A sudden howl drowns out my words.

“Kaiiiiiirliinaaaaa!!!” A blur hurtles out of the bridge gateway and blazes towards me, a blur trailing waves of blood red and bright pink fire. “KairliinaKairliinaKairliinaKairliina!!!” The nine-foot hellhound takes a flying leap to tackle me off my feet. Her impact knocks all the wind from my lungs and sends us skidding along the street in successively smaller bounces, leaving little craters behind.

Burning red pupils glow wide and frantic with excitement, complimenting the red-brown fur covering her from head to toe, save for the silky white of her muzzle and big fluffy belly. Neither the fur, nor the oversized red collar draped less so around her neck than atop her shoulders, do anything to hide the flushed nipples on her swaying breasts or the big knotted cock between her legs that’s already stiffening with excitement.

Her two-tone fires dance on the ends of the blond mop of hair on her head and lick up and down her flanks. The flames turn patches of fur briefly black with char before new fur grows in their place, and converge in rivulets along her back to her big tufted tail. Its near-panicked wagging casts waves of fire on the buildings around us and ignites a topiary of desiccated flesh.

Any sense of reserve I had left floods out of me the instant it settles on my psyche that I'm with my wife again. “Jeanette,” I croon. I cup her big shaggy head between my hands, and caress her velvety ears with tender thumb-strokes. “Hiiii! Hi, beautiful! Hi darling!”

A full-body shudder runs through my dear sweet Hound, making ever her words tremble. “As soon as I woke up I sensed you were back and I ran all the way here from where I’ve been waiting beside your throne because I love you and I missed youuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!”

“Jeanette.” I fight to get my words through laughter. “Jeanette, darling, you could’ve just teleported or used the backtunnels inside the spatial lattice, they’d have opened for you–“

“What do you meaaaaaaaaaannn?” Jeanette whines. “I love you and I wasn’t thinking about that!”

Caella materializes midair with a puff of lilac fire: a petite pixie-faced vampiress with glowing pink eyes and a high-collared blood-red gown with black accents. A black rose stands out from her black hair only by the red trim tinting its petals. She's also my wife.

“Are you and Jeanette going to breed right here?” she asks slyly.

“Easy, girl,” I murmur, all too keenly aware of the sweltering shaft pressed insistently against the thin screen of fabric covering the wetness between my legs. “Soon.”

“Soon?!?!” Jeanette howls. “What do you meeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!?!?!… soon?”

“I…” I frown. Ease my eyes shut. Where does this reluctance come from? A roving hollowness, the tiny tinny dissonance of Things Left Undone. From below? From deep below, far down in Machrae Diir… oh. Of course. The only place in the dimension still perfectly entangled with my own soul-state. “There’s something I need to do in Saingediir Fathom,” I say, opening my eyes.

“Saingediir?” Caella asks. “That’s the murder-happy place, right?”

“That’s what I said when I first explained it,” I answer. “An oversimplification. When I first created Machrae Diir, I created it to be the one place in the universe where I could exist as a truly complete entity. A dimension where I could express my entire continuum without fear of being cast out. I spoke about Saingediir as the slaughtering realm, the martial realm, because I knew there was something battle allowed me that nothing else did… at least, nothing else as I then understood it.”

I stand, once more summoning the umbral blade from the shadows under my eyes and hair and skin. “I finally understand. Everywhere else, I've always been so structured, planned, so stricekn over the way others interpret my words and deeds. Only in Saingediir could I let all that fall away, and be free--wild, zealous, impulsive. When you fight, there's so little time explain, and every reason to keep those explanations in check. I thought I was broken, able only to love violence, but I see now that it was the agony I forced into the rest of my life that made Saingediir seem comforting.”

I secure the umbral blade in its place at my side. “Slaughter was only the gateway, not the mystery. The mystery laid in reawakening the abyssal psyche of a succubus. As inevitable and deep as the sweetest dream. Defying all explanation.”

““Everything about your creations is the coolest,” Jeanette says. “I hope you know that.”

“Yeah!” Caella agrees in a little gremlin shift of her voice.

How sweet it is to blush at that, and offer a melting look of girlish joy. “Thank you, my darlings. I’d be lost without the two of you, you know?”

“Then we’d come and find you,” Jeanette declares, drawing a firm nod from Caella.

