For a while I just listen to the fledglings puffing and blowing. I suppose it's too much to ask that one of the old guard get a little peace and quiet around this impromptu campfire--one infernal vent out of a thousand.

Do they even know that this used to be Hell? Probably not.

I have to wonder if they believe in any of it--the Dark Archon, Fickle Miss Cinder, former Empress of Hell. All the things Seurchraig has told me.

Well, doesn't really matter. I lived it. So here I am in my blue coat and silver graphite armor, brushing a whetstone along my odachi's edge for old times' sake. Eventually, old Seurchraig sees fit to cut in, whispering advice into my mind as she sometimes does on impulse. I've learned to take it in stride. Sech will be as she will be. I'm the one who has to adapt to her curveballs. Evil as she is, she's also cunning. Sooner or later, I always find a way to make her advice work, and she knows that.

-Kairlina, you need to put these sheltered brats to the irons,- Seurchraig murmurs. -Listen to them. They're stealing your valor. Going on and on about how strong they are as if they know what power is. You know as well as I they haven't worked like you have. They haven't made sacrifices like you.

-Must I really?- I tighten my grip on my sword. This cursed reluctance... why do I always struggle to assert myself at times like this? Why am I so afraid to argue for my own worth?

-Yes!- Seurchraig urges. -Remember how all the humans back on Earth would walk all over you because you were gentle, and pliant, and you wanted to give everyone room to be themselves? It'll be just the same here!-

So I speak, though I don't raise my voice. I'm old. I'm powerful. And when I speak from the undeniable depths of myself, there are few who can ignore my words. Certainly not demons as young and insecure as these are.

"Corrupted an angel, huh?" I ask.

A long stroke. Otherworld iron rasps against, and shaves slivers from, the diamond stone caressing my sword's edge. A timely flare of red-orange fire gushes from the chasm. Its gleams dapple my fang-engraved helm. Embers dance about my shoulders.

"Like what?" I ask. "Cherubim?"

A little short-stack demon with spiraling horns answers, "Yeah, a little angel girl, I guess. Aren't cherubs like children? God, you old-timers are all total filth--"

"Cherubim's an angel made of a fuckload of wings with a grownup head," I interrupt. "Cherub is mortal nonsense." Another stroke. I wait.

"I meant she was, like, short and slender," spiral-horns clarifies. "Not, y'know--"

"I figured," I interrupt again. "I know how to sense a pedophile. Us old-timer scum have all kinds of weird powers like that. Powers we studied for."

I pause. Stretch out my arm so I can enjoy the light playing along the folded-steel faces of my oldest, truest companion. "Cherubim's a bit finicky anyway. Cheap question, sorry. Your first response should've been, 'what era of the hierarchy are we talking about?'"

Short-stack flops her arms. "Sorry I don't read books from grody bigots, I guess?"

"You wanna get stronger, defeat your enemies, live to fuck another day, or do you want to put on a little morality play?" I ask. "It's not heroic to pick fights with enemies you don't understand." I return to my pretend sharpening. My human life seems like such a strange interlude now, but this one ritual... I do still cherish this.

"See, everybody wants to think of themselves as the one who defeated an angel. No one actually wants to fight an angel."I rest the star-shearing edge across my knees. "Me? Oh, I wanted to FIGHT an angel. Hell, I still do." I quiver with the ecstasy of an ancient contest--what a joy it is to have its memory back in full! "I will never forget the duel I fought to escape the angel Ostriel. She caught me at a weak point a few years ago, you see. Funny thing is, Ostriel came after me for talking too loudly about how I once defeated the Archangel Muriel."

Was that me? I thought that was Seurchraig.

-Sech,- I ask, -Were you the one who killed Muriel?-

-Nope!- Sech says, bright as ever. -That was all you, loveling.-

I'm happy enough to meditate on the victory, even if my memories are fuzzy. But if that's true then it also means the shame of what came before it belongs to me. I speak on. "That was after I tired of playing God's secret angel, the nameless executioner--"

"You WHAT?" Spiral-horns squeaks.

"You weren't wrong to say a lot of us old guards are filth, you just picked the wrong reason," I say. "Now don't interrupt again. Anyway, old Hosanna in the Highest didn't appreciate my rebellion too much, so the Almighty sent Muriel after me." I grin, and my helm's rigid metal warps to mirror it. "And Muriel was not the pompous, preening, childish pushover you fledglings think of when you say 'angel.'"

