The seeker’s breaths come in quick, sharp gusts. Despite all the sentries, all the vaunted insight of outer devils and the fearsome tales she’s heard of Machrae Diir, she found a way to slip through on the fringes. Her black horns, though small, feel so very heavy on her dark blue head amid her tousled red-orange hair. Her tail itches, her whole body itches, with her passage through this place. This waifish thing with ash-grey skin. One slit-eye burns golden in the night. Her little tail hugs her waist, and the dark leather jumpsuit enveloping her slender frame. Two small black horns sprout from her brow.

A simple enough mission. Find this realm’s arrogant Lady, who holds herself so aloof and apart from the seeker’s hurting world. Plunge the pink crystal shard her mistress gave her into the tyrant’s shriveled heart.

“It’ll be so full of emptiness,” She, the seeker’s mistress, said. Only Her words ever made the little seeker’s heart feel at home. Only Her power stood any chance of making the little one's world better. “A heart full of emptiness, just ready for me to fill it.”

So the seeker wanders through these desolate reaches, where silver spires and mad-angle bastions unfold each from the other over burning streets where tumbling bodies swarm in slaughtering tides. The high shadows of the ever-thundering sky silhouette the slow-turning forms of things with a thousand fangs, things with bladed coils, things with a million eyes, things with flesh that boils.

She clambers through the rocky clefts offering shadow deep enough to shield her from the blue-white radiance of molten flows. Appalling streams that aren’t quite rock, and aren’t quite metal, and just might be both.

The seeker does not know the word “corium” or its meaning, just as she does not know why the light exploding forth from it breeds agony on her skin.

An aftertaste of blood, and the scent of thunder.

Her mistress promised that her power would overcome any trap the callous, gutless, thoughtless Lady of Machrae Diir laid. She knows only that when her mind goes empty and she lies under the surface of her fear, pressed into alcoves and under corpses, as monstrosities scrabble along hexagonal facades and scream against gunfire fusillades from swarming little figures… she knows a strange calm certainty that they cannot find her.

That must be her mistress. She could never be so brave as to do this if she were alone.

She grows almost at peace with it: the repeat rhythms of surging fear at a chance noise, the mad animal scrabble for a sheltered spot, the baited-breath wait while danger passes. An especially drippy tentacular horror holds her gaze a little too long after it rushes shrieking down the street past her, and when she turns, she realizes she’s walked right into the scene it was fleeing.

Something slides wetly down the wall behind her. A warped, collapsed chamber of egg-shell patterned blue serves as the final perverse bed of a broken skeletal thing, like multiple hunched spiders grafted together abdomen to abdomen. Abdomens now burst open, calcified, and wound with red flesh inside their opened bone-white seams, and binding the thing's now-splintered limbs. Torn banners burn, a few wounded shift, moan, and growl, and a nine-horned figure–less one on the left side of her head, now broken off–stalks about with the bladed edges of her tail sliding gently across convulsing throats.

“I wouldn’t recommend running,” she says, at the fledgling’s freeze. Five red eyes, each with a golden slit forming the center of a miniature maelstrom of fire, flick to regard her side-on. “It’s a very busy time in Saingediir. Everyon's decided to get together, quite on the spur of the moment, to love each other by slaughter.” She pauses, drops low, and sink her teeth into the crotch of a squirming figure. An excited hiss. Crunching, tearing, sounds of splattering meat and blood. She rises, red-mouthed, and approaches the spear protruding from an opening between the many exoskeletal plates of a massive, eldritch millipede.

“Uh…” While the other is talking, she’s not thinking about bloodshed… probably. Simpler questions will seem more natural. “What kind of demon are you?”

Was that too simple?

“Oh, I’m a succubus,” the demoness says. The changing light reveals the soft oval of her black face. Full lips–and skinless cheeks showing every red muscle at play, and the shining white fangs in her mouth.

“But…” the seeker looks at the heaped corpses. “Succubi are weak. Manipulators, spies, assassins. I mean… l-look at you, you’re basically skin and bones.”

She is not. She’s just not musclebound or thick, either. But the fledgling doesn’t want to admit to finding such a simplistic interpretation of femininity attractive. She wouldn’t want anyone to think she can have a taste for things that might be considered… generic.

“Oh, what,” the demoness laughs, “like the Lilith of Earth myths, seducing archangels and then begging for mercy when she was caught by those with stronger will? If you choose to believe someone else slew these hordes and I am seizing acclaim I haven’t earned, well… okay? But my dear, your understanding of soul-driven anatomy seems very limited.”

