body was legitimately very gruesome. The white fleece of the sheep person had been charred black, and its face was completely unrecognizable. Kotori could see now that was indeed very very 'undead'. With the terrible disfiguration and its skin burnt off, it looked remarkably similar to a zombie.

All three parties formed a semi-circle around around the roasted lamb, all thinking wildly different thoughts in total silence. 

Kotori was slightly comforted by the fact that she was in a jar and not the corpse. RIP.

There was a slight awkward cough from the long-haired demon.

"Are you sure that you used the Sword of Severance, My Lord? Instead of... uh... a flamethrower?"

"I know how to use the Sword of Severance, Orkruz. I've fried dozens of mosquitos before."

There was a trace of bristling annoyance in the Demon Lord's voice.

"Well, the soul clearly isn't severed," the long-haired demon pointed out smartly, gesturing at Kotori in the bottle.

"Then the Sword is clearly broken," the Demon Lord pronounced crassly. 

"I'll take a look at the sword tomorrow," Orkruz promised, suppressing a yawn. "Are we finished here? I'm going back to bed."

"My pillow." The Demon Lord interrupted, his voice oppressive and threatening. "Can you fix it or not?"

The long-haired demon paused for a moment, stopping in his tracks. A wicked smile slowly crept onto his face.

"It's very cute, Mephistos, the way you're so attached to your pillow." There was a teasing quality to his suave sing-song words. "Imagine if the entire world knew that the King of Demon's couldn't sleep without his special little pillow. Who would have expected that the Demon lord Mephistos was such a softie?"

"Tell me the answer now."

Orkruz shrugged.

"Honestly, the corpse — I mean pillow — is hanging on by a thread. It'll crumble into dust at any moment. The only reason why it hasn't disintegrated already is because of the attachment to the soul in the bottle over there. Whatever the heck you did earlier, you shattered the seal. The homunculus is broken, and it can no longer exist without a soul."

"Fuck."

"I mean, it's not a big deal? Just stick the soul you picked up back into the corpse. I think the homunculus will repair itself when you do that. There seems to be some kind of affinity already anyways."

"Orkruz, I don't want a fucking soul inside my pillow. It's disgusting."

"It's only temporary." The long-haired demon pointed out. "The Witch of Nightmares stops by every 500 years or so. She's due to visit in the next decade, so you can get the soul replaced with a better one when she stops by. I believe she sells vegetable souls too."

Kotori shivered slightly in her bottle as she overheard this.

She had only picked up bits and pieces of the conversation, but she comprehended that the situation was bad. From the sound of it, these demons weren't her friends. As far as she knew, Demon Lord Mephistos had tried to kill her, yet failed with his exorcism for unknown reasons. Never mind the fact that Saikawa Kotori still had no idea how she had gotten here.

Frankly, she was still praying that this was some kind of weird dream... 

...She had tried to will the environment to change, as this was often possible with lucid dreaming, but to no effect. She had also tried counting seconds to measure subjective time passage, thought about other things entirely (unicorns!) to distract her subconscious, and studied the color of the fire in the room to infer the approximate temperature and ignition point of various physical materials in this environment. However, none of these attempts succeeded in destabilizing the 'dream' environment.

The two demons simply continued with their conversation while Kotori silently despaired inside of the bottle.

"I refuse. I'm not letting a soul touch my pillow." The Demon Lord retaliated stubbornly.

"Suit yourself." Orkruz rolled his eyes and walked over to the table where he picked up the bottle. 

Kotori felt a lurching feeling in her stomach(?) as she was lightly shaken around. It made her feel slightly sick.

"Don't come crying to me when you can't fall asleep at night."

"Pft. Sleep is for the weak," the Demon Lord insisted.

The long-haired demon suppressed a chuckle. 

"Fine. Have it your way." Orkruz lazily tossed the glass bottle towards his liege. The burning table that the jar was previously situated on collapsed beside him. "Take good care of the soul, then. You wouldn't want the homunculus to crumble before the witch even gets a chance to visit."

The bottle flipped haphazardly through the air, curving a beautiful somersaulting parabolic arc.

Demon Lord Mephistos caught gracefully it with his fingers.

("Uugh,") Kotori muttered(?) upon being caught. She felt dizzy and miserable, like she wanted to throw up. ("Feels horrible.")

The Demon Lord stiffened, and then stared at the glass jar in bewilderment.

He had heard her voice telepathically, now that he was touching the glass.

"Are these bottles supposed to talk?" He asked Orkruz with skepticism.

The long-haired demon raised an eyebrow.

"What?"

∎

ohko

Thank you everyone who commented on the previous chapter! It's extremely exciting and motivating to see comments, and I love receiving them! I hope I'm able to do this story the justice that it deserves!