I sway there warm and without a word to say under the surreal weight of being loved, and knowing it for real. I draw a deep breath. “Saingediir. That’s the realm some idiot’s wandered into. I can sense her, a little speck of self-imposed nothing. I’m going to go see what she’s about. I won’t be long, but I must put this one thing alone.”

“Hm, well, okay,” Jeanette says. She pouts, but her big fluffy tail wags trails of red-pink fire behind her. “Just don’t be too long.” Her eyes glow insistently. “I really missed you.”

My resolve almost collapses then and there. But I still sense that nothing with the promise of becoming in its emptiness. Thrums in the deep–a call I’m so very ready to heed. I want to nurture it, this wayward sorrowing seed. “I’ll be back soon,” I murmur, hovering on tip-toe to kiss Jeanette’s fire-furred cheek, and Caella’s pink-painted lips. “I promise.”

“Hey,” Tfai–Handmaiden Ametra–calls out, in a six-fold voice of overlapping chimes and turbine-murmurs and the hypersonic shriek of a bygone shell’s greeting on its way to mark the soil of a far land. “Going off again already?”

She folds all six arms, spurs of spiral-twisted concrete chalked in psychadelic horizons tipped by delirious rainbow claws. Her tail’s a sequence of glittering red metal and blue crystal shards held together by bronze lightning-torrents, bronze like the luminescence filling her eyeless face of serrated fangs overlapped by razor-sharp plates.

There’s a certain wry pulse to the secondary corona of jade trimming her aura.

“Planning on sneaking off unseen?” she adds. Spectral silhouettes solidify around her. Darkborn rifts in reality, cubic sprawls of gestating manifestation, igniting runes and over-saturated glitches in physics burst out faster and faster around us. “Valiant effort, oh vagabond princess, but you forgot one critical detail.”

“We care about you,” Handmaiden Chyorzhiir agrees. As always, she is twenty steel-cable tentacles. A segmented body’s suggestions beneath blood-red raiments and golden hangings. Drifting ribbons to blend her limbs into her coat.

And around them there gather all the imps, the witches, the wraiths and the demons-in-the-machine, the angels of Machrae Diir of fractured script and crystallizing oil afire in knots that are always tightening yet never fully tightened. Closest of all stand the handmaidens, and the sisters of my own soul, the succubi of Machrae Diir: umbral and irradiant, sensuous and acidic and cold with the void’s infinite love.

And just when I think my heart can’t hold anymore, a magnificent shadow soars down and alights beside me–a muscular fusion of a werewolf and a colossal raven, ten feet tall, with his wings folding out from his massive clawed arms and spirals of blood-orange eyes running back along his powerful face to the crest of ashen feathers at its back.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he says, swooping low and scooping me off my feet for a kiss. I squeak, then melt into his arms. “Glad we got here in time to see you off, Kai.”

I lose myself for a few seconds in the familiar feeling of threading my tongue between the thick, hard fangs inside his maw. “You’re here! You made it!” I clutch his powerful shoulders, stroking the dreadlocks blending with the dark feathers blending with the dark fur of his broad, tawny head and the jaw hardened by an interspersed bone-white beak.

A familiar outer demon, a fusion of goat and delicate humanoid features, appears in a surge of pinkish-red fire beside him. The black-spined, rose-pink wings sprouting at her hips flap in time with her mid-air bobs. A duality of hair, snowy white one side split neatly into deep blue on the other with a light-blue fringe almost bridging each side at the bangs.

Two sets of horns, the inner pair curving up and back over her forehead to hold the red-orange fire at their apex, the outer far larger and fluted with forge-color highlights at the first curve before tinting into pale purple in the second cover towards their forward prongs. Of her armor, only her red plate shinguards and her pauldrons would actually protect much of anything. The chestplate doesn’t cover anything lower than her breasts–or her breasts, really, with open cutaways revealing purple-tinted tan flesh with nipples covered only black straps.

“Wow, Valphomet went and got really ornate,” a blond succubus remarks. “That’s hot.”

“Would’ve been here just a little sooner if this bimbo didn’t take the Den off after some starships that buzzed us,” Raven says, jerking his head towards Val.

“They scuffed the crystal,” Valphomet declares. “A price must be paid.”

“Blood or semen!” another succubus calls, earning a chorus of hollering concord.