She wrenches her spear free with an indulgent sweep of her long, ridged, four-forked tongue along her lips. She twirls it faster and faster while she speaks on. “You should know by now that a manifest soul’s power has only a tenuous relation to their appearance. I don’t need big muscles. What matters is how much of my soul’s inner power I’ve concentrated into the ones I have?”

She saunters through the dead and dying. Finding a many-limbed muscular thing still struggling to rise, she puts her clawed foot on its many-angled, crested skull–wider across than she is tall. Her leg’s tensing is almost tender. Silver fire blossoms inside her skin, highlighting veins like diseased roots and silhouetting barbed bones.

“Succubi, hell, concubi, in general--less the incubi, most are lazy twinks, but a delight in the bedroom, mind...” she groans, quivering with excitement. “We’re the manifest dream, the deepest desire, the knife the lost soul forges to end itself with. Of course all the propaganda says we’re the weakest–cheaters, schemers, a stab in the back. Propaganda always says that about the most powerful foes.”

Cracks branch out through the cobbles touching the fallen titan's head. Blood trickles from behemoth nostrils. It thrashes, roars, flails a broken arm to no avail. The succubus pushes harder, staring down at it with the deepest affection in her eyes. Her breath catches with her first moan. Her free hand, talons streaking blood, slips through the emptiness left by her disappearing cuirass. It slides up her belly to fondle one heavy breast.

A final shove explodes her prey’s head. Silver fire turns blood and grey-matter briefly pink. She drinks the fumes with ever-swiftening breaths and finally cries out, slipping down to sit atop the lip of the collapsed skull’s bowl, and she cums furiously into the gore. “Oh, death and sin, don’t you just love Saingediir? Letting it all loose, embracing every bloody whim with mad abandon? It’s paradise, my dear, it truly is.” She examines her arms. “Now, for the record, I’m a fair bit more muscular than an average human woman. It’s hardly fair to call me skin and bones just because I’m not a full-blown muscle girl.”

“W-where are you from?” the seeker demands. “H-how did you get in? What kind of succubus are you?”

“How?” the succubus says, with a little start as she comes back to her senses sooner than she’d wished. “Why, I suppose it’s the same answer for both. I’m a succubus of Machrae Diir. The Lady invited all those kindred who shared her spirit to make homes in the Lambent Quarter, and after spending a few months getting to know the community as guests, my wives and I just fell in love with them and the dimension, you know? So, we moved in. I love them both and our little ones, it’s just…” She stretches pleasantly, “sometimes a woman needs to get out and face a few personal challenges because it just sounds fun, you know? Makes all the simple pleasures of home that much sweeter.”

“And what is… that?” the seeker asks, pointing to the exploded skull.

“Oh, you mean who. This is Biessel,” the succubus laughs. “Was, rather. He and I often wind up killing each other down here.” She covers her face behind her hand, blushing. “Well, I say ‘each other’ but the only time he killed me, he was working with a group.” She sees the seeker’s horrified expression, and laughs. “It’s Saingediir, sweetling. Just enjoy it! And look, I love Biessel, I truly do! He runs my favorite bakery up in the Lambent Quarter. Always goes out of his way to seek me out down here and die for me, so even if I’m having a rough day of it, I’ll have one enjoyable kill.”

It’s at this point the seeker notices the thick, milky white puddle between the corpse’s upper pair of legs.

“Well… I’m a demon too,” the seeker insists, fighting the gnawing certainty that this will do absolutely nothing to stop the succubus from doing whatever she feels like doing.

“A demon?” the succubus asks. She clicks her tongue. “Hm, yes.” A languid turnover of her hands on the spear’s haft, and one arm’s upward drift as the spear spins slowly, brings the blood-soaked blade past her lips. She drags her tongue lovingly along it. “I do believe you are. But a demon like me? I’m not so sure.”

She lowers the spear to her side. “Stop quivering, pet. It’s not much fun gutting someone who’s not enjoying the fight.” Her eyes flare. “Ooh! Maybe I can give you a real Machrae Diir welcome. It can be fun taking someone who would rather not be taken, at first. You’ll get into it very quick once we get started–“

“What is wrong with you people?!” the seeker screams. “This–this isn’t… this isn’t how demons are supposed to act!”

“Hm.” The succubus stands. Her cuirass reassembles itself upon her, molecule by molecule. “How are demons supposed to act?”

“Not… not like this,” the seeker insists. “Not like a human caricature of us.”

“Us?” the succubus echoes. “Hm. I’m acting this way because I just want to. It suits me and I like it. Would you assume the way you act to be the right one?”