Reflections warp through the faces of my armor. Stylized remembrances of that shockwave day. Oh, bliss! How I miss that radiant foe!

"Muriel was an angel of death, and the freezing hollowness on the edge of her sword... its light was so very cold and bright. Ten wings of golden fire, and a hundred purple eyes, and limbs of copper sinew and emerald bone--we pulled out all the high-order techniques. Teleport strikes, razor crescents, perspective-based attacks--"

This all feels so hollow and self-aggrandizing. Is this really the way I must speak to other demons to earn their respect?

"Sorry, uh..." Spiral-horns raises her hand. "What's that last one?"

I straighten. "You know the gag in movies when someone picks the moon out of the sky between their fingers because, teehee, the moon looks so small from this angle? It's like that, but cutting people, objects, and space at distances where you should be way out of range."

Smoke quite literally pours out of her ears. "H-how's that work?" she asks. "That's not how..."

"Do you really want me to explain fourth-dimensional martial arts to you?" I ask in my turn. "You think hearing the actual theory is going to make it less mind-melting?"

"N-no ma'am," she says. "That's okay. Please continue."

"Gladly," I say. "The clashes of our swords ripped holes in reality." I'm struggling to remember now. Am I speaking about the battle with Muriel or the battle with Ostriel? It's all so full of burning, the repeating agony of the wounds they dealt me. I decide to hedge my bets. "In many ways, my duel with Ostriel mirrored the movements of my duel with Muriel. Poetic, don't you think? The number of times I got through her guard and carved molten divinity out of her, then she rallied and ripped my black guts open... glorious!"

"I did not, in fact, effortlessly stamp on Ostriel." I sheathe Chiron's Pyre at last. The sword thrums a little sullenly, irritated that it wasn't born in time to join me for such a magnificent battle. I pat its grip to soothe it. "Both duels were vicious."

"We leveled ancient temples, fractured mountains, burned down multiple forests and turned entire swaths of desert to glassy slag with just the collateral damage from our onslaught. It was a knockdown, drag-out, ruinous brawl that pushed us both to our breaking points."

I clench my fist, talons rasping on an armored vambrace. "THAT'S fighting an angel! Part of me died the moment I finally drove her to ground, rammed my sword through her celestial cuirass, and multiplied the impalement to a thousand fractal lances inside her body."

I sigh. The memory settles over me like a warm blanket. "There I stood, scalded to a fit of mad ecstasy by the upward explosion of sacred light that blasted out of her in her death throes. Ragged, two horns broken off, covered in slashes, my blood boiling as it seeped from my wounds. And I felt the realization like a sword in my own belly... I would never get to fight this duel again."

I subside. I know now that the memories must be true, because that finality could only come from myself. "Not saying the new way's worse. Way less devastation. And I definitely appreciate the decision not to kill someone you can seduce, just..." I shrug. "Seems to me if the new wave wants to brag about stomping on angels, wants to glorify violence, well, in that case you ought to hear the difference between violence and a real, proper, no-holds-barred fucking fight." I cock my head. "You feel me, kid?"

"Are you, like..." She swallows nervously. Ah... now there's a sound I enjoy just as much as a cry of pain: fear. "Some kind of ancient war demon or something?"

I groan, rise, and stretch heavily. "Yeah. Something like that."

"Well, you're creeping me the fuck out!" she wraps her wings around herself, cringing away. "Can you go find another fissure to haunt? God, you feel like, like a, a fucking demon-ghost or something!"

-The nerve of this brat!- Seurchraig screams into my mind. -Doesn't she know who you are? You're Asche, the former Empress of Hell, the only devil who could ever unite all its realms! She should die happy for the chance to grovel at your feet!-

-Leave it, Sech.- Liquid and all too aware how eerie my silence makes me seem, I rise from the infernal vent and step off into the hellfire night ahead. -We'll find another place.-

Long silence, both without and within.