“Semen,” Val clarifies. She grins, holding up an elegant claw. “Mostly semen.”

“Chained up somewhere fun until they’ve learned their lesson?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she agrees. “If they’re really good, I might even let them have their ships back when they go.”

“And, you’re all… you’re all okay with this? Nobody’s mad?” I ask. “You don’t all think I’m ghosting you, or abandoning you?”

“You’re not ghosting, you’re focused,” handmaiden corrects. “Though I do want to push you on one thing, Kai: you promise me this isn't just a retreat to Saingediir?"

"Absolutely fucking not!" I exclaim. "Are you kidding? Did you see how horny I was earlier? I..." Yet again, I begin to break down in tears. "It felt so good. It felt so good to embrace my lust the way I was always meant to, just for myself, just because all the happy stirrings in my slutty psyche told me to fuck. I'll do anything to hold onto that feeling?" I rub my eyes. "If at any point I feel that's in jeopardy, I will teleport out immediately and ask someone else to cover for me. That said..." I nod. "I would like to try first. I want to try trusting myself to reach for the joy of lust, again, as soon as this is done."

"Then you have my complete and unwavering support," handmaiden says, bowing.

“We just wanted to see you off,” Caella agrees.

“As the launchpad to the shuttle, so are we to you,” Chyorzhiir says, bobbing. “We will share the journey when you depict it to us upon your return, if you choose to. If not, we will rejoice in this moment, and the moment of your final return, and even the greediest among us will be well-glutted by that much.”

“I…” I tremble. “I feared you’d all belive I hated you if told you I just like to do things alone, sometimes....”

“You’ve grown as a lone duelist, a solitary creatrix, a succubus without a brothel for centuries,” Tfai says. “You’re a master of all that you are, Kai. It's only right that you be free, sometimes, to move at your own pace.”

“You’re pretty cool, if you hadn’t noticed,” Jeanette agrees. “It’s okay. That’s why I make sure to tell you all the time.”

“So,” Tfai says, gesturing to the assembled denizens of Machrae Diir, “we’d like to know what the plan is going forward, if there is one. We're here to stay either way.” She bows. "You taught me how to stitch my mind back together. I won’t call it a debt. You gave that healing to me as a gift. But I will always be grateful. Machrae Diir will always be my home.”

Her luminescence shines brighter, and in lieu of the eyes she chooses not to use for her sight, I see my own reflected in the mirror her face-plates become as she smiles. “And therefore, as I am your Handmaiden with all the joyous force of the volition you helped me to rekindle in myself, you will always be my Lady.”

“Tfai, I…” I clasp my hands before me. “I’m honored. Truly. I…” I close my eyes. “Handmaiden will tell you all the other details. As for why I look so human at this moment..." I contemplate all the deeper reasons, all the philosophy, all the limitations... and I shrug, and I laugh. "I just really like the vibe of the big, flashy demon-form reveal. Repeating that moment, that joy of becoming, over and over and over."

Handmaiden's mouth drops open in awe. ”Holy fuck. You really are learning to be yourself." She cannons into me and knocks me right off my feet again. "Kairliina, I'm so proud of you! You're really learning to love yourself--"

“She's my wife!" Jeanette shouts, diving on top of me and speaking between licks as she tries to elbow past handmaiden--who, accursed traitor that she is, has gone to work tickling me. "Get--out--of--my--way--"

"JEANETTE!" I shriek with laughter. "I'M TRYING TO GIVE A COOL SPEECH--"

Past the eager tongue of my beloved Hound, I catch glimpses of Caella, Raven, and Val exchanging looks before they smile knowingly, shrug, and join the pile.

While I’m trying to fight my way out of this sudden and cowardly coup attempt, Tfai drifts to the center of the crowd. Her voice stirs us out of the ruckus for the moment. Underneath her words, we trade giggles back and forth. “Well, then, as far as I’m concerned, the only thing left to do is welcome our dear Lady home properly! Who’s with me?”

I shrink into myself, blushing with preempive bashfulness, hiding behind my hands, as I realize what's about to happen. Oh, dear. What a terrible fate. (Milking the moment for more attention by overplaying my shyness is my favorite part of praise.)

“HERE HERE!” handmaiden screams as she scrambles to her feet, the loudest voice in a generalized tidal wave of approval.