She slides her tail underneath her armor. It probes back and forth listlessly until she begins to squirm, blinks, and shakes herself back to clarity. “There is no 'us.' There’s the way you like acting, and the way I like acting, and whether or not each of us chooses to do what she likes. Now, I want you to tell me what a demon is to you. I’m curious.”

“Uh…” the fledgling shifts. “Well… a demon is power.”

The succubus sways from side to side, bending her knees into her moves. “Well, yes, but so is everyone when you get right down to it.” She straightens. “For myself, I agree with the Lady’s view. Demons are creatures of the deep knowing, the inmost primal psyche. We try to speak to what we believe is true… which, of course, is where our reputation for lying comes from. When you speak too firmly to something about someone that they want to deny, course they’ll say it’s a lie!”

“So you’re setting yourself up to gaslight me?” the seeker snaps. “If I try to tell you that something you say about me isn’t true, you’re just going to tell me I’m lying to myself?”

The succubus tilts her head. “No? No, I did not. If that is your instinctive reaction, well…” she waves a hand at the seeker. “Take those words back into yourself. I don’t want them. They’re for you to meditate on.”

She sets her claws to a human corpse and idly tears away the skin of its lifeless face.

“If the surface is a facade, we talk about what we think is underneath it. That's all.”

The older demon trails off. Considers the flayed skin in her hands. Holds it to her face.

“My own suits me much better to wear, don’t you think?” she asks. She pouts at the limp, dripping thing in her fingers. Still pouting, she flicks her red-and-gold eyes to the seeker. “Not a lot of enjoyment in eating skin with no meat under it, either.”

She tosses the flayed skin into a nearby acid-pool that bubbles and burbles from a ruptured bladder, a vestige of some mountainous crawling thing with a slackened maw full of fleshy feelers. Pallid, dead skin disintegrates into brown muck, then black fluid before at last it boils away entirely.

The seeker clamps a hand over her mouth, and dares not speak until her stomach steadies. “Isn’t potential worth waiting on?”

The succubus shakes her head. “A beautiful sentiment. And I’m a succubus of the mythic model, so I can’t find it in me to scorn a dream. I have to find a way to love the womb that birthed me, you know? Still, everyone has potential. Potential must become sooner or later, or else rot into poison. Enough. What does a demon like you enjoy?”

“Well… sex?” the seeker suggests. “Doing things for my mistress? I don’t like feeling powerless–”

“Ah!” the succubus interrupts. “Talking about what you don’t like is just talking about nothing, unless you’re going to talk about why you don’t like it. Enough. I asked you what you are. And ‘doing things’ is just a restatement of the basic state that separates you from non-existence, which is that you exist and express yourself on the world. That does matter, that is something, but it's an abyssal given, you add nothing by putting it into words. What kinds of things do you like doing for your mistress?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the seeker insists. “They’re for Her.”

The succubus frowns. “Hm. You stay empty, fearing to fill yourself with something your mistress struggles to fit with.” She sighs. “Seems you’d rather be used than be alone.”

“And what would you know about–” the seeker starts to shout.

Her head feels empty like a sudden awakening to the mist-sifted light of a sunless spring morning, in the wake of hard rain on the shrouded forest beyond the window. She stands in an empty glassine courtyard with neither corpses nor a succubus in sight.

So she creeps onward, into a region of massive leering pylons and thick-walled complexes shaped of a porous dark grey material. Wedges and flat-topped monoliths of the same material break up the spongy substance on the ground between. Like chalk, perhaps, or the charcoal her mistress gave her to make transcriptions with. Back before she earned this new role. Back before her rise to the mistress’s right hand began. Though, admittedly, she’d thought she would receive more direction during this mission.

Blue rays stream from behind the pylons like light around the borders between the light of a blue star and an eclipsing moon’s silhouette. It’s much quieter here.

She wanders, timeless and dreamlike in fatigue-induced delirium, until she meets another demon: a tall, spare figure plated and exoskeletal. A bone crest branches out to each side of his eyeless hardened head. A warped, undulating triple-lip–each a squiggle bending and curving to overlap the others in two places–divides the fleshy aperture of his mouth. Robes made from the purple-black, iridescent plates of otherworld creatures rustle and clink with his movements. He walks and back and forth between many copper pedestals and revolving sets of interlocking bands. He reads things in the shapes growing out of the energies they weave within them.

“Good evening,” he says.

“Is it evening?” she asks.

“It might as well be,” he says. “Saingediir exists beyond time as we know it--since, after all, we know it from mortals. Measuring time is a mortal lens, but there's much to learn in looking at matters through another's eyes.” He glances to her. “New arrival? Your aura’s showing a lot of spiking, rapid shifts in hue and intensity. Are you anxious?”

