Kate had returned to her home in Hell to put away her brand-new magically created copy of the annotated Marnie’s Many Munchies containing her grandmother’s recipes. She never gave the seeming loss of the recipes much thought when Leonora had died, only bemoaning it whenever her mother decided to replicate them to little success, but now this felt like healing a scar that was long ignored but never truly gone.

Nirrti had accompanied her to meet with her parents and had now left them with an unexpected instruction. Amelia and Michael were to copy the recipes and adapt them to include the annotations and publish that version as Leonora’s Luscious Larder. This way, the library would automatically gain two copies, and other people could enjoy these lovely recipes without having to deal with Leonora’s admittedly eccentric handwriting.

Before Kate would seek out Ara to show her appreciation, she and Nirrti had decided to try a recipe from the book. The two Nightmares hadn’t spent much time together in the past year, so this dinner was long overdue anyway.

“And now we just put it in the oven?”

Kate nodded. “It’s lasagna, that’s where it goes to bake. Twenty-five minutes, then we remove the foil and do another twenty-five.”

“Alright.” Nirrti put the casserole dish the two demons had used for their lasagna into the oven and closed the door. “Is your sense of time good enough or should I start a timer?”

“A timer might be best, I inherited Polly’s impeccable temporal sense, but I don’t want to trust it with food.”

Nirrti smiled. “I don’t think I would either.” She made a small gesture with her fingers, conjuring a set of numbers into the air above the oven.

“Some things are just too important to leave to mere feeling.” Kate suddenly looked quite thoughtful.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just thought back to what Polly said about the locked section in the library. That I should check it out… have you been in there?”

“No, I always let Ama or Eisheth handle it. The list of things we keep there scares me.”

“Do you know about the…” The young Nightmare hesitated. “The paper about making someone kill themselves?”

“I wish I didn’t. Until we joined with the archive and I saw the list of the locked away books, I was under the blissful assumption that we as a society had just decided to never think about it. It wasn’t shocking that it’s a very old pre-immortality text. It’s even older than the pandemonium itself.”

“I knew it was old but didn’t have the time to check the list yet. Predating the pandemonium means how much older than you? Four, five thousand years?”

“For that specific text, it’s more of a fourteen thousand years. I was surprised we had something that old. Most pre-pandemonic texts are lost.”

“That is such a long time…”

“It is, but you should also remember that before immortality, we lived just over a millennium. As spry as she looks today, Beleth was a thousand-one-hundred and a few decades old when we became immortal. Fourteen lifetimes since that high inquisitor wrote that book, that is about as long ago as the first mentions of the Vikings in a modern human timeframe. A long time ago, yes, but still well within recorded history.”

“There is so much I still need to learn about demonic history, especially the stuff my friends haven’t lived through.”

Nirrti laughed. “I tend to forget that I have actually lived through most of the recorded history of Hell. It feels like there is so much more to time before I was born. I guess that happens when an entire civilization suddenly slows down. We no longer have to finish writing books before we die, we can take our time now.”

“Maybe we should remind our demonic authors that a published piece is always better than an unread manuscript in a drawer somewhere. That reminds me, isn’t Adelina writing something as well?”

“She has told you about that?”

“Not really. I just remember her saying something about writing a book during our first solstice together.”

“She is writing something, but it’s not my place to tell you about it.”

“Yes, it’s hers. It’s just good to know that she is still working on that.”

“I look forward to reading it.”

There was a knock on the front door. Kate gestured for Nirrti to follow her and together, they opened the door. Ara had come to visit.

“Oh, hello. What brings you here?”

Ara shrugged. “Friendship? I heard you were both here and I decided to see if you would accept my presence.”

“Of course we accept your presence, come in. There is lasagna in the oven.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Nah, we made more than enough to share.”

 

Waiting for their dinner to finish baking, the two demons and Ara got comfortable in the living room.

“I should have done this earlier.”

Nirrti and Kate both looked mildly confused. The older Nightmare decided to ask first. “What do you mean?”