“Hold that thought.” I raise my hands for silence. “I-I appreciate it, really, but it’s not necessary–“

Tfai grins, neither smug nor challenging nor ironic. The simple grin of an outer demon phasing out of the reality I’m trying to encompass with my words, and creating the one she resonates with all the same. And she starts everyone off.

“KAIRLIINA!” she yells. “KAIRLIINA, THE LADY OF MACHRAE DIIR!”

Instant echoes swell from a thousand hearts. “Kairliina! Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir!”

I quiver, averting my eyes, grinning sheepishly. “Okay, that was pretty good–“

Handmaiden whirls to her sisters and snaps her arms wide. “Sisters, who guides our steps, first in person, now in teaching, in spirit forevermore?”

“Kairliina!” they shout. “Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir!”

“Angels!” roars Caesedar, the many-mawed steel-and-fire custodian of my throne room. “Who showed you that the title of god is not higher than the title of demon? Who is holy in her heretical night?”

“Kairliina! Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir!”

“Succubi!” one of my sisters calls. “Who is the blue diamond of the deep stars, shameless maiden of Graesh Saelvur, the first of all our outer kin?”

“Kairliina! Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir!”

The last misty shreds of denial die in my final half-hearted protest–lost under the chant that takes on a life of its own, over and over again. “Kairliina! Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir! Kairliina! Kairliina! The Lady of Machrae Diir!”

“I…” I murmur. Turning circles to take in one ecstatic face after another, bewildered. And still, the cheers roll on, thunderous and hot-blooded and true.

Did I really think I’d be rejected, even here? Of course they wouldn’t. My true people, as true even as the Carag ourselves will be. The children of the lambent halls, and the far-flung fathoms of Machrae Diir. Fellow outcast, together, making a place to call home.

It is true that a princess might cry before her people, so long as she has the… oh, who am I fooling at this point? I can hide behind all the Phase-names and titles and mutant archetypes I like. In the end I’m snotty, wide-eyed, black streaks of ink and shadow melting into the tears pouring down my cheeks. It’s the ugliness that makes my weeping beautiful.

And still, still, they're cheering. They’re cheering because this is, because I am, exactly who they wanted to see. The broken-hearted demon, lonely wanderer of outer places and outer days, who’s not alone anymore. What am I supposed to do with these cheers?

Exactly what every voice is cheering me to do. Life free as my true self, and simply… be.

“Thank you,” I sob when the cheering comes to rest at last, clutching the icon of Haksaema to my chest. “Thank you all so much. I love Machrae Diir. I love all of you. I, um…” I rub my shoulder, and break off into a single laugh of delirious bliss. “I want to live with you all forever. So,” I straighten. Blink through tears that shine my sight into liquefied diamond and the prismatic edges of a dream I just might remember. “So that’s what I’m going to do. I swear this in my own name as Overlady of Machrae Diir.”

Chyorziir drifts close. Drapes a tendril over my shoulders. “You’re you, Kai. You belong with us, whether you’re demon or fae or angel or, yeah, human.”

I first dry my eyes with the handkerchief she presents me, and then absolutely destroy it with the longest blow of my nose I’ve ever given.

And they wait, smiling, full of the same joy that fills me. What words could ever equal the meaning of tears so rich as these?

Chuckling, I loss the handkerchief aside, and burn it away in blue fire. "What other kind of heart," I turn, slowly, to share this radiant boy with all of them as speak, "could be selfish, could be selfful, enough to hold this much joy inside, after so much sorrow has passed?"

In my hands, the icon of Haksaema feels so wonderfully warm.

"A demon of the deep ways!" I call, then more softly say, "never again a queen in Machrae Diir. Finally... finally, I have what I always wanted. To be, for all my splendor, but one more denizen, one more story, in a realm strange enough to contain even me." I bow. "Thank you, everyone."

The lands on the other side of the Rift of Recompense blur past with a rising howl of wind. Then, stop. Now the iron citadel’s gateway opens not on a bridge, but the descent into a dark blue abyss. I straighten to face it with eager eyes. Approach with quick steps.

My soul riding high, I recompose my dress at last. I settle my left hand around the umbral blade’s scabbard. I twist behind me and with my right, I toss a two-finger salute over my shoulder at everyone and everything I hold dear.

And I take my first zealous step onto the spiraling white-stone ramp winding down like a behemoth drill into Saingediir Fathom.