­-There's no point, Kairlina.- Sech pours her misery into me through her words. -I'm sorry. This was an imbecilic idea. That's all I ever do, make trouble for you. I'm so tired of this, you know? You've done such remarkable things. I don't understand why nobody wants to recognize you for any of it... but that's Hell for you, I suppose. They'll only respect a devil who calls herself the Devil, who picks up the names Satan or Lucifer or Lilith as if those haven't all been beaten meaningless by millennia of overuse. It's not your fault.-

-Easy, Sech.- I spread my wings and soar up on sulfurous winds. -I'm used to being othered, even by other demons. I'll survive. No big deal.-

-It's a pretty big deal to me!- Seurchraig blurts, seething with righteous indignation. -You deserve so much better, Kairlina! You deserve universes at your feet! You---

"Sech, enough, okay?" I snap, flapping my wings harder with a sudden anxious burst of energy. Gods of the lost, I'm pathetic. Am I really getting anxiety over this tiny conversation? Is my fight-or-flight response actually triggering right now? I can hardly expect to help demons like Seurchraig if I fall apart at the first hint of conflict. Weak, useless, selfish parasite. I can't believe I ever dared call myself Carag. I just don't have the dignity Sech does, that easy certainty she expresses her needs with. How did I convince myself Carag was something I invented? Only she could embody such dignity, such power--

Sech remains silent for a long time.

"Sech, I'm sorry for exploding," I whisper, my words all but lost in Hell's howling. "I'm just tired, and I..." And those are no excuses. I know I've hurt her feelings. Just another sin I'll have to learn to carry. Do better, you stupid whore, you have to do better!

Moments like this make me really uncomfortable, but since taking Seurchraig's reincarnated psyche into my mind, I hold the power in our relationship, and that means I hold the responsibility. I've inherited her power. Therefore I'm responsible for her sins, too. That's only logical. Sech is becoming a better person, I want to believe that. I have to be strong enough to carry the burden for both of us so she can have a second chance.

If I can redeem her, then I can redeem myself, I just know it!

And, besides that... she's the best lead I have for the things I did in my first life. The life I can't remember, the life I know I've forgotten because of the hollowness in my heart. The hollowness I was trying to fill when, unwittingly, I reached into Seurchraig's mind and stole the idea of the Carag from her. She's kind, she forgave me, but I'm still ashamed. To rip something so intimate away from someone is bad enough. To do it subconsciously...

As cowardly as ever, I take a low arch through the eruption-plume of a volcano so I can bask in the scalding updrafts and hide from my shame for a little while.

And that victory against Ostriel... I'm increasingly certain I only imagined it, invented it to myself so I could imagine I'd defeated an angel without also accepting that I've betrayed my own kind. God's secrete executioner, indeed... And anyhow, would an angel really behave in such a perverse way? Would I really fall over myself to suck off someone who abused me like that purely because it was a chance for sex?

I've come to accept I'm no succubus, since none of the memories of my past Sech has helped me to uncover match the essence of a dream-sneaking lust-demon. They're all about conquest, power, dominion. An ancient war-demon, like spiral horns said. I think, in the end, there's very little to me except the desire to prove myself.

In the century to come I lose every battle that means anything. I can win a skirmish. I can carve through weaker beings, beings who are clearly slower, less skilled, who lack all but the tiniest fraction of the vast arsenal of demonic powers Seurchraig has taught me to use. But I'm devastated by a radiant creature of pincers on segmented crystal cables and fires filled with screaming shock-white mouths full of chitin-fangs.

I'm forced to flee from it, covered in wounds, and hide in an alcove of a wrecked defense bunker while it rampages across the battlefield. I sink into an envelope of emptiness to hide my aura, feeling for all the world like I'm just trying to hide under the surface of myself. A trick no better than a security blanket. The ground shudders, people scream, pain-spikes of death-agony trickle into my psyche.

And I hide, useless and incompetent, bleeding black blood from all these gashes.

A duo of gun-wielding angels, a coven of witches who command enchanted planetoids to align to fuel their greatest spells, a rival devil... I lose to them all, and so many more. I flee, I die again, I'm broken and broken and broken.

Another century passes. Somewhere along the way I stumble into battles with enemies who are, I suppose, a lot weaker, and I'm at least somewhat stronger than I was. They offer challenge enough to stimulate, but I'm never threatened. The closest to a real challenger is a prototype star-frigate armed with magnetic autocannons and advanced laser weaponry.

But after I realize I can change my form to pure light and match the wavelengths of its beams, they can no longer flash-fry me with an electromagnetic crossfire. And that means they can't stop me from teleporting long enough to shred me with the autocannons.

Soon I realize that I can move myself along each beam's continuum. That's how I bypass the ship's reality barriers to teleport right up to its lasers, shear them apart in glowing crescents of superheated alloy, exposed cables, and severed lenses, then neutralize enough the autocannon turrets to clear the way for a last dash to split the hull wide open.