“Spending time with you, with people who aren’t my children. Friends.”

“Is that why you broke the rules for Kate?”

Ara smiled slyly. “I didn’t break the rules, but I like doing nice things for people.”

“What do you mean you didn’t break the rules? Yes, you are the authority here but I have done so much research on the connection between life and death, between base reality and the underworld. Everything I know points to the transfer of information out of the underworld being impossible. So impossible that trying to force it severs the connection.”

“It is impossible, but I didn’t transfer information out of the underworld. The information of the location of the recipes was available to the living already. I can tell you whatever you want to know as long as you could theoretically know it without me. How convoluted things have to be for you to know doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t care about your sources, it only cares about the existence of information. I cannot bring new information from the underworld just as matter cannot be brought back, but anything that is already here is fair game.”

Nirrti just stared for a moment, opened and closed her mouth a few times and made some rather interesting faces. “I feel stupid.”

“Please don’t! Everything you and your team have learned is beyond what I would have imagined possible without instantly breaking the connection. Yes, the attempt at direct communication was a step too far but everything before that was walking the line nearly perfectly. I wonder, how did you even find out that there was an underworld? None of my children ever did.”

“We followed the cats. Long before my time, someone thought to track a cat because it seemingly got lost every so often before reappearing in illogical places. We discovered the border world that way. One of my assistants noticed that there were still cats leaving Hell that never showed up in the border world. I read a cat’s mind to figure out where it went and that confirmed our theories about a lot of things. We knew that souls had to go somewhere since they didn’t just disappear, so we had theories about an underworld of sorts. With that confirmation, we go to work and you know the rest.”

“So it was the cats… I had considered that option but thought you might have found something else. Did you figure out how they do it? The rule breaking I mean. I literally am the rules and cats just don’t work the way anything else does.”

Nirrti shook her head. “No clue. We tried to figure out what the deal with cats is in general but haven’t been very successful. There is a reason we are still dedicating several researchers just to learning about them. I had hoped you could tell me how they are able to just go back and forth but it seems they are stranger than either of us could have imagined.”

“I wish I knew. They just showed up one day.”

“That’s also what our scientists struggle with! There is no fossil record of ancient cats developing. Cats just showed up one day and evolved from there. Granted, our fossil record is troublingly sparse. Something happened to make sure we don’t find a lot.”

“That is indeed troubling…”

Kate had just been listening so far. “Have we asked Jolene?”

Nirrti shrugged. “Not as far as I know. You wanted to seek her out anyway, didn’t you?”

“Yea, I need to confirm that we are done now, that we are on a good path now and that I can finally get back to librarian-ing properly. I guess I can ask her about the missing Hell dinosaurs too.”

Ara and Nirrti couldn’t help but laugh. “Not the phrase I would use, but please do.” The old Nightmare nodded.

“We should check on the lasagna anyway now, the timer should be up soon.”

“Right, let’s do that.”

“Ara?”

The Avatar of Finality raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Thank you. I hope you know how much telling me about the recipes means to me and my family.”

“I do now. It warms my heart that you appreciate it.”

“My mum asked how I knew, I haven’t told her of course, but I don’t know what to tell her instead.”

“Why not some of the truth? A friend gave you a hint.”

“Yes, that sounds good.” Kate sighed. “I make some unusual friends…the best I could have ever hoped for.”

“As long as we consider each other friends, I am happy.”

“You know… there is a thing demons do between friends.”

“Oh?”

“I assume you are able to have sex and feel sexual pleasure, right?”

Ara shrugged. “I have never tried.”

“Do you want to?”

“Are you asking me to try with you?”

“Yes, I am. For us demons, sex between friends is a celebration of the physical, a show of appreciation and mutual trust. I won’t be mad if you say no, I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t try. At the very minimum it will be a good learning opportunity and a nice bonding moment.”

Meanwhile, Nirrti had a wide grin on her face, not daring to say anything.