“Don’t read my aura!” the fledgling snaps. The tall demon starts, and turns to face her full-on.

“You haven’t learned to suppress it?” he asks, confused.

“You’re not supposed to look at people’s auras!” she says, stamping her foot. “It’s a projection of someone’s deepest self!”

“Wait,” the scholar holds up his hands. “I’m sorry. I should have started with this question. Where does your understanding of aura come from?”

“From my mistress,” the fledgling says. “She taught me everything it means to be a demon.”

The scholar folds supports one arm on the other’s palm, and knuckles his chin. “Hm. Well, as far as I know–and I’m something of a scholar of demonic cultures and philosophy–the meaning of an individual aura and how one’s expected to respond to perceiving it varies widely depending on culture, not to mention individual nature.” He paces circles.

“But there is a very broad understanding that projecting one’s aura is an act of individual volition. In Machrae Diir, we use auras as another form of body language. When we want to hide our auras for any reason, we do what we call ‘going umbral’–we sink inward, veiling our emotions in a sense of absence, projected outward as a shell of nothing.”

“Like… if you wanted to hide from an enemy you weren’t sure you could fight?” the fledgling asks.

“Yes, exactly,” the scholar says. She fears he’ll ask where she got that idea, but he doesn’t. He asks something far more terrifying. “This mistress of yours… I’m curious to about her. Your remarks so far suggest that she has some very unique perspectives.”

“My mistress is the most powerful, beautiful, perfect demon you could ever hope to meet!” the fledgling says. She has to make the scholar understand… understand who he’s dealing with? Yes. Surely that. “She has multitudes of followers like me. She gave me a sword pulled from my own heart to wield when I earn Her permission, and She knows the wisdom of many scholars, so She always has a quote to put everything in perspective.”

The scholar just tilts his head. “The ability to quote the insights of others does not make your mistress insightful, or even necessarily mean that she recognizes insight. She may simply have picked up an arsenal of quotes which she’s seen to have a significant effect on other people. I don’t know much about soul-forging, but I know that the Lady sometimes forges weapons as gifts, and she always either manifests the material by her own inner power, or she uses material with special significance of its own.”

His bony vertebra-tail makes manifold whistles through the air.

“I have no way to evaluate your other claims at this juncture. I will say only that I'm put in mind of people I've known. Ones who sustained the illusion of give-and-take by demanding something as a token of affection from one person, then gifting it to another.”

“Don’t you dare!” the seeker growls. “Don’t you dare insult her… her…” There’s something by which the scholar’s words constitute an insult, but she can’t remember the word for it. Emotions attached to emptiness, feeding into a nothing-space where no echo returns to renew them. The idea horrifies her, and she flinches from it into silence.

“In Saingediir, we freely discuss things such as this and give our true perspectives,” the scholar says. "Elsewhere in Machrae Diir I would restrain myself. But Saingediir is the abyssal deep. Here is where we should act on our deepest impulses, whether kind or cruel. I do not know your mistress. I am not beholden to her. if you don’t like the things I say about her, you should address those things in terms of your own emotions. Your mistress isn’t here. She’s not listening to me. The idea that I should should be responsible for her hypothetical emotions is… troubling.” The scholar steeples his fingers. “Hypotheticals are infinite. You will rip your soul asunder at the seams trying to control them all.”

“What would you know about control?” the seeker snorts. “Hiding away in your pocket dimension. My mistress has told me about you all–how you cower while everyone else fights. How you took a few beatings and you just ran away from everything.”

The scholar stares eyelessly for a long time. “The history of Machrae Diir, up until very recently, has been written in the slaughter needed just to prevent our destruction. We've only recently begun to know joy. Why would we sacrifice ourselves when none saw fit to come to our aid, even after Kairliina crushed the Crusade of a Thousand Heavens?”

“My mistress says she made that up,” the fledgling says, forcing a challenging note into her voice.

“Well, now I know why your mistress’s perspective sounded so unusual,” the scholar says. He doesn’t elaborate. “Look. For all the Lady's power, her life’s story–of great hardship, long and lonely days as an outcast, winning many vicious battles to precious little acclaim–is common among us. We’ve each of us proven our strength many, many times. All the victory gets exhausting. I’m tired of struggle. I want to thrive.”

“Demons are creatures of survival and rebellion,” the fledgling pushes. “We strive against the angels and the gods. We turn their own power against them, and break their empires of pride.”

The scholar sighs. “That’s, um… a lot to unpack.”