Hardly a fair fight, in the end. The crew are only human. Each only gets one death. I get as many as my mind can endure. How can a contest like that possibly mean anything?

As for the wavelength trick, I'm forced to admit a week later that Sech taught it me by letting me think some of her memories were mine. I've done that many times before without realizing it: projected myself into Sech's memories to understand how the various powers worked. I could never achieve any of this without her.

And I never get a second chance to test myself against the foes who defeated me in centuries past. I never get to prove that I've truly overcome someone who proved that they were better than me in the past. For all I know, I'm just stomping on up-and-comers who've had no chance to develop the kind of power I inherited from Seurchraig.

Another century. Now all my battles, as grand as they are in scale, just seem lopsided. The carrion-hounds at the fortress whose name I transliterate as Viil Geshrada are many, sinewy, tapering and hook-limbed with gnarled snouts of exposed muscle. But that's it. They look very eldritch. In the end they're only animals, possessing no special powers, and by this point slaughtering thousands of them feels more like a workout than a battle.

The nine-jawed entity I unmake in a necropolis of blue gemstone structures half-buried under shifting snows can warp reality, but not half as well as I. I move with its distortions, making myself circles and twists and all sorts of uncanny things.

And the rogue duelist Zella Faer? I'm just better than she is. It's a walkover, ended in five moves. It seems she only ever surpassed me in reputation.

Despite all this, when I face the shining humanoid goddess Litasthria in the abandoned halls of a temple-city, she effortlessly blinks in and out around me, shredding me with sudden asteroid hails, forcing my form through countless awful mutations with her light of creation. I do draw sacred blood from her cheek at the very end.

Then, always the coward, I teleport away and hide in a lava cavern, cradling my savaged form, weeping at my weakness while Seurchraig reassures me that I'll get there one day. She tries so hard to hold me together, and in the end I'm still too pathetic. I stuff my memories down deep inside, adopt an almost-human form, veil myself in shadows, and wander the most distant reaches of existence.

By the time I pull the portal-slashing trick that brings me to Shailavach in the plane of Jurnost, I've all but forgotten that I'm a demon. Sech gives up on speaking to me for all that time, I've fallen so far below my potential. It takes another demon and a closeted alien trans girl, of all things, to piece me back together. Am I able to achieve nothing without leeching someone else's strength hold me upright? Miserable little leech.

For a moment, standing there after I helped Fianyrikt to embrace herself at last, it feels nice to call myself a succubus again. To wear the sensual forms, to stand on the snowy pinnacle of Kaldriga and pretend I could ever be brave enough to wear these shapes.

When I return to Unsiiliiar Heights after pointlessly killing an old man, I finally accept that I will never experience the battle I've so long desired--a clash of true peers, a fight where I win because of something deeper than the advantages I bring to the battlefield.

I'm in a fell mood the day I walk out into the ever-shifting abyss of potential just past the pine-forests on the ridge above the estate. I raise my hands, reaching to that the feeling of a deep unknowable something that Seurchraig has taught me to know as the distant past. Calling forth ancient volcanoes, forcing them to belch lava again. Tinting their inferno from orange to blue, a pointless gesture. Is that the only detail I'm capable of contributing? Turning things blue? I can't understand why Seurchraig doesn't just leave me.

Ichril remains in Machrae Diir for twenty years. Long enough for Tevaerza and Thizhtiiriiact to grow up, tell me that they want to keep the family name--the only time I feel like I've achieved something after all--and move off into the cosmos. I'll never be a succubus, I know that now. I'll never find the easy, breathless lust that name invokes. But in adulthood my daughters choose to be succubi, and that's something.

Something I try not to think about much. Demon or mortal, I don't want to think about my girls having sex.

After that Ichril wanders, mostly, though he'll drift back in. Fianyrikt chooses to stay. She meets another Kthanktri woman, and they marry. I help them have children together. In time those children grow up, and leave, and Fianyrikt and Nrutank grow old. Nrutank dies, and a few years later at the ripe old age of a hundred and six, Fianyrikt follows.

I'm left alone with my lovers in the growing dimension of Machrae Diir, contemplating how, in all this time, I've failed to achieve anything of note. What right do I have to call forth my own realm from the acausal morass? A proud daughter of the abyss, indeed.

Worthless creature. Try harder. They'll never respect you if you keep on like this.